CHAPTER 16 Gifts Nobody Asked For

❄ · ❄ · ❄

Christmas morning at Hollin Hall was loud, golden, and utterly unreal.

The children had been up since five. By seven the great drawing room was a sea of torn paper and ribbon. The deaf great-uncle had received a hand-knitted scarf and was wearing it like a flag. Tobias had been given a tiny, expensive watch and was weeping into it. Admiral had found the box with the ham in it, and had been removed from the room by three people, one of whom was Winifred's husband, who had said more words in the past hour than in the previous week.

Elodie sat on the floor beside the tree and smiled until her face hurt.

She had learned the trick years ago. You put a smile on the front of your face and let it walk around by itself while the rest of you stayed home. It worked beautifully. Several people told her she looked radiant. Rafe, passing with a tray of cocoa, gave her a very sharp, searching glance and said nothing at all.

Julian sat across the room in an armchair with a book in his hands. He had not turned a page in twenty minutes. Every few moments his eyes lifted toward her and then fell away, the way a hand goes to a bruise and withdraws.

She was good at ignoring him. It took everything she had.

“I got you something,” said Rafe, dropping onto the rug on her other side and pressing a tiny parcel into her palm. “Don’t open it in front of him.” Inside lay a jar of cinnamon no bigger than a thimble, with a handwritten label: For Emergencies. She laughed before she could stop herself, and across the room Julian's head came up like a compass needle.

On the far side of the fire, Odalys met Elodie's eyes over the rim of her teacup and lifted it a quarter inch. Elodie could not tell if it was a greeting or a question.

“Cara.” Her father dropped heavily into the place beside her on the rug, a mug in each hand, his dressing gown rumpled, his silver hair standing up on one side. He looked, she thought, every one of his sixty-eight years. “Coffee. Sugar, two spoons. I remembered.”

She took it. “Thank you, Papa.”

“You did not sleep.”

“No.”

“Neither did I.” He studied her over the rim of his mug. His eyes, dark and deep-set and heavy-lidded, were the same ones she saw in the mirror every day. “Walk with me. After the unwrapping. There is something I must show you, and it is not for the family.”

The snow had stopped by ten, and the world outside had that stunned, rinsed look it has after a storm. They went out through the garden door, down the shoveled path to the stone bench beneath the oak, where she had cried two days before. Her father brushed the snow from the seat with his glove, very formal, as if he were seating a duchess.

“I have lied to you,” said Vittorio. “I wished to say it here, where no one can hear.”

She did not move.

“The merger,” he said. “The Voss merger. You think it is a matter of tradition. Of heritage. It is not.” He drew a breath, and for an instant he looked as small and gray as the winter sky. “Four years ago I made a mistake. A large one. I expanded into Europe, into twenty new stores, without telling you. I borrowed. The currency turned against us, and the shops did not take, and I borrowed again to cover the first loan. Anders's father held the paper. He holds it still.”

The wind moved in the bare branches. Somewhere in the Hall, a child shrieked with happiness.

“How much?” said Elodie. It came out very quiet.

“Three hundred and forty million.”

She did the arithmetic out of habit. It was every shop opened since she was twenty-three, plus every Christmas she had worked.

She sat with her hands in her lap, feeling the number settle into her body like cold water.

“Voss does not call the loan because he wants the company, not the money,” said her father. “If I resist the merger, he will call it. If I marry you to Anders, it becomes family property. The debt disappears into the dowry.” He laughed, a tired, awful sound. “This is what I have done to my daughter. I put her on the table as collateral. I told myself it was love. I told myself he was a good boy, handsome, kind, who would look after you when I was gone. And meanwhile I let you build the whole company with your own two hands, and said nothing, and let you think the walls were solid.”

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“Because I was ashamed.” His voice broke. “Because your mother built that company with her bare hands, from a folding table in a church basement, and I put it in a pit. I could not look at you. I could not say it. So I made you a clause instead. I made it a game. Settled by Christmas, a husband by January. I thought, if she is married to Anders, she will never have to know.”

“Papa.”

“I am a coward, cara. It is the family disease. Your mother used to say I would rather lose the war than say I was frightened.” He wiped his face roughly with his glove. “When I saw you at that table last night, standing beside that boy, saying that you do not need my approval, I was proud. And ashamed. And I thought, here is the only brave person in my family, and I have been trying to sell her.”

Elodie did not know when she had begun to cry. It happened as quietly as the snow. She put her arms around him, this old, stubborn, wounded man, and he held her very tight, and she smelled the wool and vanilla and cologne of every childhood Christmas.

“Why are you telling me now?”

“Because tomorrow Anders will ask you to marry him,” said Vittorio. “Properly. In front of everyone. He has told me. He has a ring.”

She went rigid. “He can't.”

“He can. And you will have to say something. I wished you to know what the something costs.”

She drew back and looked at him. For the first time in her life she saw her father not as a king, or a judge, but as a man, one who had loved badly and bravely and been afraid. And she felt, under the fury and the grief, a strange new tenderness open in her like a window.

“Thank you for telling me,” she said. “I'm furious with you. I'll be furious for months. But thank you.”

“That is fair.” He almost smiled. “Your mother would say the same. She would say it with a wooden spoon.”

She laughed, wetly. They sat together on the cold bench and watched the sun climb above the birches. And at the upstairs window of the east wing, half hidden behind a curtain, a tall dark-haired figure watched them from a distance, and did not look away until they had risen and gone in.