Christmas Belles

  Christmas Belles

  By Susan Carroll

  Text copyright @ Susan Carroll

  All rights reserved

  To my four greatest fans, Dorothy, Pat, Jean and Janet who also happen to be my sisters.

  Prologue

  Christmas Eve, 1805

  Never had sprigs of mistletoe been nailed into place with such fierce determination Miss Chloe Waverly balanced atop the ladder, smacking her hammer against the nail, her blue eyes squinting at the clang of every blow. Her slender frame swayed precariously, her shimmering lengths of honey brown hair tumbling across the delicate contours of her face. Pursing her lips, she dealt the stubborn nail another mighty wham.

  "Chloe!" Her older sister's voice rang out sharply. "Do finish with that before you break your neck or my ears. The infernal racket you are making! It goes quite through my head."

  Using the handle of the hammer, Chloe brushed the hair back from her eyes and glanced down to where Lucy stood on the other side of the arched doorway that led into the parlor. The neat arrangement of Lucy's blond ringlets made Chloe more conscious of her own disheveled state. But then, she had never seen Lucy look anything less than what she aspired to be: a young lady of high fashion and elegance, from her soft leather pattens to her immaculately manicured fingertips.

  Lucy took great care that the folds of her soft kerseymere gown did not snag against the ladder. Even her frown in nowise diminished her beauty.

  "When you said you intended to hang the mistletoe," Lucy complained, "I did not know you meant to kill it. Surely you can find some more merciful means of execution."

  "I've nearly finished. You want me to make a proper job of it, don't you?" Chloe asked, making a sweeping gesture with the hammer. She always talked with her hands She could not seem to help it. "It wouldn't do to have the kissing bough come tumbling down in the midst of our celebrations."

  Lucy took a step back, warily eyeing the movements of the hammer. "I do not see what difference it makes. Who do you fancy there will be to kiss? Only Papa or old Squire Daniels, whose breath always smells like tobacco and onions."

  "You can never tell." Chloe dreamily regarded the bough of dark green leaves with its pallid berries. "Perchance we might have some unexpected visitor."

  "And perchance we won't."

  "But we could—someone young and handsome."

  "But we won't." Lucy smiled sweetly and stalked away.

  "But we might," Chloe muttered under her breath. She tightened her grip upon the hammer, but she paused to watch as Lucy rustled gracefully past the settee, where their youngest sister, Agnes, reclined, deeply engrossed in a book.

  Chloe had a deep and abiding appreciation of all that was beautiful, and Lucy was certainly that. If her own eyes were blue, Lucy's were bluer. Her hair had tints of sunlight, but Lucy's was spun gold. She was short, but Lucy was tall and statuesque. And although she was only a year older than Chloe, Lucy had a bosom.

  Ruefully, Chloe stole a furtive glance down the front of her high-waisted frock. She had just turned sixteen last month and was still as flat-chested as Dan, the stable boy.

  Ah, well. Someday, she thought with a tiny sigh. Chloe was a great believer in all good things coming to those who waited long enough. Cheerfully, she resumed her hammering until she was certain that the bough of mistletoe was there to stay. Then she carefully descended the ladder to survey her handiwork.

  Besides the mistletoe in the arch, she had decorated the parlor as well with swags of holly draped about the mantel, evergreen festooned in loops over the windows. The mullioned panes sparkled with a crystal sheen of frost. A roaring fire had been banked upon the hearth, and although the night wind sang past the shutters, the parlor seemed snug and cozy.

  Chloe could already feel it, a kind of magic that quickened her blood, that special magic that came only on Christmas Eve, as hushed as a new-fallen blanket of snow, as warm and glowing as a candle's flame. The magic seemed to have transformed the parlor until one quite forgot the shabbiness of the carpet, the settee pillows turned over to disguise the fact that the velvet had faded. Not that Chloe noticed those things anyway, except when Lucy pointed them out to her.

  Her decorating finished, Chloe found herself with nothing to do but take a restless turn about the parlor. Tingles of excitement and happy anticipation coursed through her, and she wished she had someone to share the feeling with. But Lucy sat at the parlor table, absorbed in examining the largess of her presents, and Agnes never looked up from her book. The girl was reading Homer, not the Chapman translation, but in the original Greek. Agnes was so clever, it was almost alarming.

  After regarding her sisters' preoccupation in wistful silence, Chloe clapped her hands together in hearty fashion and rubbed them briskly "Oh, do let us go for a walk or something. We could go down by the old oak and see if the Christmas rose has begun to bloom."

  "In the cold and dark?" Lucy's brow arched with incredulity.

  Agnes raised her sharp little nose up from her book long enough to comment. "It isn't properly a rose plant at all, only a species of hellebore."

  "But it's called a Christmas rose because it blooms at Christmas," Chloe said.

  "That's only a legend. There is no reason it should bloom on Christmas rather than any other day of winter. Plants cannot read the almanac." Agnes's look was as severe as that of the sternest old governess. Sometimes, Chloe thought, her younger sister seemed more like fourteen going on forty.

  "It would do you no harm to go for a walk anyway, Agnes," Lucy chimed in. "You spend too much time at your studies. You are going to end up with great bumps over your eyes."

  "It is far better than what you do, constantly primping in front of a mirror. You have wasted your entire evening gloating over that pile of fripperies."

  Lucy flushed and circled one arm rather protectively around her newly acquired collection of fans, gloves, and jars of scent. "You need not be so spiteful merely because I received more presents than you. If you had been invited to visit Cousin Harriet in London, you would never have made as many kind friends as I did, for you never take the pains to be agreeable to anyone."

  "I would not want such friends or such a heap of rubbish." Grumpily, Agnes nestled deeper against the settee cushions, subsiding once more into her book.

  Lucy turned her eyes to Chloe, looking half-defiant, half-ashamed. "I feel quite badly that the rest of you have not received so much." She hesitated and took a deep swallow. "Of course, I intend to share."

  "Why, Lucy, that is very generous of you." Chloe schooled her jaw not to drop open. It was generous of Lucy and decidedly unusual. Sharing had never come easily to her lovely sister. But, unlike Agnes, Chloe did not grudge Lucy her store of treasures or her visits to London. In fact, Chloe feared the sojourns had done Lucy little good, merely providing her with tantalizing glimpses of a glittering, fashionable world in which she, as the daughter of an impoverished knight, could not hope to take part. It left Lucy more discontented than ever with the simple life they led at Windhaven Manor, isolated along a sweep of coast in Norfolk.

  Chloe made haste to assure Lucy that she did not feel any of the fans would suit her, nor did she really care for that brand of scent.

  "Well, if you are really sure," Lucy said with a regretful smile, but her sigh was tinged with relief. She was just beginning to scoop her treasured hoard from the table when Emma entered the room. At the age of twenty, Emma was the eldest of the Waverly girls.

  Chloe pounced upon her sister at once, eager for someone to share her enthusiasm. She dragged Emma about the parlor, calling upon her to admire the decorations. Emma wiped her hands on the folds of her apron, a few wisps of soft brown hair escaping her chignon to frame her plump, pretty face. She summoned up
a placid smile.

  "It is all very pleasant, dear," Emma said.

  "Pleasant," Chloe echoed drearily. She was fond of all her sisters in different ways. But sometimes she felt like giving them each a sharp poke with a pin. At least that might produce some small shriek of excitement from them. She supposed she might as well resign herself. She could expect no real enthusiasm until Papa came home from calling at the vicarage. Papa was the only one who ever threw himself into the festivities with the same unbridled delight as she did.

  Emma gave Chloe a motherly pat on the shoulder. "I am sure we shall have a very nice Christmas. I have just been checking on the plum pudding. Even though it is my first effort at such a thing, I believe it may be the best dinner we've ever had."

  Lucy groaned. "There is no need for you to go announcing that to anyone else, Em."

  "Oh, Lord, no," Agnes piped up scornfully. "The world mustn't know we are so unrefined that we eat."

  "Not that we eat," Lucy snapped. "That we cook."

  "We, dearest?" Emma laughed with one of her rare flashes of humor.

  Lucy pulled a face but could not refrain from smiling a little at herself. It was a well-known fact that Lucy never went near the kitchens except to demand more hot water for her bath. But they did not have as many indoor servants these days at Windhaven, only Polly, the maid, and Old Meg, the cook. Emma, being of a domestic turn, had taken to helping out with the preparation of meals. Chloe had also tried to do her share, but being a little too inclined to daydream, she was something of a disaster in the kitchens. Ever since the day she burned the bread so hard and black it could have been used to repair the crumbling stone at the north end of the house, Old Meg had threatened Chloe with the soup ladle if she "durst cross the threshold of my kitchen again."

  Chloe had felt both guilty and relieved at the ban. It seemed unfair that the burden of maintaining the household should fall on Emma's shoulders. Yet she never complained, not even at times like this evening, when she was looking a little tired.

  Forcing Agnes to draw in her feet, Chloe gave Emma a gentle nudge until she plunked down beside the younger girl on the settee. Emma flashed her a grateful smile, then mopped her forehead with the heel of her hand.

  "I declare, it seems hotter in here than it was in the kitchen. How much wood you girls have stacked upon that fire! We won't even need the Yule log brought in."

  "That's Chloe's doing," Lucy said. "She's been brewing some sort of concoction in that little black pot."

  Agnes turned another page of her book and sniffed. "Probably some other beastly Christmas custom she has discovered and means to inflict upon all of us."

  "It has nothing to do with Christmas," Chloe said. "Or at least only a little bit." She had nearly forgotten about the little iron pot she had suspended over the hottest part of the flames. But now she hastened over to check its contents.

  "Actually, what I have been doing," she told her sisters, "is melting some of Papa's lead shot."

  This announcement at least produced a reaction from them. The parlor chorused with their exclamations.

  "What!"

  "Melting lead?"

  "Whatever for?"

  "Another of Chloe's half-mad schemes," Agnes said. "You may depend upon it."

  Chloe smiled sheepishly. "Perhaps it is a little mad. But I was talking to the squire's house-keeper, Mrs. Brindle. She told me of the most interesting old legend—"

  Her sisters united in a heartfelt groan.

  "No, do but listen," Chloe insisted. "Mrs. Brindle told me that if an unmarried girl drops molten lead into cold water on Christmas Eve, the lead will assume a shape, give her some sign of what her future husband will be."

  "What next!" Lucy exclaimed. "Now the girl is passing the time of day with housekeepers. Have you no sense of decorum, Chloe?"

  "It is all utter nonsense anyway," Agnes added. "Wait until Papa hears how you have been wasting his lead shot."

  "Papa won't care," Chloe said. "I do not believe he has ever shot anything in his life, not even a rabbit. Oh, please," she added coaxingly. "Let us just try dropping the lead in water. What harm can it do? It is only a bit of fun."

  Agnes snorted with disgust, and Lucy rolled her eyes. But Emma, as ever willing to indulge Chloe, joined her at the fireside, though Chloe suspected her sister came as much to insure that Chloe did not burn herself as for any other reason.

  Whatever Emma's motives, both she and Chloe crowded round a bucket of cold water Chloe carefully dipped up a ladle full of lead and tipped it into the bucket. The molten lead hit the water with an awful hiss and a cloud of steam. Chloe waved her hand, trying to disperse the haze before her eyes.

  When the shape in the water became visible, Emma said, "I fear it doesn't look like much of anything to me "

  That didn't surprise Chloe. When she pointed to clouds overhead, indicating the shapes of horses, daffodils, dancing cats, Emma never saw those either.

  Chloe narrowed her eyes, applying her own powers of perception to the lead solidifying in the water. "It looks like a cross of some sort. That must mean that your husband will be a religious man, a man of the cloth, perhaps."

  "Oh!" was all that Emma said, but a peculiar look crossed her face. Her cheeks turned bright pink with a most self-conscious expression.

  For all her feigned sophistication and amusement at the proceedings, Lucy also crowded close to peer into the bucket.

  "Do mine next," she demanded.

  Chloe obeyed. After another hiss from the bucket, she studied the forming shape.

  "It looks like a lump of something," she said.

  "A lump of lead. Only a lump of lead," Agnes was heard to mutter from her post on the settee.

  "No, a lump of gold!" Chloe cried triumphantly. "The fates proclaim that Lucy is to marry a very wealthy man."

  Lucy giggled. "Tell the fates I am much obliged to them. And could he have a title as well?"

  While she, Emma, and Chloe laughed at their own nonsense, Agnes shook her head darkly. "Candidates for Bedlam, the lot of you."

  She resisted all attempts to coax her to join in the game. When Lucy went so far as playfully trying to drag her from the settee, Agnes dealt her hand a ringing slap.

  Lucy rubbed her stinging knuckles, but she still chuckled. "All right for you, Madam Sourpuss. Let us do yours, then, Chloe."

  Nodding, Chloe raised up the ladle for the last time. She told herself that it was only a silly game, all in fun, but that did not prevent her hand from trembling a little as she poured the lead She watched for the shape forming in the water, her heart thudding with eager anticipation.

  Her excitement quickly turned to puzzlement. She squinted at the scrap of lead. "It looks like an arrow."

  "I suppose that means you are going to marry Robin of the Hood," Agnes called out derisively.

  "No, it might not be an arrow," Lucy said. "It's more of a sword or dagger."

  Emma smiled. "Perhaps that means you are going to marry a soldier."

  "Oh!" Chloe exclaimed. "I shouldn't like that. I would not want a soldier for my husband."

  "What about a sailor, then?" a jolly voice boomed from the doorway.

  Chloe turned sharply at the same time as her sisters to regard the stout, elderly gentleman who stood framed beneath the arch.

  "Papa!"

  Sir Phineas Waverly paused to blow on his palms, his hands chafed raw from the cold. He had forgotten to wear his gloves again, likewise his hat. The ends of his graying hair straggled across his brow, his side-whiskers badly in need of a trim. Even though the hem on the cape of his caped coat was slightly frayed, in Chloe's eyes, he still cut quite the dashing figure, very much what he must have been on that glorious long-ago day he had been named a Knight of the Bath.

  As he shed his cloak, he looked about him, saying, "How well the decorations look, my dears. But bless me, you've forgotten the mistletoe."

  It was a game of Papa's since the days of their childhood. Sir Phineas always stood d
irectly beneath the kissing bough, pretending to be ignorant of its existence until he should be captured.

  "Oh, Papa." Agnes groaned. "We are far too old for such jesting."

  But Chloe was already rushing forward, with Emma not far behind. Lucy for once forgot her newly acquired sophistication and romped with the rest. While Chloe launched a frontal attack, Emma and Lucy moved in from the sides, surrounding Sir Phineas, covering his bewhiskered cheeks with ruthless kisses. He struggled manfully, but as his defense took the form of seizing each girl in a great bear hug, his protestations were not taken seriously.

  Agnes was at last driven to abandon her book and join them, giving her father a prim peck on the cheek. Not, she was at great pains to assure everyone, because it had anything to do with the mistletoe. No, she always greeted her father thus when he returned from a long absence.

  "Indeed," Lucy mocked. "Papa must have been gone all of three hours."

  Agnes glared at her.

  "More like five," Chloe corrected. She regarded her father reproachfully. "You have been at the vicarage forever, Papa. You were not even here to hang the holly."

  "It could not be helped, my dear." Sir Phineas exhaled a deep sigh. The glow that had suffused through him from all the hearty embracing seemed to fade. He crossed the room to hold out his hands to the roaring blaze. "Ah, that feels better."

  While Emma scolded Papa for forgetting his gloves, Chloe surreptitiously sought to remove the bucket of water Not that she feared Papa would be angry over the waste of shot, but he was bound to ask the nature of the game, and Chloe did not want to explain. Papa would laugh at such nonsense, but he would look rather sad as well. He always did at any talk of husbands for them. Chloe was fully aware how much her father had worried of late about the difficulty of providing suitable portions for his daughters.

  Was it such worries that troubled him even tonight, Christmas Eve? For Papa was troubled about something. The more Chloe observed him, the more she was sure of it. Despite the pockets of age beneath Papa's eyes, the eyes themselves retained the glow of youth, as bright as any candle flame. But tonight not even the reflection of fire shine brought any sparkle to his eyes.