Page 66 of All I Want for Christmas… Is You
MY FIRST NOEL
DANELLE HARMON
CHAPTER1
24 DECEMBER, 1779, BERKSHIRE, ENGLAND
My dear Katharine,
I do not quite know how to begin this letter, and I hope you will forgive it coming to you at a time of year that is meant to be one of peace and happiness. Christmas should be a joyous season, but I fear that in examining my own life and our intended plans for a future together, I am finding an absence of that joy, and I beg you to release me from my promise to you. You are a fine woman, and I know that you will bring happiness to some fortunate soul, but I am afraid that after much reflection, I have come to the decision that I am not that man. I am sorry. I hope you will find it in your heart to forgive me.
— Bisley
Lady Katharine Farnsleyread the letter over a second time, then let it fall from nerveless fingers to her desk. A trembling started deep within her bones, and nausea flared in her stomach as she tried to digest the shock of what she had just read.
After an engagement that had already become suspiciously long, Viscount Bisley was breaking it off. Throwing her over. Just like she’d been thrown over twice before.
She stood up, her knees shaking, her tears held firmly in check, and took a deep and steadying breath. Dazed, she walked to the looking glass and studied herself by the light of a candle.
What is so wrong with me that no man will have me?
Large, dark blue eyes gazed back at her. At times those eyes had been cold, calculating, even cruel. At the moment there was nothing in them but stunned disbelief.
She pushed an errant lock of thick blonde hair back into place, touched one cold pearl earring, and turned from the mirror. She could take the letter to Perry who, as the Earl of Brookhampton, would likely call Bisley out for this insult to his sister, but Perry had been through enough this past year and Katharine had no wish to see him fighting a duel on her behalf.
She wished she could go to her mother with the letter, but Mama was in London, spending Christmas with friends.
Lady Katharine was on her own.
She walked to the window and looked out over the dark and wintry Berkshire countryside. Night had fallen hours before, and an icy rain beat against the windows of the old manor house as a gust of wind lashed it like a jockey whipping a horse.
A beastly night to get such news, and on Christmas Eve, as well.
A beastly night indeed.
She turned from the window, put her head into her hands, and quietly, so that not even the fire crackling in the hearth would hear, wept.
* * *
“Stand and deliver!”
It was a miserable evening to be working the road from Wantage to Lambourn but sometimes a man didn’t have a choice. Noel O’ Flaherty watched the coach come to a stop, its wheels sinking into the chalk mud, its lanterns showing sleet beating down from the heavens above in weak bars of light that barely cleaved the darkness. He could see that the door of the coach bore a fancy crest, but the drizzle and the gloom made it impossible to make out, let alone recognize.
He pulled his tricorn low and cursed his cloak, threadbare now—no elegant robber was he, but a desperate one, a hungry one, a currently impoverished and homeless one—for its inability to keep him warm and dry. It wouldn’t do to shiver when you were holding up a person. And he had a bad feeling about this coach. There it stood in the darkness, silent and waiting, something menacing about it. He was Irish. He had bad feelings and good ones, all the time. This was a bad one. A very bad one.
The driver looked down at him. “Come now, sir, my master has just returned from a long trip abroad and would like to get home to his family. What are you doing out bothering good, decent folks on a night like this? It’s Christmas Eve!”
“A lad’s got to eat at Christmas just like any other time of the year,” Noel muttered, watching the driver from behind his pistol as he urged his mare, a great piebald beast with shaggy fetlocks and a shock of mane and tail, closer to the coach. Normally, the terrified occupants would raise the shade or open a door, thinking that by making his task easier, he’d show mercy. But in this case, the coach remained ominously silent and still and the bad feeling at the base of his spine became more pressing.
Danger.
Get the devil out of here, and do it now.
His stomach growled. His spine tingled in warning. He ignored both.
“Get out of the coach,” he repeated.
Nothing.
