She couldn’t just capitulate, and of course he wouldn’t drag her along with him. He had far too much dignity. And she wouldn’t go home without him; she couldn’t bear the shame of it. So unless they spoke and worked it out, Christmas would be a disaster and likely the beginning of an unimaginably bigger one, one that might not ever be mended.
Pamela tried to swallow the lump in her throat, waved away her maid’s offer of morning chocolate, and slid out of bed to prepare to test her fate and her future.
He was in the breakfast room, looking as heavy-eyed as she felt.
She slipped into her chair and asked the footman for some tea and toast. She didn’t think she could pretend to eat anything else.
“Good morning, my dear,” her husband said in his normal cool accents.
“Good morning,” she said, looking at her plate.
“Did you sleep well?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
He hesitated. “Nor I,” he said.
She looked up at him.
His smile was wan. “I had a thought in the night,” he said slowly. “Since we’ve received competing invitations for the holidays, promising diverse pleasures, what say we take advantage of both? That is to say: we spend half the holiday with my old friends, the Fanshawes, and the other half with your family?”
She blinked. “Why, yes,” she said, with rising enthusiasm. “That sounds equitable. The twelve days of Christmas divided. Six with your friends, and six at my family home. Oh, Jonathan, what a lovely idea!”
“Actually,” he said, smiling back at her, “five and five, because we need two days of travel to get from the Fanshawes to your family home.”
“Oh, Jonathan!” she cried. Forgetting the servants, she rose from her chair and rushed round the table to him—and into his opened arms.
But it was after they’d kissed and gone back to their places, with their servants still hiding their smiles, that she realized that still meant five days with his mistress.
And he remembered that an armistice was not exactly peace.
“Their manor is historic,” Jonathan said, looking out the window at the stark gray pile that was Fanshawe Manor as their coach went up the long and winding drive to the front door. “It dates from Charles II’s day.”
“Yes,” Pamela said in a pinched voice, looking down at her guidebook. “So it says here. Evidently Charles gave it to a mistress for services rendered. Interesting how heredity holds true.”
Jonathan’s lips thinned. “He gave it to a Fanshawe, not to one of Marianna’s ancestors,” he said patiently.
Pamela sniffed. Her husband chose to believe it was because the swansdown that trimmed her pretty bonnet had got up her nose, and not because of what he’d said.
Their coach rattled up the front drive. Jonathan tried to see the manor as it might look through his wife’s jaundiced eyes, and had to admit it didn’t seem to be the cheeriest place to spend a Christmas holiday. Fanshawe Manor was an ancient and impressive house, but the overall impression was stark and bare. It was a great box of a place perched on a sloping hilltop. Landscape was something that occurred miles behind it, like the background of a picture. Odd, but when he’d first seen the manor all those years ago, it had looked like a fine place to spend Christmas. That had been because it was his friend Tony’s ancestral seat, and being able to spend Christmas with a family had been a welcome new experience for him.
He hadn’t known that Tony’s widowed cousin Marianna would enliven the holiday for him in ways he couldn’t have foreseen. Much his senior, but still comely, jolly, plump, and pretty, the widow had given him several fine Christmas surprises, gifts of herself that she kept on giving well into the glad new year. They’d kept up their association until he’d had to go back to university. When summer came, he went off on his grand tour, with Wellington’s forces. While he was away, Marianna had become Tony’s uncle’s second wife, and a permanent resident of Fanshawe Manor.
Tony had fallen at Salamanca. But Jonathan had seen Marianna since, always with her husband. It was hard to avoid them if one was at large in London, and he’d never seen a reason to try to keep out of their way. The affair was ancient history, one he never gave a second thought. Both he and Marianna, and their world, had changed out of all recognition. Marianna and Fanshawe were a well-matched pair, of a similar age and easygoing disposition. It was true he didn’t pass much more than the time of the night whenever he met up with them when he was on the town, and further true that he hadn’t seen them for a while.
When their invitation had come he thought it a fine way to introduce himself and his bride as a couple to the ton. Where else could they have gone, after all? Christmas was a holiday meant for sharing, and he was now an orphan. His brother was abroad, his sister lived in the north, and nothing in either of their histories or attitudes made him think they wanted, much less required, his presence. His closest friends, those who had survived the wars, were war-weary and reclusive. His newest friend was his wife. Spending the holiday with her relatives did not appeal. They were a clannish bunch who only made him feel more of an outsider. But the Fanshawes, he remembered when he read the slip of vellum requesting the honor of his presence in their home for Christmas, knew everyone.