A Christmas Promise by Mary Balogh Page A

angry and dreadfully upset when Wilfred responded to the letter she had written to his father with a passionate love letter. All the love that might feed her aching and empty heart. Yet a forbidden love.
    Perhaps, she thought at first, if she could just be patient, she would within a year or so have a child on whom to lavish all the pent-up love that was fairly bursting from her. Even though it would be his child, it would be hers too, and a person in its own right. But hope even for that faded as the days and then the weeks passed and he never came to her at night. For which blessing she was profoundly thankful. She found herself almost sick with dread for the first couple of weeks when she retired to bed. But without those terrifying encounters there would be no child.
    She did not know how she would live with an empty, meaningless marriage, and with no children. Being an only child herself, she had always dreamed of having a large family of her own—five or six children. And dogs and cats. And—oh, and life and love and laughter.
    For the first two weeks after the funeral she at least had the evenings to herself. After dinner, during which they always conversed politely on impersonal topics, she retired to her sitting room while he did she knew not what. She did not even know whether he went out or stayed at home. He never entered her sitting room, which was at the opposite side of her bedchamber from her dressing room. And so she made of the room her own private domain, rearranging the furniture for maximum coziness, filling it with her own personal belongings from home—from her father’s home, after she had spent a day there gathering together what she wished to keep. And in her private sitting room she read and sewed and felt almost happy.
    But that was not to last.
    “What do you do in the evenings?” he asked her abruptly one day at dinner.
    “I read,” she said. “Or I embroider. Or I knit. All those things that any real lady does, my lord.” But she flushed under his steady gaze. She did not often forget their agreement. “I am sorry.”
    “Bring your book or your embroidery or whatever you choose to do this evening to the library, then,” he said. “We might as well spend our evenings in a room together since we seem on the whole to have learned to be civil to each other.”
    “Yes, my lord,” she said. But she felt only dismay and a sinking of the heart at having to obey this man’s every whim. Life was not fair to women, she thought. And that was an understatement. She wondered what he would say or do if she refused or at least expressed her reluctance to obey. And yet, looking at him as he signaled a footman to refill his wineglass, she reminded herself that he was at least human, that at least spending the evening in the same room with him would give the illusion of closeness, would take away some of the loneliness of her existence.
    She fetched her embroidery to the library, knowing that it would be pointless to bring a book, knowing that she would not be able to concentrate on its pages. And she settled herself into a deep leather chair on one side of the roaring fire while he sat at the other, a book spread on his lap. And she bent her head over her work and found that she had been wrong. There was an aching loneliness, far worse than that she felt usually of an evening. For it was a cozy room and warm against the early December chill. And her husband was sprawled comfortably in his chair. It was the perfect domestic scene.
    And yet it was all illusion. They were strangers, unhappy strangers, who had agreed for the sake of good sense to live together with civility. There was no affection, no closeness whatsoever. She could not, if she wished to do so, lift her head to share some confidence or some piece of nonsense with him.
    She lifted her head to look at him. He was looking steadily at her, his book neglected on his lap.
    “It is pretty,” he said, indicating the cloth on which she