Chapter Nineteen
“You ride,” said Gideon. It was not quite a question.
“I rode a great deal as a girl, before the horses went the way of everything else. I am told it is a thing the body keeps, like grief and arithmetic.”
“Then the house wants holly, and the best of it grows past the second bend where the cart will not go.” He said it to the window rather than to her, in a manner that meant he had been turning a thing over longer than he intended to admit.
“Mrs Fenn has dropped the want of greenery into every conversation for a week. I would sooner fetch it than be reminded of it again.”
“You are proposing that we go and cut holly.”
“I am proposing that I go and cut holly, and that you come, because you will otherwise spend the afternoon teaching Louisa her long division, and I have seen what that does to your temper.”
So, they went. The grey little mare from the second stall remembered the body’s part of it for her, as promised, and the cold clear afternoon was the kind December occasionally produced to apologise for the rest of itself.
He rode beside her without conversation for the first quarter-mile, which she had expected, because conversation was a thing he came to once he had decided the silence had done its work.
“You are watching me to see whether I will fall off,” she said.
“I am watching you to see whether I shall have to invent a reason we went out, should you fall off. The reason would have to satisfy Mrs Fenn, who does not accept the first version of anything.”
“I shall not fall off. I am insulted on the mare’s behalf and on my own.”
“Then I have nothing to watch, and may attend to the holly with a clear mind.”
“The children will wonder where we have gone.”
“Rosalind knows precisely where we have gone. She proposed it, in fact, with the particular carelessness she uses when she has arranged a thing and wishes it to pass for an accident.”
“Rosalind arranged for us to cut holly?”
“Rosalind arranged for us to be a mile from the house, on horseback, with no children and no Mrs Fenn and nothing whatsoever to do but speak to one another. The holly is her cover. She is twelve, and already a finer tactician than half the men I have done business with.”
“And you let her.”
“I let her. I find I have given up resisting the schemes of women who are cleverer than I am. There is a sort of peace in it once a man stops struggling.”
They came to the stand past the second bend, where the holly grew thick, dark and berried along the line of an old hedge.
He dismounted, came to her side and put up his hands.
Then there was the small unhurried business of her coming down into them, his hands at her waist, her own hands at his shoulders for the moment it took.
Her feet were on the ground, but the moment was a half-second longer than the descent had required, and they both noticed it, but neither remarked on it.
They cut holly. He had brought a knife and a length of sacking, and she held the branches back while he cut the berried sprays.
They argued, comfortably, about how much was enough, because Mrs Fenn’s standard for greenery was theological rather than practical and neither of them could be certain of meeting it.
“That is a great deal of holly,” she said.
“It is a great deal of holly for a house. It is a modest amount of holly for a house with Mrs Fenn in it. Cut more.”
“You will have me scratched to the elbow.”
He looked at the heap of it on the sacking. “My mother did this every year. The one thing of hers the house kept doing after she was gone, because Mrs Fenn would not let it lapse. I had forgotten it until this week. I find I am glad to be reminded.”
She looked at him and thought how rare and unguarded a thing it was for him to offer a piece of his mother into the cold air between them. She did not make a great deal of it, because making a great deal of it was the surest way to send him back behind the door.
“Then we shall do it every year,” she said, “and Mrs Fenn shall be insufferable, and the bargain shall be kept.”
It was as she straightened from the last of the holly that she saw the mistletoe.
It hung in the old apple at the corner of the hedge, where the orchard ran out into the rougher ground, a great green tangle of it high in the bare grey branches with its berries the colour of pale wax.
She had not thought of mistletoe in years.
There had been none to think of in Lady Foskett’s house, where Christmas was a matter of correct cards and a goose and no nonsense whatever about greenery over doorways.
“There is mistletoe,” she said.
He followed her look. “There is. It is a parasite and a thief, and it will kill that tree in another ten years, and I have left it precisely where it is for reasons I decline to examine.”
“It is too high to reach.”
“It is too high for you to reach. I am a great deal taller than you, and considerably less sensible, and I have a knife.” He went to the tree and reached up, but the lowest of it was still a hand above his fingers, and he looked at it with the particular affront of a tall man discovering a thing that has been built taller.
“It appears to be too high for me as well. This is a blow to my self-regard from which I may not recover.”
“Lift me.”
She had not entirely planned to say it. It arrived as the true things arrived with her now, ahead of the part of her that managed what she said. He turned and looked at her, and there was a beat in which the whole afternoon seemed to gather itself and wait.
“Lift you,” he said.
“You are a great deal taller and considerably less sensible, and you have a knife. I am lighter than a duke and have a longer reach than my height suggests. Lift me, and I shall cut your thieving parasite, and the hall shall have its sprig, and your self-regard may recover at leisure.”
He put the knife in her hand. His hands came to her waist again, and she put hers on his shoulders, and up she went into the cold, bright air and the bare branches with her arm stretched over her head.
She cut the sprig and came down again slowly into the circle of his arms with the mistletoe in her hand and the berries cold and waxen against her glove.
He held her there a moment before he set her down at all.
She was aware of several things with the heightened clarity she had come to associate with him: the cold air, the smell of holly, the warmth coming off him in the December afternoon, and his face very close because she had come down close.
She was also aware of the mistletoe in her hand between them, and the absolute knowledge they both had of what a sprig of mistletoe meant when it was held between two people standing this near.
Neither of them looked at it, but they looked at each other.
“It is only a custom,” she said, and her voice came out steadier than she had any right to expect. “A foolish one; the church disapproves of it entirely.”
“Christmas is over,” he said, but his eyes did not leave her face.
His hands did not move from her waist. The mistletoe hung between them, and the moment hung with it, drawn out long, thin and very bright, the kind of moment she understood she would be able to find again in her memory years from now with her eyes shut.
And then, because neither of them was, yet, the sort of people who took a thing simply because it was held out to them, he set her down.
“Your sprig,” he said.
“My sprig,” she agreed, and her voice was not quite even after all, and it did not seem to trouble him in the least.
They rode home with the holly across his saddlebow and the mistletoe tucked into her glove, and she carried it up to the house and gave it to Mrs Fenn, who received it with the satisfaction of a woman whose week of hinting had borne fruit.