Christmas Betrothals

She was cornered, by parental authority and by the part in her heart that wanted to make her ageing father happy, no matter what.

‘It is not so very easy to find a man who is everything that I want.’

‘Then find one who is enough, Lillian.’ His retort came quickly. ‘With children great happiness can follow and Wilcox-Rice is a good fellow. At least give me the benefit of the wisdom old age brings.’

‘Very well, then. I will promise to consider your advice.’ When she held out her hand to his, she liked the way he did not break the contact, but kept her close.

Half an hour later she was in the morning room to one side of the town house having a cup of tea with Anne Weatherby, an old friend, and trying to feign interest in the topic of her children and family, a subject that usually took up nearly all the hours of her visit. Today, however, she had other issues to discuss.

‘There was a contretemps last night at Lenningtons’. Did you hear of it?’

Lillian’s attention was immediately caught.

‘It seems that your cousin Daniel and a stranger from America were in a scuffle of sorts. I saw him as he walked from the salon afterwards. He barely looked English, the savage ways of the backwaters imprinted on his clothes and hands and face. So dangerous and uncivilised.’ She began to smile. ‘And yet wildly good-looking.’

‘I saw nothing.’

‘Rumour has it that you did.’

‘Well, perhaps I saw the very end of it all as I came from the retiring room. It was but a trifle.’ She tried to look bored with the whole subject in the hope that Anne might change the topic, but was to have no such luck.

‘It is said that he has a reputation in America that is hardly savoury. A Virginian, I am told, whose wife died in a way that was … suspicious at the very least.’

‘Suspicious?’

‘Alice, the Countess of Horsham, would say no more on the matter, but her tone of voice indicated that the fellow might have had a hand in her demise.’ She shook her head before continuing. ‘Although the gossip is all about town, the young girls seem much enamoured by his looks and are setting their caps at him in the hopes of even a smile. He has a dimple on his right cheek, something I always found attractive in a man.’ She placed her hands across her mouth and smiled through them. ‘Lord, but I am running on, and at thirty I should have a lot more sense than to be swayed by a handsome face.’

Lillian poured another cup of tea for herself, while Anne had barely sipped at hers. She hoped that her friend did not see the way the liquid slopped across the side of the cup of its own accord and dribbled on to the white-lace linen cloth beneath it. How easy it was to be tipped from this place to that one. His wife. Dead!

Her imaginings in a bed bathed in moonlight took on a less savoury feel and she pushed down disappointment.

No man had ever swept her off her feet in all the seven years she had been out and to imagine that this one had even the propensity to do so suddenly seemed silly. Of course a man who looked like this American would not be a fit companion for her with his raw and rough manner and his dangerous eyes. The promise she had made her father less than an hour ago surfaced and she shook away the ridiculous yearnings.

Betrothed by Christmas! Ah well, she thought as she guided the conversation to a more general one, if worst came to the worst, John Wilcox-Rice was at least biddable and she was past twenty-five.

She met John at a party that evening in Belgrave Square and she knew that she was in trouble as soon as she saw his face. He looked excited and nervous at the same time, his smile both protective and concerned. When he took her fingers in his own she was glad for her gloves and glad too for the ornamental shrubbery placed beside the orchestra. It gave her a chance to escape the prying eyes of others while she tried to explain it all to him.

When the cornet, violin and cello proved too much to speak over she pulled him out on to the balcony a little further away from the room, where the light was dimmer, the shadow of the shrubs throwing a kinder glow on both their faces.

‘You had my message from your father, then, about my interest—’ he began, but she allowed him no further discourse.

‘I certainly did and I thank you for the compliment, but I do not think we could possibly—’

‘Your father thinks differently,’ he returned, and a sneaking suspicion started to well in Lillian’s breast.

‘You have seen my father today?’ she began, stopping as he nodded.

‘Indeed I have and he was at pains to tell me you had agreed to at least consider my proposal.’

‘But I do not hold the sort of feelings for you that you would want, and there would be no guarantee that I ever could.’

‘I know.’ He took her hand again, this time peeling back the fine silk of her right glove, and pressing his lips to her wrist. Without meaning to she dragged her hand away, wiping it on the generous fabric of her skirt and thinking that this meeting place might not have been the wisest one after all.

‘I just want you to at least try. I want the chance to make you happy and I think that we would rub along together rather nicely.’

‘Well,’ she returned briskly, ‘I certainly value your friendship and I would indeed be very loath to lose it, but as for the rest….’

He bowed before her. ‘I understand and I am ready to give you more time to ponder over it, Lillian, for as like-minded people of a similar birth I am convinced such a union would benefit us both.’

She nodded and watched as he clicked his heels together and took his leave, a tall, thin man who was passably good looking and infinitely suitable. A husband she could indeed grow old with in a fairly satisfying relationship.

Sighing, she made her way to the edge of the balcony, the same moon as the night before mocking her in her movements, remembering.

‘Stop it!’ she admonished herself out loud.

‘Stop what?’ Another voice answered and the American walked out from the shrubs behind her, the red tip of a cheroot the only thing standing out from the black of his silhouette.

‘How long have you been there?’

‘Long enough.’

‘A gentleman would have walked away.’

He pointedly looked across the balustrade. ‘The fifteen-foot drop is somewhat of a deterrent.’

‘Or stayed quiet until I had left.’ The beat of her heart was worrying, erratic, hard. ‘Why, most Englishmen would be mortified to find themselves in this situation …’ She didn’t finish, owing to a loud laugh that rang rich in the night air.

‘Mortified?’ he repeated. ‘It has been a long while since I last felt that.’ His accent was measured tonight and at times barely heard, a different voice from the one he had affected at the Lenningtons’ with its broad Virginian drawl. She was glad she could not catch his eyes, still shaded by the greenery, though in the position she stood she knew her own to be well on show.

Perhaps he had orchestrated it so? The gold band on the ring finger of his left hand jolted her. His marriage finger! She tried not to let him see where she looked.

‘We have not even been introduced, sir. None of this can be in any way proper. You must repair inside this instant.’

Still he did not move, the dimple that Anne Weatherby had spoken of dancing in his cheek.

‘I am Lucas Clairmont from Richmond in Virginia,’ he said finally. ‘And you are Miss Davenport, a woman of manners and good taste, though I wonder at the wisdom of Wilcox-Rice as a groom?’

‘He is not that. You just heard me tell him so.’

‘He and your father seem to believe otherwise.’ Now he walked straight into the light and the golden eyes that had haunted her dreams made her pause. She swallowed heavily and held her hands hard against her thighs to stop them from shaking, though when he picked a slender stem from a pyracanthus bush behind him and handed it to her she leant forwards to take it.

‘Thank you.’ She could think of nothing else at all to say. The thorn on the stem pricked the base of her thumb.

‘I am glad I have this chance to apologise for frightening you yesterday at the Lenningtons’.’

‘Apology accepted.’ For the first time some of her tension dissipated with the simple reasoning that a criminal mind would not run to seeking any sort of amnesty. ‘I realise that my cousin can be rather trying at times.’

His teeth were white against the brown of his face and Lillian was jolted back to reality as his eyes darkened and she saw for a moment a man she barely recognised.

A dangerous man. A man who would not be moulded or conditioned by the society in which he found himself.

So unlike her. She stepped back, afraid now of a thing that she had no name for, and wondered what her cousin had done to cause such enmity.

‘Have no fear, Miss Davenport. I would not kill him because he’s not worth being hanged at Newgate for.’

Kill him? My God. To even think that he might consider it and then qualify any lack of action with a personal consequence.

I would if I could get away with it.

John Wilcox-Rice’s gentle mediocrity began to look far more appealing until Luc Clairmont reached out for her hand and took it in his own. The shock of contact left her mute, but against her will she was drawn to him.

Against her will? She could not even say that!

His finger traced the lines on her palm and then the veins that showed through in the pale skin of her wrist.

‘An old Indian woman read my hand once in Richmond. She told me that life was like a river and that we are taken by the currents to a place we are meant to be.’

His amber eyes ran across hers, the humour once again back. ‘Is this that place, Miss Davenport?’

Time seemed to stop, frozen into moonlight and want and warmth. When she snatched her hand away and almost ran inside, she could have sworn it was laughter she heard, following her from a balcony drenched in silver.

She stopped walking quite so briskly once she was back amongst others, finding a certain safety in numbers that she had never felt the need of before. Would he come again and speak to her? Would he create a fuss? The very thought had her hauling her fan from her reticule, to waft it to and fro, the breeze engendered calming her a little. She stuffed the sprig of orange berries into her velvet bag, glad to have them out of her fingers where someone might comment upon them.

‘Your colour is rather high, Lillian,’ her aunt Jean said as she joined her. ‘I do hope you are not sickening for something so close to the Yuletide season. Why, Mrs Haugh was saying to me just the other day how her daughter has contracted a bronchial complaint that just cannot be shaken and …’

But Lillian was listening no more, for Lucas Clairmont had just walked in from the balcony, a tall broad-shouldered man who made the other gentlemen here look … mealy, precious and dandified. No, she must not think like that! Concentrating instead on the mark around his bottom lip that suggested another fight, she tried to ignore the way all the women in his path watched him beneath covert hooded glances.

He was leaving with the Earl of St Auburn and a man she knew to be Lord Stephen Hawkhurst. Well-placed men with the same air of menace that he had. The fact interested her and she wondered just how it was they knew each other.

As they reached the door, however, Lucas Clairmont looked straight into her eyes, tipping his head as she had seen him do at the Lenningtons’ ball. Hating the way her heartbeat flared, Lillian spread her fan wide and hid her face from his, a breathless wonder overcoming caution as a game, of which she had no notion of the rules, was begun.

Once home herself she placed the crumpled orange pyracanthus in a single bloom vase and stood it on the small table by her bed. Both the colour and the shape clashed with everything else in her bedroom. As out of place in her life as Lucas Clairmont was, a vibrant interloper who conformed to neither position nor venue. Her finger reached out to carefully touch the hard nubs of thorn that marched down its stem. Forbidding. Protective. Unexpected in the riot of colour above it!

She wished she had left it on the balcony, discarded and cast aside, as she should be doing with the thoughts of the man who had picked it. But she had not and here it was with pride of place in a room that looked as if it held its breath with nervousness. Her eyes ran over the sheer lawn drapes about her bed, the petit-point bedcover upon it in limed cream and the lamp next to her, its chalky base topped by a faded and expensive seventeenth-century tapestry. The décor in her room was nothing like the fashion of the day with its emphasis on stripes and paisleys and the busy tones of purple and red. But she enjoyed the difference.

All had been carefully chosen and were eminently suitable, like the clothes she wore and the friends she fostered. Her life. Not haphazard or risky, neither arbitrary nor disorganised.

Once it had been, once when her mother had come home to tell them that she was leaving that very afternoon ‘to find excitement and adventure in the arms of a man who was thrilling’. The very words used still managed to make her feel slightly sick, as she remembered a young girl who had idolised her mother. She was not thrilling and so she had been left behind, an only child whose recourse to making her father happy was to be exactly the daughter he wanted. She had excelled in her lessons and in her deportment, and later still when she came out at eighteen she had been daubed an ‘original’, her sense of style and quiet stillness copied by all the younger ladies at Court.

Usually she liked that. Usually she felt a certain pride in the way she handled everything with such easy acumen. But today with the berries waving their overblown and unrestrained shapes in her room, a sense of disquiet also lingered.

Poor Lillian.

John Wilcox-Rice and his eminently sensible proposal.

Her father’s advancing age.

The pieces of her life were not quite adding up to a cohesive whole any longer, and she could pin the feeling directly to Lucas Clairmont with his easy smile and his dangerous predatory eyes.

Standing by the window, she saw an outline of herself reflected in the glass. As pale as the colours in her room, perhaps, and fading. Was she her mother’s daughter right down to the fact of finding her own ‘thrilling and unsuitable man’? She laid her palm against the glass and, on removing it, wrote her mother’s initials in the misted print Rebecca Davenport had returned in the autumn, a thinner and sadder version of the woman who had left them, and although her father had taken her back into his house he had never taken her back into his heart. No one had known of her infidelity. The extended holiday to the Davenports’ northern estate of Fairley Manor was never explained and, although people had their suspicions, the steely correctness of Ernest Davenport had meant that they were never even whispered.

Perhaps that had made things even harder, Lillian thought. The constant charade and pretence as her mother lay dying with an ague of the soul and she, a child who went between her parents with the necessary messages, seeing any respect that they had once had for each other wither with the onset of winter.

Even the funeral had been a sham, her mother’s body laid in the crypt of the Davenports with all the ceremony expected, and then left unvisited.

No, the path Rebecca had taken had alienated her from everybody and should her daughter be so foolish as to follow in those footsteps she could well see the consequences of ‘thrilling’.

John Wilcox-Rice was a man who would never break her heart. A constant man of sound morals and even sounder political persuasions. One hand threaded through her hair and she smiled unwillingly at the excitement that coursed through her. Everything seemed different. More tumultuous. Brighter. She walked across to the bed and ran a finger across the smooth orange berries, liking the fact that Lucas Clairmont had touched them just as she was now.

Silly thoughts. Girlish thoughts.

She was twenty-five, for goodness’ sake, and a woman who had always looked askance at those highly strung débutantes whose emotions seemed to rule them. The invitation to the Cholmondeley ball on the sill caught her attention and she lifted it up. Would the American be attending this tomorrow? Perhaps he might ask her to dance? Perhaps he might lift up her hand to his again?

She shook her head and turned away as a maid came to help her get ready for bed.

Chapter Three

Luc spent the morning with a lawyer from the City signing documents and hating every single signature he marked the many pages with.

The estate of Woodruff Abbey in Bedfordshire was a place he neither wanted nor deserved and his wife’s cries as she lay dying in Charlottesville, Virginia, were louder here than they had been in all the months since he had killed her.

He did not wish for the house or the chattels. He wanted to walk away and let the memories lie because recollection had the propensity to rekindle all that was gone.

Shaking away introspection, he made himself smile, a last armour against the ghosts that dragged him down.

‘Will you be going up to look the old place over, Sir?’

‘Perhaps.’ Non-committal. Evasive.

‘It is just if you wish me to accompany you, I would need to make plans.’

‘No. That will not be necessary.’ If he went, he would go alone.

‘The servants, of course, still take retainers paid for by the rental of the farming land, though in truth the place has been let go badly.’

‘I see.’ He wanted just to leave. Just to take the papers and leave.

‘Your wife’s sister’s daughters are installed in the house. Their mother died late last year and I wrote to you—’

Luc looked up. ‘I did not have any such missive.’

The lawyer rifled through a sheath of sheets and, producing a paper, handed it across to him. ‘Is this not your handwriting, sir?’ A frown covered his brow.

With his signature staring up at him, Luc could do nothing else but nod.

‘How old are these children?’

‘Eight and ten, sir, and both girls.’

‘Where is their father?’

‘He left England a good while back and never returned. He was a violent man and, if I were to guess, I would say he lies in a pauper’s grave somewhere, unmarked and uncared for. Charity and Hope are, however, the sort of girls their names suggest, and as soon as they gain their majority they will have no more claim to any favours from the Woodruff Abbey funds.’

Luc placed the paper down on the table before him. So poor-spirited, he thought, to do your duty up to a certain point and then decline further association. He had seen it time and time again in his own father, the action of being seen to have done one’s duty more important than any benefit to those actively involved.

Unexpectedly he thought of Lillian Davenport. Would she be the same? he wondered, and hoped not. Last night when he had run his fingers across the pale skin on her wrist he had felt her heartbeat accelerate markedly and seen the flush that covered her cheeks before she had turned and run from him.

Not all the ice queen then, her high moral standards twisted against his baser want. Because he had wanted her, wanted to bring his hands along the contours of her face and her breasts and her hips hidden beneath her fancy clothing and distance.

Lord, was he stupid?

He should not have made his presence known. Should not have sparred with her or held her fingers and read her palm, for Lillian Davenport was the self-styled keeper of worthiness and he needed to stay away from her.

Yet she pierced a place in him that he had long thought of as dead, the parts of himself that he used to like, the parts that the past weeks of sobriety had begun to thaw against the bone-cold guilt that had torn at his soul.

The law books lined up against the far wall dusty in today’s thin sun called him back. Horatio Thackeray was now detailing the process of the transfer of title.

Woodruff Abbey was his! He turned the gold ring on his wedding finger and pressed down hard.

Lillian enjoyed the afternoon taking tea in Regent Street with Anne Weatherby and her husband Allen. His brother Alistair had joined them, too, a tall and pleasant man.

‘I have lived in Edinburgh for a good few years now,’ he explained when she asked him why she had not met him before. ‘I have land there and prefer the quieter pace of life.’ Catching sight of a shopkeeper trying to prop up a Christmas tree in his window, he laughed. ‘Queen Victoria has certainly made the season fashionable. Do you decorate a tree, Miss Davenport?’

‘Oh, more than one, Mr Weatherby. I often have three or four in the town house.’

‘And I am certain that you would do so with great aplomb if my sister-in-law’s comments on your sense of style are to be taken into consideration.’ He smiled and moved closer. ‘If I could even be so bold as to ask for permission to accompany Anne to see these Yuletide trees next time she visits, I would be most grateful.’

The man was flirting with her, Lillian suddenly thought, and averted her eyes. Catching the glance of Anne at her side, she realised immediately that her friend was in on the plot.

Another man thrust beneath her nose. Another suitor who wanted a better acquaintance. All of a sudden she wished that it could have been just this easy. An instant attraction to a man who was suitable. The very thought made her tired. Perhaps she was never destined to be a wife or a mother.

‘You’re very quiet, Lillian?’ Anne took her hand as they walked towards the waiting coach.

‘I have a lot to think about.’

‘I hope that Alistair is one of those thoughts?’ she whispered back wickedly, laughing as Lillian made absolutely no answer. ‘Would he not do just as well as Wilcox-Rice? His holdings are substantial and Scotland is a beautiful place.’

The tree in the window was suddenly hoisted into position with the sound of cheering, a small reminder of her father’s ultimatum of choosing a groom before Christmas. Lillian placed a tight smile across her face.

‘I am not so desperate as to throw myself on a stranger, Anne, no matter how nice he is and I would prefer it if you would not meddle.’

The joy had quite gone out of the afternoon and she hated the answering annoyance in her oldest friend’s eyes. But today she could not help it. She had not been sleeping well, dreams of Virginia and the dark-haired American haunting her slumber, the remembered feel of his thumb tracing the beat on her wrist and the last sight of him tipping his head as he had left the room in the company of his friends.

To compare Lucas Clairmont to these other men was like equating the light made by tiny fireflies to that of the full-blown sun, a man whom she had never met the measure of before in making her aware that she was a woman. Breathing out heavily, she held on to her composure and answered a question Alistair asked her with all the eagerness that she could muster.

Chapter Four

The gown Lillian wore to the Cholmondeley ball was one of her favourites, a white satin dress with wide petticoats looped with tulle flowers. The train was of glacé and moiré silk, the festoons on the edge plain but beautiful. Her hair was entwined with a single strand of diamonds and these were mirrored in the quiet beading on her bodice. She seldom wore much ornamentation, preferring an understated elegance, and virtually always favoured white.

The ball was in full swing when she arrived with her father and aunt after ten; the suites of rooms on the first floor of the town house were opened up to each other and the floor in the long drawing room was polished until it shone. At the top of the chamber sat a substantial orchestra, and within it a group of guests that would have numbered well over four hundred.