A Gentleman Under the Mistletoe (The Lord Julian Mysteries #7)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

“What in the name of Good King Wenceslas was I thinking?” I muttered this query for the third time in an hour as a footman leaned too far from his ladder and went tumbling into the snow. Ropes of greenery came down after him, along with a few whoops from the balcony above and a dash or two of profanity.

“You all right there, Young Jamison?” somebody called down.

Young Jamison sat up, snow atop his head, greenery about his shoulders. “Right as a trivet what’s got a pot of toddy keeping it warm. Oh, didn’t see your lordship there on the terrace. Happy Christmas, sir!”

A bit too happy, and Christmas was still weeks away. Clearly, the day’s portion of toddies had already found its way from the pot into the staff.

“Carry on, Young Jamison.” I should have assisted the man to his feet, should have returned the cheery salutation. My dear father would have done both, my brother Harry would have been up the ladder himself, and Arthur—the present duke—would have good-naturedly ignored the whole ridiculous business.

Papa and Harry were dead, Arthur was cavorting about Munich or Salzburg in anticipation of a remove to Vienna—his letters were nearly incoherent with joyous plans and amazing sights—while I bided at the family seat and doubted my sanity.

Happy Christmas, indeed.

I returned to the warmth of Caldicott Hall, which would be spared decking with boughs of any sort until later in the month.

“Julian, there you are.” Dorothea, Her Grace of Waltham, made a cheery picture coming down the grand staircase. She was attired in Father Christmas green, which went nicely with her red hair and Celtic complexion. “I vow you have been least in sight for the past fortnight. Did I, or did I not, just see Young Jamison plummeting from the heavens outside the library?”

“Mama, good day. Jamison came off a ladder and is none the worse for losing his balance. He might well be the worse for drink, however.”

“Nonsense.” Her Grace swanned down the remaining steps. “A tot to ward off the chill never addled anybody’s wits. Ginny has sent word that she’ll be here tomorrow. Declan has a slight cold, so they will tarry an extra day in Town.”

My youngest sister, Virginia, had two children—a boy and a girl. I was godfather to the boy, Declan, whom I had last seen when the lad had still been a gurgling bundle of joy held securely in the arms of his adoring papa. His younger sister was a stranger to me.

With the arrival of Ginny and her offspring, the holiday onslaught would begin in earnest. “I shall endeavor to contain my disappointment at the delay. I assume Lord Kerrick is accompanying his wife and children?” He’d better be, or my brother-in-law and I would have words .

“Of course. Kerrick adores the holidays as much as I do.”

Lachlan, Earl of Kerrick, adored my sister, and she returned his affection in scandalously full measure. They had been a love match, and I hoped they still were.

“Mama, might you have a word with Mrs. Gwinnett about the toddies?”

Her Grace peered at me. “If she made them any stronger, the peace of the realm would be imperiled.”

“Precisely. The peace of Caldicott Hall has been shattered since Stirring Up Sunday. Some restraint with the rum is in order. The kitchen being a feminine domain, and Mrs. Gwinnett being a sensitive soul, I will leave it to you to request that she moderate her generosity.”

The duchess’s expression took on that considering aspect mothers aimed at a child who had just possibly blundered onto the verge of vexing them.

“Are you coming down with something, Julian? An ague? A megrim? You grow cranky when you are stalked by illness.”

I am not perishing cranky. My mother and I were navigating a gradual thawing of relations after years of polite distance. That she would set a verbal trap of the classic maternal variety should have been reassuring.

“I am in the pink of health,” I replied, starting up the steps, “though somewhat short of sleep. I will leave you to negotiate with Mrs. Gwinnett while I tend to the day’s correspondence.” I bowed slightly and resumed my progress up the steps.

“Arthur never complains about the holiday toddies.”

Arthur, His Grace of Waltham, seldom complained about anything. I loved my surviving brother fiercely and of late resented him in equal measure, even as I gained new sympathy for the burdens he so stoically carried.

“Of course Arthur didn’t comment on the toddies, Mama. He was too busy shoveling himself out from under a daily deluge of reports, letters, invoices, and parliamentary epistles. I will now do my feeble best to impersonate him lest his duchy fall to pieces on my watch. I bid you good morning.”

Mama waved a graceful hand. “Very well, then, be on your way. Tend to business in the Caldicott male tradition, and I won’t tell you my news.”

Fiend. I came back down the steps. “Unfair, madam. If my mood has suffered because I was nearly potted by a tipsy footman, you cannot blame me. The Christmas pudding has barely begun soaking, and the lot of them are teetering on the brink of riot.”

The maids abetted their confreres, lingering beneath the mistletoe dangling from every doorjamb and crossbeam in the Hall.

I could not honestly say I missed Spain, where I’d spent several hard years in uniform mostly on reconnaissance. I’d been good at my job, to the surprise of both the enlisted men and my superiors, and to my own surprise most of all.

I did miss the simplicity of that life and the sense of having an occupation at which I was competent. This business of serving as steward of Arthur’s dukedom was irksome in the extreme, and yet, I’d nearly demanded the job when I’d exhorted His Grace to see some of the world. That Osgood Banter, Arthur’s devoted paramour, traveled with him meant the duke’s eventual return was in doubt.

Merry Olde was murderously intolerant of those who preferred the intimate company of their own gender. Arthur and Banter were safer on the Continent, and thus I’d sent them traveling with heartfelt best wishes.

“What is your news?” I asked while Her Grace fiddled with a red ribbon dangling from the kissing bough suspended from the foyer’s chandelier.

“The news is happy, for the most part. To see old friends and distant family is always a happy occasion, or it should be.”

“Mama, I am honestly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work required to maintain Arthur’s correspondence. He could glance at some parliamentary report and know whether it required reading, skimming, or a summary toss into the flames. I must attend to every word, and my eyes… What is your news?”

I need not remind my mother of my weak eyes. Since the day a mortar shell had landed on a powder wagon in my general vicinity, my eyes had been sensitive to excessive light. I wore blue-tinted spectacles in bright sunshine and when my vision otherwise bothered me, which was frequently of late.

“Hire another secretary,” Her Grace said. “Hire three. Arthur would not want you ruining your sight over the price of turpentine or sailcloth.”

Both were vital issues to the Royal Navy. “Your news?”

“Uncle Terrence will join us for the holidays this year.”

I weathered this blow as I might have weathered the news that my much-treasured personal mount, one Atlas, was colicking, which was to say, badly.

“Merry Uncle Terry is inflicting… rather, visiting us for the holidays?”

“He’s mellowed, Julian, and he did worry so about you and Harry.”

Uncle Terrence was neither merry nor in the strict sense an uncle. He’d been a friend of my grandfather’s from Grandfather’s four-in-hand days, though Terrence was years Grandfather’s junior. The march of time had nonetheless turned Uncle Terrence’s disposition from salty to sour. Some of my most bewildering boyhood memories had been of Uncle Terry sitting glum and silent at the Christmas feast, or stalking around the Boxing Day open house like some sort of bad fairy at a storybook christening.

“You are the hostess of this gathering, Mama. If you choose to add Uncle Terrence to the guest list, I will welcome him graciously as well. Now, if you’ll excuse me?”

“Have you paid a call on the nursery yet today, Julian?” Her Grace asked the question a bit too casually.

“I will stop by after I have reviewed the morning mail.” I’d said the same thing yesterday, with predictable results. I’d finished my afternoon apologizing to my young nephew for my neglect—again.

“Of course you will. Truly, Julian, you are failing to enter into the spirit of the holidays. One would despair of you but for the fact that you are pining for Miss West.”

With every fiber of my being, I missed Hyperia West. “She and I do not dwell in each other’s pockets. I look forward to her eventual arrival at the Hall.” Had dear Perry not agreed to spend her Yuletide with us, I’d likely be swilling toddies, tumbling off ladders, and adorning myself in greenery too.

Hyperia West was my friend, fiancée, and the lodestar of my honor. Love was too pallid a term for the esteem in which I held her, and yet, the date of her arrival was still undecided.

“Well, then, away with you,” the duchess said, tucking the red ribbon into the kissing bough. “Back to your turpentine and sailcloth, and Leander will simply have to accommodate your more important duties.”

Mama took few shots, but she aimed each one for the bull’s-eye. “Good day, Your Grace. I’ll see you at luncheon.”

“No, you won’t. I’m meeting with the committee to discuss prizes at the Boxing Day fête. You will take a tray in the study, which you will ignore, and then you will eat half the offerings cold, and Mrs. Gwinnett’s feelings will be hurt, and I will have that to deal with well as your disdain for a hearty toddy.”

She blew me a kiss and sailed off in the direction of the conservatory while I contemplated ordering myself a whole pot of toddies.

Arthur’s correspondence was important, never-ending, and infernally boring. When I should have gone directly to the study and locked myself in with a vow not to emerge until every piece of mail had been dealt with, I instead marched to the family wing and climbed to the nursery suite.

Leander was five-going-on-sixish, my late brother Harry’s by-blow, and recently commended by his mother into the keeping of the ducal side of the family. The boy was coping with a lot, and somebody had best warn him that the holiday mêlée would include Uncle Terrence.

The mail, despite all my wishes to the contrary, would still await me in another quarter hour.

I found the lad with his nose in a book, some tale about King Arthur and knights and dragons. “No soldiers today?” I asked as the nurserymaid scurried off for a much-deserved cuppa in the servants’ hall.

“I played with them already,” Leander said. “Unless you’d like to play with me?”

The child could reenact a number of Napoleonic battles with frightening enthusiasm. “If you’ve dismissed the men to their barracks, it would be a shame to muster them out again for a mere skirmish.”

“Because you are busy.” Harry’s ghost peered out at me through Leander’s reproachful eyes.

I joined the boy on the toy chest where he’d perched. Not the most comfortable seat for a grown man. “Christmas is coming. The whole house is busy. I vow I’ve never seen so much cleaning and dusting and polishing in my life. I shut the door of the study in part just to get some peace.”

Leander peered up at me. “You could take a nap.”

“Then Her Grace would worry that I’m sickening for something.” Was Leander still taking naps? I did not know, and I was his legal guardian. “Have you been to the stable today?”

He had his father’s love of horses. My land steward was in the process of buying a pony that I’d present to the lad on Christmas morning. We’d dickered and dithered with prospective sellers until ponies had been trotting through my dreams. The chosen beast was awaiting his fate in the livery stable at the estate village, though precisely who had bought the pony for whom was cloaked in utmost secrecy.

“I visited Atlas after breakfast,” Leander said. “Young Jamison took me, because Nurse said you were busy.”

The child needed a proper governess, but Her Grace and I agreed that could wait until the New Year. For the nonce, Leander enjoyed a degree of liberty most boys would envy.

Though he also, I suspected, endured a degree of boredom unprecedented in his short life. “Have you written to your mama this week?”

“You asked me that yesterday. I write to Mama on Sundays because there’s nothing else to do after supper on the Sabbath.”

“I see.”

“Mama writes back that I’m to be good, not to eat too many sweets, and to listen to you and Uncle Arthur, except Uncle Arthur isn’t here.”

“He will come home next year, or that’s the plan. This toy chest is hard.”

“It’s wooden. Wood is hard.”

I rapped my knuckles against the boy’s crown. “Your head is hard. Would you like to make another trip to the stable with me?” A mountain of mail threatened to figuratively bury me at that suggestion.

“No, thank you, Uncle Julian. I’m reading now.”

“You are no help whatsoever.”

His gaze turned wary. “Help with what?”

I’d aimed a similar cautious, uncertain gaze on grouchy old Uncle Terrence countless times. “I was making a jest. Hoping you would help me avoid sorting all the mail and whatnot. You would rather be studious than abet my truancy.”

He turned the page of his book. “Dragons breathe fire. I would like to breathe fire, but why doesn’t the dragon get burned? Are dragons made of metal?”

“They are made of magic, and magic is impervious to flame.”

Leander silently repeated the word. Im-per-vious. “I will be impervious to lemon drops. I will fill my tummy with them and never get a bellyache.”

“A fine ambition. Well, if you have no further news to impart, I’ll be on my way.”

He shot a glance at the toy chest reserved for his various armies. “Will you come back tonight?”

“I will, and you can tell me what you’ve learned about dragons. Perhaps Father Christmas will bring me one, seeing as I’ve been a good boy and all.”

My humor was falling flat, and perhaps that’s what I deserved for dodging carpet victories over the Corsican menace.

“You aren’t a boy, Uncle Julian.”

“True enough. I am a nephew, though, of sorts. My uncle Terrence will join us for Christmas, and he’s something of a dragon in human form. Not very jolly, always seems to be finding fault.” Though Aunt Bertha held perennial top honors among the Ancient and Distinguished Order of At-Large Critics.

“Was your uncle a soldier?”

An odd question, but then, Harry had been a soldier, and Leander measured all in his ambit by the lights of the father, of whom he had no memory.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, he was. Fought the Americans, among others.”

“Maybe your uncle Terrence will play soldiers with me. I’m a nephew too.”

“So you are, lad. So you are, but you might want to keep your dragon book handy in case Uncle Terrence isn’t in a mood to play. He’s not much given to merriment.”

“Like you?”

I am not perishing cranky. “Yes, like me, at least lately. Uncle Terrence is coming to the Hall because he has nowhere else to go, and he is family, of a sort.”

Leander returned to his book without firing further broadsides, and I left the nursery feeling like a dismal excuse for an uncle.

Leander was family of a sort , and he hadn’t anywhere else to go. If I was lucky, the boy wouldn’t pick up on the comparison, though lately, luck and I hadn’t been keeping company much. Uncle Terrence at the figurative gate, flying footmen outside the library window, and now my nephew wasn’t in charity with me.

I marched my not-cranky self to the study, sat at Arthur’s grand desk, and pulled a stack of Arthur’s important correspondence to the middle of the blotter. I had picked and shoveled my way through about half of it before I noticed a tray at my elbow. Toasted cheese sandwiches gone cold.

I picked one up and bit off a corner and reached for the next piece of mail.

The truth was, I hadn’t anywhere else to go for Christmas, unless I wanted the solitary gloom of my London town house. Even in my cranky, grumpy, hungry, resentful state, I knew that was no solution for what ailed me.