Christmas Beau

And the Eastons, of course. He wondered how high in the instep Judith Easton was and how well it would please her when she discovered who all the children he had spoken of were. He wondered if she would approve of her son and daughter mingling with the riffraff of the London slums. He smiled grimly at the thought.

He had brought them to Denbigh a little more than two years before after sharing several bottles of port with his friend Spencer Cornwell one evening. Spence was impoverished, though of good family, and restless and disillusioned with life. He was a man with a social conscience and a longing to reform the world and the knowledge and experience to know that there was nothing one man could do to change anything. Cornwell had fast been becoming a cynic.

Except that somehow through the fog of liquor and gloom they had both agreed that one man could perhaps do something on a very small scale, something that would do nothing whatsoever to right all the world's wrongs, but something that might make a difference to one other life, or perhaps two lives or a dozen lives or twenty.

And so the idea for the project had been born. The Marquess of Denbigh had provided the captial and the moral support-and a good deal of time and love too. He had been surprised by the latter. How could one love riffraff-and frequently foulmouthed and rebellious riffraff at that? But he did. Spence had gathered the children-abandoned orphans, thieving ruffians who had no other way by which

to survive, gin addicts, one sweep's boy, one girl who had already been hired out twice by her father for prostitution. And Mrs. Harrison had been employed to care for the girls.

They lived in two separate houses in the village, the boys in one, the girls in the other, six of each at first, now ten, perhaps twenty with more houses and more staff in the coming year. Two years of heaven and hell all rolled into one, according to Spence's cheerful report. In that time they had lost only one child, who had disappeared without trace for a long time. Word had it eventually that he was back at his old haunts in London.

The marquess wondered how Judith would react to sharing a house with twenty slum children for Christmas. He should have warned her, he supposed, told her and her sister-in-law the full truth. Undoubtedly he should have. He always warned his other guests, gave them an opportunity to refuse his invitation if they so chose.

He watched the scenery grow more familiar beyond the carriage windows. It would be good to be home again. He had been happy there for three years, since the death of his father. Or almost happy, at least. And almost not lonely. He had good neighbors and a few good friends. And he had the children.

Watching the approach of home, the events of the past two weeks began to seem somewhat unreal. And he wondered if he had done the right thing, dashing up to London as soon as word reached him that she was there. And concocting and putting into action his plan of revenge-a plan to hurt as he had been hurt.

But of course it was not so much a question of right and wrong as one of compulsion. Should he have resisted the urge-the need-to go? Could he have resisted?

The old hatred had lived dormant in him for so long that he had been almost unaware of its existence until he heard of the death of her husband. Perhaps it would have died completely away with time if Easton had lived. But he had not, and the hatred had surfaced again.

"When is this punishment to end?" she had asked him just two days before.

He rested his head back against the cushions of his carriage and closed his eyes. Not yet, my lady. Not quite yet.

But did he want her to suffer as he had suffered? He thought back to the pain, dulled by time but still bad enough to make his spirits plummet.

Yes, he did want it. She deserved it. She should be made to know what her selfish and careless rejection had done to another human heart. She deserved to suffer. He wanted to see her suffer.

He wanted to break her heart as she had broken his.

He opened his eyes. Except mat his hatred, his plans for revenge, seemed unreal in this setting. He had found happiness here in the past few years-or near happiness, anyway. And he had found it from companionship and friendship and love-and from giving. He had found peace here if not happiness.

Would he be happy after he had completed his revenge on Judith Easton?

He closed his eyes again and saw her as she had been eight years before: shy, wide-eyed, an alluring girl, someone with whom he had tumbled headlong in love from the first moment of meeting. Someone whom he had been so anxious to please and impress that he had found it even more impossible than usual to relax and converse easily with her. Someone who had set his heart on fire and his dreams in flight.

And he remembered again that visit from her father putting an end to it all. Just the memory made the bottom fall out of his stomach again.

Yes, he would be happy. Or satisfied, at least. Justice would have been done.

Kate was asleep on Amy's lap, a fistful of Amy's cloak clutched in one hand. Rupert should have been asleep but was not. He was fretful and had jumped to the window twenty times within the past hour demanding to know when they would be there.

Judith did not know when they would be there. She had never been either to Denbigh Park or to that part of the country before. All she knew was that it would be an

enormous relief to be at the end of the journey but that she wished she could be anywhere on earth but where she was going.

Her anger had not abated since the afternoon during which she had been trapped into accepting this invitation. But she had been forced to keep it within herself. Amy was quite delighted by the prospect of spending Christmas in the country after all, part of a large group of people. And the children were wildly excited. Judith had voiced no objections, realizing how selfish she had been to have decided against spending the holiday with Andrew's family that year.

Amy of course was delighted not only by the invitation but also by what she considered the motive behind it.

"Can you truly say," she had asked after the marquess had left the house, "that you no longer believe he has a tendre for you, Judith? Do you still refuse to recognize that he is trying to fix his interest with you?"

"I do not know why he has asked us," Judith had said, "but certainly not for that reason, Amy."

Her sister-in-law had clucked her tongue.

But Judith had lain awake for a long time that night. He had said that he had waited eight years for a second chance with her. He had called her by her given name. He had kissed her hand, something he had done several times during their betrothal.

She could not believe him. She would not believe him. And yet her breath had caught in her throat at the sound of her name on his lips and she had felt the old churning of revulsion in her stomach when he had kissed her hand.

Except that it was not revulsion. She had been very young and inexperienced when they were betrothed. She had called it revulsion then-that breathless awareness, that urge to run and run in order to find air to breathe, that terror of something she had not understood.

She had called it revulsion now too for a couple of weeks, from mere force of habit. But it was not that. She had recognized it for what it was at me foot of the stairs when he had kissed her hand. And the realization of the truth terrified her far more than the revulsion ever had.

It was a raw sexual awareness of him that she felt. A sort of horrified attraction. A purely physical thing, for she did not like him at all-and that was a gross understatement. She disliked him and was convinced, despite his words and actions, that he disliked her too. She distrusted him.