O Night Divine A Holiday Collection of Spirited Christmas Tales - Kathryn Le Veque Page 0,69

very flattering offer of marriage. Why should I be so bad-tempered?

Anger was one thing. Taking it out on a servant was another, especially on one who had been her playmate when they were children. Alice had only tried to persuade her to go to bed.

Emma set the beautiful vase back down on its table and strode around the drawing room in the hope the exercise would somehow shake off this discontent. Instead, the generously proportioned walls seemed to close in on her, trapping her in a life that was good, safe, and pleasing to her family.

With a gasp, she ran to the French windows and threw the door wide open. The cold air hit her with a welcome blast, though the dark, misty night was impenetrable and should have done little to ease her sense of confinement. She drew her shawl up over her shoulders and stepped out onto the terrace. From there, the ground sloped downward in a series of lawns and gardens that were distinctive and most pleasing to the eye in daylight. Shrouded in fog and darkness, they could have been anywhere. Or at any time.

That idea rather pleased her, and she moved back into the room only to pick up her mother’s abandoned shawls on the sofa and wrapped them around herself. As she walked out onto the terrace once more, the clock chimed from the gallery. Midnight. It was Christmas Eve.

Every Christmas of her life had been spent in this house. She remembered only warmth and laughter, collecting holly and other greens and berries to decorate the hall, and the dining room and whichever other rooms they had chosen. Simple times, when her father had been alive, and she and her siblings had run wild…

Even later, when everyone began to grow up, and they had lost their father, the warmth remained. Her eldest brother Joe had always come home for Christmas when he was in the country. After marriage, her sister Roberta had dragged her husband and children here for Christmas. Only John had been absent for years when he had joined the army. But even he was back in recent times, invalided out after Waterloo. And now there was Hazel, Joe’s wife, whom she loved, and their wild, eighteen-month-old son who smiled more than any child she had ever encountered.

Standing by the balustrade, she stared into the swirling, freezing dark, watching her breath stream out into it, and realized the sky was not quite opaque after all. She could not see the moon, but there was one star managing somehow to twinkle in a hazy kind of way. She smiled, working out that it shone to the east, like the star which had drawn the wise men to Bethlehem.

I could follow the star. It might lead me to Selim.

She closed her eyes. Don’t think of him. How can I agree to marry another man if I still dream of Selim?

It was beyond foolish. A man from a different country, a different faith, a friend of her brother Joe who had burst into her life more than two years ago, for a mere week. His dark eyes had sparkled much more brightly than the star up there. In fact, his whole person had seemed to shine, dashing, larger than life, and full of fun and laughter. Selim, her rebellious Ottoman prince…

And then he had gone, and ever since, excitement had always seemed to be lacking.

She had enjoyed two London seasons now, broken hearts as she was meant to, and rejected more suitors than her mother felt she should. And now there was Lord Davitt, and she really thought it was time to grow up and accept him.

It was a good match. And she liked him. Four-and-twenty years old to her nineteen, amiable, respectful, and amusing. She couldn’t have considered him if he wasn’t amusing.

She gazed up at the star, barely visible at all now, and tried to imagine next Christmas. Would the same star shine down on her here, then? When she was Lady Davitt, perhaps even a mother?

She closed her eyes. Oh yes, she could see it, the same family warmth, her own little baby, admired by all, herself admitted into that upper rank of married women alongside her mother, Roberta, and Hazel. Davitt would stand proudly at her side, while Hazel, holding Emma’s baby, would glance over her shoulder at Joe, share one of those smiling, secret looks that only they understood. Emma would turn to Davitt…

Her eyes flew open. For that was