A Christmas Promise by Mary Balogh Page B

worked.
    “Thank you.” She lowered her head again.
    “I have four fellows coming to Grenfell Park for Christmas,” he said. “I had invited them out there before our wedding for a few days of shooting. Do you wish me to put them off? It would be easy to do, what with my sudden marriage and your bereavement.”
    Four gentlemen. To be entertained over Christmas. She turned cold. And one of them would doubtless be Sir Albert Hagley.
    “No,” she said. “It would not be right, my lord.”
    “Is there anyone that you would like to invite, then?” he asked. “Some friend or friends? You have not associated with any since our marriage, but there must be some. Are there?”
    “There is no one of your class, my lord,” she said. “No one with whom your four friends would be pleased to mingle.”
    “Invite them anyway,” he said. “I will leave it to your discretion, my lady, to invite only those who will feel comfortable.”
    They were fair words, she thought. Civil. And yet looked at another way, they were insufferably condescending. She could invite some friends provided they did not murder the English language every time they opened their mouths? Or laughed too loudly at a joke? Or dipped their fingers into the gravy?
    “Thank you,” she said. “How many do you wish me to invite?”
    “As many as you like,” he said.
    She bent her head over her work again, and he said no more. She was busily trying to decide whom she would invite. But her friends would be reluctant to leave their families over Christmas. She would invite some people, however. She would think of someone. She remembered suddenly her promise to her father to make Christmas a warm and wonderful celebration. She could hardly do that if she were alone with five gentlemen.
    Yes, she would find someone—or preferably a few people—to invite. And if her husband’s four friends did not like mingling with cits and other members of the middle class, well, then, she would treat them accordingly. After all, her promise to be civil had, strictly speaking, been made only to her husband in her dealings with him.
    She looked up at him, prepared to do battle if he should have anything else condescending to say. But he was reading his book and looked deeply absorbed in it.
    B Y THE NEXT DAY Eleanor had decided that she would invite two aunts, her father’s sisters, and the two unmarried daughters of one of them to spend Christmas at Grenfell Park. Aunt Beryl had been married to a tenant farmer until his death five years before. He had worked hard and left Aunt Beryl and Muriel and Mabel in comfortable circumstances. Aunt Ruth had always lived with them. She had never married.
    They were refined, she thought. Indeed, they had several times dined with Lord Sharples, whose tenants they had been. Aunt Beryl boasted frequently about those occasions. But Eleanor despised herself for choosing the most refined of her relatives to invite. As if it mattered. As if she cared what her husband or his four gentlemen friends would think. She loved all her relatives. The times when they came together for various celebrations had always been the highlights of her life.
    She would have written the invitations during the morning, but the housekeeper suggested that they go over the household accounts together. Her husband was from home and would be gone for most of the day, he had told her at breakfast. He was closing her father’s affairs with her father’s man of business.
    And she would have written during the afternoon, but visitors called again. There were not many any longer, but most days brought one or two. Mr. Simms came, bringing with him his wife, who had been ill the first time he came. Mrs. Simms looked about her in awe, although her husband was almost as wealthy as Papa had been. But she relaxed and settled for a comfortable coze when she knew that his lordship was from home. She and Mr. Simms rose to leave only when Lady Lovestone and her daughter arrived.