Chapter Fourteen
Wilfred was not sure what to expect when he rang the bell pull outside the Pernrith Chance townhouse.
What he had not expected was this.
“There you go! Now you are adorned like us.” Irene grinned, pulling him into the hallway after she had attached a boutonniere to his jacket. “Ready for the onslaught?”
Wilfred wanted to say, Absolutely not. ‘Onslaught’ was not a word that he generally attached to the Christmas season. ‘Festive,’ perhaps, or ‘merry.’
Not ‘onslaught.’
Though when he considered the last few minutes—hugged warmly by Irene on the top step as she and not the family’s housekeeper or footman had opened the door, his luggage whisked away by Dempster, and a sprig of holly attached to his lapel—Wilfred had to own that it was a kind of onslaught.
The trouble was, Irene was grinning and so Wilfred felt he could do absolutely nothing but grin inanely back.
“‘Onslaught’?” he repeated, as the sound of a pianoforte being played beautifully tinkled through the house.
Irene nodded sagely, her smile undiminished. “I am sorry to remind you that there are a great number of traditions we indulge in over the Christmastide, and many of them start today. For example, I hope you are in fine voice.”
“Oh, please don’t ask me to sing, Reeny.” Wilfred did not wish for his throat to dry up and sound so hoarse, but it was a natural response to the suggestion of singing. “You know I do not—”
“I am afraid you do not get a choice,” Irene said lightly as she took his hand and started pulling him to the drawing room. “Time to select a Christmas carol, and swiftly. Here he is, Mama!”
A rush of warmth swept over Wilfred as they stepped into the drawing room, and it was not just the heat from the fire cracking merrily. Several voices cried out in delight at his arrival, and the Viscountess Pernrith stepped forward with her arms open, engulfing him in a hug.
“Wilfred! We were absolutely delighted when Irene told us you were coming for the full week. We’re a child short with Jessica married so recently. It’s a delight to have you.”
Wilfred tried to smile at the welcoming embrace, and not wince at the insinuation—kindly meant—that he was a child of the family.
What he wanted from their second-eldest daughter was anything but brotherly.
“I cannot thank you enough for inviting me for the week—or at least, allowing Irene’s invitation to stand,” he said aloud as the older woman released him. “I hope I will prove a pleasant houseguest.”
“Nonsense. We know that you are a good soul,” said Irene’s father, who was sitting by the pianoforte playing a duet with Theodora. “We would have you spend the night for the holiday week in years previously if we’d only had the space. Tea?”
“Why not whiskey?” called Michael from the sofa on the other side of the room, casting a wink in Wilfred’s direction.
Irene tutted. “Michael Chance, it isn’t even eleven!”
“But it’s Christmas!” protested her brother.
The two of them fell into bickering as she stepped across the room to berate him and Wilfred smiled to watch them at it. He’d never had any siblings to bicker with.
He had thought himself alone, but the viscountess was still beside him and she sighed as she shook her head, though her face showed a brilliant smile.
“It is usually Gwen and Michael who have such rows,” she said, her expression mirthful. “But I suppose there’s always change in a family. Tell me, Wilfred, how are you? Sit beside me and tell me all your news.”
Wilfred swallowed hard as the mother of the woman he loved guided him toward another sofa. “‘News’? I have no news.”
Except he had paid a woman to pretend to be courted by him, something he had immediately regretted and tried to put an end to, and he’d only done it because the viscountess’s only son had recommended it, and he had only done that because Michael had seen instantly that he was in love with the viscountess’s daughter…
Perhaps that was not the sort of thing that he should be speaking of, however.
“I was thinking of finding a new butler,” he said instead. “For my countryside estate.”
Irene’s mother lowered her voice. “Yes, Irene mentioned it, and I think it’s a marvelous idea. While you are here, perhaps you can speak with Pernrith about it.”
“Wilfred’s turn!”
There was mingled laughter and retorts of “Can the man even sing?” as Wilfred saw with sinking spirits that the viscount was rising from the pianoforte stool.
“I’m afraid it’s tradition, young man,” twinkled the father of the house. “You can’t use the excuse that you are only ‘dropping by’ not to participate this time. Do you know ‘The First Noel’?”
To Wilfred’s great relief, he did—and Theodora played beautifully and thankfully did not continue with all six verses.
As he sang, Wilfred attempted not to catch Irene’s eye.
She was smiling broadly, but he could not tell and did not wish to know, whether she was laughing at him or merely enjoying seeing him put on the spot.
Then, somehow, it was luncheon.
“As you know, we don’t go in for anything special on Christmas Eve,” Irene said, handing Wilfred a plate. “Just a cold sideboard for luncheon and dinner. It gives the servants a rest. Cold ham? Or would you prefer pheasant?”
Cold ham, cold pheasant, cold salmon, cold pies, cold potatoes, cold beef—for all that the Chances said they had nothing special, Wilfred’s eyes bulged at the sheer amount of food laid out on the sideboard. It was more than he ever remembered there being.
“Disappointing after last year,” said Irene placidly, as though this was a devastating blow but she would live through it.
Did she not recall the size of previous feasts?
“I suppose we shall have to hope that tomorrow will impress you. You’ve never been a proper houseguest before.
I don’t think we’ve ever fed you three times in one day. ”
“‘Impress me’?” Wilfred said with a laugh as he settled back on the sofa with the plate on his knee, utterly unsure how he would be able to eat like this. “I am seriously impressed as it is!”
She smiled, and Wilfred’s pulse skipped a beat, and he wondered whether this was a mistake.
Oh, he was enjoying himself no end. Being a part of the Chance family for Christmas was something he had looked forward to most as a child. He’d gone home every evening those days, wishing he could stay longer. Now he’d be here the entire week. As if he were one of the Pernrith children proper.
But he was no longer a child, and what he wanted from them was far different.
He wanted Irene.
When luncheon was over, Wilfred sat back with a groan—his eyes had been far larger than his stomach but he had been unable…fine, unwilling to put any of the delicious fare back. At least he could now spend the afternoon relaxing and doing nothing so taxing as—
“Charades,” Irene said promptly, to calls of jubilation from her family.
Wilfred’s smile faded. “‘Charades’?”
“You knew to expect this. We’ve played before,” his best friend and the woman he loved said smartly. “How shall we divide into teams?”
It’s all very well, he could not help but think, for Irene to say that I have played before.
Of course he had; charades was an annual Chance Christmas tradition, as well as a most popular after dinner game, and one the two of them had played together at the Duke of Axwick’s dinner party just this past autumn.
But it was quite one thing playing with friends and acquaintances whose opinions do not matter to you while three glasses of wine were inside you. It was quite another to play entirely sober, in the cold light of day, with someone as competitive as Michael.
“I say, that’s cheating!” the man protested.
“It is not cheating if I move my mouth but make no sound!” Gwen shot back in anger. “Mama, tell him!”
“I cannot possibly argue with someone on my own team, my child,” the viscountess said serenely. “I say instead, you are a cheat!”
The family collapsed into laughter, even Gwen putting on a smile, and Wilfred looked around, feeling, in this chaos, somehow at peace.
It was all…all so much. The Chances were always so much. That a family could accuse each other of cheating and yet there be no true anger, no falling out? It was intoxicating.
Wilfred swallowed hard as he sat down after his go. He had been fortunate, indeed, to have Irene on his team—she thought like him, or knew how he thought so well that it took but a half a minute for her to guess ‘The three Magi.’
And that meant he was momentarily left alone with his thoughts, and they were this: that they, the Pernrith Chances, were his family. Even if he’d never be so bold as to accuse any of them of being a cheat.
Perhaps his parents, had they lived, would have had more children.
Perhaps he and his parents and those siblings would have played charades.
Perhaps they would have bickered about whether ‘magi’ or ‘kings’ was the correct answer.
Perhaps laughter would have filled the room, and there would have been shrieks of outrage as someone feigned something false, and perhaps he would have never known the Chances because he would have already had a family.
Wilfred’s throat was dry. He would never know. For some reason, he couldn’t find it within himself to long for what he had never had.
“It’s snowing!”
He turned to the window at Irene’s sudden statement—arguably a cheat, as Michael was currently stating, because she had spoken while it had been her turn.
It was snowing. Snowing hard. Flurries of white flakes were cascading down from the heavens and the garden upon which the drawing room overlooked was being swiftly covered in a sheet of white.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Irene said, and Wilfred’s stomach twisted with a thrill as he nodded.
“Snowball fight?” he guessed, and her smile was reward enough.
As it turned out, it was not enough for everyone else.