Gifts of the Season: A Gift Most Rare / Christmas Charade / The Virtuous Widow

But Clarissa’s attention had already bounded forward. “What did you call me?” she asked. “Mem what?”

“Memsahib,” he said, concentrating on making the paste stick. “That’s what fine ladies are called in India, as a form of respect. Your mother would be memsahib, while your father would simply be sahib.”

“Memsahib,” repeated Clarissa, relishing the sound and feel of the foreign word. “Do you know other Indian words?”

“Oh, an entire wagon full,” said Revell expansively. “Instead of a gown, you would wear a sari. Your mother’s grand ball would be called a burra khana, and Miss Blake here would be your ayah.”

Sara laughed, wrinkling her nose. “I do not know if I wish to be anyone’s ayah. All the ayahs I ever had were cross-tempered old women who’d pinch my arm to make me obey.”

“Did you truly know ayahs, Miss Blake?” asked Clarissa curiously. “Or is it like the elephants, and you only mean from books?”

“From books, I am sure,” said Revell quickly, rescuing Sara from her misstep. “I’m the one who’s more at home in Calcutta than London.”

“Which is how you’ve come to know so many peculiar foreign words, I expect,” said Clarissa, leaning closer to admire his handiwork. “Why, my lord, that is almost a proper chain after all. Here, let me put it with the others.”

Gingerly she gathered up Revell’s chain and carried it across the room to add it to the other decorations they’d made, pausing to admire the animals once again.

“We need to talk, Sara,” said Revell, his voice low and urgent as he touched her arm. “When can we meet alone?”

Startled, she blushed, and pulled her arm away. “We shouldn’t, Revell,” she whispered. “That night on the terrace—wasn’t that enough?”

“Not by half, it wasn’t,” he said. “Tonight, after Clarissa is in bed. Ten o’clock, say, by the same door to the terrace.”

“Please, Rev, I do not—”

“I’ll not take no, Sara,” he said firmly. “Tonight, on the same terrace. Don’t fail me, lass.”

But before she could answer the door to the schoolroom opened and in swept Lady Fordyce.

“Look, Clary, look what I’ve brought you from town!” she called gaily, holding up an elaborate mask decorated with gold beads and red plumes. “It shall be the perfect accompaniment to your costume for—oh, my, Lord Revell! You surprise me, my lord!”

She might have been surprised, but Sara was beyond that, to out-and-out speechless horror. To have Lady Fordyce discover her like this, in Clarissa’s schoolroom, with Revell standing so guiltily close to her that there could be no respectable explanation possible.

Not that Revell wouldn’t venture one. “I didn’t intend to surprise you, Lady Fordyce,” he said, remaining beside Sara as if there were nothing at all remarkable about such proximity. “I was simply helping your daughter with the elephants.”

Lady Fordyce’s face went cautiously blank. “Elephants?”

“Yes, Mama, look!” Gleefully Clarissa held a paper elephant in one hand and a tiger in the other. “For the ballroom! Miss Blake and I made the animals, while Lord Revell made chains!”

“Even babies can make chains,” explained Revell modestly, stepping to the table to drape one of his chains from one hand across to the other. “And so, therefore, can I.”

“But elephants and tigers, Miss Blake?” asked Lady Fordyce, disapproval frosting her voice. “For my masquerade ball?”

Sara nodded, resolutely determined to put the best face on what now seemed a disastrous decision. “Yes, my lady. The elephants were inspired by our lessons on ancient Rome.”

“But your lessons are one thing,” said Lady Fordyce, her expression growing darker still, “and my Christmas masquerade is quite, quite another.”

“Ah, but there will be no more appropriate creatures imaginable,” assured Revell as he idly swung the chain back and forth. “You’ve only to see how the Prince of Wales himself is covering his walls with peacocks and tigers everywhere, and my own brother is having the dining room of Claremont House painted all over with frolicking monkeys.”

“Your brother the duke?” asked Lady Fordyce, reconsidering the elephant in her daughter’s hand. “His Grace would approve? And the Prince, too?”

“I should not be surprised if you set a new fashion, and all on account of your daughter’s lessons,” said Revell, his smile shifting toward Sara, as if to thank Clarissa’s governess for such a splendid notion.

But at the same time his gaze seemed to warm as he found Sara’s, giving his words another meaning that only she would understand, and that would remind her once again of the meeting he sought with her later.

“You know, Lady Fordyce,” he continued, determinedly not looking away and not letting Sara do so, either, “that in England today there is nothing more choice, more desired, than that which comes from India, and never more so than this Christmas.”

Chapter Five

By the single candlestick in her chamber upstairs from the nursery, Sara took one final look at her reflection in the small looking glass over the washstand. Did her eyes truly seem brighter, happier, her mouth more ready to curve into a smile? Or was it no more than the most wishful hopes and the wavering candlelight that had made the difference, and not Revell?

Lightly she touched the crooked head of the paper tiger that she’d hidden in her pocket, now tucked into the frame of her looking glass, and as she ran her finger along the hardened paste on the tiger’s neck, she smiled, thinking of how gamely Revell had struggled at the low schoolroom table. Tomorrow, when they began decorating the ballroom in earnest, she’d sworn to herself that she’d return the tiger to the other ornaments. Deciding what to do next about Revell wouldn’t be nearly as easy.

From the hall below she heard the ten echoes of the case clock chiming the hour, and swiftly patted her hair one last time. She’d dallied long enough; now that she’d made up her mind to meet Revell—though only for the briefest few minutes imaginable!—she didn’t want to keep him waiting.

She hurried down the back stairs, keeping her footsteps as soft as possible so that no one else would know she wasn’t asleep. Not that anyone was likely to notice. With the house so full of guests, most servants were still busy helping in the kitchen or with serving, and from the voices and merry laughter in the drawing room, the Fordyces and their friends weren’t likely to retire to their bedchambers until midnight at the earliest. She paused to press herself against the wall to allow two footmen to bustle past with covered trays.

Around this corner, she thought as she fastened the front of her cloak, then down the last hall to the terrace doors, and to Revell. As hard as it would be, she meant to tell him the truth, as quickly and with as few words as possible, and then she would—

“Miss Blake!” called Lady Fordyce breathlessly behind her. “Oh, Miss Blake! How vastly fortuitous that you are still awake!”

Reluctantly, Sara stopped, her anticipation crumbling. As much as she wished to run ahead, to pretend she hadn’t heard her mistress, her conscience wouldn’t let her.

“I couldn’t sleep, my lady,” she said, her explanation mechanical with disappointment as Lady Fordyce joined her. “I was only going outside for a brief walk.”

“Then how glad I am to have found you first,” declared the older woman, her round face flushed and glistening with a hostess’s duress as well as the wine from dinner. She took Sara firmly by the arm to steer her back toward the drawing room, clearly unwilling to let Sara even consider escape.

“Miss Talbot wishes to sing,” she continued, “and none of the other ladies seem to be able to cope with the stiffness of our sorry old pianoforte’s keys. But now we have you, Miss Blake, a born accompanist if ever there was one! You must play for Miss Talbot. Come, come, come, you cannot wish to keep such a splendid company waiting a moment longer!”

Miserably Sara thought of Revell, of keeping him waiting far more than a moment, of dreams of her own that had waited for six years and more. But that was nothing tangible, nothing definite, and nothing that could be explained to Lady Fordyce without risking her position and her livelihood. And so, with her head bent in dutiful unhappiness, Sara went to her fate, and the pianoforte.

She hadn’t come.

For over an hour Revell had waited for her on the terrace, letting the cold wind flail away at his body through his coat as well as the hopes he’d held somewhere near his heart. He’d come early, not wanting to miss her, and he’d stayed late, in the ever-dwindling possibility she’d been delayed. He’d stayed until he’d lost the feeling in his hands from the cold and his face had settled in an icy grimace, and he’d given up only when he could invent no more excuses on her absent behalf.

She hadn’t come because, quite simply, she hadn’t cared.

Now he sat at the breakfast table, listlessly prodding at his toasted rolls and shirred eggs while the purposelessly cheerful conversation rolled around him. He wondered what he’d do to pass this day, and all the ones that would follow. He reminded himself that Sara hadn’t promised to meet him, or anything else, for that matter. He tried to compose a suitable greeting for her when they met again, one that somehow wouldn’t put his disappointment and bitterness on public display. He considered inventing some sort of family emergency and leaving this afternoon, and never looking back. He endeavored not to imagine how his older brother would jeer and call him the greatest, most sentimental fool in Christendom, and how, this time, Brant would be right.

“Like the rarest, sweetest nightingale!” the man next to him was gushing. “Ah, Miss Talbot, how we were blessed to have such a songbird in our midst last night!”

Miss Talbot, the plump and amorous blonde who, to Revell’s dismay, persisted in trying to catch his attention, now giggled, balancing a teaspoon delicately between her fingers.

“You are too, too kind, Mr. Andrews,” she simpered. “I do my best, I do, even when you gentlemen do make me go on and on!”

“‘On and on,’ my word,” said Mr. Andrews, chuckling as if this were the greatest witticism in the world. “I could have listened to your sweet voice all the night long!”

He leaned into Revell, suddenly confidential. “Such a gem of a voice you missed last night, Lord Revell, oh, what you missed!”