“I apologize,” Pamela said.
Jonathan opened his eyes all the way, and saw her seated at the dressing table.
“I should not have left your side last night,” she said, looking at his reflection in her mirror. She’d been waiting for him to wake up and had spoken the minute she’d seen those thick eyelashes of his flutter and open. “I suppose I was just so pleased to be with my family again that I forgot it was my duty to make sure you were as comfortable as I was. Forgive me for that.”
He sat up. Holding his blanket over his naked body, he rose and came to stand beside her. “I do,” he said, gazing down at her. “And I earnestly ask you to forgive me for my poor choice of words. I never want to be your master. But I do wish I could have you as my partner in this new life of ours.”
His blanket was not very securely held. They were late for breakfast.
They came down the stairs to see the manor had been transformed in the night. Evergreen branches were swagged over every mantel, and were twined around the chandeliers. The staircase was decorated with ropes of rosemary and pine, enlivened by strings of nuts and bright winter berries.
“Greetings!” her father called when they entered the dining room. “We’ve been at work for hours, sleepy heads.”
There were a few murmured comments about newlyweds from among the others in the room that made Pamela’s cheeks grow as rosy as her much kissed lips.
“Did you forget, puss?” her father asked.
She frowned in incomprehension as she took a seat at the table.
“Marriage has addled your wits.” Her brother Kit laughed. “We always get up at dawn to start decorating the old place on Christmas Eve. Remember?”
“Oh!” she said, round-eyed. “Is it the twenty-fourth today?”
“Aye. But don’t worry, we haven’t hauled in the Yule log yet.”
“Not that we haven’t picked it out,” her sister Rosemary said. “Father has had his eye on it for months. And the children are on tenterhooks, waiting for us to finish breakfast so we can go out with them and help them bring in the rest of the bunting. We still have yards of holly and ivy, to say nothing of mistletoe, to harvest.”
“Not that those two need any mistletoe,” a cousin called out, and made everyone laugh.
“We can’t put any holly, ivy, or mistletoe up until tonight,” her mother cautioned them, unnecessarily, because they all knew it so well. “Bad luck to set so much as a pinch of any of them inside until dark. But we can and will collect it today. First, we’ll go watch you gents cut the Yule log. Then, while you haul it home, we’ll get our holly and ivy. You men can come help us pull down the mistletoe. We’re all ready to go, so finish your breakfast and we can get started,” she told Pamela. “But be sure to eat enough to keep you warm, it’s very cold today. We can have another cup of tea while we wait. We didn’t want to start out without you. It would be a hard thing to have you to come all this way and miss all our fun.”
“I’ll say!” Pamela’s brother Harry exclaimed. “Remember how vexed Charles got that year when he overslept and missed dragging the Yule log back?”
“Didn’t I just?” Charles declared. “I still get hot when I think about it. How could you let me sleep past that? I was looking forward to it, and only overslept because I was so overactive the day before. Remember? We had that horse race and a foot race, and I was so tired I couldn’t wait to fall into bed. I still believe it was because I was the one who found the log that year, and not Kit, that he deliberately let me oversleep.”
“Hardly,” Kit said. “You were overactive at the punch bowl the night before, if you remember.”
“Me?” Charles laughed. “And what about you and your friend Wilson? Didn’t I hear something about the flask he enlivened the punch bowl with that night? Or don’t you remember?”
There was much laughter, and soon others at the crowded table began to offer other versions of the reason why Charles had missed dragging home the Yule log that year. Then they started to talk about the year before, when they’d chopped the chosen log only to find it rotted at the heart and how they’d had to scurry to find a new one.
Pamela laughed as she remembered. Wanting to share the fun, she looked at her husband, at her side. He sat with a faint, agreeable smile on his lips. But his eyes were glazing over. She shot a glance at Laughton, her sister’s husband, and saw a similar expression in his mild brown eyes. Her own widened as she realized every second word she was hearing was “remember?”