“You will wish to go to your room,” she informed him. “Will you join us for tea later?”

“I believe I will forgo the pleasure of meeting our guests until dinnertime,” he told her.

She nodded. Even through the cold impassivity of her face he thought he could detect her relief. He gestured to the door so that she would precede him. He did not offer his arm.

It had been a mistake to come-and that was a colossal understatement. He should have stayed in London, where he had had numerous invitations to spend the holiday with friends whose company he found congenial and in whose presence he could relax and be himself. But he had remembered his father and imagined how sad he would be if he could see his son apart from his wife and child at Christmas, just one year after the wedding that had brought all the elderly man’s dreams to happy fulfillment.

Elizabeth, dressed with greater care than usual in an evening gown of pale blue, a color she knew became her well, went down early to the drawing room before dinner. Even so, Mr. Chambers was there before her, standing before the marble fireplace, his hands clasped behind his back, looking like the master of the house. She was relieved to see that he was clothed severely but immaculately in black and white. Had she expected otherwise? She had never seen him look slovenly or heard him speak in anything other than refined accents. He bowed formally to her and she curtsied. It seemed strange to realize that he had been her husband for longer than a year-and that this was his home.

They had no chance for conversation. The door opened again to admit Lord and Lady Templar and Elizabeth’s Aunt Martha and Uncle Randolph.

“Ma’am. Sir,” Mr. Chambers said in greeting to his parents-in-law, bowing courteously. “How do you do?”

“Mr. Chambers,” Lady Templar said with distant hauteur, her hair plumes nodding as she inclined her head. “I trust you are well?”

Elizabeth introduced her aunt and uncle, and Mr. Chambers greeted them with a bow.

“Welcome to Wyldwood,” he said to them. “I am delighted you were able to join Elizabeth and me here for Christmas.”

It was a sentiment he repeated over and over again during the next half hour as the rest of the family came down for dinner. Elizabeth stood beside him, making the introductions and feeling enormous relief. She had feared that he would allow himself to be dominated by her mother, that he would allow her to treat him as a guest-an inferior, uninvited guest. How humiliating that would have been.

He was to be put to a further test, though.

When the butler came to announce that dinner was served, Lord and Lady Templar were close to the door and proceeded to the dining room without delay. Everyone else held back until Mr. Chambers had offered his arm to Aunt Martha and followed them. Elizabeth, on Uncle Randolph’s arm, cringed at the discourtesy of her parents’ preceding a man in his own home, and hoped there was to be no unpleasant scene.

“Perhaps, sir,” Mr. Chambers said with quiet deference when they entered the dining room, addressing his father-in-law, “you would care to take the place at Elizabeth’s right hand at the foot of the table. Ma’am,” he added, addressing Elizabeth’s mother, “will you honor me by sitting to my right at the head of the table?”

With the rest of the family crowding into the room behind them, Elizabeth looked fearfully at her mother, whose bosom was swelling with outrage.

“Lizzie,” she said, ignoring Mr. Chambers, “your papa is the gentleman of highest rank here, and he is head of our family.”

But not of Mr. Chambers’s family, Elizabeth might have pointed out, and perhaps would have if her father had not saved her by exerting his authority-a rare occurrence.

“Take a damper, Gertrude,” he said, and moved off toward the foot of the table.

Lady Templar had no choice then but to proceed in the opposite direction, from which vantage point she displayed her displeasure by ignoring her son-in-law all through dinner and conversing with gracious warmth with Uncle Oswald on her other side. Mr. Chambers conversed with Aunt Martha and Bertie beyond her and looked perfectly composed and agreeable, as if entertaining a tableful of members of the ton were something he did every evening of his life.

Had she expected him to be gauche? Certainly she had feared that he might.

He also looked gloriously handsome. Elizabeth, playing the unaccustomed role of hostess in her own home, was nevertheless distracted by the sight of her husband and by the disturbing memories of their two weeks together last year, and wished he had not come to spoil her Christmas and everyone else’s-including his own, she did not doubt. At the same time, she regretted the sudden death of his father, whom she had liked.

Had he lived, she and Mr. Chambers would very likely not have lived separately for the past year. Perhaps they would have made something workable out of their marriage. She had been quite prepared to make it work. Indeed, she had been eager to move away from her mother’s often burdensome influence in order to become mistress of her own home.

And she had fallen in love with Mr. Chambers on sight.

Lady Templar was still bristling with indignation when the ladies withdrew to the drawing room after dinner, leaving the gentlemen to their port.

“Well!” she exclaimed. “Of all the impertinence! I must say I am surprised, Lizzie, that you would stand by and watch your father humiliated by a man very far beneath our touch without uttering one word of protest.”

“Shhh, Mama,” Elizabeth said, mortified, since the words had been overheard by her sister-in-law and by all her cousins and aunts. “This is Mr. Chambers’s own home.” And the man very far beneath their touch was her husband.

“Lizzie!” Her mother’s voice quavered with indignation. “Never did I think to live to see the day when you would tell your own mother to hush. And did you see what happened, Martha? Did you, Beatrice? When I would have stood, as was perfectly proper given my rank and position in this family, to lead the ladies from the dining room, that man had the effrontery to set four fingers on my arm and nod at Lizzie to give the signal.”

Elizabeth was both mortified and distressed. She had never been able to stand up to her mother-not even when informed that she was to be sacrificed in matrimony to a wealthy cit in order to recoup the family fortunes. But Mr. Chambers was her husband, and she owed him loyalty more than she did anyone else-including her mother.

“Mr. Chambers has a right to expect me to be hostess in his own home, Mama,” she said. “I am his wife. It is what all men expect.”

“Well!” There were two spots of color high on her mother’s cheekbones.

“You are the most ungrateful of daughters, Lizzie! I am very vexed with you. Besides, how can you expect to be hostess of such a large house party when you have no experience? And when you have Jeremy to attend to? I have given you almost half a year of my time and this is the thanks I receive?”

“I do appreciate all your help, Mama,” Elizabeth said. “You know I do.”

But her sister-in-law set a hand on her arm and smiled at her. “Come and join the group about the pianoforte with me, Lizzie,” she said. She had had her own conflicts with her mother-in-law during the eight years of her marriage.

Elizabeth, grateful for the excuse to avoid further conversation with her mother, nevertheless felt guilty as Annabelle linked an arm through hers and led her away. She had lied to her mother. She was not grateful.

It was with dismay that she had watched September turn into October and October into November without any sign that her parents intended to return home and leave her mistress of Wyldwood again. Despite loneliness and depression over her apparently failed marriage, she had liked being mistress of her own home for a few months.

It was later in the evening, after they were all assembled in the drawing room, that trouble struck again. There were two tables set up for cards. Another group was gathered about the fireplace, conversing. A crowd of younger people was clustered about the pianoforte, listening to young Harriet perform. Elizabeth was on her feet watching the card games and reflecting on the fact that Christmas was already shaping up to be its usual predictable, tedious self. With what high hopes she had embarked upon a totally different life last year. She really had been happy about her arranged marriage, especially after meeting the jolly Mr. Chambers and then receiving his son. But nothing had come of her bright hopes after all, except that she had Jeremy.

Mr. Chambers was moving away from the fireside group and stopped beside her.

“We will be decorating the house tomorrow?” he asked.

“Decorating?” She looked blankly at him.

“For Christmas.” He raised his eyebrows. “With holly and ivy and pine branches and mistletoe and all that.”

“Oh,” she said.

“And a kissing bough.”

Harriet had just finished playing. At the same moment a lull had fallen on the conversation by the fire. His words were generally audible.

“A what?” Lady Templar asked, looking up from her cards.

“A kissing bough, ma’am,” Mr. Chambers repeated. “And other decorations to make the house festive for the season. Have you made no plans, Elizabeth?”

“We have never used Christmas decorations,” she said. She had sometimes wished they had. The assembly rooms in the village at home had been decorated one year for a Christmas ball. They had looked gloriously festive, and they had smelled richly of pine.

“Then we will this year,” he announced.

There was an audible stirring of interest from the direction of the pianoforte.

“A kissing bough,” young Sukie said, and there was a titter of self-conscious male laughter and the higher trill of girlish giggles.