Regency Christmas Gifts by Carla Kelly Read Free Book Online Page B

you sir, are a kind friend,” she told him. He could
have wriggled like a puppy from the pleasure, but he was
forty-three and knew better.
    Dinner was an unalloyed delight. He thought of
all the roast beef and dripping pudding he had eaten through the
years in this dining room without overmuch thought, and found
himself looking at the tender beef before him through Beth’s
eyes.
    “ Mama, have we ever had anything like this before?” she had asked her mother after
the first bite.
    “ If we have, I don’t remember it,”
Mrs. Poole replied, which told him more than he ever wanted to know
about their meals.
    Thomas lightened whatever embarrassment she may
have been feeling at such a question by regaling his guests with
stories of weevils at sea, and water so thick and long in the kegs
that it nearly quivered like pudding. As his guests ate, then ate
more when he summoned David Fillion to keep the food coming, Thomas
told them stories of rice and mysterious concoctions in the Far
East, a memorable dinner of pasta and tomatoes in Naples, and
homely corn pudding in South Carolina, washed down with something
called apple jack that left him with a two-day headache.
    Dessert was cake, which made Beth clap her
hands in wonder, and Mrs. Poole mouth I love cake as she
turned her unmatched smile on him again.
    “ I am too full to eat this,” she
told him, and touched her little waist, but she ate it anyway,
closing her eyes with each forkful she downed. She ate slower and
slower, as if wanting to savor each bite and hold it in memory.
Finally, she could eat no more. She shook her head with obvious
regret.
    A whispered conversation with David Fillion
when Thomas went to the front of the house to pay the bill meant
that he could present the rest of the cake in a pasteboard box to
Beth. She took it with a curtsy, handed it to Mr. Laidlaw, then
threw herself into his arms.
    “ This is going to be such a
Christmas because we will have cake,” she whispered in his ear.
“Mr. Jenkins, thank you.”
    And then she was a well-mannered child again,
and it was her mother’s turn to struggle, which gave Thomas a
little unholy glee. He could do his own struggling later in the
quiet of his home.
    Mr. Laidlaw assured him that he could easily
escort the ladies home in the post chaise, so he would not have to
make another round trip, but Thomas wouldn’t hear of it.
    “ My sister will just scold me for
eating too much, if I come home now,” he said as he loosened the
top buttons on his trousers. “Excuse this, but I’m in
pain.”
    Beth laughed and waved the pasteboard box under
his nose, which made her mother giggle like a school
girl.
    They were all so easy to laugh with that he
wished he could have signaled to the post rider to slow down so he
could savor the moment in much the same way as Mrs. Poole had
slowed down to enjoy her cake. He snagged an errant thought out of
the cold night air and wondered if this was what it felt like to
have a family. If it was, he wondered how any man, soldier
or sailor, could tear himself away to go to something as stupid and
time-consuming as war.
    Back in Haven on Carmoody Street, Mr. Laidlaw
shook his hand once and shook it again. Mrs. Poole invited him in,
which was a fortunate thing, because he wasn’t going to leave
without a few more minutes of conversation.
    Beth set the cake box on the table and just
stared at it a moment, before yawning.
    “ Young lady, you are going to bed,”
her mother said.
    Beth made a face.
    “ I mean it.”
    He watched them both, enjoying the loveliness
of the moment, even though it was prosaic in the extreme and
probably what went on all over the world, even though he had missed
it, he and many men like him. I was cheated , he
thought.
    He stared out the window in the sitting room
while the ladies of the house went into the bedchamber. He heard
muffled laughter, and then a gasp and more laughter, and knew right
down to the soles of his feet that he had indeed been