He enjoyed Christmas even more than he had expected to, considering the fact that it was busy and noisy with so many children. Abby and Gil had a new baby since last year, and Camille and Joel’s family had expanded during the past summer to include the twin baby girls they had adopted because no one else would take them together.
Only three of their children were their own. The other six were adopted. It was a distinction that blurred into insignificance within the family, however. They were all equally Camille and Joel’s children.
It ought to have been an impossibly chaotic Christmas. And in a sense it was, since Camille and Joel ran a rather informal household in which the children were rarely confined to the nursery with their nurse unless they were eating or sleeping or at their lessons—which they were not over the holiday. It did not help that both twin babies were teething and being a bit cross about it, or that Abby and Gil’s Ben had recently learned to crawl and used his new mobility to disappear from everyone’s sight and cause mass panic while he embarked upon unceasing explorations of his world, especially dark corners and narrow gaps between furniture. And the two dogs of the family were irrepressibly excited by the arrival of a third, Beauty, Gil’s great lump of a canine, and chased and followed her wherever she went—when various children were not hanging all over her instead, that was, or sleeping with their heads pillowed on her back.
But it was also an unexpectedly good time for all of them, Harry included. An unencumbered uncle was communal property, he soon discovered, to be climbed upon without a by-your-leave and talked at and quarreled over and slept upon and, once, vomited over. He enjoyed himself so much, in fact, that he stayed to see in the New Year and then, in the middle of January, went to Gloucestershire with Abby and Gil and stayed with them a month.
He had not been away from Hinsford for so long at a stretch since before his return there from Paris. He would not have thought it possible. He would have expected to feel some panic. But he stayed away by choice and enjoyed every moment. Well, perhaps not the vomit moment.
When he set about analyzing what it was about this Christmas that had so warmed his heart, he realized that it was mainly the evidence all about him that life had worked out well for his mother and sisters. One could not know, of course, how it would have turned out for them if the Great Disaster had not happened. But Harry found it difficult to imagine that they would all be as happy as they actually were.
It was a strange realization. Did disasters sometimes happen to turn one away from a wrong course into the right one, the one that would bring the most happiness and the greatest fulfillment? Were some catastrophes not really catastrophic at all when one could look back and see the whole picture?
His mother had married Marcel a few years ago and seemed younger now than Harry could ever recall her being. He remembered her as a quiet lady of unshakable dignity and marble demeanor. Life with his father, he had realized even at the time, could not have been easy, though she had certainly been unaware that it was not a legal marriage. Now she was warm, vibrant, ready with smiles for everyone and open arms for her many grandchildren—and she was never far away from Marcel, who did nothing much to hide the fact that he adored her.
Camille had been the biggest surprise. She had been a stern, rather sour young woman—or so she had appeared to her younger brother—always very moral and upright and judgmental, and she had been betrothed to a viscount who was very much like her. Happiness and Camille could never realistically be mentioned in the same breath back in those days. Now she was vigorous and cheerful, always slightly disheveled though never downright untidy, almost always with a small child balanced on one hip or a baby, sometimes two, cradled in her arms while other children hung about her, tugging at her skirt for attention or simply enjoying being close to her. Joel, though he led a busy life as a portrait artist of growing renown and as a teacher in the orphanage school where both he and Anna had grown up and where he had met Camille, usually had a child on his lap too or perched on an arm of his chair or hovering about his easel when he painted, as likely as not washing out brushes for him that did not need washing. Yet they enjoyed an unusually close personal relationship too, those two. Not that Harry was ever able to observe them in their private apartments, of course. Heaven forbid! The happiness they shared was obvious anyway. And when had Camille become beautiful, even to a brother’s eyes?
And then there was Abby, who had been about to make her debut into society when the ghastly discovery was made. She had been looking forward to a Season in London, with its dizzying number of balls and other entertainments and the prospect of meeting an array of eligible gentlemen and making a brilliant marriage. She had fled to Bath instead to live with their grandmother and had been sweet and quiet and placid and apparently resigned to her lot in life for several years after. But then, after Gil had helped bring Harry home to England and stayed with him at Hinsford for a while, the two of them had met and married. Not for love, it might be added. Gil had needed a wife so that he could persuade a judge to return his young daughter to him from his late wife’s parents, who considered him an unfit father. It had not taken long for the marriage to turn into a love match, however. They lived now in a modest manor within a big idyllic garden close to an equally idyllic village. Gil farmed and Abby tended her garden and visited her friends and involved herself in village affairs and looked after the three children. Their happiness with each other was a palpable thing.
Harry was head of his immediate family, for what that was worth now that he was no longer head of the whole Westcott family. He had suffered after the Great Disaster as much on behalf of his mother and sisters as on his own account. He had felt so very helpless to shield them from the pain and the ruin and the bleak prospects the future had seemed to offer. He had been a mere twenty years old, for the love of God.
He need worry about them no longer. Life had been very good to all three of them.
They worried about him, though.
His mother took him aside a couple of days after Christmas, having invited him to take coffee with her in the small sitting room attached to her bedchamber. Marcel was downstairs somewhere, probably putting into practice some of the ingenious hand signals seventeen-year-old Winifred, Camille and Joel’s eldest daughter, had devised to communicate with Andrew, who was deaf and mute and liked to follow his grandpapa everywhere.
Harry knew he had become the despair of his whole family because they no longer understood him. They worried because they feared he was turning into a hermit, though in fact he was not, and because they were still not convinced he had fully recovered from his war wounds. He had, though he still grappled with nightmares and no doubt always would. They worried because he was approaching his thirtieth birthday yet showed no apparent interest in settling down. Good Lord, how much further down could he settle?
“I love my grandchildren so much my heart sometimes seems fit to burst,” his mother said as she set down his cup before him. “But occasionally, for sheer sanity’s sake, I need to withdraw to a quiet room and shut the door behind me. I do not know how Camille and Joel do it. Or Abigail and Gil, for that matter. I daresay that is why parenting is done by young people.”
“If I had been asked ten years ago what would be the perfect life for Cam,” he said, “I would never, given a million tries, have described this one. It suits her to perfection, though, does it not?”