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Winter came to Aubrey Hall in a way winter had never come to Kate in the whole of her life, and she stood at the window of the room that was now hers, on the eleventh morning of her first English December, and watched it snow, and did not know whether she wanted to laugh or weep.
She had seen snow, of course. She had seen it on the honeymoon, in the mountains, from the warm inside of coaches, a novelty, a spectacle, beautiful and brief. This was different. This was snow that meant to stay, that had settled over the whole of the Kentish countryside in the night and turned it silent and white and strange, that lay thick on the bare black trees and the frozen hedgerows and the long sweep of lawn where, as she had experienced firsthand in the spring, they played some family game that everyone took far too seriously. It was beautiful. It was also the coldest, whitest, most foreign thing she had ever seen, and standing there wrapped in a shawl that was not nearly warm enough, Kate felt, with a suddenness that took her breath, how very far she was from home.
Because it was December, and in the country of her childhood, December was not this. December was warm. December was gold, not white. And it was not December she was thinking of, standing at that frozen window, but October, the October just past, the one she had spent on a boat somewhere off the coast of France, married over four months, sailing home to England, and had not, until this very moment, let herself think about at all.
Diwali. She had missed Diwali.
She had not even marked it. That was the thing that came to her now, sharp and unexpected, standing in the cold looking at the snow. The festival of lights, the one she had known her whole life, the one her father had loved, the whole warm blazing world of it, the little clay lamps set out in their rows, the light pushing back the dark, the sweets and the noise and the family and the whole golden warmth of it, all of her childhood was in that festival, and this year, the first year of her married life, it had come and gone somewhere on a boat off France and she had let it pass unmarked, unlit, unremembered, because she had been newly married and traveling and happy and it had simply, quietly, slipped by. And now here she was, two months later, in a cold white country, about to be swept into everyone else’s festival, the great warm English Christmas that the whole household had been preparing for days, and she had not so much as lit a single lamp for her own.
The grief of it surprised her. She had not thought she was religious; she was not, particularly, had never been. But she found, standing at the window, that it was not about religion at all. It was about home. It was about being a girl in a warm country where the December nights glowed gold, and being now a woman in a cold country where they glowed, if they glowed at all, with a light she did not yet know, and having, somewhere between the two, let the last thread of her own childhood slip through her fingers without even noticing until it was gone.
“You’re miles away.” Anthony had come in behind her, and now his arms came around her from behind, and she leaned back into the warmth of him, which was the one warm thing in the whole white morning. “You’ve been staring at that snow for a quarter of an hour. Are you all right?”
“I’m cold,” she said, which was true, and not the thing. “Your country is very cold, Anthony. I don’t know how any of you survive it.”
“By huddling together and drinking a great deal, mostly. It’s the whole reason for Christmas, if you want the truth, we invented an enormous festival in the middle of winter purely so we’d have an excuse to light every fire in the house and eat too much and pretend the dark isn’t so bad.” He kissed the top of her head. “You’ll like it. I promise. It’s the best thing we do, the Bridgertons, Christmas. We’re insufferable about it. Mother has been planning it since roughly August.”
“I don’t know any of it,” Kate said quietly, and there it was, out, the true thing. “That’s what I’ve been standing here realizing. I don’t know any of it, Anthony. The songs, the customs, whatever it is you all do, I’ve watched the servants hanging greenery for three days and I don’t know what half of it means. Everyone in this house has done this every year of their lives. It’s, all of you, you’re swimming in it, all the memories, all the little rituals nobody explains because everybody already knows. And I’ll be standing in the middle of it not knowing the words to a single carol, not knowing which fork or which custom or when to do what, the one person in the whole house it isn’t, the one person it doesn’t already belong to.” She turned in his arms to face him. “I don’t say it to be pitied. I just, I hadn’t understood, until this morning, how far outside it I’d be. Your family’s warmest, dearest thing, and I’ll be standing at the edge of it, foreign, watching.”
Anthony’s face had grown serious, and she watched him truly take it in, watched him see the holiday, for the first time, through her eyes, foreign instead of familiar, and she saw it cost him something, the understanding.
“I didn’t think,” he said slowly. “I’m sorry. I’ve been so busy being glad to bring you here for it, showing you off, I didn’t stop to think that the thing that’s home to me is a foreign country to you.” He took her face in his hands. “But Kate, you won’t be at the edge of it. I won’t let you be. You’re a Bridgerton now, you’re my wife, this is your family and your home and your Christmas as much as anyone’s, and if you don’t know the songs then I’ll teach you the songs, and if you don’t know the customs I’ll stand beside you the whole time and tell you what comes next, and you will not be foreign, not for one minute, I swear it—”
“I don’t want to only learn yours.” It came out of her before she’d fully decided to say it, and she heard the ache under it. “That’s the other thing. I’ve been standing here realizing I let my own go. This year. Diwali, we, it’s a festival, in October, the festival of lights, I’ve kept it every year of my life and this year it came and went on a boat off France and I didn’t even, I let it pass, I didn’t light a single lamp.” Her voice caught. “And now I’m to throw myself into your festival, your lights, your customs, and there’s a part of me that feels like if I do, if I just become English and Christmas and Bridgerton, then the last of, then India’s really gone, then I’ve traded the whole of where I came from for the whole of where I’ve landed, and I don’t, Anthony, I don’t want to have to choose. I don’t want to give up my December to have yours. But I don’t know how to have both.”
Anthony was quiet for a moment, holding her, and then he said, “Then we’ll have both.”
“You can’t just—”
“Why not?” He said it simply, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. “Why can’t we have both? Who’s going to stop us? It’s my house, and you’re my wife, and if my wife wants to keep a festival of lights then my wife will keep a festival of lights and the whole of England can mind its own damn business. Tell me about it. Diwali. Tell me what you do. Tell me what you did, every year, at home, and we’ll do it, Kate, this year, here, we’ll do it, and then we’ll do Christmas too, and you’ll have both, and I don’t see the smallest reason in the world why you shouldn’t.”
And Kate looked at her husband, and something in her chest, which had been very tight all morning, began, slowly, to loosen.
She had not expected to end up telling him about Diwali standing at a frozen window in Kent, but she did, haltingly at first and then not haltingly at all, about the little clay lamps, the diyas, rows and rows of them, on every ledge and step and windowsill, the light multiplying in the dark, about the sweets her father favored and the ones she’d favored as a girl, about the noise and the color and the whole warm blazing heart of it, the festival of light driving back the dark, and Anthony listened, all of it, and asked questions, real ones, and by the end of it Kate was not homesick, or was homesick in a different way, a way that had warmth in it instead of only loss.
“Right,” Anthony said, when she’d finished. “Lamps. We can find lamps, or make them, there’s a whole still-room full of things and half the servants have nothing to do this week but complain about the cold. And it’s midwinter, Kate, do you see, it’s the darkest time of the whole year here, which is the entire point of Christmas, driving back the dark with light, that’s what all the candles are, that’s what the Yule log is, we light up the darkest night of the year and dare it to do its worst. It’s the same thing. It’s your festival too, underneath, it’s the same thing your father was doing, light against the dark in the deep of winter. We just do it a few weeks later and with worse weather.” He grinned. “You’re not as foreign here as you think. You’ve been keeping a midwinter festival of lights your whole life. You’ve just got to teach us your half of it.”
And that, in the end, was how the Bridgertons came to keep Diwali.
Not properly, not the way Kate had known it, there was no doing that, not here, not in the snow, and she did not pretend otherwise. But when she came down at last, warmed and steadier, and Violet met her in the hall with the particular searching kindness Kate was already learning to recognize in her mother-in-law, and said, “Anthony tells me there’s a festival we’ve been neglecting, and that we’ve a great deal to learn, and not much time, so you had better come and tell me everything, because I’ll not have a daughter of mine spending her first Christmas here feeling like a guest in someone else’s celebration,” Kate found that the tightness in her chest was quite gone.
Violet was, it emerged, a formidable ally. Within the hour she had the still-room mobilized and the housekeeper baffled and half the family drafted into the making of small lamps, and she asked Kate a hundred questions and listened to every answer and did not once make Kate feel that her festival was a curiosity or a concession, but treated it, simply, as a thing the family would now do, because a member of the family did it, and that was how families worked. “We take in all sorts, we Bridgertons,” Violet said, at one point, setting out lamps with her own hands, matter-of-fact. “It’s rather our specialty. I married a man everyone thought I oughtn’t, you know, and my Anthony’s gone and married a woman from the other side of the world, and I daresay it’ll go on like this, every one of them dragging home someone impossible and wonderful, and the family just gets larger and stranger and warmer, and that’s exactly as it should be. We don’t make people smaller to fit us, Kate. We get bigger to fit them. Now. Show me again how they’re meant to be arranged, I want to do it properly.”
And on the longest darkest night of that first English winter, a few days before the English Christmas, the Bridgertons of Aubrey Hall set out row upon row of small lamps along every windowsill and ledge and stair, dozens of them, a hundred of them, the whole great old house glowing gold against the black of the deepest night of the year, and Kate stood in the middle of it with her husband’s arm around her and her new enormous family around them both, the children delighted, the little ones running from lamp to lamp, Violet surveying the whole warm blazing spectacle with satisfaction, and she watched the light push back the dark exactly the way it had every year of her childhood, in a country ten thousand miles away, and understood that she had not lost it after all. That she did not have to choose. That the girl who had lit lamps against the dark in a warm gold country and the woman who stood now in a cold white one were the same person, and that the light was the same light, and that here, impossibly, in the last place she’d have looked for it, in the snow, in England, among strangers who were fast becoming the opposite of strangers, her festival had come home to her, carried the last stretch of the way not by her but by the people who had decided, simply and without fuss, that what mattered to her would matter to them.
“There,” Anthony murmured, beside her, watching the lamps. “You see? Both. I told you. Both.”
“Both,” Kate agreed, and did weep, then, a little, but it was the other kind of weeping, the kind that had warmth all the way through it.
And then there was the English Christmas, and Kate threw herself into the whole of it, and it was easier now, all of it, the carols she did not know and learned, the customs she did not understand and was taught, the church service she attended not out of a faith she did not hold but out of love for the people beside her, the greenery and the mistletoe and the enormous groaning feast and the games with rules everyone had to keep re-explaining and the gifts and the noise and the sheer overwhelming warmth of a Bridgerton Christmas in full riot. She learned it all, that first year, standing beside Anthony, who never once left her side, who told her what came next at every turn, so that she was never foreign, never at the edge, always, from the first day to the last, held right in the warm middle of it. And she found, to her own surprise, that she loved it, that this cold strange white festival of a country not her own had its own deep warmth once you were inside it, its own light against its own dark, and that it was, now, a little bit, hers.
But it was the lamps she remembered, always, ever after, from that first Christmas. Not the carols or the feast or the great English customs, though she came to love all of those in time. It was the row upon row of small glowing lamps along the windowsills of Aubrey Hall on the darkest night of the year, and her new family setting them out with their own hands, and Violet saying we don’t make people smaller to fit us, we get bigger to fit them, and the understanding, settling over her in the golden dark, that she had married not just a man but a family that had looked at everything foreign about her and decided, without hesitation, to make room, to grow larger, to carry her festival of lights the last of the way home across an ocean and a world, and set it glowing in the snow.
She lit lamps every year after that, all her life, every October, in England, in the deepening dark. And every year, without fail, the whole enormous ever-growing family lit them with her. It became, in time, simply a thing the Bridgertons did, one more strand in the great tangle of their traditions, and the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren grew up thinking nothing of it, lighting the diyas in autumn and the Christmas candles in winter, two festivals of light against the dark, as though the family had always kept both, as though it had never been anything but theirs.
Which was, Kate thought, every single year, watching the light multiply along the windowsills, exactly how belonging was supposed to work.