Chapter Six
By St. Thomas’s Day, the valley had been sealed shut for a fortnight. From her window Ophelia could see that the lane to the gatehouse had vanished, the river had shrunk to a grey scar below, and the passes beyond the near slopes had disappeared entirely under a wall of snow.
Bronwen, bringing her chocolate, confirmed it. She had a countrywoman’s certainty about weather, and she did not trouble to hide her satisfaction in being proved right.
“No one’s been in nor out this fortnight past, miss, nor will be before the New Year, my da says.
He’s never wrong about snow, though he’s wrong about most things.
So the duke’s caught fast with the rest of us.
” She set down the cup and gave Ophelia a look far too knowing for a girl of eighteen.
“Which I’d have thought would please you better than it seems to. ”
It ought to have pleased her. The snow was her safety, yet she still felt the duke’s attention following her about the house, gathering up every mistake, however little she gave him.
She had tried to be stone.
She thought she had been managing it tolerably well, until the household went out for the greenery that morning and Adrian Sutton undid her resolve simply by being kind to a housemaid.
It was the custom at Plas Eira, Lady Elise declared, for the whole house to gather the Christmas greenery on St. Thomas’s Day, and no one, duke or scullery maid, was excused.
They went bundled to the eyes in every wool and flannel the house could provide.
Adrian was the most comic of them, for he had brought nothing fit for Wales and wore a vast, moth-eaten greatcoat belonging to the late Sir Rhys. It made him look like a bear.
They waded through the glittering snow to the copse below the chapel, carrying baskets and a billhook. Their breath smoked before them, and the cold hurt to draw, sharp enough to catch at the back of the throat.
Adrian kept his distance from Ophelia.
She noticed this, though she should not have. He did not appear at her elbow or turn her dull answers over like coins. He worked with the men cutting holly and bay, accepted Miss Pettibone’s opinions upon the proper length of ivy-vines, and left Ophelia to gather mistletoe in peace.
She told herself she was relieved.
Then she saw him take the heavy basket out of Bronwen’s arms.
He did it without thought. Bronwen was labouring up the slope beneath a load of holly, her boots slipping, and he went to her and took it. He did not glance around to see who had noticed. Markham would have looked for an audience. Adrian merely offered Bronwen his free arm.
“You’ll spoil your fine coat, Your Grace,” she said, laughing up at him.
“It is not my coat. It belonged to a far better man than I, and I cannot make it worse than the moths have.”
She took his arm and they went up the slope arguing cheerfully over whether Welsh moths were superior to English ones.
Ophelia stood in the snow with a sprig of mistletoe crushed in her fist. He had seen someone struggling and chose to help even though he need not have, and nobody would have thought less of him for it, because a duke not noticing a maid struggling was nothing to be remarked on.
Cruel men are easier to guard against.
A few minutes later, her boot slipped on a patch of packed snow. She caught herself before she fell, but Adrian had seen. He came back down the slope and stopped a careful distance from her.
“Is it the cold making you a little clumsy, Miss Jones, or the company?”
“The cold, Your Grace. Plainly the cold.”
“Plainly.” She heard the smile in his voice. “Then take my arm. I promise not to bite. I should only like you not to fall.”
It was funny, and there was no hook in it that she could find. No one had been funny with her merely for the pleasure of making her smile for longer than she could remember.
She took his arm.
She told herself it was only sense, the slope being treacherous and her feet numb with cold inside her boots, the excuse a lady might make for accepting a gentleman’s support. She knew it for a lie and let it stand anyway.
They went up the hill together, and she did not fall.
She managed not to speak for most of the way back to the house. Then, in the great hall, with the greenery piled and steaming faintly in the heat of the fire, her undoing was completed by a hoop of bent withies and Adrian’s cheerful inability to make a kissing bough.
“Miss Jones, I am at your disposal,” he said. “Teach me to be of use. I am told it builds character, and mine is by all accounts in need of extensive repairs.”
There was no help for it.
They sat at the long table with the hoop between them, and Ophelia showed him how to bind the crossed circles into a globe and twine bay, rosemary, and holly through the frame, the bruised leaves giving up their scent under his clumsy fingers.
Rosy crab apples and candle ends were fixed among the greenery.
At the heart of it all went a sprig of mistletoe with its waxy white berries.
“One berry is plucked for every kiss,” she told him, “and when the berries are gone, the kissing is done. That is the rule of it, Your Grace. My mother taught me.”
His hands stilled.
The question showed briefly in his face, and Ophelia braced herself for it, yet he only returned his attention to the ribbon.
“Your mother sounds a very interesting woman.”
She did not say anything in response, because she could not think of a single thing to say that would not lead to dangerous territory.
He asked nothing more, and his silence felt more dangerous than the question would have done.
She busied herself, bent her head over the greenery. “That knot will not hold, Your Grace.”
“It has held me for several minutes.” He had his finger caught in the loop; tugging only tightened it.
Ophelia shook her head and pulled the trailing end, freeing him instantly. “You are not part of the kissing bough.”
“That explains a great deal.”
“Principally why no one has hung you from the ceiling.”
The answer escaped before she could stop it.
He looked at her, delighted.
For an instant she remembered too late that Olivia Jones did not say such things. Then his smile caught at her, and another witty remark escaped her lips, and another.
When his next knot collapsed, she called him the most helpless duke in Christendom.
“I cannot be the most helpless,” he protested. “There are Russian grand dukes. One of them must be worse.”
“You are the most helpless duke presently in Wales.”
“I accept the distinction.”
He indicated a crooked crab apple for her judgment.
“Hopeless,” she said.
“Cruel woman. I had begun to think there was kindness in you.”
“You have mistaken competence for kindness.”
“I often do. I possess so little of either.”
She laughed.
The sound startled her, but Adrian only smiled, as though he had known all along that she could.
“Tell me what each of these is for,” he said, threading a length of red ribbon through the withies. “I have spent most of my life understanding nothing and being forgiven for it, but I find I should like to know more about this.”
“The bay is for glory. Rosemary for remembrance. Holly for endurance, because it keeps its green through winter.” She touched one of the small red apples. “These are only pretty. My mother said one was allowed a thing for no better reason than that.”
“A sensible woman indeed.”
“The most sensible,” Ophelia agreed, thinking that sensible was a safer word than interesting.
“Then I shall take her advice.” He fixed another apple into the greenery. “Even if you insist upon hanging it crooked.”
“I did not hang it crooked.”
“It was straight until you touched it.”
“Give it to me.”
He lifted his hand out of reach, and the ribbon tightened sharply.
Adrian looked down. He had tied himself to the bough again.
Ophelia began to laugh.
He regarded his trapped hand, salvaging what dignity he could. “You see how indispensable you have made yourself?”
“Only to the most helpless duke in Wales.”
“The most helpless duke presently in Wales.”
“Hold still.”
He obeyed. She took his hand between hers and worked the ribbon loose. His skin was warm from the fire, his fingers relaxed in her grasp.
The task took longer than it should have.
Neither of them remarked upon that.
The household moved around them, hanging holly over the mantel and arguing over the ivy, but for a few moments Ophelia heard nothing except Adrian’s breathing.
Lady Elise’s face recalled her.
Her godmother entered the hall and stopped still, staring at them, weary dismay plain on her face, as if the thing she had feared had happened exactly as expected.
Ophelia drew her hands away.
The bough was finished. It lay between them, the mistletoe at its heart. She and Adrian had been leaning over it, towards each other, far too close.
“There,” Ophelia said. “It wants only hanging. One of the servants must do it. It is bad luck for the maker to hang her own.”
She rose, gave him the smallest curtsey, and went to help Mrs. Probert with something that did not need her help.
She did not look back.
She could no longer pretend there was no danger.
Lying awake that night, she forced herself to examine it dispassionately. A danger named was a danger half disarmed.
She was beginning to like him.
Worse than like, even.
A charming man had been kind to her for a fortnight, and she was falling towards that kindness as the snow fell, inevitably. He had made her laugh. He had listened when she spoke of her mother. He had seen the questions she could not answer and chosen not to ask them.
She could not afford any of it.
She was Ophelia James, runaway bride and scandal, living under a false name, her safety staked on no one learning where she was. Adrian was a London duke, well acquainted with the man she had fled.
It is nothing, she told herself. An hour over a hoop of withies, no more.
The fire had long since burned down to embers, and still she lay watching the dark ceiling, tracing shapes in it that would not resolve into anything.
She lay awake for far too long trying to convince herself of it.