A Christmas Promise by Mary Balogh Page A

through the door one minute later, his greatcoat still unbuttoned despite the evening chill and the brisk wind. But he could not even go to Bertie to pour out his venom and his frustration, he realized. She was his wife and this was his marriage. A private business. Not one he could discuss with a friend. He thought of Dorothea again as he buttoned his coat and pulled on his gloves hastily. He could not remember ever having felt more lonely than he felt at that moment.
    T HERE WERE FEWER THAN two weeks left before Christmas, she told herself, gazing out of the carriage window on unfamiliar countryside made drab by a heavy gray sky and a semi-dusk despite the fact that the afternoon was no more than half gone. There was no feeling of Christmas. Usually there was. Usually she took a maid and went shopping several times, not so much because she could not have purchased everything all at once, but because she liked the atmosphere of the shops and streets. She had always particularly liked Oxford Street at Christmas.
    Perhaps it was because her father was recently dead, she thought. Undoubtedly that was the reason. And thinking about him, she felt the now-familiar aching in her chest and throat and the equally familiar sense of guilt. She had been unable to mourn for him. She had not once cried for him. She looked down at her blue velvet cloak, the one she had worn at her wedding. She had even put off her black mourning clothes when they left London. So had her husband, but she noticed that he wore a black armband. She did not. Tomorrow Papa would have been dead one month.
    Or perhaps, she thought, it was because she was recently married and yet was already very unhappily married. They were seated side by side in the carriage, yet they had exchanged scarcely a word since leaving London, only the essential civilities. She was curious about the countryside, anxious and eager for her first glimpse of Grenfell Park, wondering how much farther there was to go. And yet she could not ask him. They had scarcely spoken in the five days since their quarrel.
    She had wanted to apologize for that. Her behavior had been unpardonable. He had been quite justified in calling her a shrew. She had started it all, she had been forced to admit. Though he had looked stunned when she had told him there were twenty members of her family coming for Christmas—and indeed she had been surprised at the number when she had added it up—he had not made any objection either about the number or the character of his guests. Perhaps he would have had she given him time, but the point was that he had not before she decided to quarrel with him—her usual self-defense when she felt nervous or embarrassed.
    She had wanted to apologize also for the smashed figurine, which had been one of her favorite pieces in the house. But she had not seen him again that evening or all the next day and the day after that only briefly. And he had bowed to her with distant formality and looked at her with cold, haughty eyes and spoken in a voice to match. And she had remembered the reason she had invited so many and the reason her nerves had been so brittle in the library that evening and the evenings before it.
    He had a mistress. He did
that
with another woman when he had a wife. Not that she cared, of course. She would a thousand times rather he did it with someone else than with her. But even so, for five days she had felt unlovely and unattractive and lonely, although she had told herself her life was as she wished it to be. She did not want him anywhere near her bed, except that she wanted a child. And she spent five days wanting Wilfred and trying not to think about him. And five days remembering the blond and delicate Dorothea Lovestone.
    So she had hardened her heart and not apologized. And it was too late now. Too late to restore even the less than satisfactory civility to their dealings together.
    She was startled out of her black thoughts by the sight of a solitary