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“Thank God for small mercies,” he answered briskly. “Anyway, enough about the Napps, we’ve got all day with them tomorrow. The first of your Christmas presents awaits.”

Lizzie looked at him with surprise. “Are we doing that now? I thought we were exchanging them this evening.”

He shook his head. “You’re to receive the first of yours now,” he said, tucking her arm through his and leading her through the kitchen garden and into the courtyard where Florence was stabled.

“You buy me too many presents,” Lizzie tutted, thinking of the painting he had bought her only last week that now hung in their bedroom above the bed. It showed a storm-tossed sea with several sea nymphs sporting in the waves. Lizzie had thought it was rather too risqué for the parlor, although she was not convinced, as Benedict was, that the mermaids resembled her so very much.

He shook his head. “Not possible.” They followed the path down to the end of the garden, and Lizzie halted in astonishment, catching sight of what stood there. “What do you think?” he asked.

“That’s not ours!” she exclaimed looking at the gaily painted wagon. “Is it?” She spun around to look at his face.

“It is now.”

She turned back again. “It has a chimney!”

“It has its own stove.”

Lizzie ran down the garden path to peer in at the windows. “I love it!” she cried. “Can we go inside?”

“Of course,” he said, laughing at her enthusiasm. “We can do whatever we want. It’s ours.”

“There’s a key for the door?” She watched him unlock it, and he swung her up inside. When she saw the interior, she gasped. “It’s so grand!” She gazed about in wonder at the canopy over the bed and the cunningly carved wooden fixtures and fittings, so cleverly wrought. “Oh, I love it!” she said clapping her hands. “Is it really ours?”

He wrapped his arms about her waist and rested his chin on her shoulder. “We could always sneak out here and sleep in it after Molly’s left for the night,” he suggested. “Just you and me.”

Lizzie sighed happily. “Yes, that sounds perfect,” she murmured, looking back over her shoulder at him. “A midnight tryst.”

He leant in for a kiss which she happily bestowed. Lizzie had vastly enjoyed the last month spent at Winchester Street, which was a very handsome and well-proportioned house. It had been pleasant to be able to host family and friends in the fine sized parlor and around one’s own dining table. Indeed, she was looking forward with pleasurable anticipation to another three months living in comfort before the next season started.

Still, she was already anticipating when they would next be able to take to the road again. Benedict had simply shrugged and said they would rent the house out for six months of every year. “And if children come, we’ll rethink things. I don’t want you struggling when that time comes.”

Remembering his words now, Lizzie bit her lip. She hoped he wasn’t going to be difficult about her pregnancy. She adored taking fully immersive baths instead of strip washes and having their fires ready laid in handsome fireplaces. Somehow, though, she felt she enjoyed these things all the more because she did not always have the benefit of them.

And there was something very intimate and simplistic about living with one other person in so very confined a space. She missed that sometimes now they had their own dressing rooms. On occasion she had to go in search of Benedict even when they were under the same roof. You never had that problem when all you had was a wagon and a campfire.

“What are you thinking of?” he murmured.

“Our old wagon,” Lizzie improvised. “What will we do with it now?”

“Give it to Jack?” Benedict suggested. “He needs his own space with Frank and Maggie carrying on like a pair of regular lovebirds.”

Lizzie nodded her head in agreement. “Good idea. They should have arrived in Southend by now.” Her sister and brother-in-law were spending Christmas at Maggie’s friends’ boarding house. Frank had been teetotal for nine months and was anxious to make a good impression on the friends who had taken her in during their time apart.

“Sure to have,” Benedict agreed.

“Do you still think they will be back in time for our New Year’s dinner party?” Lizzie asked, faintly anxious for the familiar faces she knew. Some of Benedict’s prizefighting fraternity were attending their New Year celebrations this year, and Lizzie did not yet have all their names straight in her head. She had met a brace of them over the last few months, and some of them were rather alarming.

Nat Jones would be there and his ‘lady friend’ Dot. Then, too, there would be Benedict’s friend Clem Dabney that Lizzie had met several times and thought a handsome rogue. Goodness only knew who he would bring with him, for every time she had met him, he had a different lady on his arm. Just lately he had invested in a theatre which everyone said should keep him supplied with a different dancing girl for every night of the week. Lizzie had taken exception to that, but Benedict had winked at her and told her Nat was only joking.

The Andersons they had not seen much of, nor had they made any festive plans. They had paid a rather stiff formal visit the previous week to Winchester Street and partaken of a light luncheon of thinly sliced sandwiches. Everyone had been rather awkward with one another, except for Benedict who had not seemed to be at any pains to be particularly agreeable.

Her uncle was plainly still mortified by the events that had transpired, but Lizzie and her aunt had done their best to carry things off between them. Betsy had been full of her engagement to Frederick Mountford, but there had been some constraint about that, for her father had turned reserved and disapproving whenever that young man was mentioned.

When Uncle Josiah had stumped out of the room to take a turn about the garden with his pipe, Betsy had confided in them. Frederick’s aunt, Mrs. Lessing, had still not given her approval to their match, so it had not been formally announced, a fact her father did not appreciate.

Aunt Hester had explained, with two spots of bright color in her cheeks, that the young couple were having to ‘bide their time’, and as Lizzie knew, her uncle ‘abhorred any kind of subterfuge’ and thought Frederick should announce his intentions and stand independently on his own two feet.

Betsy chimed in again at this point, extolling the futility of Frederick being cut off without a shilling from his aunt’s will. ‘Especially,’ she had added, ‘when their own finances were still so up in the air.’ Benedict had rolled his eyes, but Lizzie had quickly asked how the legal case against Reverend Milson was proceeding and thus averted any disaster.