“You and Ewan always played battledore. He was rubbish at it, and you never wanted to beat him on three, so you played to five sets.” He paused. “And you always won,” he called after her. The winter quiet exaggerated the volume of his voice.
Merry’s forward steps continued, but slowed and then stopped altogether.
“You hated playing spillikins on the mahogany floors,” he said, “because there was not enough challenge in it, so you always played in the gardens, just off the graveled path that led to the boxwood maze.”
Stop talking. Just stop this instant. So why did the words keep coming? “You and Ewan played hopscotch along the watering fountain, and both tried to get one another to miss a step and tumble into the fountain.” He stared over the top of her head. “You never did,” he said softly to himself. A sad little chuckle rumbled in his chest. “Ewan always did. And I was and remain certain it was intentional. That he loved taking a swim…” Stop. Just stop.
This time, he managed to quell the flow of memories.
Ever so slowly, Merry turned and faced him. The expression she wore was stricken.
Another blast of wind gusted around them, pulling at her plait and dusting her midnight tresses with a faint coating of white that gave her the look of some magical, winter wonderland creature.
Luke clenched and unclenched his hands, his left palm gripping the handle of the saw hard enough that the wood bit through the thick fabric of his leather gloves.
He’d been wrong.
With her lips parted and her wide-eyed gaze upon him, he’d never been more exposed and vulnerable than he was in this very moment.
Everything Merry had believed about Luke Holman, the painfully serious Lord Grimslee as a boy, had been a lie.
Of their own volition, her legs drew her back over to him.
She stopped with just two paces between them so she might better see the slightly heavy, angular planes of his face. His lips were tensed and strained white at the corners. His clear blue gaze was guarded. Wary.
“But… but… you never played with us,” she said.
“No.” Doffing his high, fur-trimmed hat, Luke beat it against his thigh.
Every expectation, every rule, everything from what I was to eat or not eat, on to who I was able to interact with was carefully specified.
It hit her with all the force of a fast-moving carriage.
“You weren’t allowed,” she whispered. “That is why you didn’t speak to me. Or play with me. Because you were instructed not to.”
A muscle rippled along his jaw, the tension there palpable, and her fingers ached with the need to smooth it away.
“I wanted to,” he confessed.
And her heart buckled.
How wrong she’d been about Luke Holman. So very wrong.
For she’d thought he felt himself above her. She’d thought him too serious and studious to partake in the children’s games she’d played with Ewan.
Only to find she hadn’t been invisible. Rather, Luke’s parents had insisted he live a life devoid of a child’s pleasures.
Now, she thought of him in a new light, as a lonely boy whose entire existence had been dictated to and for him. A boy who’d never been able to simply be a boy and who’d instead dutifully followed the rules set down by his parents, while wishing for more. Wanting for more.
She thought of herself as she’d been just two days ago, chatting and laughing with her siblings about Luke, all the while failing to see him as a person… and worse, not considering what had shaped him into the person he was.
Mayhap that was why he wished to join her, then. Mayhap he wanted to steal moments from now that he’d been denied for his thirty-four years before now. In this moment, with all he’d revealed, she found herself seeing him in a new light. Or, really, seeing him for the first time. Mayhap that was why, despite her earlier resolve to be rid of his company, she found herself relenting.
“Christmas trees,” she said.
Luke cocked his head, sending a lone curl falling over his brow, softening him.
“That is why we’re h-here.” She gestured through the whorl of snowflakes to the rows of evergreen ahead. Merry huddled deeper into the folds of her cloak. “When your brother and I were small, we came upon a story of Martin Luther and how one Christmastide season he decorated the branches with candles.”
Luke looked from her to the trees and then back to her. “Are you saying we are here… to decorate a tree?” He spoke slowly, one trying to puzzle through the peculiarity of that telling.
Her lips twitched reflexively. “No, we aren’t decorating the tree here.” She gestured to the saw in his hand, and he followed her pointed glance. “We’re going to cut one down and decorate it at your family’s household.”
His mouth moved, giving him the look of a trout out of a water. With a soft laugh that stirred a breath of white from the cold, she beckoned him forward. “Come.” She started through the rows of trees, eyeing the options around them. The viscount she recalled would never dare enter Green Park to cut a tree down. He would have seen not only the process, but the intended result, as inane.
The crunch of snow and gravel indicated Luke intended to join her.
Not for the first time, she wondered at just what accounted for the drastic change that had befallen him in her absence. The only certainty was that she enjoyed this newer version of Luke. Around him, she didn’t feel as if she was nothing more than a servant, which was what she was and what she’d been treated like by every lord or lady she’d come across in her travels of the Continent.
“I confess to not understanding it all,” he said as he fell into step beside her. “It’s hardly logical.”
She glanced over, and he launched into a lecture. “Trees have no place in a household. They exist outside and are hardly an article to be decorated.”
“Says who?”
He opened his mouth. “Says… everything the world knows about trees.”
How very much like the sober little boy who’d called out Merry and his brother for one of the many games they’d played outside his schoolroom.
She stopped and put herself in his path. “Ah, but that is the point, Luke.”
“What is the point?” he asked, looking hopelessly perplexed.
She took mercy. “Cutting trees down isn’t logical. It doesn’t serve any purpose but one”—she lifted a single finger—“to bring pleasure.” Merry held his gaze and tried to will him to understand. “That which is fun or enjoyable is not bound by or created in logic. It is simply a matter of finding pleasure without any purpose required.” Merry marched off, and this time, he accompanied her onward in her search without hesitation.
Merry passed her gaze around the copse, eyeing the trees as they went.
“How did you learn of this?” he asked.
“I’ve been traveling these past years. Your family was generous enough to send me abroad to visit households throughout the Continent.” Shivering, Merry rubbed her palms frantically back and forth in a bid to bring some warmth to some part of her body. “I spent time with one noble family, where the lady of the household was from Portugal. The Regiment of the local high-Sacristans of the Cistercian Order wrote of Christmas branches that, upon Christmas Eve, were adorned with the brightest oranges. The other servants secretly derided the lady for that tradition, and I?” She smiled wistfully, remembering the eccentric older woman. “I was just so very fascinated, I wished to know everything about it.”