Read Online Marian's Christmas Wish by Carla Kelly - Free Book Online

door, listening as Percy showed
Papa’s horses to his guest, explaining in his careful way their excellent
bloodlines, their prime points.
    “But, my dear Percy,” they heard Sir William say, “whatever
can your mother be thinking of to keep these prime goers here all year,
unridden and eating their heads off? Is it not a peculiar extravagance? I do
not wonder that your estate is all to pieces.”
    Marian set her lips tight together. “And next he will
prose on about my eating habits. He thinks to tell us how to manage,” she told
Lord Ingraham. “He is right, of course, and that is the sorrow of it.” She
sighed. “Mama refuses to sell them. She cries and sighs and takes to her couch
when the solicitor comes, or when the bailiff and I attempt to get her to
listen to reason.”
    “And this falls to your task?” he asked, his voice low.
    “Oh, yes! And I am a thankless child.” She stifled a
laugh. “I thought I would lose all countenance when Mama pointed at me after
one of those quelling interviews and declared, ‘How sharper than a serpent’s
child is a thankless tooth!’ Ariadne and I were in whoops about it for days.
Poor Shakespeare suffers at Mama’s hands.” She looked at him.
    “Speak, by all means, Marian.”
    “King Lear is scarcely my favorite, I must admit. Really, Gil, why
doesn’t that wretched Cordelia just say what she thinks?”
    It was Lord Ingraham’s turn to smother a laugh. “Why,
indeed, Marian? Cordelia’s a regular spineless wonder. Why did I never see that
before I met you?”
    “But setting Shakespeare aside—which Mama has always
done—we are in the basket and Ariadne will be sacrificed on the altar of duty.”
    “And another thing,” Sir William was saying, “do you
not think Ariadne is a trifle short?”
    Marian looked at Lord Ingraham in amazement.
    “I do not know that there is anything we can do to
correct this oversight,” said Percy from the other room, his voice a study in
seriousness.
    “Perhaps the rack?” Lord Ingraham whispered to Marian,
and then clapped his hand over her mouth when she started to laugh. He held it
there, even as his own shoulders shook.
    Sir William made his ponderous progress down the row of
loose boxes, commenting on this horse and that horse, animadverting on the
spendthrift ways of some, and raising questions about the wisdom of a
connection with the Wynswiches. Soon their footsteps receded into the distance,
and the stable doors were slid in place again.
    Marian was long through laughing when Lord Ingraham
removed his hand. She sat on the floor, her knees drawn up, her chin resting on
them, as Mama Cat coiled around her and rubbed against her legs. “I had such
high hopes for Ariadne, and now Percy thinks to marry her to that silly fat man.”
She shook her head. “Percy tells me I must not speak so. And so I should not.”
She wagged her finger in his face. “But, sir, I will never marry. From all that
I can see, it is an uncomfortable business. Now sit down again, and hold still.”
    Lord Ingraham obeyed and she smoothed the salve in
another layer over his cheek again. “Marian,” he asked suddenly, “how old are
you?”
    “I am almost seventeen,” she replied, and started when
he winced. “Am I hurting you? I would not for the world.”
    “No, no. Your fingers are wondrously careful.” He
swiveled his head slightly to regard her. “How soon are you seventeen?”
    She shrugged. “In March, but it hardly signifies. We
cannot afford a London Season for Ariadne or for me, and besides, I did not
inherit the Wynswich looks. But I did have such plans for Ariadne and the
vicar.”
    The cat jumped into Lord Ingraham’s lap, turned around
several times, and settled herself. He fingered her fur thoughtfully. “Surely
there is someone in this wide world who prefers black hair to chestnut, and
blue eyes to Wynswich brown,” he said. “But I see a mulish look in those blue
eyes, and I am reminded that marriage is an