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A Christmas Novella

Copyright © 2017 by M. J Logue.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Publisher's Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author's imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
It's December already.

Where has that time gone, since last year?

Well, this year has seen book six (!!!!) in the Uncivil Wars series - and also it's seen a bit of a departure for me, in that Thomazine and Thankful Russell have got their own series, and it's out there with Endeavour Press being a real book and everything. The series begins with An Imperfect Enjoyment - although, if you like, you could argue that it really began with last year's Entertaining Angels novella. That's where it all starts, after all....

So this one is really for the ladies (and gentlemen - though I suspect this is more one for the romantics amongst us) who, like Thomazine Russell (nee Babbitt) saw something worth the having in one scarred, slightly mad lapsed Puritan officer of somewhat dubious past.

Happy Christmas from the Babbitts and the Russells, or Essex and Buckinghamshire respectively. And from one author who likes writing about the whole ruffianly, cheerful, loving lot of them.

Christmas in the 17th century - even after the Restoration - wasn't quite like our Christmas. Especially in rural areas, where they were more prone to keeping to the old ways. The whole twelve days of Christmas were celebrated, between 25th December and 6th January, but not every day was celebrated equally. All work stopped except looking after the livestock, even spinning was banned as it was the most common occupation for women and flowers were placed around the spinning wheels. People would visit friends and it was seen as very much a community celebration. (Work re-started on Plough Monday, the first Monday after Twelfth Night.)

Up until Christmas Day it was expected that people would keep to a strict fast, but on December 25th all bets were off and the feasting started. People decorated their houses with greenery - holly and ivy and bay and rosemary, all the evergreens - instead of with tinsel and trees. Obviously no turkey, but festive boards groaned instead with roasted meats, winter cheeses, fruit, pasties of various shapes, sizes, and denominations -

And the cake.

Oddly enough, given that the feast of Christide was a festival of faith celebrating the birth of Christ, it was also a festival of misrule, when everything was turned on its head: when the existing order of society was overturned, and anarchy (and silliness) reigned, briefly. The prime mover of the tomfoolery was chosen by cake. Yes, really. A bean was baked into the fruit cake that was served on Twelfth Night, and whoever found it in his slice was Lord of Misrule for the duration, and expected to lead the general shenanigans.

(Yes, there is a recipe for Twelfth Night cake - it still exists in some parts of the world as a tradition, although I believe you can now get small plastic models of the infant Jesus to bake into your batter. I'm imagining the look on Thankful Russell's face if he bit into that, never mind the bean....)

### -1-

"I love this time of year," Thomazine Russell said sleepily, and bounced baby Nathaniel more comfortably in position against her shoulder. (He didn't want to be bounced, and grumbled about it like an irritable cat, but did not protest too horribly. And so that was all right.)

Major Thankful Russell - whose title was a courtesy only, now that he was retired from adventure and an occasionally-glittering career as intelligencer to the Admiralty, and looking forward to a quiet life with his beloved family on a backwater Chiltern sheep farm - did not feel _quite_ so ardent about midwinter as his wife did. He had spent most of his afternoon out on the hill excavating sheep from snowdrifts, and was feeling hard done-to. He knew in a real and practical sense it wasn't actually his responsibility to wield the shovel, but nonetheless: he was not made to be able to stand by and direct operations whilst other men did the labour. Consequently, his back ached, his head ached, his wrists ached, and he had blisters on both hands. It was a crowning mercy he had not died of cold and exposure to the elements -

"Stop going on about it," his loving wife said, without opening her eyes.

"Well, I _might_ have - how did you know what I was thinking?"

"You grumped," she said, and he bridled - "I did _what_?"

"You _grumped_. You've always done it when you're cross, and it's the only thing you've got to be cross about at the moment. It was a guess, my honey, and you just confirmed it." She sat up and opened her eyes and smiled at him. "You are singularly unfitted to manual labour, husband, but bless you for trying."

"I am not, either!"

"Yes you are. You are willing, but unpractised. I thought Gillespie was going to belt you with the shovel at one point." And her mouth started to twitch at the memory of it, " - when you piled in to that drift up by the lane end, digging like a terrier, and you caught him smack in the face with a shovel full of snow?"

"He should not have been standing so close behind me!"

"He has, I imagine, considerably more practise with a shovel than you do, dear. I would guess he knows what he is about."

"And I do not? Are you suggesting that there is more to digging holes, than meets the eye?"

She did not say anything, his bright girl. She just looked at him, and there was such a tenderness in her eyes that he did not mind that she thought he was a dangerous lunatic with a shovel. "We did not lose a one," he said proudly, and she nodded.

"Of course you did not. I would have expected no less. They are all accounted for?"

"To the last lamb."

She hefted Nathaniel to her shoulder, smiling, and crossed the fireside to sit beside him. "You are a darling and most conscientious silly, you know. Master Gillespie is a more than capable supervisor of such work."

"I am not a lily of the field, tibber. I am unused to being purely decorative."

His son snuffled and squirmed between them, and then transferred his person from his mother's shoulder to his father's, like a rather unnervingly large caterpillar, with an ease of three months' life experience. "You are not _purely_ decorative," she said, "-you have just taken over the responsibilities of a towel."

"I have?" - a sudden wet warmth on his shoulder, and his offspring's contented lip-smacking, gave him pause. "Thomazine, he dribbles!"

"He does, my honey. I don't imagine that he'll be hungry for an hour or so yet, but - I should not put your fingers _too_ close to his mouth, dear. He also bites."

"Is that - is that as it should be?"

She laughed at him, but he didn't mind. He had had so little experience with happy, healthy children, it was all still a miracle. The fact that this little fair-haired grub knew who he was - the child's entire little body vibrated with joy when he clapped eyes on his parents, even at three months old, and he took an infinite delight in tangling his father's pale hair in his fingers. (He did the same to his mother, but she had the good sense to wear her hair confined, for the most part. And Russell did not mind, not really, not even when he had to be cut free with Thomazine's embroidery-scissors.) "He's only exploring," she said patiently, " - he finds things out with his mouth, still: he's not starved. Well, probably not much. I could nurse him all day every day and he wouldn't complain, would you, grubling?"

The child was humming to himself. It was probably no more than a sound to him, a noise that gave him pleasure to make and to hear. He made all sorts of odd noises, and sometimes they sounded like words, and probably they were not. Humming, though.

Russell looked at Thomazine, and Thomazine looked at Russell, and her eyes were suddenly shiny-bright. "He doesn't half sound like you," she said wonderingly, and blinked hard a time or two. "You do that. When you're happy. You hum. With no tune to it. Like a bee." She put her free arm round him, and he put his head on her shoulder and with Nathaniel between them they made a perfect circle of happiness. The snow was falling again, little sizzles and splats falling down the chimney into the fireplace.

It was not a wild night; it was calm, and if you did not mind the fact that the sky was full of feathers, not cold. But they had a good, stout, warm house, and a warm fireside. And they had each other.

"Sleepy boy," Thomazine said, and brushed her lips across his hair, as soft as a snowflake.

"Nathaniel, or I?"

"Both of you, my honey. Time for bed, I think."

"It is yet early."

"You have had a long day - and I will have plenty, over the coming weeks. Christmas is a busy time, in a worldly household."

\- she was laughing at him again, but he thought she probably had reason . He did not know any better. Until he was twenty-one he had not even known what Christmas _was_ , in the world: brought up by an unnaturally zealous Puritan sister, he had not known there was such a thing, a time of feasting and frivolity that you could enjoy without fear of its condemning your immortal soul. He had skirted around it, for this last twenty years, but he had never been submerged in its festival like this. Always before he had been on the outside and looking in at Christmastide, and now suddenly the household was turned upside down about him, and all their talk was of bakings and makings and sweetmeats and gifts. He knew what it was, he knew what the words meant. It was just that presently he felt as if he were in the eye of a tempest.

Not so very many years ago, he had never even allowed himself to dream that he might have what other men had: a hearth and a home where he belonged, and a wife who loved him and a chubby fair-haired baby and a place in the world. All this – it was what he had _wanted_ , and it seemed churlish to find it quite so overwhelming as he did.

But he did. Maybe he would get used to it, in time, when he was a staid old married man, but presently he was all adrift and panicky, for he had nothing in his past that he might compare this to. For there had been two distinct halves to his life: before Thomazine, and after Thomazine, these last few months of pure ordinary joy, split like an apple -

"A plain russet-coated Apple," he said aloud, with a breath of laughter, for he had been a plain russet-coated lieutenant, once - not one of the late Lord Protector's plain russet-coated captains, although he had loved whereof he knew and fought for what he loved. And he had been Thomazine's father's lieutenant, then, and his company had known him as Hapless, for his wilful bad luck. And Thomazine, who had been all of two years old when she first set eyes on him, had called him Apple, for she could not say Hapless altogether.

She still did. He had been her Apple for all of her life: first when she was a little girl, and he had been her fiery rebel angel, and then to his wonder and joy it seemed her opinion of him had not changed after she was a woman grown. And she did not mind at all that he was only good to look on from his right side after his soldiering days, or that he could be black company indeed sometimes - you could not be so hurt as Russell had been and it not leave its mark - or that he did not always know what such simple worldly things were as keeping Christmas. She was patient with him, and gentle, and she was kind. (She was a woman, and a mortal woman, not a saint. She was not _always_ patient, or gentle, or kind. Sometimes she just told him in short words to buck his ideas up, though even the being told was sufficient for him. So long as it came from Thomazine, though, for she was possibly the only person this side of heaven that he trusted absolutely.)

" _My_ plain russet-coated Apple," she said firmly, for another of the joys of being married to a woman who had known you for all of her life and half of yours, was that she tended to have a very good idea in what direction your wandering thoughts were tracked, and to follow it.

"I was thinking –"

"You were thinking about Christmas. And the New Year, I have no doubt. It's all right, my honey. It will be all right."

"All shall be well?"

It wasn't a question, as such, it was more of a shared lovingness between them: her insistence on Dame Julian of Norwich as sovereign sage, that all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well, and Thomazine had always used it as her stock reply when he was fretful. Storing up trouble, she said. He had a suspicion that he had probably been fretful for some weeks.

\- But then he was worried, he could not help but be worried, this was their first Christmas in this house as a family, he and she and Nathaniel. He was worried that he would disappoint her - that he would say or do something amiss, not knowing any better - that he would make everyone wretched, for his not knowing -

She sighed again, and rubbed her cheek against his hair. "Russell, give over _worriting_."

"I know, but –"

"Do you like raisins?" she said.

It seemed like an odd question. "I - yes, you know I do, but –"

"Do you like winter cheese?"

"I –"

"And brawn? Roasted meats?"

"Thomazine, I hardly know -"

"If you do nothing but _eat_ for the whole twelve days of Christmas, my honey, and allow those of us with greater experience of the festival to revel till we are thoroughly sick of it, you will be none the worse for it."

"But –"

"But nothing. It is a time of - of joy, and celebration, and thanksgiving, and good things. If you can do nothing else, my darling, put your trust in me that I would not make you do a thing you were not fitted to do. It will not be like the ones at White Notley, the times before we were married. It will be much quieter, and there will be not as much, ah, you know. Riotous merriment."

"I don't mind riotous merriment," he said rather plaintively. "I'm just not sure what to _do_ with it."

"Mind Nathaniel, and eat cake," she said. "Can you manage that, for the better part of a fortnight?"

Just over a year ago, he had stood in a wintry damp church and promised to love her, comfort her and keep her, for as long as they both should live.

And Thomazine had made a like promise. She would not ask him for anything that he could not give. Not yet. Perhaps one day – perhaps he would be happy enough in being himself that he could have strangers about him, acquaintances from the neighbouring farms and houses that he knew in passing only, and he would not be afraid the whole time of their staring and whispering behind their hands, about his scarred face and his young wife. Maybe one day he would be ordinary, and unexceptionable, and he would not care.

He did not think it would be this year, though, and he was sorry for that. She deserved all the light and laughter and joy he could give her, and if it was within his gift he would have strewn sunbeams beneath her feet all the days of her life.

If it was within her gift she would have done the like for him, too, and that made a great lump rise in his throat, for he did not deserve to be so loved.

"I think if you are gentle with me," he said slowly, "- if you can be mindful that I do not know better, and I will probably say stupid things, and I \- I may be shocked, and it may take me a while to not be offended at such –"

"And _I_ think all will be well, and all manner of things shall be well, and you are worrying too much over things that will probably be of no matter at all. I tease you about riotous merriment, my honey, but honestly, it will be a time of thanksgiving. I hope you will come to like it. I will do my utmost to see that you do."

"You always do, my tibber. And you wish it, and so –"

"You may have as much time for devotion and godly reflection as you wish," she teased gently, and he sat up – "I don't _want_ it, Zee! I am not like that! I am not a - a dry, cold, humourless Puritan, I am not like that, my faith is not like that, I –" quite absent-mindedly he was patting Nathaniel's back where the child drowsed against his arm, and he realised he was doing it and stopped. "I want to be ordinary," he trailed off. "I want to be like everyone else."

"You have never been conspicuously quite like any one else I know," she said, and took his face in her two hands and kissed him. "Possibly a little sillier. Stop _thinking_."

"I'm tired. And I have blisters on my hands –" he held his free hand up for her disapproval, "- and were I not sore and tired I should not be half so cross-grained, I think. Or fretful. I will be better in the morning. I promise. I will throw myself into your preparations with abandon."

She patted her shoulder for him to snuggle into, and settled herself more comfortably. "Tomorrow, Russell. Tomorrow is another day."

It was a sweet, tender domestic moment, and he should have been happy to stay so for the rest of the night.

Instead, there was a commotion at the front door, a mercifully brief one, and Eadulf Gillespie, their steward, thumped into the parlour without so much as a by-your-leave.

"Colonel Babbitt's just ridden in to the yard, major."

Thomazine flew upright, Nathaniel yelped and started to wail, and Russell experienced one of those horrible sinkings of the heart. "Daddy? Has something happened?" Thomazine whispered, and her face was white in the firelight.

"Aye," Eadulf Gillespie said grimly, "your sister -"

"Joyeux? What -"

"The other one. She's happened, by the look of him. The colonel's got a face on him as would crack a glass, major. If ye'd be so kind as to attend him, before there's murder done."

### -2-

It was not so long a journey from Essex to Buckinghamshire.

Of a pleasant midsummer, maybe, and with a full day of daylight, it was a good seventy-odd miles, and it was even then a journey that Russell would turn his nose up at making did he not have to.

"How, ah, kind of you to visit," he said faintly, hoping against all evidence that his father in law would reveal some delightful pleasure-trip. (In the falling snow, at midwinter, and near dark. A man could hope.)

"Kind," Hollie Babbitt said, and raised an eyebrow. Which had long been a particularly irritating mannerism he had, and Russell had known the man for twenty years. He forgave the colonel a lot for the fact of his being Thomazine's father, mind - he even forgave the man seven years of having being his lieutenant, which had nearly got them both killed on a number of occasions - but his habit of sarcastic understatement was infuriating.

Thomazine's little sister sniffed, and glowered. Not the littlest any more, it seemed, either: although what they described in town as a "pocket Venus", she was by no means tiny, and she was definitely more womanly than she had been when Russell had last set eyes on her. Since he was still none the wiser, he gave a faint social smile - the one that didn't show all his teeth on one side, and didn't frighten the wits out of people in daylight. "Is everyone well, at White Notley?"

"Everyone is fine," Hollie said through gritted teeth, " and with _her_ out of the way, like to remain so."

"Oh."

"Oh, Nell," Thomazine said reproachfully from the doorway, Nathaniel clamped to her shoulder scarlet-faced and screaming fit to burst, "what have you done?"

"I haven't done anything!" she burst out, "it's _him_ , he is so cruel, he is the worst father and I hate him and it's not fair!"

"You got all this to look forward to," Hollie said. A suspicious mind might have considered him as sounding smug about it, too.

Nell Babbitt rounded on him. "You see? You _see_? He is unnatural! He wants to be rid of me!"

"Wanting to be rid of you is a perfectly bloody natural response to the way you've been acting up these past weeks, missy!"

"How _dare_ you!"

"Would one of you," Russell said briskly, " - _one_ of you, please, at once \- care to enlighten me as to what acting up has taken place, and in what manner this makes you unnatural? Please? Thomazine, my tibber, would you remove that child to a place of safety, lest he burst?"

He thought he sounded perfectly calm, but she looked at him with that level simmering green-amber glare that she'd inherited from her father and truly, he could not bear two of them looking at him as if he'd put something unmentionable on the supper table. She did not go, though. She just _looked_ at him.

"Now!" he yelled, surprising even himself, and then stopped and closed his eyes.

"My apologies," he said, to the room at large. (Nathaniel was gone. He could hear his wails fading up the stairs, and Thomazine thumping like a carthorse in protest. He would face that later on.) "You were saying."

### -3-

It took a good quarter-hour by the clock to settle Nathaniel again, for the child was fond of his cuddles and his father - in that order, possibly -and he had found the Babbitt-related disruption to his routine upsetting.

Nell had clearly fancied herself in the part of ministering angel, too, and her nose was properly put out of joint that the child did not settle with her straightaway. Or, indeed, that Thomazine did not hand over her child straightaway to be settled, but marched instead up and down the nursery singing reproachable soldiering songs both secular and profane until the little boy's howls of outrage had simmered to a gravelly grizzle. "I don't think you're doing that quite properly, Thomazine," she said critically, observing her baby nephew slung over his mother's shoulder like a bundle of laundry. "It can't be good for him."

"Surely," she agreed, "and you with the benefit of how many children?"

"Mama never sang such things to _us_."

"True enough. Daddy used to sing it to me, though, who d'you think taught me the words? Anyway, it's a perfectly respectable song."

"Teaching that child about drinking and - and rough soldiering, while he is still at his mother's breast! Thomazine, really!"

Nathaniel grunted, sounding like a small spaniel, and grabbed his mother 's kerchief in one sticky fist, and went to sleep quite abruptly. Thomazine looked at the top of his head narrowly. "There's nothing wrong with rough soldiering, Eleanor," she said, and her lips tightened. "It has been a good enough career for this family. You are the daughter of a professional soldier, and the sister of a soldier's wife, and _we_ have never wanted for anything."

"Oh, don't be so starchy, Zee! Daddy was long retired by the time I came along, and your Russell hasn't seen a battlefield since the old Queen died \- don't be so up yourself." She tossed her curls and put out her hands coaxingly, "Give him to me, the wee mannie. He wants his Auntie Nellie, doesn't he?"

"Eleanor Babbitt, what kind of language is _that_ to use to your sister!"

"Oh, well, we can tell who _you're_ married to, can't we? Master Prim and Proper Zeal?"

Thomazine bit down on what she had been about to say, with an effort. "You have been in my house slightly less than a half-hour, Nell, and you are already being rude about my husband - who has been nothing but kindness to you - and our parents."

"Since when were _you_ such a paragon of virtue, sister?"

"Possibly since I married," she said, and in her head she knew the humour of it - for before she married and became responsible of the happiness of one slightly-broken retired Admiralty intelligencer, one engaging fat blonde baby, and the smooth running of a wholly disordered household, she had been something of a hoyden herself. She was still not above getting down on her knees and digging the garden, or kilting up her skirts to chase her husband up the stairs when no one was watching. She did not think she had grown staid, or boring, but she thought she might have _grown up_. "And since when were _you_ so awful that your own family cannot bear to have you under the same roof, and must farm you out to your sister eighty miles hence?"

\- Which was where a sudden dreadful thought struck her. "Dear God, Nell, you're not expecting, are you?"

"I what! No! No you cheeky mare I am not!"

\- which was the old Nell back briefly, and not the present mannered young lady of fashion. Which was a relief. Nathaniel stirred and quacked, and both of them looked at each other in some alarm. "Sit down," Thomazine hissed. "On the bed. And talk to me."

"There is nothing to tell!" she hissed back, but sat anyway.

It seemed that Nell's exile was all a great misunderstanding, and her parents were the most unreasonable and dictatorial people alive. She had made a friend - a very respectable, decent girl called Sarah Slatcher, whose family owned a great stretch of land out to Great Dunmow - it seemed the two girls had friends in common, and had run into each other at so many suppers and parties, and had fallen to talking on so many times that eventually an invitation had been extended for Nell to pass a few days with the Slatcher family.

"Boys?" Thomazine said warily.

Nell shook her head. "Absolutely no boys. Boys are silly things, of no account."

Briefly, she wondered how much the story that her husband was getting downstairs, differed from this innocently girlish tale. Nell was a little bit too fashionable - a little bit too elegant - for there not to be boys. Even for Thomazine at that age, there had been boys. (One boy. Specifically. He was downstairs, currently, and she was not sorry that there had not been others.) But it seemed not. It seemed that Sarah Slatcher was a Person Of Some Significance and had introduced Nell to a positive social whirl, of parties and suppers and gaiety and -

"And the arts," she said proudly. "I have been to the theatre. With the Slatchers. Many and many times, in Colchester. Not that _he_ would approve," she finished, nodding at the floor, and Thomazine bit her lip again to not say the thing that she wanted to say, which was that actually that prim and proper Master Russell had seen more plays - and hot off the press ones, at their first production - in his time in London, than Mistress Know-All had had hot dinners.

"Have you, indeed."

Nell raised her head defiantly. "And I'm going to be an actress," she said, and Thomazine was so surprised she almost dropped Nathaniel on his head.

### -4-

"Getting up again out there," Hollie said comfortably. "Glad we got here before dark, or I'd have had to spend the night with that little madam upstairs somewhere, and there'd ha' been murder done."

"Mm," Russell said, not committing himself to anything. She'd done _something_ dreadful, of course, or her father wouldn't have dragged her across two counties by the scruff of the neck, in the snow. He just couldn't imagine what it could be. And he wasn't stupid enough to come out and ask, either.

"Russell, I hate it when you do that!"

He had been an intelligencer, in a previous life. He was very good at putting a whole world of disbelief into a non-committal syllable. Had he been so aged and infirm as Nell Babbitt evidently thought him, he would have looked over his spectacles at that point, too. (He was rather looking forward to the day when he did require to have his vision corrected. He imagined - falsely, no doubt, but he could dream - that being able to look severely over the top of his spectacles would improve his disciplinarian ability no end.) "Mm-hmm," he said, and his father-in-law sat up from his comfortable sprawl and glared at him.

"I can always go home, you whelp, if you keep doing it, an' all!"

"Sorry. Force of habit." Another spray of hard snow pelted the black window glass, and he couldn't help a little shiver. "As you say. Getting up, out there. I hope it will be safe to travel. When you mean to travel, I mean."

"Trying to get rid of me already, then?"

"I – no!"

Hollie snickered to himself. "If someone turned up out o' nowhere with that one, I'd be wanting shot of her at the earliest convenience, too. You know what it says in the Bible about brawling women."

"I do. She is, what? Contentious?"

"Eleanor? Man to man, then, Russell – speaking not as my son in law, you understand – d'you consider Thomazine to be a meek and biddable wife?"

"No," he said, quite without thinking, and then the corner of his mouth that could, curled up in a slow smile. "It's marvellous. Very restful."

"Restful? Are you out of your _mind_?"

"Oh no. No, Zee takes as she finds, and tells you so in short words. I should hate to be married to a woman who took offence, and then went all round the houses in not telling you why she was offended. I am often stupid," he amended, "she must correct me often enough, but I think I am grown almost competent as a husband. For the most part."

"You're all right, Hapless," Hollie said gruffly. "Got an odd kick in your gallop at times, but you're not a bad lad. Our Zee's settled, and happy, which is not a job I'd ha' cared for. Which is all a man can ask for, no?"

It was an unexpected gift. "You think she is happy? Really?"

"Don't fish for compliments, Russell, it doesn't become you. You know damn' well she is. You make her happy. Which - speaking as the lass's father - is bloody hard work, and no small achievement. Mind, making _you_ happy is no small achievement either, so I tip my hat to her an' all. Maybe it's all top-show, then, and maybe the two of you fight like cats in a sack and Nathaniel is the result of five minutes of armed neutrality - though I doubt it." He gave a long sigh, and settled himself against the warm back of the settle. "Well. Nell is the same – for straightforwardness, I mean. Which is not always comfortable. I was hoping a bit o' time away from me and her mam might ding some common sense into madam upstairs, to be honest."

"I - what, _us_? I couldn't - Hollie!"

"Takes too much for granted, that forward wench. Thinks she bloody knows it all. Aye. Well. She'll find out the hard way, like the rest of us had to."

They had fenced about it long enough. "What has she actually _done_?"

"Lied. Oh, I'm not telling you I was an angel, in my younger days – you know damn' well I wasn't – but I never numbered theft and deception amongst my sins, Hapless. She's cheeky, she's bad-tempered, she tells lies - I suspect, though I do not _know_ , that she may have been associating with young men." He raised a significant eyebrow. "In Colchester."

"I can't believe she would be that bad!"

"Then you don't know our Nell, Hapless. She started knocking about wi' some very fashionable sorts at the turn of the year and next thing I hear of it is what were you thinking of, colonel, I hear your youngest is on the stage with the Colchester Comedians and calling herself Thalia."

"Thalia - what?"

"A muse," Hollie said grimly. "The which I was not. A-mused, that is. Mind, I was when she fell off the stage. She was not expecting to see _me_ there, I tell you that for nowt. Prancing about in the middle of bloody Colchester wearing nowt but the second-best bed-curtains. Draperies, Russell. My youngest daughter, in a public place, in draperies."

"Good Lord."

"I hope He wasn't looking, lad. To think that any child o' mine could be so lost to all propriety that she'd fetch up on a public stage. Chucking herself about in front of a paying audience, pretending to be no better than she should be, and getting throttled for it."

"Othello," Russell hazarded, and his father-in-law shot him a venomous look.

"Don't tell me you go in for theatre as well, you whelp, or Thomazine is coming home with me this night, and my grandson's coming with her."

"Master Shakespeare's work is considered tame," he said blandly, "- lately. Very old-fashioned stuff."

"Well, hark at _you_ , Master Critic. So there's our Eleanor, warbling like a bloody linnet and wearing nowt but a bedsheet, while some young buck in cheap satin britches is chucking himself at her in a most overwrought manner – poor stuff, I call it, so I shoved my way to the front of the stage and I waited till she were lay on the bed near enough to hear me – a bad, mark you, a bed! – and bright boy in the britches wriggling himself all over her, mucky little crawl – and I stood up and said, Nell Babbitt you get some clothes on, you little wanton, you're going back to your mother's this minute!"

In his youth Colonel Babbitt had been accustomed to command, and he still had the kind of voice that carried across two counties in the middle of a battlefield. Apparently that tragic production had collapsed to hoots and catcalls as the heroine had been haled offstage, screeching in protest. A number of the more vociferous admirers of the Matchless Thalia had briefly considered whether to engage with her assailant, and then realised not only the size and determination of her opponent – and, more significantly, a certain unmistakable family resemblance – and melted away into the crowd.

"Her gave me hell on," Hollie said, with a certain grim relish. "The language, Russell! It didn't come from me, can tell you that much. She cussed and swore up and down at me, and the more bad language she used the more determined I was that the Colchester Comedians was about as respectable as my – uh - it was no place for a decent young lady. God knows what she'd told 'em she was, but their manager was mortified when he found out she wasn't it. He seemed like a sensible enough feller – for anybody connected with the theatre, that is – couldn't get rid of her fast enough, when he catched on she had a decent family and they were not at all approving of her tripping about on the stage. Paid her off without a word."

"And she told you she was -?"

"Staying round a mate's house at Great Dunmow. Forgets Essex is a small county, that one does – and you got to have a good memory, to be a liar, and she hasn't. I wouldn't ha' minded the lying. No. No, I _would_ ha' minded the lying. But I said if she was going to be a bloody actress she could start by acting like a lass that had been brought up, not dragged up, and she didn't care for that, I can tell you!"

"What did you do?"

"Warmed her bum for her, big as she is," he said grimly. "She bloody come home _then_ , I can tell you. Squalling the whole way about what a dreadful father I am and how I've ruined her life and she can't show her face in Colchester ever again. Two days later she tried to shin out o' back bedroom window with the egg money and run off to join the players again. At which point her mother steps in, and believe you me, Het is harder on them girls than I am. Henrietta said if she ever pulled a trick like that again she'd tie her to the bedpost with a length of rope, and see how she liked _them_ apples. And that, Russell, is how it's been for a month almost, them two at each other's throats day in and day out, one eye on Nell every hour of the day for when she's going to try pulling a stunt next. I thought your Thomazine was wild when she was a lass but she wasn't wicked, Russell, she was wilful but she were never plain disobedient. I do not know what's got into Eleanor. It's like she cannot brook being checked. Can't bear it. I don't care for being told what to do, but I've not got a maggot in my head about it – I'd not run my neck into a noose just to not do as I was bid."

"She is so set on becoming an actress?"

"She is so set on not doing as she is commanded," Hollie corrected. "Honestly. I fear for her. If I told her not to put her face in't' fire I'd think she'd do it, just to spite me. It is very hell, living in that house presently. What Het says she will do the opposite, out of badness. When I bid her do a thing she weeps and pines all over t'place, as if I do it out of cruelty – if Het bids her, she flies out at her. It is, truly, as if she is run mad. Het's miserable, all the time – you would be! I'm not thrilled myself, sharing a house with madam's perverse moods! – and I've been married to Henrietta for past twenty years, Russell, and my wife's happiness comes before my daughter's whimsy. She will be married soon enough, and off my hands, God willing. I have to live with Het. I do _not_ have to live with Eleanor." And then he grinned, and suddenly looked much younger, and not at all like a man of fifty-some years who had ridden eighty miles in a day and a half in midwinter in the company of a young woman whose company he did not care for very much. "We've spoiled her, me and Het, and now we are reaping the whirlwind. She was ever the baby of the household and we let her get away with murder. A little time away from us will do her the world of good, I think – aye, and do us the world of good, for she sets me and Henrietta at each other a-purpose, to have her way. She thinks herself so grown up and independent? Well, then. Let her _be_ independent, and see how she cares for it."

"What – me? _Us_?" He knew he was goggling like a fish, but could do little about it, for every time he thought about it he was taken aback all over again quite anew. "You want me – you want _us_ to discipline Eleanor for you?"

"Give over, Russell. I want you to have her here for a month – keep her out of mischief, for one thing, and let Het simmer down, for another. Keep her away from them undesirable mates of hers. Bloody fast lot they are – too much money, and not enough sense. And bloody work the wench, as well: make her earn her keep. We don't keep her idle at home and I'd not expect to see her idle here."

He thought, suddenly, of Thomazine. (He often thought of Thomazine unbidden, but this time it was with purpose.) She had _said_ it was a busy time of year, for a goodwife. She had said there would be much to do, and many preparations to make, and the Lord alone knew he was going to be no help at all to her, for he knew nothing at all about the practicalities of celebrating Christmastide.

Russell took a deep breath. Many hands would make light work, and he was keen on light work, for his darling girl. "She will be here until the New Year, then? Yes. Yes, I think we would – we would welcome her company."

### -5-

Breakfast was an odd meal, the next morning, at just past dawn.

Nell was nothing short of weird. She was wearing an old-fashioned, high-necked dark grey bodice and a kerchief the size of a tablecloth over it. (Russell found it mildly unsettling, actually: she was dressed quite disconcertingly in the stark manner of his late and unlamented sister, and it set all the flesh on his back to crawling.) Her hair was modestly covered, and every now and again she would sniff forlornly and press the back of her hand to her mouth.

Thomazine was starving-hungry, having had Nathaniel in one of his more bottomless moods since just past midnight and consequently she was not feeling either conversational or fashionable. She was wearing a shabby wool jacket that Russell was rather fond of, and that had consequently been darned and refashioned more times than was seemly for a moderately-successful man of business's wife. It was rose-red, and the wool was soft and thick and slightly fluffy to the touch, and every time she wore it it made her beautiful.

Bit scruffy, if you were critical, but beautiful, and he moved his chair a little closer to hers for the pleasure of brushing her warm and slightly-fluffy sleeve with his fingers every time he reached for the bread. She knew he was doing it, of course, and that knowledge and the warm rose-red made her glow like a candle, and that only made him the worse. Their eyes met across the breadcrumbs and he gave her a rueful grin. It didn't seem right, somehow, to be harbouring carnal thoughts towards your lawful wedded wife when her family seemed to be descending into chaos about her.

She gave him one of those long, smug, possessive looks from under her lashes that made him blush like a maiden, and his diabolical father-in-law snickered unkindly.

"It's December, children. Not April and May," that reprobate said, and Thomazine cocked an eyebrow at her esteemed parent and said, "Obviously _you_ never did such a thing."

"Aye, well, you need to talk to His late Majesty as to my marital failings," Hollie said, dropping his napkin on the table. "He had a habit of standing between me and your mother that used to tease her to madness. There she was at Essex, poor owd gal, new-married and so soon as the ink was dry on the contract there's me posted to Yorkshire for t'next three years. I promised her as soon as I was stood down I'd not spend another night apart from her in this life." He gave his errant youngest a baleful look. "For which my thanks, Eleanor."

Nell hiccupped and pressed _both_ hands to her mouth. (Russell felt sorry for her, but it seemed no one else did, presently.)

"On which note, I shall take my leave. I reckon it's going to come on to snow again this morning and I'd like to get some way towards my own bed by dark."

"Take one of my horses," Russell said, and automatically he was considering the logistics of it, "Marlowe knows the road, he did it often enough before we were married. You have money? You might need to stop over \- the Swan at Amersham has lodgings, though the food's over-rated - " on his feet, and quite reflexively sorting out the things that might be needful. Thomazine gave him a quick, grateful look - surely _she_ had not been about to weep as well? - and whirled off to the kitchens to turn out the cupboards.

Hollie shook his head, smiling. "Two days, tops. If I set off now, and the roads are still clear -"

"Marlowe's good for the run, if you rest him sufficient, and if it keeps light long enough. Well -" he glanced at the ashen sky, "I'd not say _run_ , in this, but -"

And then all was ready, and Hollie was checking the big dappled horse's girths and settling Russell's least-worst winter cloak over his shoulders and slinging a snapsack full of food over Marlowe's saddle. The first tiny dry flakes were starting to settle on his shoulders. "If the weather holds I'll make Bishop's Stortford by nightfall," he said consolingly, "if not all the way. I will be fine."

"Of course you will." Russell slapped his horse's solidly dappled neck. "He would not have it else."

And Thomazine was slamming out of the house with a protesting little bundle - "Give granddaddy a kiss," she sobbed, thrust a very disgruntled Nathaniel into Hollie's hands, and fled, howling.

Both father and grandfather had, it must be said, most efficient reflexes. Hollie did not drop his first grandchild and the usually-imperturbable Marlowe did not make a bid for freedom despite Nathaniel's lusty yelling down his unsuspecting ear, because Russell had grabbed the horse's bit before he had chance to do much more than hop sideways. "God knows what's up with 'em," Hollie said - in response to a question that hadn't been asked - and handed the child back. (Had kissed him, though, even despite the little boy's evident aversion to bristles.) "I wish you all joy of her. And I'll see you when the dust has settled." He grinned, and touched his hat. "I'd wish you a happy Christmas, Hapless, but - let's hope for a peaceful one at least, then."

### -6-

It was not, then, the most comfortable household for a day or two. Thomazine was red-eyed and a little bit watery for a day or so, but then she always was, when she parted from her parents. She was – unlike _some_ people – fond of them.

Eleanor continued to be weird. A man might think she had been recently bereaved, with her habit of drifting about the house in her old-fashioned black draperies with a lace-edged handkerchief in her hand. She looked at Russell as if he might bite her, which irritated him enormously, and she sniffed dolefully at Thomazine all the time. She bucked up a fraction if you put Nathaniel into her lap, but it was hard not to be bucked up with Nathaniel in your lap: he was such a bunchy, cheerful little soul, even if he was mostly dribbling at this time. (Though even that was a rather cheery dribbling, and concerned the boy not a whit.)

And she _stared_. That was probably even worse than the tragic muse – the look of horror and disgust on her face if she caught them holding hands, or if Russell kissed the top of his wife's head in passing. As if they were doing something indecent. Thomazine, who was considerably less inhibited in her expression than her husband, suggested to Russell in the privacy of their own chamber that if the silly wench continued to goggle at them in that manner, she might be moved to it, too.

"You wouldn't," Russell said firmly, and with more confidence than in fact he felt.

"I might," she said, and narrowed her eyes in a manner that left him in no doubt that whatever _it_ was, he wasn't necessarily going to like it. "All that sighing and snorting. I swear, my honey, it is like sharing my house with a mule!"

"Without the saving grace of her being of some practical use."

At which _she_ snorted. "Ah, so she _is_ getting under your skin, then. I was beginning to worry, with you going about looking all patient and hard done-to – you know, that it was just me being intolerant, and that you hadn't noticed at all."

"Being looked at as if I might be catching? Um, no, tibber, I was aware of it. I was choosing to pay it no mind on grounds that she is your sister, and family relations might become somewhat strained if I murdered her."

"Put her back on the stage, I bloody would," Thomazine muttered darkly. "It is a want of attention that ails her, and nothing more. Not enough happens in these parts for her, and when it does, it doesn't involve Barbary corsairs, stolen heiresses, or gold."

"I could set her to my accounts?" he said, and blinked innocently, "- if she would know of pirates, she should see what the going rate is for port duties. She can have all the romance and glamour her heart desires, if she wants to look over Master Dolling's returns from the _Persephone_. He makes it up, I swear, for amusement. Why in God's name am I paying duty on ten goatskins? What do I, or any other man living, want with goatskins?"

"You are trying to cheer me up. Stop it."

"Tibber, if I let myself be half as irritated with that little madam as I should like to be, I would have taken to biting pieces out of the furniture by now. Which would neither have been to the improvement of my appearance nor the furniture's. Ignore her. Which, after all, she will hate most of all."

### -7-

He couldn't take his own advice, of course. Most of all he couldn't take his own advice when he came across her weeping properly in the parlour – not stage-weeping, but weeping like Thomazine, all scarlet and snotty and swollen – and he stopped in front of her, being his customary uncomfortable self where other people's emotions were concerned.

"Go away!"

"It's my house, Eleanor, I – well, I can't, in any real or practical sense, go away."

"I hate you!" She flung her head up and looked at him defiantly. "I wish I was dead!"

"No you don't." (He spoke with some experience. On many and many a time, when he had been young and hurt beyond endurance and lonely and wretched: before Thomazine, when he had thought what there was then was all there would ever be – oh yes, he had wished for death with all the passion in him. Then. And now, with the benefits of hindsight and tenacity, would not have wished that despair on anyone.) "Nothing is so bad as all that –"

"How do _you_ know? You don't know _anything_! _You_ wouldn't understand what it is to _suffer -_ you're just a – a horrible dry _stick_!" And then she started weeping again, noisily, and telling him in between snorts what a horrible thing he was and how nobody understood her, nobody, even her own father had turned her out –

"Well, if you will persist in acting the grand tragedian," he said without thinking, and then regretted it when she slid from the window-seat into a puddle of faded black skirts and howled like a dog.

"Oh, bloody hell. Nell – Eleanor – oh, in all charity – will you stop _yowling_ , child! You are a woman grown, not a baby - you should know better!"

"I might have known you would disapprove, you horrible, nasty, cold-blooded - _creature_!" She dropped her head on her knees, and then jerked it up again. "Don't you dare touch me! Don't you even go _near_ me!"

"You are behaving like a –" he didn't know what she was behaving like but it shocked him and irritated him in equal measure and more than anything else he wanted to shake some sense into her silly head. "Grow up!" he snapped, and she surged to her feet with a fluidity that was rather alarming and yelled into his face, "Get away from me, you monster!"

He backed up a step. And then inclined his head with his old chilly grace, and said, "You would call me Caliban, mistress?"

He would have turned on his heel and left her to her stage-hysterics but he hurt too much. (He had _been_ Caliban, once. Before Thomazine. It had been the name by which he had signed his intelligence reports – being, at that time, _not honour'd with a human shape_ , or so he had felt. He had thought – he had hoped – it would not matter any more, that people only saw the scar. But it seemed it did.) And it seemed he was not changed so much after all, and he twitched his head aside so that she would not see that she had made him weep, that she had hurt him so much –

Her hand clenched on his sleeve. "I didn't mean –"

And he twisted his wrist so that her fingers fell away. "I don't _care_ what you meant."

"I don't _mean_ how you look! I meant you –"

And actually, he did not care what she meant, and he left her to her confusion.

### -8-

Thomazine was furious, and the house was unbearable for the better part of a day but where Russell was a brooder Thomazine's wrath was like a refining fire, and Eleanor was swiftly left in no doubt that her behaviour was unacceptable.

" _Not_ speak to my husband in such a way," he heard, and, rather more hearteningly, Nell's plaintive, "I didn't _say_ he wasn't pretty! ...From the good side!"– and Thomazine's tart, "I like him as well from _either_ side!"

Which eased his poor crushed vanity a bit - a tiny little bit. It seemed that Nell had truly not meant his looks were monstrous, after all, but rather, to imply that his –

"Morals," Thomazine said ruefully. "Sorry."

"My what?"

"She does not think your, um, principles are those of an ordinary free-thinking gentleman. You are, apparently, a relic from the days of bear-baiting and you disapprove of innocent frivolity."

"I do?"

"Well, no, my honey, you do no such thing. But she _is_ seventeen and when you're seventeen...."

He raised his eyebrows encouragingly. Russell at seventeen might have been subject to an excess of godly discipline by day, but he had had a surprisingly broad education in a number of local establishments of ill-repute by night. It was, he thought ruefully, only the more blameless customs of worldly life of which he was innocent. He did not think it would be helpful to remind his wife of that fact, presently. He did not think for one minute that Thomazine meant Nell supplemented her drinking-money by playing the fiddle in a bordello. (At least, he _hoped_ not.)

"You can be a little bit judgmental, when you're seventeen," she said, and that much he agreed with. "And then you grow up."

"If you live that long."

"In her case...."

"The season of goodwill to all men, my tibber, remember?"

"It says to all _men_ , Russell. It never mentioned, annoying little sisters." She sniffed. "According to her, you don't hold with the theatre."

"I don't! It's a shockingly rackety way to earn a living – and there's no money in it, none at all! You can't sustain a family on what they pay in the theatre!"

"And you don't hold with boys."

"Surely, I do not hold with boys." He tried to look prim, failed, and grinned at his wife instead. "I _do_ hold with girls, though. One girl in particular. I hold with her as often as I can."

"Not often enough, presently, what with madam upstairs with her eyes on stalks if we so much as look at each other," Thomazine grumbled. "I don't know what she was doing with boys, but if it shocks her so much that I might occasionally pat your bum in passing – in approval, you understand – "

"Indeed. To check it's still there. I quite understand."

"I pity her future husband, is all I can say. It would not surprise me if she were to think a woman finds babies under the bramble-bush, in baskets."

"Now Thomazine, that is a most uncharitable attitude," he said severely, "and not at all the proper one for a gently-reared young lady –"

"It's a very reasonable attitude. If a lady is married she is meant to remain married to the same man for the rest of their lives together, and it seems perfectly sensible to me if they are going to have any number of children exceeding one that her duty is to set about the creating of same, with all dispatch." She blinked at him very solemnly, and he recognised his own slow cat's-blink of happiness reflected back at him. "It's _supposed_ to be nice, my honey. My duty is to have the babies, and _your_ duty is to make the bit before as nice as possible so I don't mind the having-babies bit. Yes?"

Oh, she took him all aback, sometimes. In the most delightful and solid and practical and wise ways imaginable. "I don't think you're supposed to be quite so, uh, _pragmatic_ about it, tibber."

"I think I should be very silly indeed if I thought being married was all about trailing clouds of draperies and kissing people's wrists." She picked up his hand, looked at it critically – "You've got ink on your fingers, Russell. Again." – and kissed the inside of his wrist. "Well, did that make you go all shivery?"

"You're asking the wrong man, Zee. Of course it did."

She gave him a look of withering disgust. "Don't tell lies. I imagine you thought, what's she doing down there, the daft mawther, when she could be a foot and a half higher up and we'd ha' both got considerably more enjoyment out of it." And stood on her tiptoes, took his face between her two hands and kissed him very soundly on the mouth. "Like that. Much nicer."

It was, of course, much nicer, but he wasn't sure how it related to Eleanor.

Thomazine cocked an eyebrow at him. "She doesn't think you _do_ it, my honey. Is what. Now, she and I have had words, and we are going to put all this behind us – aren't we? – _Nell_ is going to apologise, and _you_ are not going to hold it against her. She was silly, and ill-judged, and I have promised if she says one more unkind word to you I am going to box her ears. And if you don't stop glowering at her and toying with your food and slamming the doors after you, I am going to box yours."

He could not help it, and it was not a thing you could undo with pretty words. She had _hurt_ him.

"A wretched first Christmas you will have," she said firmly, "if you will persist in sulking. And you will make it wretched for me, and you will prove her right, because she thinks you go about with a Friday-face perpetually anyway, and you will make it miserable for Nathaniel and it really _is_ his first Christmas. Now. I have said she can write a note to her friends out at Great Dunmow, to explain where she is and what has gone before, and that we will see to its delivery. Which we will, of course, won't we? You can put it in with your letters, and it will go in the morning. And all will be well, my honey, and all manner of things shall be well, and tomorrow Nell and I will start making the Twelfth-night cake."

"Does it take so long to make a cake? Almost two weeks?"

She looked at him long and thoughtful. "You are a dear, sweet, delightful, gorgeous man." – which was nice. But was the calm before the storm. "And sometimes you are actually too stupid to live. Yes, and yes, and yes. If you do it properly. Put spices on your list for the carrier from London, Russell, for we mean to be thorough."

### -9-

All was quiet, for a few days after that.

The snow had settled, and it gave the countryside an odd, muffled quality, but it was stiff-cold and you could travel easily enough on it. Not bitter cold but a sort of sparkling cold, so that the ducks skated on the pond and you had to break the ice so that the animals could drink. ( _Gillespie_ had to break the ice. Thomazine was quite implacable on that point, after the incident with the sheep at the lane end.) You could hear noises for miles – a dog, barking, on a farm a mile or two up the valley. The chime of bells on a harness as some frivolous soul went trotting on the highway.

The sheep – but then, this was Four Ashes, and it was sheep country, and there were a lot of sheep.

And Russell was sitting in his office with the quarter-day accounts, feet twined around the legs of his stool, gnawing absent-mindedly on a pen and listening to the sheep and the bells and the sound of Thomazine singing something reproachable in the kitchen, and Nell laughing – which was remarkable in and of itself, and a sound he had only begin to hear this last day or so – and the fire settling and shifting on the hearth. And Nathaniel snoring, in a laundry-basket under his feet, because all hands were required to the kitchens presently and since Russell could not be relied on to do anything more constructive than poke about and ask naive questions, he was relegated to the role of temporary nursemaid.

\- It was a job he was loving, it must be said, although he suspected he was having an easy time of it. Mostly, what he and the child did in this drowsy warm silence was doze companionably, and occasionally have one-sided conversations regarding the weather and suitable gifts for much-beloved members of the household.

Out in the hall there was an abrupt deal of commotion, and at first he was confused and after that he was irritated more than anything else, for he was at a particularly tangled point in the household finances and he could well do without Master Gillespie barking hysterically at someone in the hall.

The someone burst through the door and yelled, " _Where is she_?"

\- As if Russell was in some way omniscient, and as if _she_ might not refer to any number of female members of the Four Ashes household from the kitchen cat upwards. And as if he knew who this remarkably rude young person was, and specifically, as if he might be intimidated by the presence of a young man in a wig that appeared to have been sculpted from decayed plaster.

"I beg your pardon?" he said icily, and looked up sharply into the young gentleman's face just for the pleasure of seeing the lad start.

The young man obliged, of course - most people did, on seeing Russell in full daylight for the first time, and it was a thing he was long since accustomed to - and Russell smiled to himself. (In his head. He didn't want to scare the boy _too_ horribly.) There was an awkward silence, and since the young man in the phenomenal wig was very much the interloper in this particular domestic scene, Russell was in no hurry to set him at his ease. He set his pen down and showed his teeth a very little, like a dog greeting an intruder.

"Where have you \- imprisoned - her?" the boy said, all wide-eyed and quivering, and that was just starting to get silly.

"Where have I what-ted? Imprisoned? I - what?"

"You know to whom I refer, you - you - "

"If you seek my wife, I last saw her doing nefarious deeds in the kitchen with a basket of apples. She mentioned something about an apple and orange tart. Which would be nice. My housekeeper is engaged in the same activity, if that was the lady in question." And then he was bored with the politeness of it and stood up, being all too aware that in addition to a significant facial scar he was two yards high, conspicuously fair-haired, and he could loom like nobody's business. "And if you mean the youngest Mistress Babbitt, young man, I might ask in my turn - who the hell are _you_?"

"Jasper Venning, sir, as is her protector!"

Russell sat down again. "Oh dear God Thomazine told me no boys."

"What?"

"What is your business, Master Venning? Please? Other than, ah, protecting my niece's virtue, a thing which I suspect stands in slightly less need of protection than you do?"

"Are you _threatening_ me, sir?"

"Indeed I am, young man. Mostly I am threatening that I know your father, and have done so for the better part of twenty years. He was a captain in my company, and I know him very well indeed. If he thought you were careering about Buckinghamshire instead of at your studies, he might be inclined towards severity - and a stoppage of your allowance?"

" _Sir_!"

"Why are you in Buckinghamshire, anyway?" - it seemed like a reasonable question. "Given that it wants but a few days to Christmas, and - what?"

"I have come by Essex," the boy Venning said through gritted teeth, "to my good horse's detriment and mine, only to find that Mistress Babbitt had been spirited away into seclusion here, and so I followed to rescue her."

He was going to have to get used to this. He had a son - presently asleep, in a basket intended for the conveyance of laundry, under the desk in this very room - and presumably one day Nathaniel was going to do stupid things like this and he would require stern correction. "What a _remarkably_ daft thing to do," Russell said, quite mildly, and the young man flushed.

"How dare you, sir!"

"Dare I what? Advise you that the, ah, wilting maiden in question is presently in the kitchens having the time of her life overseeing the creation of what I am assured is the cake to end all cakes, and unless you suspect her imminent danger of assault by several pounds of raisins, she stands in need of no rescue at all."

"You use her for such menial labour!"

"Could you be a little less loud, Master Venning? My son is asleep."

Looked as if he'd poked the boy with a stick. "Your _what_?"

"Nathaniel. My son. I would endeavour to introduce you more formally but - well, he has been entrusted into my care, it wanting but a few days to Christmas. Most of the women of the house are otherwise engaged." He was trying to be stiff and formal, but he couldn't help a surreptitious, appreciative sniff. "There is much to be done in the kitchens. We get in the way, Nathaniel and I...is it not so in your house?"

"You are - making ready for Christmas?"

"Yes," Russell said warily, wondering what was strange about it. "Is that not - ordinary, for the season?"

"Oh, making - shred pies, and brawn, and roasting ham, I have no doubt!"

"I - well, judging by the scent of it, yes, I believe so. Why?"

It appeared the boy had meant to be sarcastic. "Is that not a bit - worldly?"

What could Russell say but, "Well, probably. But we are a fairly worldly household, sir. We keep Christmas, for one. Did you not expect it so?"

Drew Venning's boy did not expect the Russell household to hold festival. The Russell household, or at least the nominal head of it, did not expect the crumpled note that was thrust under his nose.

_Help mee hellp I amm tuk prisonner by a most_ \- he considered holding it upside down, or wondered if it was written in cipher, for it made no sense at all -

"Notorious," Jasper Venning translated grimly.

"Oh. Oh, I see. Most, ah, inventive penmanship."

\- notorious villen he menes to sell mee for my dowrie -

Russell folded the horrible object neatly, considered giving it back, and then decided not to bother and tossed it onto the fire. "I am going to sell my niece by marriage for her dowry? What?" And then he couldn't help it and it popped out, "Is anyone so hard-up that they would _buy_ the silly wench?"

### -10-

\- Which was the point at which the Venning boy forgot that in point of fact he was not acting out some preposterous tragedy of blood on the Colchester stage, and drew his sword with an expression of tormented chivalry.

It had been twenty years since there had been a civil war in England and every day of it since Thankful Russell had given profound and heartfelt thanks to God for another twenty-four hours of grace. He did not care for blood. He really, spectacularly, did not care for some whelp in a ludicrous wig to draw steel on him in his own house, especially not an overdressed, over-scented, beribboned maypole in high-heeled boots -

Which was no reason at all to pin the boy to the table with a letter-opener through the cuff of his unsuitable coat. In Russell's younger days, you could grab a man's loose hair and slam his head against the table till he stopped fighting. Jasper Venning's wig came off in his hand instead, and it felt really rather unpleasant to the touch: managing to be both greasy and powdery at once.

Under the table, Nathaniel started yelling, not unreasonably.

"You are breaking my wrist, sir!"

"Break your bloody _neck,_ sir, an you do not let go your weapons!"

"I _have_ let go of my weapons!"

The howling beneath the table was reaching a heart-rending pitch. "Sit down in that chair and hold your tongue!" Russell roared at battle-order volume, and in the sort of practised movement that would have stunned Thomazine had she seen it, hooked the basket from under the desk with one foot and swept his scarlet-faced offspring up into his arms.

"I declare, sir -"

" _Shut up_."

"I must _insist_ , sir -"

He was joggling the child ferociously, stalking to and fro with the boy clamped protesting against his shoulder quite stiff with outrage, and it was not helping, none of it was helping, singing was not helping, bouncing was not helping, and Jasper Venning was _certainly_ not helping, squawking about unhanding the child and flapping like some kind of lopsided popinjay whilst still pinned to the table. "Release that child, sir, you are frightening him!'

"Shut up and be still, you puppy!" Russell yelled, and the infernal Venning hooted and flapped some more -

Which of course was the point at which Thomazine swept in.

She said only one thing. "Russell, you had one job!"

And then she grabbed Nathaniel from him, and it was some consolation that the boy did not settle, but howled and kicked in an absolute outrage to be returned to his father. Thomazine was distinctly unimpressed, at any rate. Her mouth had taken on that unmistakable straight set that did not bode well for its viewer. "You had _one_ job," she said again, darkly, and now was not the time to tell her that she had a streak of flour through her eyebrow, and a line of it at table-height on her bodice.

In fact she looked hot, flustered, and distinctly unforgiving, and he rather suspected that flattery would get him nowhere. Even were he in the mood for sweethearting, which he was not, he suspected that flattery was futile. "And who the hell is this?" she snapped - did not wait for an answer. "Russell why have you got this boy nailed to the table -what on earth are you doing?"

"I -"

"Russell is that _your_ sword?"

"I must protest, madam -" the boy Venning piped up, and Thomazine rounded on him with a very abrupt, " _Did I ask you_?"

At which point Nell appeared, with a timing that suggested she had been waiting just out of sight for a perfect cue. "Jasper!" she said, sounding most surprised. "What brings you here?"

"Well - wait, what? Because you -" he began, and by an astonishing coincidence right at that very moment Nell pressed her hand to her forehead, overcome by emotion, and swooned away in a most becoming flutter of skirts.

### -11-

Thomazine lay in bed, listening to the two people she loved best in the world snore in not quite harmony, and hard snow sting on the roof.

It had been hard work. Restoring Nell, who had never fainted in her life before, under Jasper Venning's glinting eye - he knew _something_ , that one did - and then Gillespie bounding in with a maniacal zeal to say that he'd got Marlowe settled in all right and tight just in time before the snow had set in, and did Russell want he should have the sheep brought down to the home field before it settled fierce?

\- for it seemed Master Venning had brought it on himself to bring Russell's Marlowe home from White Notley as well as his own horse. How very kind of him. Anyone might think he had planned to leave Four Ashes in company, mightn't they?

He'd been about to explain that one, too, but Nell had conveniently swooned off again and they had their hands full, and then Russell had been about to turn young Master Venning out of doors and Gillespie said he couldn't, not in this, it'd be tantamount to murder. And Russell had started to get that grey shading about his mouth that meant he was on the edge of one of his headaches, and next thing he would start being brittle and brilliant and not very funny, and then he'd be blind for half a day and filthy bad-tempered - and horribly sick \- on it. (One of the many things she would never forgive the late King for, that: having not quite managed to get Russell killed on a number of occasions, the works of His Majesty's armies had left her husband with a tendency towards disabling headaches if he were over-tired, or distressed. She added it to Eleanor's tally, too.) "Bed," she said, and he said something inaudible and she squeezed his hand. It probably looked very wifely. It was a threat, and he knew it, and surrendered gracefully.

He was not so frail that he did not glower at Jasper Venning in passing and direct Gillespie to provide that elegant young gent with a bed for the night - and a guard to his chastity. Venning had bridled, and Thomazine had glared in her turn and said loudly, "This is a respectable household, sir. Don't be coming in here with your fancy dissolute London ways."

\- which had almost finished Russell altogether, and she could hear him snorting with badly-stifled giggles, all the way up the stairs. Nell had suddenly come to her senses and been outraged. "I'm going to talk to you in the morning," Thomazine had said grimly. "Now get up those stairs."

It was all still, now. All calm and quiet, and she could curl against Russell's warm back, admiring the solid muscle of him. It was lovely - _he_ was lovely - and you could almost forget that it was ankle-deep in snow outside and still coming down, when you were cuddled up in a warm bed under a stout roof. She indulged herself in a brief, warming fantasy where they kicked Nell out into the glittering dark with her young man ( _was_ he?) in tow and had the house to themselves again.

But it was not so, and she nestled her cheek against the space between his shoulderblades and folded her arms round his waist and sighed.

And then sighed again, in case he hadn't heard the first time. "Russell are you awake?"

"That bit of me is," he murmured - unhelpfully.

"I shall bite you, shortly. Horrible man."

"You woke me up in the middle of the night to tell me I'm a horrible man? Unkind."

"I can be more unkind, an you do not pay attention?"

He rolled over with a great creaking of the bed-ropes and took a firm grip on her bum. "Well, now you've woke me up, my tibber, I'd like to know what you mean to do with me."

"Talk to you of my sister. And stop distracting me."

"To perdition with your sister. And that benighted fashionable ninny she fetched after her."

"Russell you can't!"

"I assure you I can, my girl."

She wriggled herself closer to him, partly for the joy of it and partly because if there was not so much as a finger's-width between the length of their two bodies he had less opportunity to distract her. "And you think that's helpful? Asking in interest, you understand, and not -" he angled a hip to make his intentions perfectly clear, " - not with any lewd intent."

"Oh, not much. Russell, concentrate."

"I _am_ concentrating."

"On my sister, you wretch!"

"Must I? May I not concentrate on you, instead? Much more pleasurable. And you know it."

She did. That was the worst of it. "Eleanor," she said firmly, before she forgot. "You're the intelligencer. So intelligence."

"I'm retired," he groaned, and then admitted defeat. "All right, my tibber. My considered opinion. Who's she trying to irritate - us, him, or your parents?"

And he sounded very suddenly sharp, and awake, and she knew then he had been paying more attention than she had suspected. "What?"

"She no more fainted back there than I'm the Shah of Persia, tibber. She wasn't expecting His Highness to turn up, was she? Which is odd, because she asked him."

"She what?" She almost sat up. "My sister, asked a boy? To do what? The pert little madam!"

"Oh, she made up some story."

\- He was changing the subject, then. Russell might have been paid to undertake intelligence work for the Admiralty before he was married, but he was still a rotten liar at home "Saying. What?" Thomazine said grimly, and in case he didn't realise she wasn't joking, took a firm hold of a portion of his intimate person that he'd been trying to encourage her to take hold of for some minutes. "Russell?"

He took a deep breath, and she felt him tense. "She got a note to him saying that we had carried her off to, uh, sell her off to the highest husbandly bidder. I was in the process of convincing him of the absurdity of that suggestion when you came in."

"My sister, told a strange boy, that you and I were conspiring to marry her off for money? And - Russell, what? You seem - does it not _bother_ you?"

He was laughing, now, shaking silently. "Given that earlier this year I was apparently a murderer and a spy, the idea that I might wish to dispose of a peculiarly irritating young relative for profit seems tame in comparison. Doesn't everyone? No, it doesn't trouble me at all. She got a message to him saying that she had been kidnapped, but did not expect him to come. He did, and that surprised her. My guess is that the fainting-fits were intended to prevent us discovering on what errand he had been summoned - she not knowing that _he_ , in proper theatrical style, had already flourished her badly-written note under my nose."

"Her note? _What_? How?" - then she remembered. "She told _me_ she was writing to the Slatchers, to tell them where she was. The little madam!"

"Oh, she did, tibber. I saw it go, remember? I imagine she put that - _scrawl_ \- in under its cover. I am only astonished it was not in cipher. I begin to suspect Eleanor of a most reprehensible taste for lurid fiction."

"Only _begin_ to suspect, my honey? Oh, I will get to the bottom of this - manufactured intrigue, Russell, you see if I don't!"

"I am very sure you will," he murmured, and bent his head and kissed her ear till she shivered, "but I am sure of one much more important thing. What it is, all of it, is made-up foolishness, of no significance. And I have Marlowe back safe, which is a great comfort to me, and all is well at White Notley - else he would have said so, my bright lady, so we know your father was safe returned - and so the only person who has been truly offended is Master Venning, who has had several uncomfortable rides for naught. And he seemed more outraged by my mishandling of his wig, so I shall waste no more of my sympathy on him." He blew on the place he had kissed, with intent. "On either of them."

"But Russell -"

"But, Russell." She couldn't see him in the darkness, but he sounded amused and loving. And intent, damn him. "Do you plan to kiss me, maid, or do you mean to lie there huffing into my shoulder?"

"Russell she's in the next chamber, she'll hear us!"

"If the little besom means to sit on a cold floor with her ear pressed to the wall in order to hear a man and his wife in the privacy of their marital bed, she deserves all she gets." And then he slithered. He slithered, like a lithe and lovely six-foot blond eel, under the coverlets, and he stopped with his chin on her belly and kissed her belly-button.

She thought she might have stopped breathing.

"Give her something to listen to, then, shall I?" he said.

### -12-

As it happened, the next day was not fit for man nor beast to travel. The snow had carried on falling in the night, and had frozen with the dawn to fantastic glittering carved shapes like spun sugar.

\- Which did not trouble Russell in the least bit, when Gillespie came panting into the warm parlour to tell him of the lamentable state of affairs in the sheep-field, where the drifts had piled up. He smiled very sweetly at Thomazine and completely ignored everything she said to him about staying inside in the warm like a sensible man. Rolled his sleeves up, flexed his fingers in a way that did not bode well for the shovelling, and clapped the world's most disreputable, shapeless, horrible hat on his head, and went.

"I do not know why I bother," she said to Nathaniel, who said nothing, but squirmed and smiled most engagingly in reply till she picked him up and cuddled him. "He's not even had his breakfast, your daddy hasn't. What a silly man. Yes he is, he is a very silly man. And he will be all cross and cold when he comes back in, won't he, my honey?" She buried her nose in the baby's shoulder, snuffing the sweet milkiness of a happy, healthy baby.

"I imagine you will have to sweetheart him into a better temper then, won't you?" Nell said grudgingly from the doorway, and Thomazine looked up and raised her eyebrows.

"It doesn't take very much doing, Eleanor. As you well know." And then hoisted Nathaniel into her arms and said, "Well, since you have broached the subject, then. Why are you doing this?"

The girl was perfectly bare-faced about it, too. "Doing what?"

"Oh, you know. Behaving like the worst slut off the streets. Acting up at home. Upsetting my husband. Fetching young men who ought to know better halfway across the county on some stupid made-up fiction." Nell opened her mouth to protest and Thomazine leaned forward and fixed her with a hard stare. " _I know what you said,_ Eleanor. Don't you be trying it on with me."

"I did no such thing," the shameless little madam said, and wriggled her shoulders in a manner that implied a total lack of apology about it, too.

\- which was so evidently a lie, that Thomazine felt the blood go boiling to her face. "Oh, really? So, what? You _didn't_ write to Master Venning telling him to rescue you from your evil family who were going to sell you in marriage to the highest bidder? That wasn't you, that was somebody else? Have you no shame at all?" Nathaniel grumbled ominously and she hushed him. "You hurt him! Me! And heaven only knows how mam and dad felt about your behaviour, which was - Nell it was horrible!"

Nell really did have no clue. "I didn't," she said scornfully, "it's a _play_. And if Master Venning didn't know that, more fool him, because he knows exactly what play it's from. It was a joke. _As he well knows_."

"He - what?"

"If you weren't so _rustic_ , Thomazine, you'd probably know it, too!" - and she tossed her head again as if she absolutely did not care. "You are being very silly, I think: you are refining too much on a thing that was a little silly joke between friends -"

" _He_ didn't think so, did he!"

"Well, that's hardly my fault, given that to my sure and certain knowledge he has seen the play four times already! Thomazine the part of Cloris was _written_ for me! It could hardly have been more obvious had I written it on a paper and nailed it to his hat!"

"Written. For you." (And when she thought nothing else about her little sister could have shocked her.)

"It wasn't a very successful play," Nell said, sounding for the first time apologetic. "I think Jasper - uh, Master Venning, I mean - was one of the only people who came to see it more than once."

"Pray tell?"

" _Marriage Out Of Fashion._ And I played Cloris - she's the heroine: she's this beautiful young girl whose parents want to marry her off to Mr Praywell, who's this dreadful boring old Puritan who can't, um, he's an old man and he lives out in the country -"

"Based on whom?" Thomazine said in an awful voice, and Nell looked blank.

"If you were a bit less backward, you would know _all_ the fashionable comedies are like that. They're not based on anyone. Don't flatter yourself! They're just - well. You know. A bit of fun, really. Nobody takes them very seriously. Cloris's parents want her to marry Mr Praywell because he has money, and um, she wants to marry Lovehard because he's, um, er...." Her lips twitched, and Thomazine wasn't sure if it was embarrassment or mirth. "Hot. Basically."

"Let me guess. Young, handsome, witty, absolutely flat broke, and wholly untrustworthy?"

" _Thomazine_!"

"And despite the fact that Cloris is presumably a respectable girl, this - object - decides he will court her anyway in defiance of all custom and propriety? Hm. I'm not surprised nobody went to see this play, Nell. Your man Lovehard sounds like a real piece of work. I mean, if he will deceive and humiliate a man who's never done him the least harm, before all of society, why would he not do the same to Cloris when he tires of her?"

"Because that's not how it works in plays!"

"Really? Oh. It's why I never took to plays, then, when Russell and I saw all the ones we saw in London. I couldn't rid myself of the feeling that under all the glamour none of them were very nice people, and they deserved all they got." Nell's mouth was fallen open. "I quite liked the end of _The Indian Empereur_ , mind. Pretty much everybody died horribly, and I thought most of them deserved it. Honestly, Nell, if you must go and - make stuff up - can't you make sensible stuff up, where good things happen to decent people? Instead of me walking out of the Cockpit feeling as if I needed a wash?"

"I - I didn't know - you? And _him_? The _Cockpit_?"

"Don't change the subject. You have behaved appallingly, Nell! I could bloody belt you, I really could!"

"Why? What's so bad about quoting a line from a play to a friend?"

"Dear God, woman, are you so lost to propriety that -"

"Oh, don't try that one on me, Thomazine Russell, after the tricks you used to play on mam and dad! I know what you used to get up to -"

"I never did anything so dreadful as you!"

"Really. _Really_. So sneaking out of the house at funny hours of the night and coming back in with the back of your skirt tucked into your waistband -"

"I never did that!"

"Oh yes you did, mistress. And I tell you what-all as well, Mistress Butter-Wouldn't-Melt Thomazine. You used to come back in our chamber smelling of horse. Overnight. A body might think you'd been meeting a man in the stables under cover of darkness, and I bet daddy didn't know about _that_ , did he?"

"Excuse me!"

" - So you lecturing me on what a good girl ought to do, doesn't fly with me, sister! I have not always behaved properly, no. _And neither did you._ I want to be an actress and I will carry on - acting up, if you will have it so - until I have my way: _I've_ not done anything I ought to be ashamed of, except send a friend a note that _you_ have made a mountain out of a molehill of. If I was going to take exception to _anybody's_ behaviour, sister, I might have objected quite a lot to _you_ throwing yourself at that very unsuitable man – there are a lot of people I know at home who were quite shocked by it, you know! Did you ever think what your behaviour might do to _my_ prospects, hm?"

"And there was no reason at all why I should not be a wife, and a number of very good reasons why _you_ should not be an actress!"

"No, well, most rational people would say you shouldn't marry a tatty middle-aged intelligencer with no prospects, but you did! You're as old-fashioned as daddy, Thomazine! Not respectable, pfft! It's not immoral for a woman to make her own way in the world!"

"Blackmailing her family into letting her do it is a little morally suspect, mind...."

"Who is blackmailing whom?" Jasper Venning wanted to know from the doorway. "And is there any breakfast - a thousand pardons, madam, I did not realise you were engaged in family concerns. I interrupt. My apologies."

\- he would have excused himself, very elegantly, and Thomazine couldn't shake herself of the feeling that the boy had been trying to avoid her. Instead she dumped Nathaniel into Nell's lap and gripped Jasper warmly by the elbow.

"Not at all, sir, we were engaged in idle pleasantry, no more. Sit down. I want to talk to you as well."

\- Thomazine had a grip like a horse-bite, her husband had always said so. (Even when she had been hiding out in the stables with him unattended for hours, before they were married. She might have nipped him once or twice, maybe, in play. Nothing wrong with that.) Jasper gave a wan smile and sat.

"I understand you suspect my husband of being a - a bad man," she said coolly, and he flushed.

"Well, I - not in so many words - but she said -"

"No, not _she said_! Nell is - she does not tell lies, but – really, Jasper, how could you believe that! How could you even _think_ it!"

"She had said he was strict!" the boy flared at her, and Thomazine flared back, "Oh, _grow up_!"

"Well, it is so in the plays, madam, and she told me he was strict, and he does look like a - " He was floundering, just like Nell had done, and suddenly his eyes went wide and scared as if he knew it had gone beyond being a silly misunderstanding and that he had just talked himself into a pile of trouble. He could not know _everything_ , of course. Jasper Venning could not know that of all the stupid unlikely things in the world, the idea of Russell - Russell, who was fierce and loyal and loving and beautiful and who nobody on God's earth could accuse of being significantly like any other man alive - being a caricature of puritanical zeal was the most laughable.

"A what, Master Venning? Did you think you had found your own Mr Praywell? Some silly old godly dupe, perhaps? I have a fashionable lover under the bed, you think, or hidden in the clothes-press?"

"Of course not! But he - he does look the part, you must own, and when she said - and then he was so abrupt when -"

"When you burst in on us uninvited, and disturbed our peace with your shouting and racketing about, and your silly made-up stories?"

The boy had the grace to blush, and dropped his eyes. And then for the first time, he said, "I'm sorry. It's not funny, is it?"

\- and once Jasper Venning had apologised, she looked up at Nell, and the silly chit had tears trembling on her lashes: unless this was some acting-trick, but her mouth was wobbling, and she said, "I didn't think!"

"I know very well you don't think!" Jasper snapped at her, and then she did burst into tears, and because she was weeping so must Nathaniel, distressed by the noise and the hot tears dripping on his poor little head.

"I'm sorry!" Nell wailed, "- but please stop being cross with me! I didn't mean it! I will be good from now on!" And gave a great wailing hiccup. "I just want to be on the stage!"

"The way to go about it is not to irritate your entire family beyond measure, you silly chit," Thomazine snapped - "will you comfort that poor child, in all charity!"

(She meant Nathaniel, for she did not think his poor infant composure would be at all helped by being passed from pillar to post to pillar, like unwanted baggage. Instead Jasper Venning slid off his chair and crouched gingerly on the floor beside Nell, patting her heaving shoulder. Like that, then, so. Even if Nell didn't think it was. Interesting.)

"There is no money in the theatre, my honey," she went on, and then gave in to her maternal impulse and snatched her son back. "It is a pretty dream, no more. You must -"

"Although if you were to have a patron," Jasper Venning said, and he sounded quite kind about it, "- a wealthy husband, say, who took an interest in the arts -"

" _No_ ," Thomazine said, in the sort of voice she used when Nathaniel was reaching for a hot coal.

He ignored her, of course. "You could be in so many productions as you chose - private ones, you understand, you could have plays written for you especially!"

She raised a swollen, scarlet face. "I _had_ a play written for me! And daddy wouldn't let me be in it!"

"He doesn't recognise your talent, Thalia. He doesn't have an artist's soul...."

"An art....soul?" - Thomazine was her father's daughter and she couldn't help it, and she did think poets deserved to have their pretensions pricked. Regularly. Jasper didn't get it, and Nell did, and gave her a burning look of loathing. (Which was better than the wet, at any rate.)

\- Nathaniel, unsettled by the tears and the jiggling, squirmed and then belched roundly.

"Now that is the sort of thing plays ought to be about," Thomazine said, rubbing her son's back till he produced another, milkier burp. " _Real_ things. I'd go and see a play about those." And then shut one eye and looked at Jasper Venning narrowly. "Not silly made-up things put about by silly overwrought people with too much time on their hands, entirely based on the contents of someone's wardrobe."

"The only people who were privy to that - genuine misunderstanding - were Eleanor and I, and I have apologised!"

"Well, so have I!"

"Jasper, can I tell you something?" - Thomazine didn't wait for an answer. "Do you know why my husband wears black so much?"

He frowned, and opened his mouth, and then shook his head. Not, then, trying to be clever for once. "Not - is he in mourning, perhaps? For something? Some - some tragedy in his past, some dreadful secret, some -"

She cut him off before he'd imagined Russell as a new Hamlet, and provided him with the full cast of supporting ghosts and unnatural relations. (How little he knew, bless him, and how close he was to the truth.) "No, sir. He is fair. He has fair hair, and dark eyes, and it suits his colouring. And because his wife - to wit, _me_ \- has a fancy to see him in black, he wears it a good deal, even though if I let him have his head he would turn himself out like a popinjay. He has a fondness for light and colour which if you were to look about this house with your eyes open, sir, you would have noticed. It's nothing to do with a tragic past, or being a – a malcontent, or a Puritan."

"Then why does he -"

" _Because I fancy him in black_ ," she said, rather more bluntly than she had intended. And there was an awkward moment whilst that young man - who had evidently decided that passion was reserved for the young and glamorous, and not for a significantly-scarred gentleman in his middle years and a young lady with too much unfashionably-coloured hair and a big nose - percolated the unlikeliness of mutual desire. "I think he is striking - and lovely - and -"

"I have the idea!"

"Though red," she said, thoughtfully, after a moment of awkward silence. "A really vivid scarlet. That would suit, I think."

"Dear God," Jasper Venning said in a faint voice.

"I have been trying to get him to wear a really bright red for the better part of twenty years, you know. I think he would look wonderful. Being tall and slight -" her eyes rested on young Master Venning's broad shoulders and what she suspected might become a comfortable paunch, by the time he was Russell's age - "he could carry it off. All those ribbons and things. _He_ wouldn't look silly."

"As I do?" Jasper said, and there was a degree of most unexpected humour in his voice. As if he knew it.

And what could she say to that? "Fashion is not intended to be sensible, I always think. It's one of the reasons I am not very fashionable. I find it too easy to laugh at myself."

Nell sniffed, sounding suspiciously as if she agreed, which was unflattering to a woman's vanity. "Well, so. He's sorry, and _I'm_ sorry. I don't know how else I can make amends."

"Given that it's knee-deep in snow out there and still falling, madam, I suspect there is little of any practical bent that any of us will be able to do until it thaws," Jasper murmured. Coming from a man in probably the least practical clothing created since the advent of the heeled slipper, it had a certain irony. Thomazine suspected he knew that, too. "I may put myself to being entertaining. I flatter myself I may amuse, if little more."

"I can make buttered ale," Nell said, and gave another sniff, but this time rubbed her nose on her sleeve and perked up. Then she added, a little shyly, " - or I can mind Nathaniel, whilst you -?"

### -13-

Oddly, Christmas Day itself passed almost uneventfully.

It was not sunny. It should be, somehow, from the way Thomazine had described her excitement to him: it should be bright and all the birds should be singing, and instead it was a bitter leaden midwinter morning and his feet were cold, even in spite of his new stockings that Thomazine said he should have against the deep snow. He wriggled his toes joyously inside his boots, for the sheer shameful pleasure of the thought of his warm stockings. "Blue," he whispered to himself - a shocking vanity, that the pretty blue of the wool should give him such a little inner joy.

New stockings, and Thomazine in a rose-red wool gown at his elbow so that all he could think of throughout all the sermon was his wife, glowing like a joyful ember. Oh - and Nell, who was doubtless very pretty if your tastes were quite so showy, and Jasper Venning and his phenomenal wig which stunned every eye into a bemused silence.

Some giggles. Some sighs. A deal of attention from the congregation before and behind, and all his old horror of being conspicuous swept over him in a boiling wave of humiliation. He dropped his handkerchief too, and Nell groaned out loud, sounding as if she just wanted him to get out of the way. Which he could not do, being in a state of such blind shaking misery that he could neither move nor mend -

Bells. He had forgot, in eleven years of Commonwealth, the joy of Christmas bells, had he ever known it, and he stood in the silver snow-light at the church door staring up at the chiming sky with the most absurd feeling of excitement.

"Do not, in all charity, drop anything else," Thomazine breathed down his ear, and tugged at his hand none too gently - "or we'll never get out in one piece. A number of unattached young ladies of this parish are ogling Master Venning like our kitchen cat eyes the cheese."

" _Him_?" Russell forgot to breathe back quite so discreetly, and was consequently on the receiving end of a stern look and a scowl from his wife. "What on earth -?"

"I imagine they think he may have broke loose from a travelling menagerie, my honey. He's a bit exotic, for Four Ashes."

"A charmingly understated way of putting it!" His nose twitched, he realised Venning was looking at him somewhat sardonically, and he tried to turn it into a sneeze. "He's wearing scent!"

"I am aware of that fact, husband?"

"I imagine most of the north aisle is aware of it, tibber - whoof!"

"There's no accounting for taste, dear."

"Or smell!" She stood on his foot, hard, which made him laugh more than anything else. And then he stopped, struck by a sudden horrible thought. "You wouldn't have me wear scent....or a wig, like his? Would you?"

She said nothing. But she _looked,_ most expressively. And then she stood on her tiptoes, right there in the middle of the churchyard, and she kissed him on the mouth with a rather delightful matter-of-factness, as if it was a perfectly ordinary thing to go about kissing your husband in public places. Some people thought it was most unbecoming conduct, of course, and sniffed and turned their noses up. And for possibly the first time in his conventional fortyish years, Russell - all flushed and happy with the kissing and the cold - did not mind the stares or the censures.

Astonishingly, even _Nell_ didn't seem to mind. She seemed to have thawed quite remarkably, since that initial misunderstanding. She didn't stare quite so much as she had, or if she did, she dropped her eyes quickly enough that he never caught her at it.

Even Venning grew amicable, and really, someone who had spent most of his childhood being punished ought to be grateful for that amity, as a grown man.

He wasn't. It made him deeply suspicious, for they were up to something, these two children. He thought it was probably a nice something, but Thomazine watched them out of the corner of her eye too, so he didn't think _she_ knew what it was, either. Any kind of conspiracy that involved that horrendous wig, wanted watching.

He smiled thinly at Jasper Venning, hoping his eyes did not slide sideways too obviously at the mannered curlicues of the thing that rested on the boy's head. (Imagined, with a kind of guilty delight, the expression on his father-in-law - who was notoriously blunt-spoken and utterly without conceit - the first time he saw that preposterous outburst of worldly vanity. He suspected it would be gloriously unflattering, sweary, and he would give much to hear it.) And then, having been polite, squeezed Thomazine's hand. "And now what?" he whispered.

"We go home and feast," she said, with a sigh of pleasure. And then caught herself up and said sternly, "Obviously we have further devotions today, my honey."

"But feasting."

"But. As you say. Feasting."

Like his wife, he thought he should be sober and respectable and a model of good behaviour before them all, even on this joyous day. But. "Those things that you -?"

"The same, Russell. You may finally get into the mince pies." She put her head on one side. "Though I happen to know you have tried one or two already, thinking yourself sneaky."

"I did not!"

"You have too. After the house was put to bed. Master Sticky-Whiskers."

And he had to admit to it, for he had: the temptation of that lingering sweetness and spice had been too much for him, after days of kitchen torture. There was a great log of ash burning on the fire, one of the branches culled from the coppice that gave their house its name, scenting the house with a fiery incense, and the smell of a feast of fat things creeping from the kitchens again.

He knew what these things were, of course, he was not stupid, he had been _aware_ of Yule logs and mince pies and wassailing: he had just never been _in_ them. And was also aware of how ludicrous that sounded, that a grown man might be shy of Christmas. But they had never celebrated Christ's birth at Four Ashes, before. It had not been _that_ sort of house. He wondered, idly, if the grinding noise he could hear was the sound of a piece of beef roasting on a spit in the kitchens, or the sound of his late and unlamented sister turning in her grave.

"What are you smiling at?" Thomazine hissed, "- and do you mean to pass the sallet to anyone else, my honey, or just to sit giggling at it all afternoon?"

"I think I may be growing accustomed to feasting," he said serenely, and poked the sallet for a precious slice of orange.

"You'll get fat," she warned, and he licked the sweet juice from his fingers and blinked at her.

"I mean to, my tibber. After you and Eleanor have gone to such a deal of trouble to make it so, it would be discourteous of me not to."

"Though Jasper Venning's got a head start on you," she whispered, "- be poddy before he's forty, that lad. Best pass the mince pies back this way."

Which made him giggle, just as she had predicted.

She was careful with him, and gentle. There was a certain unspoken implication in company, that he might turn disapproving if the festivities became too riotous, and that it was only under suffrance that he tolerated it at all. She liked to give the impression that he was a stern patriarch humouring a pretty young wife -

"I thought you'd prefer it so," she said, and he gave her a wry look.

"Really. Do you think anyone is convinced?"

"No, dear, but it is a polite fiction, and it stops the neighbours thinking you're _too_ strange."

"Heaven forfend."

"Stranger than in fact you are," she amended and he did a thing that he could never once have imagined himself doing, in this house. He stuck his tongue out at his lady wife and then when she burst out laughing, he took her by the shoulders and kissed her mouth, right there in front of half of the company. (She tasted of sweet ale and apples, and so he did it again, since the sky had not fallen the first time.)

"And what happens next?"

She gave him one joyous, sparkling look, and the stern patriarch humouring his _et cetera_ , blushed to the tips of his ears. "I mean," he began, all of a fluster, and she grinned at him.

(He wondered how many other men and maids had flirted so, under the cover of plain conversation. How you could say something wholly unexceptional with your mouth, in front of a room full of people who believed you to be conventional and proper, while the brightness of your eyes said another thing altogether.) Feasting, and merriment, and silliness, until after Twelfth Night. And then gifts, and misrule, and a single day of joyous anarchy - and then all would return to its plain workaday self, and Thomazine would take up her distaff again, and hands return to the plough.

But there was Christmas. And it was real, and he was in it, and he did not think he could ever go back to a plain workaday self for having had it.

It was not a thing of faith: his faith was what it was, it was the solid sure thing at the core of him and he did not want, or need, ceremony and ritual to celebrate it. It was the _people_ -ness. (That's not a word, Russell - and so it was not, but it was the word in his head for what he felt.) It was your door being open to one and all, of sharing what you had with joy and willingness. Not charity, not alms, but that it did not matter who came to your door, there was a welcome for them. Plenty, and generously given: it had given Thomazine as much pleasure to raid her stores and plan and make this feast, as it gave her to sit down to the result of it. People looking out for each other, thinking of each other, helping each other. Loving-kindness, if you cared to have it so; not a thing a marred, mad Puritan boy had ever dared to hope for, twenty years ago, not for himself. He had known it existed, it was real, but he had never thought to be anything more than a beggar at its table.

And yet here it was, and he was in it.

He imagined the kingdom of Heaven would be so on earth, did men behave so to each other every day. But they did not, and they would not, and so these few days were a joy and a wonder to him - a suspension of a hard-earned cynicism, until January.

"You are wool-gathering, sir," Nell Babbitt said pertly, and caught up the cheese from under his nose.

And he was warm, and well-fed, and beloved, and he was a little - only a little - tipsy on good spiced ale and stolen kisses, and so he was more free than otherwise he might have been with his little sister-in-law; he smiled at her with his heart in it, the real, lopsided smile. "I am a sheep-farmer, mistress," he said, "-what else should I do?"

"Think you are more funny than in fact you are?" Thomazine said, and put her hand on his so that he knew she meant it in affection.

"I was thinking on my good fortune," he said, and turned his head to look at his wife. Not smiling, now, but fierce with loving. "Marvelling on it."

"You are an idiot," Thomazine said tenderly.

"An idiot who enjoys more of the Lord's favour than he ever dreamed, my tibber. And an idiot who counts his blessings on an hourly basis, I assure you."

"I should never have considered you such a romantic, sir," young Venning said. (He sounded quite taken aback by it, too.)

"Then you do not know him very well, do you?" Thomazine said, and her hand that had been placidly on top of his squeezed his fingers hard, as if she grew ardent in his defence.

"No," the boy said. And looked at Nell, very pointedly. "No, I do not."

### -14-

Shame was not a feeling that came easy to Jasper Venning.

It wasn't, in fact, a thing he thought he had ever experienced before, not properly.

And now he was perfectly mortified, and it was all Nell Babbitt's fault.

Yes, it had been a fine joke, that Thalia was a runaway from a good Puritan family - he knew that anyway, his own father had been one of her father's officers. Just that when he'd seen _Marriage Out Of Fashion_ \- well, he had known Praywell wasn't _real_ , but it had been -

Thomazine Babbitt's unlikely whirlwind romance, and the happiness and the sheer uncharacteristic frivolity of her cockeyed courtship, had been the talk of half of Essex, a year ago. But when he'd had that silly note he'd forgotten all that, hadn't he? Nell had snapped her pretty fingers and he'd jumped, all carried away by the drama of it, fancying himself in the role of her knight in shining armour. It hadn't even crossed Jasper's mind that he - that _they_ \- he knew Thomazine was married to a man who had been brought up stricter than was natural, but he hadn't really thought -

Well, he hadn't thought at all - end of. Had arrived _ventre a terre_ at Four Ashes expecting to rescue a fair maiden from the gloomy ghost of Noll Cromwell, and had found instead that he was intruding on a storybook romance in its own right: just not the one he'd been expecting. Fancying himself the hero of the drama, and realising that on this occasion, he was the villain of the piece. Which was sobering. And he'd come thinking Nell a sophisticated woman of town, and then when he'd realised he'd been duped he'd been furious, but only like you might be angry when you'd been caught out by an infuriating child's trick. (She was seventeen, in all charity. She was a _baby_ , really.)

There, and she had realised what she had meant as a silly game had misfired, and she had suddenly become a woman again. Had owned her mistakes, and gone to make them good, and she had done it with a sweetness and humility that was oddly charming.

He wasn't in love with the silly chit. So much he did know.

She was pretty, and sweet, and bright and witty and lively and she deserved more out of life than to marry some clodhopping farmer. That didn't mean she was going to marry _Jasper_ , mind. Fine figure he'd look, leg-shackled to a resting actress. And he was much too young to be thinking of sticking his head into that noose.

He had always prided himself on not treating people shabbily: not his tailor, not his bootmaker, not his stable-boy, not the meanest serving-girl in the rattiest tavern in Colchester. And he had been - well, if his father found out how he'd spoken to the Russells, both of them, _either_ of them, Jasper suspected he'd disown him. Or offer him outside, one or the other.

That was the bit that irked him. If he had set out to cut them, fine. That would be well. But they were a plain - a _very_ plain - ordinary man and his wife, who did little of remark or exception. (If you did not think about it _too_ hard, because if you refined too much on that marriage you might start to think about the very singular Babbitt daughters, who seemed to be somewhat independently-minded, as a rule. The eldest girl had married for love, in the face of all convention. The middle girl had married above her station. And - well, it worried a man, as to what the _youngest_ might be capable of, on current showing.)

And she hadn't set out to deceive him. He quit her of that. She was just silly, and young, and - she was spoiled, he thought, she was young and pretty and bright and because of that she had never not had all the things she wanted, and so it did not cross her mind that she could not always have all the things all the time. She hadn't meant to be unkind, or thoughtless, or hurtful: she had just thought - _not_ -thought- that what she wanted she should have, just for the asking of it, and she had not considered that her misplaced humour might be taken amiss. It was childish, no more. And yet on the stage she was a witch and a siren - he truly believed that she was one of the finest comic actresses of her generation, it was not mere flattery - and off it she was a girl. It confused him, and yet it intrigued him, for which _was_ she, truly?

All of which left him no further than rusticating in a rather nicely-appointed little manor in a snowdrift, while the master of the house panted about excavating charmless sheep from snowdrifts with every appearance of joy, and its mistress made a great fuss about suppers many and various.

It was ordinary. It was _nicely_ ordinary, it was simple and homely and rather nice, so long as he got to go somewhere more exciting at the end of it, and he felt such a fool for the ordinariness of it. Even the infant was a chubby, ordinary, nice little blonde person who chuckled and waved his feet about, and was neither malcontent nor supernaturally intelligent.

"I want a word with you, young Mistress Babbitt," he said grimly, to the empty room. "I d'reckon I'm overdue giving you a piece of my mind, gal."

And as it happened, there she was _not_.

She was not in bed. He didn't look, obviously. But he had ears and eyes. Where Nell was, even when she was asleep, was not restful.

She was not in the parlour, where a sleepy tousled Thomazine smiled blankly at him and scrubbed her face with her free hand, yawning horribly. Nathaniel was asleep at her breast, which was - disconcerting, to say the least. (There was evidence of breakfast on her bodice, and a stickiness about her lips that implied honey, so she'd been up for a while; even if not necessarily awake.)

There was a dreadful disreputable knitted bonnet in a puddle on the stairs, by which Jasper inferred that Russell had been and come and gone and neglected to take his hat. Not unreasonably, in Jasper's opinion. He wouldn't have wanted to wear the wretched thing, either.

\- He paused on the bottom stair and listened. A few patterings on the roof, but he rather fancied they were the tiny scrabbling claws of starlings, rather than a further snowfall.

Far off and away, those benighted groaning sheep were making forlorn noises, and he assumed by the emptiness of the little closet off the hall where Russell cast his accounts, that his host was somewhere out there on the frozen hills with his factor, making the beasts more unhappy.

Someone was singing in the kitchen, he could hear them even through a closed door, but it wasn't Nell.

Nell was missing.

Nell's cloak was missing, from its peg under the stairs. (Thomazine was keen on not leaving wet cloaks lying around the house. _Thomazine's_ was there, a sensible and wholly characteristic gray frieze, next to Russell's good cloak. Not his scruffy working coat, which was further proof that he was out doing nefarious things with half-frozen sheep.)

Nell's horse was missing: or, rather, _Marlowe_ was missing, that stolid, wholly reliable chunk of purposeful horseflesh. Which was clever, he must own it, for Marlowe's not being in his stall would not necessarily raise eyebrows - after all, why should Russell not take his own horse out? - but Nell's pretty little lady's mount would be conspicuous by her absence.

She was the daughter of a man who bred horses. Was he being unduly suspicious, to think that the sort of independent-minded chit who saw herself in a career on the stage, might be more than capable of saddling a horse by herself and going off - where?

The tracks of a trotting horse through the snow said so.

The woman feeding her chickens in one of the cottages set back off the Hughenden road said so - not two hours past, she said, and going up for Wycombe at a brisk walk. Be there by now, did the maid have an errand to run: there and done and coming back again.

And Jasper had smiled thinly, and given the woman a coin for her attention, and set his own horse up the Wycombe road.

It would snow again before the afternoon, he thought. The sky had that odd slaty look to it, and there was a stillness to the air that frightened him a little.

He was being silly, of course, he was being old-maidish and he would bump into her coming back down the Wycombe road. Wycombe was not London, she could not be there all day. The roads were passable, if a man was careful. Or a woman. She was fine. She would be fine.

He meant to shake her till her teeth rattled, mind.

And it irritated him more that it mattered, for he suspected that he was being played like a fish on a line by that young lady, to see how high he might jump if she pricked him. Knew it, but set against the possibility of a world without a Nell in it to play him and prick him, it somehow did not matter any more if she thought he was a poor weak silly fool, so long as she was only whole.

### -15-

She had a basket. That was the first thing he noticed - it looked so utterly odd with her, and yet, she was carrying a very goodwifely and very new and evidently very empty basket.

"Nell what the hell are you doing?" he said, very close to her ear.

She jumped about a foot into the air, dropped her basket, and burst into tears. And that wasn't like Nell, either.

Jasper sighed. (Mentally consigned his pale, soft, almost-new riding-boots with the turned-down cuffs, to a muddy perdition.) Knelt in the sloppy mud of Wycombe, picking up tangles of lace and spilled walnuts and a single, perfect, apple -

"Eleanor what?"

She knelt alongside him and their fingers brushed as they both stooped for a draggled length of lace. It did not send shivers of delight down his spine. It filled him instead with a sense of profound irritation - his gloves were already ruined, and her hands were wet and red with the cold, and so he stripped off his spoiled glove and thrust it at her. "For goodness' sakes, child, put something on your hands! And what is the matter with you?"

"I made him s-sad!" she howled, and people on the other side of the street turned and stared at them, for of all her virtues Nell's voice was a carefully-modulated thing of projectional wonder. "And Thomazine is mad with me and it's horrible!"

"And so you thought to run away?"

\- well, _he_ didn't know, did he?

And she hit him with the basket, hard, so that all the breath came out of him in one long agonised hoot, and everything they had just so carefully picked up out of the freezing mud went slopping into the filth again. "I wanted to make it right!" she yelled, and flung her unravelled ringlets out of her eyes with one hand. (It left a great streak of something horrible just above her eyebrows, but he thought it best not to mention that.)

Not that he was presently capable of speech, being starved of breath altogether after a basket in the belly, but he widened his eyes at her to express understanding, whooped a couple of times, and sat back on his heels panting. "And this is - right?" he said when he was able to make words again.

She glared at him, looking like a mutinous small child. "Yes! Yes, it is!"

Jasper stood up. His elegant breeches were a thing of ruin - but, well, whatever. He held out his ungloved hand, looked at her horrible chapped little paw, and sighed. "Pie," he said firmly. "Come on."

"What?"

"Things will look better on the outside of a hot pie, madam."

"That's not very fashionable, Master Venning."

And he looked at her thoughtfully for a second. And then, "I say it is, Mistress Babbitt. As of this hour forwards, mutton pie is all the rage in Buckinghamshire." There was something else troubling him. He glanced at his shoulder, where a fat white flake was nestling in the folds of deep blue wool. Followed by another, and then - "Being snowed on, mind, is definitely outworn. Advance."

### -16-

"Right," he said, and bluntness wasn't fashionable either but he suspected he might have left fashion in a muddy gutter outside. "What on earth is all this about?"

Her lip wobbled again. "I made Russell ever so sad, and I didn't mean to. And Thomazine's hell of a mad with me."

"So will I be, if you carry on using language like that in a public place. Without the swearing, madam."

"And then he died and then she died," she said, and cocked her eyebrow at him. "Come off it, Jas. I've heard worse than hell, with the Comedians."

"You're not with the Comedians - you're with me. And I don't care for it. And stop changing the subject."

"When did you get so boring?"

"About the same time you got so daft."

He handed her his handkerchief wordlessly and she blew her nose with a resoundingly wet trumpet voluntary. (She pushed it up her cuff, but he wasn't sure he wanted it back after that.) And then she sighed. "All right then. You know I said."

"I do know what you said. What I don't know is why, in God's name, you said it!"

"I didn't think you'd take it _seriously_!" she said.

"But _why_?"

"Because I was cross with them and I thought it was funny and I thought you'd get the joke! I mean, he _is_ strict! And he doesn't approve of the theatre, and he _does_ wear black all the time! And he _was_ a -"

"Eleanor, as a result of your – misplaced humour - I now know more about the... the..... look, there are things a man should not have to have in his head and the prospect of your sister, uh..." He took a deep breath and held it till his eyes bulged, for this was not a thing to say to a delicate maiden. Not to Nell Babbitt, really, either. But it had to be said. " _She likes it."_

Nell was blinking and her lip was curling as if someone had wafted a bad smell under her nose. "You mean he dresses like an underfed raven because my sister fancies him. Well, something I didn't already know, Jas."

He nodded, just the once. ( _He_ didn't like the idea much, either.) "And as soon as she said it I thought - I can see it, actually."

"What? That you fancy him as well? Or the black?"

"No! No, no, neither - Eleanor stop muddling me up! Their house!"

"Now you're muddling _me_. What about it?"

"Thomazine told us, remember, that if he was left to his own devices and didn't look - as you so inelegantly put it - like an underfed raven for her delight, he would turn himself out like a popinjay. It seems that your uncle has a wholly indiscriminate eye for bright colours, child. All of them. Together. Thus, the house."

She stared at him blankly. "Why it looks like a Turkish brothel, you mean?"

"Eleanor...."

"Oh, stop being so stuffy. You know what I mean. And he _is_ still strict," she muttered.

"Oh, dreadfully so! I mean, you can tell by looking at Thomazine how in fear of him she is. Mortally afraid. And that poor infant - his father beats him, you know, you can see it. Give over, Nell! That poor man is a perfectly unexceptional gentleman and you are trying to make him into a playhouse ogre!"

She shuffled. "You must admit, he looks like one. He looks like Thomazine ought to be permanently unfaithful to him -" Jasper snorted - "no, because she's a young girl married to an old man and that's what always happens on the stage!"

"Surely, infant! And that rather appealing little blonde person is whom? The gardener's son? Looks a hell of a lot like his father to me -"

"Language, sir," she said demurely, and her eyes sparkled with naughtiness, her spirits briefly restored. "I don't mean that she is _really_ unfaithful, silly! I just meant he looks like the sort of person whose wife ought to be!"

"Because he wears black? I'm confused!"

"No, because he's boring," Nell said, waving an airy hand. "He doesn't _do_ anything."

And Jasper Venning, who had nearly been done - or undone, even - by Thankful Russell not a week ago, gave a very twitchy smile indeed. "Nell, you wrong him."

"I know, Jas." And all unexpected, those great tragic hazel eyes brimmed with tears instead of merriment. "I can't help it. I don't think I am made to see things as they are, more...as they _ought_ to be, if they were exciting. Thomazine likes real life - laundry and baking-day and picking over the garden for weeds - and I – well, I don't, basically. I like adventure, and excitement, and - I like somebody else doing my baking and my weeding while I - great art, you know?"

He had little sympathy, for the first time. "You can't go round making things up like that, Nell. You can't. It's not fair."

"I didn't think anyone would actually take any _notice_ ," she murmured, and one of those tears fell to sit sparkling like a little diamond on the scrubbed table-top, amongst the rubble of the pie. "Not really. I didn't mean any harm. I just didn't think."

"And where do you think they think you are now? Run away?"

"No! I wanted to make it all right again! I wanted - I - I was going to -"

"To what, Nell?" A sudden horrible unworthy thought struck him. "You were going to stay away just long enough to have them near-frantic, weren't you? Just long enough to have them worried to death, and then come back?"

"No!"

"Then what _were_ you going to do?"

She looked even sulkier than previous. Then she muttered something into the piecrust. He didn't hear a word. "Speak up, please."

"I was going to buy them presents. To make up for it. I imagine I will still be here at New Year, and if you must know, I was going to spend far too much money on utterly useless and frivolous gifts - being an utterly useless and frivolous person. Obviously."

He leaned across and peered into the basket, at the laces and walnuts and apples - a length of little brass bells on a string, as you might hang from a pony's bridle or above a child's cradle - silly, glittering things, magpie-trinkets.

And then he sat back in his seat with the beginnings of an idea. "Not colourful enough, infant. Not _nearly_ bright enough. Now. What d'you have left in your purse?"

### -17-

It was almost dark by the time her basket was filled to their mutual satisfaction.

"Which sounds like a euphemism," he said. It had taken rather more than the contents of her purse to fill it, and he had had to add his own store.

But that was all right, because Nell was sparkling again. And Jasper was a bloody fool, although he was still not altogether sure in his own mind if he was a bloody fool who was fond of a girl who might have been his little sister, or something else.

"He's going to look _ridiculous_ ," she said blissfully.

"For one night only," he reminded her. "I do not think for one minute that Thomazine will be at all happy with being married to a maypole. I suspect she prefers dark and dangerous."

"Him? Dangerous? I don't think so!" She hugged herself with a rapturous little shiver, and not for the first time he thought just how absurd and ruffled she looked, wearing one of his gloves and not the other, with her not-quite-straight little nose gleaming like an ruddy ember over the draggled fur of her collar. "It will be so much fun."

She whirled, and her cold hand was like a bird's claw on the bare skin of his wrist, and there were snowflakes on her eyelashes. "I don't think he will have ever had so much fun _in his whole life_ ," Nell said, beaming up at him. "Are you _sure_ you don't mind?"

"That for one night only I get to look like an underfed raven, infant? Surely not."

"I think you might be a bit wider in the shoulders than he is."

"I think for a few hours I can put up with an unfastened waistcoat."

"I'm not saying you're fat, you understand -"

"Indeed. We run to solid, in my family. Next you'll be suggesting that Thomazine breaks out in a rash of pearls and hairdressing?"

"Oh, she's done all that already. She said it was deadly dull."

To which Jasper could only stare at her in some astonishment.

### -18-

On their return Russell was absent-mindedly cross, but he had his mind on other things - the thickening snow, for one thing, as if he were expecting someone or something else - and as soon as his missing chicks were safely stowed before the fire with mugs of mulled ale and wedges of toasted cheese, after he had cast his eye over them and found them intact he forgot to be irritated.

\- which gave Jasper the unsettling feeling of being a horse at a fair, too.

Thomazine, on the other hand, was not so easily mollified.

"Shopping," she said. " _Shopping_. Really."

"Really," Nell said, and glanced up and grinned. "Presents For Twelfth Night. I kept thinking...well...what you said. About him wearing colours. _Awful_ colours."

"Thank you," Jasper said dryly. "What my lady means to say, we thought - misrule, and all: the world turned upside down -if we could furnish him with a costume of the most fashionable, the finest tailoring, the utmost taste -"

"But we couldn't, so Jas is going to lend him something instead."

"Don't be ridiculous," Thomazine said briskly. Then her eyes slid sideways to Jasper's impeccably tailored sleeve. "Show me."

With a little sleight of hand, they juggled the bells and the apples and the laces and the silks out of sight, and let her see only the tangle of lurid ribbons perched like a fallen rainbow on the linen.

Thomazine's hand flew to her mouth. "Oh my word. You really do mean to -"

"Do you think he will?"

"I think he would love to. But not to go out of the house, you understand. I think he would be too afraid of being laughed at."

"That's ridiculous," Jasper said, and Thomazine gave him a long and thoughtful look. "Not in this part of Buckinghamshire, my honey. Not in those clothes."

"Then he must learn to be a bird of paradise, dear lady, and _soar_ \- and to the devil with the nay-sayers."

### -19-

Thomazine rose before dawn, on the morning of Twelfth Night.

Stupid, to be so excited, and she a respectable matron of two years' standing, a staid mother of a hopeful family -

"Pull harder," she gasped, and Doraty gave another heave on the laces of her old stays. "'Tis no good, maid, I can't get they edges together nohow!"

And the dangerous bronze silk, all slippery and spice-scented, had fit her like a glove before Nathaniel, when she had worn it in London. "More. Of - me. To. Love," she grunted, and ruthlessly shoved her bosom down under the lacings of her gown.

"There still be a gap, maid. I can arrange your collar so best I can, but - " she stood back critically, her head cocked. "D'reckon 'ee need to put a piece in, there under the arms. Plenty-a turnin' in they skirts, Mistress Thomazine, iss fay!"

"But I wanted to wear it today," Thomazine said plaintively, and Doraty laughed.

"Oh, Mistress Vanity, look you! Well, who'd see the back anyways, an we pin a piece over your laces, so?" And she pinned and tucked, humming, pulling and patting till eventually she was satisfied. "Tis nice to see you in your London clothes again, my pretty," the little maid said. "Not that you're not always neat and proper, your mammy wouldn't-a had it any other way, but not dressed up fitty. Fine."

"Might I move?"

"So long as you don't breathe in too hard!"

And there was only one thing she wanted to do, really. Tapping down the landing in her heeled slippers in the dark, creaking and rustling, to bounce like a hoyden on the bed's edge until -

"Oh that is not a sight I could ever tire of, " her shameless husband said sleepily, faced with Thomazine's barely-contained bosom six inches from the end of his nose.

"Are you awake?" she demanded.

"No, my tibber, " - and he yawned to prove it, "I often dream that you sit on the end of our bed in full Court dress with your hair on end." He levered himself upright. "'S there an occasion?"

"Presents," she said meaningly, and he laughed.

"And how do you know you have any, my lady Peek-in-the Presses? I being a most notoriously joyless husband?"

"I peeked," she said, " - obviously."

"Pert madam," he said, and shoved his head under the covers. Thomazine was having none of that kind of behaviour. Quick as a snake, her hand dived under the covers after him, but a little the lower down. "Stalemate, sir."

"That is my elbow, wife." - he sounded smug about it, too, as if he thought her grip were mistaken where it was. And truly, it was not. It was the ticklish flesh over his ribs that drew her without fail. He gave a dreadful whoop, convulsed briefly, and fell out of bed with a thump that set Nathaniel to howling, in the little closet off their chamber.

"Teach you to be smart," she said, and tucked their yowling offspring under her arm like a parcel. (He quieted rapidly, fascinated by the unfamiliar cold slitheriness of the silk in his fingers.) "Are you hurt?"

"Only in my dignity, tibber."

"Well, then it's time you were up and doing, my honey."

He sat up and blinked at her sleepily. "Doing what? What am I to do?"

And Thomazine took his hand and led him to the shadows of the dawn-dark clothes press, guiding his fingers to the cool textured figures of Jasper Venning's embroidered waistcoat. She could feel his confusion. Setting Nathaniel down in the rumpled sheets, she fumbled for the striker and tick-tick-ticked until the precious candle caught alight, and then she perched on the bed the better to see his expression at the robin-red satin coat, the silk worked waistcoat like a garden of flowers, the ribbon-looped breeches -

The colours were muted, by candlelight. But still.

### -20-

"I look -" he spread his hands helplessly, "Thomazine, I look -"

He looked, bless him, like what she imagined a Haymarket tart looked like - the suit was redder than a sunset, the waistcoat a dazzle of riotous birds and flowers in no shades known to nature. She wondered, not for the first time, if her husband's ability to perceive colours was in paired in some way.

"Green stockings?" she said faintly, "Are you quite sure?"

His hand lingered over the bowl where she had laid out the ribbons. "Which do you think?" And he sighed like a maiden, "They're all so pretty, I might hardly choose...."

She was tempted to guide him towards discretion. But these were his gifts, and this was his choice, and she smoothed his hair back and tied the yellow silk band at the nape of his neck as if she were delighted with it.

His eyes shone, though, with a joy that went too deep for words. And if he choose to look like a popinjay, who was she to argue?

He stood in front of the glass, and that was enough for Thomazine, really, for getting him to look at his own reflection most days was like pulling teeth. Tilting his head this way and that, straightening the waistcoat and smoothing his spotless linen: she could see what he would have been, had he kept his beauty. (Kept more of it, then. He was still beautiful.) Vanity was not a thing that sat well on his elegant shoulders. He looked odd - well, he looked _very_ odd, in those dreadful gaudy silks - but he looked utterly, blissfully happy.

She closed her eyes and put her head against his shoulder. (He still _felt_ the same. She must just learn to keep her eyes closed when he dressed.)

He gave a great happy sigh, like a dog settling down before a warm fire. She almost expected to hear the steady beat of a tail against the boards. Instead she heard the rustle of silk, as he shrugged off the shattering coat. "What are you doing?"

"Getting dressed," he said, and started to whistle sibilantly between his teeth - a thing he only ever did when he was really happy.

"You _are_ dressed!" And then, "Do you not like it? I thought you liked it!"

And Russell - a slightly more recognisably-himself Russell, in just his linen - kissed her forehead, and gave another happy sigh. "I love it, my tibber. But I look ridiculous."

"You look -"

"I _look_ like a middle-aged man in somebody else's clothes, love. Which is marvellous, briefly. Delightful though it is to indulge my inner strumpet -"

" _Russell you can't say that_!"

"Why? I appear to have been dressed by a magpie with access to a whore's wardrobe, and it is perfectly lovely, but if I left the privacy of our chamber looking so I suspect people would think you had buried me under the floorboards and remarried." His hand lingered tenderly over the brilliant yellow bow in his hair. "I hardly know myself."

"Oh my honey leave it!" It was a silly thing to weep for, but somehow that brave, ludicrous yellow ribbon moved her more than the put-on peacock feathers. He paused with the gaudy silk between his fingers. "Leave it?"

"A little harmless vanity!"

"I look absurd," he said, but he didn't sound sure: he sounded hopeful, as if he wanted her to deny it. "A man of my age, tricked out like a tuppenny-ha'penny market stall -" And then he stopped and straightened his shoulders. "I should know better."

She set her hand over his, so that he could not untie the ribbon. "Possibly not all together, love. That is perhaps a little dazzling to the eye. But a little colour is not forbidden, if it so delights you."

"I do not look – too silly?" he said shyly, and she knew what he meant but would not say: like a man who does not deserve to be looked at.

"You look like _yourself_ , my honey. In a somewhat stunning ribbon."

"I almost wish I could wear them all together," he said with another happy sigh. "I cannot decide which I like the best..."

"Oh, you are a darling. We are at home, dear man."

"Surely, Thomazine, or my lack of clothes might have been marked by now."

"Then you may wear what the hell you _like_ , Russell."

### -21-

Jasper Venning had been awake since dawn listening to the silence of snowfall.

He was perfectly aware that Thomazine and Thankful Russell had been up longer. There had been furtive gigglings and thumpings up and down the landing for about an hour, and the sort of noises of which a gentleman about town is aware and a lady ought not to be. Discretion was the greater part of valour, and he was going nowhere till the thumping stopped.

After which he thought he might have fallen asleep again, for when he woke it was full daylight, and someone was singing downstairs, and somewhere else in the house there was a baby, laughing. (Possibly at the singing, which compensated for tune with enthusiasm.)

He dressed, and tiptoed down, catching his head on the holly of a kissing-ball as he passed underneath it. Cursed, and went back upstairs, and dispensed with the wig. This was not a fashionable house, and no one would mind. Least of all him, if someone had turned the house into a wig-catching, wintry forest overnight. (Oh, _very_ zealous, Eleanor Babbitt - with boughs of bay and rosemary and heaven knows what pagan greenstuff scattered fragrant and glistening on every flat surface, still dusty with fresh snow.)

"Good, ah, morning," he said warily, and then stopped, for all the gaudy ribbons that he and Nell had chosen in Wycombe - Thankful Russell was wearing them. All of them. Together. Thomazine had braided him like a plough-horse, or a maypole: one long braid above his ear, entwined with the yellow ribbon, and a blue bow just over one eye, and a lover's-knot of red and rose-pink and green at the nape of his neck. "Good God," he said, and Russell turned his head abruptly, chiming like a peal of bells because Thomazine had plaited the bells in, too.

That was what was making the baby laugh, his fat little fingers patting at the gleaming, tinkling bells.

"Good morning, Master Venning," Thomazine said sweetly, and her husband gave Jasper a smile that was pure joy and said nothing at all.

"Very festive," Jasper said, and did not laugh, and the man who was not, after all, Mr Praywell gave one long sigh of sheerest bliss.

"I look ridiculous," he said, and Thomazine looked at him out of the tail of her eye and then at Jasper to see what he might say, but Russell did not, in fact, look ridiculous. He went beyond looking ridiculous, to be fair. He looked like nothing on earth, and so he looked absolutely like himself.

"Marvellously colourful," Jasper said firmly. "You may start a fashion, sir. _Most_ cheering to the eye and the heart, on such a cold morn."

He heard Nell on the stairs, and he turned his head quickly to frown at her _– don't break this, child_ – but her head was up and her eyes were bright and she walked past him as if she stepped onto a stage before an audience of hundreds. "When you are done," she quoted softly, "I am not done, for I have more – we forgot some, Jasper."

"Perhaps a little overdone," Thomazine murmured, but she was smiling, and then – "Oh, Nell, you shouldn't have!" as her little sister poured out the basket of apples and laces and trinkets and gingerbread-pigs. "You are too silly!"

Russell tinkled at her, and still said nothing. Not that he needed to, for the last creature Jasper had seen quite so radiant with a satisfied desire had been his seven-year-old nephew, coming into possession of a much-coveted red leather bridle for his pony. (That had had bells on, too. He wondered if it was the bells that did it?)

It was almost childlike, that expression of a heart's desire that went too deep for words. And then Thomazine poked him, just as if he had been a child needing to be reminded of his manners, and he turned those shining eyes on both of them and breathed, "Thank you. Thank you so very much."

"No," Nell said. "Thank _you_. For making me mindful of the gift of kindness again."

### -22-

It had had the potential to be awkward, Thomazine thought; but in the end all had passed off well.

_Well_ was maybe not the best choice of word. Not _badly_ , then. It had not been like their childhood festivals, back in White Notley. There had not been shriekings of laughter and frantic games about the house: no one had been sick on a surfeit of marchpane, no one had read any dubious poetry or acted out charades, there had been no guisers. But there had been a lot of eating, and a lot of laughter, and some gifts.

It had been quiet, but she suspected that it had been a quietness of wariness, and that next year would be less subdued. There had been moments where if you knew Russell well, you would know that he did not know what to say, or what to do, next: that he was not quiet out of reserve, but because he was watching, waiting to see how to go on. Nothing conspicuous, only what looked like stiffness and disapproval, and was not – was only the desire of a rather fiercely private man not to make more of a fool of himself in company than was strictly necessary.

He had remained lavishly beribboned, poor lamb, and if you were looking you might catch him eyeing himself with satisfaction in any shiny flat surface he could find. Preening, as if the magpie results gave him some pleasure. That was a sufficient gift, to see him look at himself with satisfaction. (It wouldn't last, of course: it was the colours that pleased him, not his own image, and she couldn't see him casting off thirty years of raven-elegant and wholly black wardrobe any time soon. Sadly.)

Nathaniel had been delighted with everything. Shininess and bright colours and noise made him crow with excitement, and his fat little fingers had clutched for anything and everything. Probably they should not have let him play with _all_ the things, but there it was. Possibly when Nathaniel was older, the house would echo to the Christmas excitement of small boys, their games and their laughter and their overexcited tears. For now, it was quiet, and peaceful.

Even Nell was subdued, but not unhappily; more, as it were, _thoughtfully_. And Thomazine was still not sure what way the wind blew with those two, or even if it would carry on blowing. She thought that Jasper might be the keener of the two on the business of sweethearting. But that might change. She thought that Nell might have grown up, rather suddenly and not entirely comfortably, slightly after dawn this morning. It might be that the business of actressing had become a silly childish dream – and, knowing Nell, it might not, either. That was not Thomazine's to know.

She didn't even know if it would stick, but certainly her heedless little sister had learned a valuable lesson. Might even make her a better actress, she thought, and grinned to herself. Thomazine had known how fragile other people's feelings were since - well. Since a very little girl had realised just how raw and messy and horrible the feelings of one damaged young lieutenant were, and how much other people hurt him even when they weren't meaning to. Once you saw that – once the childish you had seen a careful, competent, contained grown-up boy breaking his heart in secret tears for a thoughtless joke, or a badly-disguised shudder – you could not unsee it, not ever. People's hearts were delicate. Even your parents' hearts were delicate, and took gentle handling. (Even your _parents_ were people, then, which was a remarkable piece of intelligence when you were seventeen.)

Russell had escaped mid-afternoon, pleading overfed sleepiness, which had relieved the company of its formality somewhat - although possibly only he and Thomazine knew quite how much it had relieved _him_. Jasper had been all worldly and indulgent about it, too, putting it down to Russell's age. (She'd seen her husband's eyebrows twitch as if he'd been poked, overhearing that, too.)

It was hard work for him, she knew that. Being surrounded by people, even if they were people he knew and loved. He could only be sociable for so long before he had to go off by himself and be easy, even if it was only for a half-hour's respite. She did not think he was really sleeping off a full belly. She thought he was probably sitting on their bed in the fading light, admiring his borrowed finery in splendid isolation.

And that was all right, too. He was what he was, just as Nell would probably forget in a week's time that other people's feelings counted as much as her own, and Jasper Venning would resume that appalling wig, and Thomazine would stop trying to fatten everyone as if they were Martinmas geese and getting irritated by leftovers. And she was enjoying the silence, to be honest. _She'd_ pleaded putting Nathaniel down for a nap. She could have gone in and checked on her husband but – she didn't want to. He deserved his privacy, and she deserved a few minutes of not playing the gallant hostess. (She needed her respite as much as he needed his.) Anyway, Nathaniel had long since worn himself out with excitement, and she had given him into Doraty's care already half-sleeping, and now she could sit in the parlour and watch the sun set over the hills and do _absolutely nothing_.

For a while she could hear the buzz of voices in the house. And then they faded away to nothing, and she sat with her eyes closed, listening to the fire falling to ash and the stillness of a snowy dusk.

Then her eyes popped open again, for she could hear Jasper Venning's voice outside the window.

She could see their shadows, long and slight and silver-blue across the snow. His tall and broad in the shoulders - he probably would run to fat in his middle years, were he not careful, and did his wife not take care what she set on the table before him - and somehow boyish, without that ludicrous curled wig. And Nell, her little sister, who had not yet quite a woman's carriage, not quite, but had a woman's shape and a woman's -

The two shadows brushed, their ethereal fingers barely touching, and Thomazine leaned further out of the window, straining her ears for the hint of a loverly whisper on the still twilight. And a hand, a very familiar hand, closed on her shoulder, and drew her quite inexorably back into the parlour.

"Don't you dare, Thomazine Russell," her husband said quietly.

"That - that head-on collision between a French etching and a nightmare, is about to kiss my sister!" she hissed, and he gave a most indiscreet snort of laughter till she clapped her hand over his mouth. "Russell! They'll hear you!"

" I've not said a word," he said against her hand, and kissed her fingertips. If it were light enough to see, he would be smiling, she knew it.

"Oh, you -! He's a - a man about town, he is nothing short of fast, and she is my baby sister - I remember her being born, Thankful Russell, and so do you! She is a child yet!"

"He is barely three years older than she is, my tibber, and you were no older when you decided you were going to start courting me in earnest."

" _I_ decided!"

"Mm. You did. Being already clean gone on you, madam, I surrendered with as much speed as would retain what little dignity I had left to me."

She couldn't help but laugh at that, thinking of her funny, dear, most proper husband's very _improper_ surrender. "Don't change the subject," she said, putting her arms round him, "I cannot approve of -"

"Tibber," he murmured, so close to her ear that his breath tickled her, "if you choose to waste the first quarter-hour I've had alone with you in the better part of a month, in fretting about your infernal sister's romantic entanglements -"

"She's a child!"

"She's seventeen. And old enough to make her own mistakes."

"Thankful, you are -

"Incorrigible," he said contentedly. "Not to say fond, foolish, and distinctly lewdly inclined."

Outside the window, the murmuring grew louder, as yet indistinct as the distant cooing of doves. She had been melting into his arms, forgetting her duties as a housekeeper and a mother and a wife -

"We are setting a bad example to those children!" she yelped, breaking away at an unmistakable sound from just outside the window.

He leaned past her, taking the opportunity to kiss her ear in passing, and tugged the casement closed firmly. "If they have not the sense to come in out of the snow, my tibber, and find a corner of this considerably too-big house in which to be private, I wash my hands of them both. And for myself, I would think Nell could do worse than pattern herself on you, for I consider myself well content."

"You're not taking me seriously, husband! How _can_ you!"

That shameless man took a pin from her hair, and then another, and another, loosing her braid and running his hands through the thick waves. "Well, I normally begin like this," he said, and his voice trembled a little with amusement, "and then I set to kissing you in earnest, and -"

She shook her head, owning defeat. (Did not stop kissing him back. Which was lovely, after almost a month of snatched kisses and frantic busyness.) "You are shocking," she said, trying to sound stern against his mouth, "- where are your _principles_?"

"Upstairs," he said, and he was definitely laughing, now, she could feel him doing it. "Do you want to come and help me look for them?"

### -23-

Not a bird.

Not so much as a mouse turned a pebble over in the frozen trees, and Colonel Hollie Babbitt reined his horse in. Both of them snorted, which was a misty operation. "About a mile to go, I reckon, then."

And for possibly the twentieth time since they had left the snug home of his wife's second cousin three-times-removed-by-marriage twelve miles distant from Hughenden, Mistress Babbitt said, "Are you sure we're doing the right thing, dear?"

He grinned over his shoulder at his good lady. "Nope. I surely am not. But you will own it's been hell of a quiet without our Eleanor."

It had.

It had started off as wonderfully peaceful, and quiet, and amicable, and -

Well, too quiet, was what. Been a house full of children for years, of all shapes and sizes: sometimes they'd been Babbitts, and sometimes their numbers had been swelled by the addition of a quiver-full of Pettitt nieces and nephews from up the road in Witham, and sometimes there'd been a baby Venning or two from out at Diss. Been quite the surprise to see young Jasper trot up to White Notley them couple of weeks back, it having been all of five or six years since he'd last set foot over the doorstep - but looking well, looking very well, though it made Hollie feel his age a bit to see the eldest boy of one of his old comrades looking quite so grown-up.

Put the idea into his head, really, seeing Jasper. And Het had thought he was run mad, for about ten minutes, and then she'd made a great fuss about how they couldn't, it was impossible, they couldn't just turn up unannounced and uninvited on her doorstep -

To which Hollie had pointed out that there was considerable form in the Christmas story for turning up uninvited on people's doorsteps, and if the worst came to the worst there was usually a bit of room in the stables. At which Het had given him one of those not-quite-joking slaps on the arm, and a hard stare. (Twenty years and a bit they'd been married, and she still didn't always know how to take him. He quite liked that. Still a bit unpredictable, then, after twenty-odd years.)

She'd said it every hour on the hour for the full twelve days and really, they were doing nowt else, and there was no reason why they shouldn't: it was midwinter, all work had stopped for the duration. Mattie could see to the beasts for a week. There might be comments passed in White Notley but really, if a man couldn't down tools and pay a call on his absent daughters without half the village looking at him cross-eyed, the world was a sad and sorry place.

And besides, grandsons. (That was what nailed it for Het, the magic word of grandchildren. Couldn't see enough of young Nathaniel, and lecture Thomazine on the proper care and feeding of babies.)

\- and so here they were, ambling slowly through the deep, crisp snow, at a sedate pace that befitted a retired colonel of horse and a sober and respectable matron.

"We look ridiculous," she said, and he grinned at her again.

"Aye."

"Married for twenty years, Holofernes, and to arrive on my daughter's doorstep holding hands like a pair of children!"

"Aye..." He didn't let go of her hand, though. If she would insist on mounting herself on a four-legged feather-bed, he could only take advantage of that fact and let his horse amble alongside her on a loose rein, his fingers linked with hers.

"Your hands are cold," she grumbled, but she didn't let go either. The cold suited Het, though he didn't think she'd be flattered by it: her eyes were sparkling, her cheeks pink above the fur collar of her winter cloak.

And then there they were, slipping and slithering up the long hill to the ash trees, and there it was. Took him by surprise every time - his little girl, his baby, the mistress of her own house: that house, that gold-new great edifice, about the size and a half of White Notley, with the setting sun turning all the windows rose and scarlet. You listened to Russell and they apparently lived in a little turnip in the woods but that lad had spent ten years at Court, even if he'd never quite made the inner circle - if it didn't have gilded plaster it was hardly fit for human habitation, in Whitehall, and it'd rubbed off on the boy somewhat. He hadn't quite had Four Ashes rebuilt in the Palladian style but Hollie doubted very much if you'd catch Russell hanging out of the upstairs windows trying to fix a leaky gutter.

Stuffed the place full of weird foreign baubles and new-fangled rubbish, in Hollie's opinion, but it was warm and it was decent and it was comfortable and you couldn't ask for much more than that, could you?

\- even if that odd lad did have a unicorn's horn mounted over the fireplace in the dining room. Be stuffed crocodiles next, Hollie supposed. Normal men had coats of arms or portraits but not the Russells, oh no. Nothing short of mythical beasts for that boy.

And there were three chimneys smoking. Not two, like most people, but three. "Money to burn, that lad," he sniffed, and Het gave him an arch look. "It's cold, dear. Would you like our daughters to be cold?"

"Well, they're in, anyway, or they'd not have t'fires lit. All of them. So we needn't worry on that score."

He dismounted with a thump, in a splatter of snow.

"I think it's starting to fall again," Het said, sounding a little panicky.

"It will be fine," Hollie said, sounding more comfortable than he felt. (After all, what could possibly go wrong, when you hadn't seen nor spoken to two of your daughters in almost a month? Apart from sickness, or death, or -)

It seemed to take about a hundred years for anyone to come to the door, after the heavy sound of the knocker had echoed throughout the house. Which was about two inches ajar, as if someone had slipped out recently, and all the snow round and about the gardens was all churned up as if people had been passing to and fro. Not that that troubled him, no, not at all, not like a man's imaginings could conceive robbers and ne'er-do-wells, gangs of ill-meaning vagabonds, bad people -

But it was all right, because someone inside was yelling with laughter. Shrieking with it, like a thing demented.

And then that grim Scotsman they kept as general guard-dog had yanked the door open, and probably would have said something dour and incomprehensible if Thomazine hadn't appeared in the doorway halfway across the hall behind him.

She was holding up her skirts in one hand - her London skirts, the bronze silk that Het hadn't stopped muttering about the expense and the impracticality of until Hollie had sloped off under cover of one winter afternoon to buy a bolt of glimmering silver-green of silk of her own - and her cap was off, and all her hair was fallen down her back. And she was all flushed and joyous and happy.

And she was tagging that scar-faced reprobate she was married to behind her by the hand, like a dog on a string.

And that was - it was curious, and not wholly proper, but it was the sort of thing he was accustomed to turning a blind eye to from his eldest and her man, and pretending he disapproved of it. (And doing exactly the same thing with his own girl - but then nobody ever thought their aged parents were capable of anything so frivolous as dalliance, when the house was empty.)

It was him that was the surprise: Russell, normally so elegant and restrained in his personal appearance, with a sheaf of gaudy silks braided through his pale hair. All pink and tousled and most horribly beribboned and you couldn't have told by looking at his expression, which was as unreadable as ever it was, but if he'd had a tail it'd have been wagging fit to burst.

"Good lord above, Hapless," Hollie said - quite involuntarily, all startled out of him. "What the hell -?"

"Daddy!" Thomazine squeaked, and her face went joyous and starry.

"Daddy!" came another voice from behind him, in a tone of delight he had not heard from Eleanor Babbitt in some months. And then, "Mama!"

- and then Het was off the horse and there was an all-round riot of hugging going on, which left Hollie \- unhugged - at somewhat of a loose end, wondering if he ought to join in the general embracing or whether it was a purely feminine thing, and whether this new decorative version of Thankful Russell was an indication that he was likely to take to this hugging thing with abandon, which would be, really, a step too far.

He liked his son-in-law a good deal: loved him, even, but - it'd just be too weird.

"I can explain all of this," Jasper Venning said, from six feet behind the lot of them. A very odd-looking Jasper Venning, who appeared to have left his wig somewhere, thank God, and who had one very red cheek - as if he might have fetched a slap for his pains - and very bright eyes. As if the slap hadn't put him off whatever it was he was doing to have deserved it.

Russell flung his beribboned head up with a jingle of bells, and Hollie stifled a giggle. (It was too hard, seeing a lad so conscious of his dignity so absolutely bereft of any dignity whatsoever, and trying to look as if having a knot of gaudy ribbons the size of a baby's head hanging over his right eye was perfectly everyday behaviour, for him.) "There is no need," the fair-haired lad said stiffly, and Hollie shook his head.

"No need at all," he said, smiling. "I can see how it is, Hapless." He shrugged, spread his hands, meaning to take in the loving domestic chaos about him. "It's Twelfth Night. And you got the bean."

### ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Writer, mad cake lady, re-enactor, historian.  
Been slightly potty about the clankier side of Ironside for around 20 years, and lists amongst my heroes in this unworthy world Sir Thomas Fairfax, Elizabeth Cromwell and John Webster (for his sense of humour.)

I have five cats, one of whom has a reproachful look and a habit of flatulence

Book one of my latest series, which is An Imperfect Enjoyment, is set in 1665. It's funny, bloody, and rather sexy, and it involves most of the poets, playwrights and mistresses you've heard of from Restoration London. _(In a purely tangential capacity, you understand – Russell.)_

If the world of poetry, theatre, plague and arson doesn't appeal, however, and you want to get hard and heavy with my troop of Ironsides, you need to read the Uncivil Wars books, which mostly feature Thomazine's estimable father in his military capacity. (And Russell when he was young and daft, and Uncle Luce, and a whole cast of sweary and deeply unromantic supporting characters.)

I lurk on social media at www.asweetdisorder.com (asweetdisorder on Instagram too!) on Twitter @hollie_babbitt, or on Facebook as my very own self.

\- and A Sweet Disorder is, indeed, after the rather lewd poem by Robert Herrick. Not that I'm suggesting that I'm scruffy or anything. Much.

