Boxing Day

You wake on the twenty-sixth of December with his card under your pillow, which is a ridiculous place to keep a duke's handwriting, and you know it.

You lie there for a while, looking at the ceiling. You think about the notes that went up and down the stairs last night, carried by poor Joss in his stockinged feet. You think about the last one he sent, and how long you looked at it.

Your candle burned all the way down. Nobody came to put it out.

That feels like something.

"Boxing Day," Trix announces at breakfast, "is the one tradition he can't stop, because it isn't really Christmas, it's charity, and Edmund's too stubborn to be uncharitable."

The duke, behind a newspaper three weeks old, turns a page. "I'm sitting right here."

"I know, dearest. I'm describing you to Ava."

"Miss Ashdown," he says, without lowering the paper, "is perfectly capable of forming her own opinion of me."

"Oh, I have," you say. "It's coming along very nicely."

The newspaper twitches. You'd swear it twitches.

He leaves after breakfast to see to the estate, as far as anyone can in four feet of snow. You spend the morning helping Mrs. Dunstan with the linen closets, because sitting idle in a stranger's house makes you itch. And that's how you find them: on the top shelf of the stillroom, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, two dozen parcels with names written on them in a black, slanting, impatient hand.

Mrs. Haverleigh. Pruett. Joss. Polly. Mrs. Dunstan.

You stare at the handwriting. You'd know it anywhere now.

"Mrs. Dunstan," you say slowly. "What are these?"

The housekeeper goes pink to the roots of her iron hair. "Those aren't for looking at, miss."

"They're Christmas boxes."

"They're St. Stephen's boxes," she says firmly, as if that makes all the difference. "His Grace leaves them in here every year. He thinks I don't know it's him. He has the steward buy the things and he writes the names himself, and then I hand them round and say they're from the estate, and everyone says thank you very much, Mrs. Dunstan, and we all pretend."

"Every year?"

"Every year since the duchess died. Warm gloves for the grooms. A shawl for Cook. Books for Joss, the boy wants to better himself." Her voice catches a little. "He's not a hard man, miss. He only acts like one at Christmas."

You look at the parcel with Polly on it, small and neatly tied.

You think about the man at the pianoforte in the dark. You put the parcel back very carefully, as if it might break.

The servants' dance is held in the great hall that evening, because the servants' hall is too small, and because Trix asked, and because the duke said, "Do as you like," in a voice that meant I'm not going to watch.

Pruett, it turns out, plays the fiddle. Two of the grooms play pipe and drum. The maids have done their hair with ribbons. Tobias sits by the bare hearth with his bad leg on a stool, clapping time. Somebody has lit every candle in the hall. Not the windows, you note. Every candle inside.

It's warm, and loud, and lovely.

You dance with Joss, who treads on you. You dance with one of the grooms, who swings you so hard your feet leave the floor. You dance, extremely solemnly, with Pruett, while a kitchen maid takes over the fiddle, and Pruett informs you in a stately whisper that he has not danced since the Peace of Amiens.

When the set ends you're breathless and laughing, and you turn around, and the duke is standing at the foot of the stairs.

Watching. Arms folded. In black, as always, with the candlelight catching his cheekbones and making his eyes look silver. Every maid in the room has gone quiet and a little dazed. You can't blame them. He's unfairly beautiful when he's cross.

Trix sees him too. Before he can retreat, she has crossed the floor and taken his arm in both hands.

"No," he says.

"Yes."

"Trix."

"One dance, Edmund. One. It's St. Stephen's, it isn't Christmas, you said so yourself." She tows him into the middle of the hall like a tug pulling a warship. "And you can't dance with me, it's dull to dance with your sister. You'll dance with Ava."

The whole hall waits.

He looks at you. You look at him. Pruett lifts the fiddle with a tiny, devilish flourish you would never have expected from a butler.

"Miss Ashdown," says the duke, in the voice of a man walking to the gallows. He holds out his hand. "Would you do me the honor."

"Only if you promise not to enjoy it."

"I can safely promise that."

It's a country dance, quick and simple, the kind you've danced at every village assembly of your life. Hands, turn, down the set and back. Nothing in it.

Except that his hand is warm around yours, and his other hand at your waist on the turns is firm and sure, and when the figure brings you face to face he is very close, close enough that you can see the faint shadow on his jaw and a tiny scar through one dark eyebrow. He dances well. Of course he does. He moves like a man who used to love this.

"You're smiling," you tell him, on the third turn.

"I'm not."

"Your mouth isn't. Your eyes are."

"My eyes," he says, "are concentrating on not being trodden on."

"Pruett said the same thing."

"You danced with Pruett."

"Beautifully."

"Pruett." He turns you under his arm. His breath stirs your hair. "I want that noted somewhere."

The music ends. You're both still for one beat too long, his hand still at your waist, your hand still on his shoulder, the hall spinning slowly around you.

Then he steps back and bows. "Good night, Miss Ashdown." And he's gone up the stairs before the applause dies.

Later, Trix walks you up to your room with her arm through yours, flushed and happy.

"He danced," she keeps saying. "He danced."

"One dance."

"One more than in five years." At the turn of the corridor she slows. Ahead, a narrower staircase climbs up into the dark of the third floor. Her voice changes. "Don't go up there, Ava. Not that way."

"Why not?"

"That's the old nursery wing. There's only one room that matters up there, and he locked it after the funeral. Nobody's been inside since. Not even Mrs. Dunstan has the key." She shivers. "The maids say they hear things."

"What kind of things?"

"Footsteps. At night."

You laugh, and she laughs, and you say good night.

But you can't sleep. Hours later, wrapped in a shawl, you open your door for some air, and you look down the corridor toward that narrow staircase.

At the top of it, under the door of the room nobody enters, there is a thin gold line of lamplight.

Someone is in there.