Christmas Betrothals: Mistletoe Magic

Taking a breath, she firmly told herself to stop this introspection and, finishing the champagne, bent to the task of answering the many questions Ellie was pounding her with.

A sensible and prudent husband …

The five words were like a mantra in the aching centre of her heart.

They had finally gone. All of them. Her father to his club and her aunt to a bridge party at an old friend’s house. Eleanor and John had returned home to see if their parents had arrived from the country.

Four days ago she had fancied herself in love with one man and today she was as good as married to another. The very notion of it made her giggle. Was this what they termed a hysterical reaction? she wondered when she found it very hard to stop. Tears followed, copious and noisy and she was glad for the sturdy lock on the door and the lateness of the hour.

Carefully she stood and walked to the book on the shelf in which she had pressed one orange bloom. The flower was almost like paper now, a dried-up version of what it once had been. Like her? She shook her head. All of this was not her fault, for goodness’ sake! She had made a choice based on facts, a choice that any woman of sound mind might have also made.

The Davenport property was a legacy, after all, one that needed to be minded by each generation for the next one. The man she would marry had to be above question, reputable and unflinchingly honest. He could not be someone who was considered a suspect in a murder case. Besides, Luc Clairmont had neither called on her in town since she had made her ridiculous confession nor tried in any way to show he reciprocated her feelings.

Her fingers tightened on the flower. She was no longer young and the proposals of marriage, once numerous, had trickled away over the past year or two.

Caroline Shelby’s exuberant youth was the embodiment of a new wave of girls, a group who had begun to make their own rules in the way they lived their lives.

Poor Lillian.

The conversation from the retiring room over three weeks’ ago returned in force.

Everything had changed in the time between then and now! A tear traced its way down her cheek, and she swiped it away. No, she would not cry. She had made the right and only choice, and if John Wilcox-Rice’s kisses did not set her heart to beating in the same way as Luc Clairmont’s did, then more fool she. Marriage was about much more than just lust, it was about respect and honour and regard and surely as the years went by these things would gain in ascendancy.

Feeling better, she placed the flower back in the book and tucked it on to the shelf. A small memento, she thought, of a time when she had almost made a silly mistake. She wondered why her hands felt so empty when the orange bloom was no longer in them.

His father’s face was above him red with anger, the strap in his hands biting into thin bare legs. Further off his mother sat, head bent over her tapestry and not looking up.

Screaming when silence was no longer possible, William Clairmont’s beating finally ceased, though the agony of his parents’ betrayal was more cutting than any slice of leather.

‘Another lesson learnt, my boy,’ his father said, trailing his fingers softly down the side of his son’s face. ‘We will say no more of this, no more of any of it. Understood?’

Luc woke up sweating, trying to fight his way out of the blankets, cursing both the darkness and the ghost of his father. If he had been here now, even in a celestial form, he would have made a fist and beaten him out of hiding, the love that most normal fathers felt for their children completely missing in his.

As fury dimmed, the room took shape and the sounds of the early morning formed, shadows passing into the promise of daylight. He hadn’t had this particular dream for years and he wondered what had brought it on. Nat’s mention, he supposed, of the Eton fiasco, and the events that had followed.

The knock on the door made him freeze.

‘Everything in order, Luc?’ Stephen Hawkhurst’s head came around the portal, the fact that he was still in his evening clothes at this time of the morning raising Luc’s eyebrows.

‘You’ve been out all night?’ The smell of fine perfume wafted in with him.

‘You refused to join me, remember? Nat had an excuse in the warm arms of his wife, but you?’ He came in to the small room and lay across the bottom of the bed, looking up. ‘Elizabeth has been dead for months and if you don’t let the guilt go soon you never will.’

‘Nathaniel’s already given me the same lecture, thanks, Hawk.’ Luc didn’t like the coldness he could hear in his own words.

‘And as you have not listened to either of us I have another solution. Leave this place and move in with me and I’ll throw the grandest ball of the Season and make certain that anyone who is anyone is there. Properly done it could bury the whispers of your past for ever, and as the guest of honour with Nat and me beside you, who would dare to question?’A smile began to form on Stephen’s face. ‘You’re a friend of Miss Davenport’s. If we can get her and her fiancé to come, then all the others will follow.’

‘She is engaged to Wilcox-Rice!’ Luc tried to keep his alarm hidden.

‘I heard it said this evening and on good authority that the wedding will be after Christmas …’

‘The devil take it!’ Luc’s curse stopped Hawkhurst in his tracks.

‘What did I miss?’

‘Nothing, Hawk,’ Luc replied, ‘you missed nothing at all, and I should have damned well known better.’

A whoop of delight made his heart sink. ‘You are enamoured by Miss Davenport? The saint and the sinner, the faultless and the blemished, the guilty and the guiltless. Lord, I could go on all night.’ Hawk was in his element now, fingers drumming against the surface of the blankets as he mulled over his options. Luc sat up against the headboard and wished to hell that he had said nothing.

‘I suppose you could always hope that Wilcox-Rice will bore her to death?’

‘I could.’ From past experience Luc knew it was better to humour him.

‘But with the wedding planned for early next year that probably won’t give you enough time.’

‘That soon?’

‘Apparently. Davenport is her cousin, you know that, don’t you, so when you wrap your arm around his neck next time, best to do it out of sight of your lady.’

‘She isn’t my lady.’

‘An attitude like that won’t effect any change.’

‘Enough, Stephen. It’s early and I am tired.’

His friend frowned. ‘Nat and I were the closest to brothers you ever had, Luc, so if you want to talk about anything …’

‘I don’t.’

‘But you would not be adverse to the ball?’

‘You were always the problem solver.’

‘Oh, and another thing. When I was out tonight I heard from a source that the police have determined Paget’s death as suicide and we both know what that means.’

‘I won’t be had up for his murder!’

‘If you stopped harassing Davenport and quit the gambling tables, you wouldn’t be a suspect and, to my mind, Daniel Davenport isn’t worth the trouble no matter what he has done to make you believe otherwise.’

‘My wife might have disagreed.’

‘Elizabeth knew him?’ Surprise coated the query.

‘If the letter Davenport sent her was any indication of the feelings between them, she knew him very well.’

‘Hell.’ Luc liked the shock in Hawk’s word, for he had begun to question his own reactions to all that he was doing.

‘If you kill him, you’ll hang. Better to do away with him on some dark night far from London’

‘Shift the blame, you mean?’ He laughed as Hawk nodded and felt the best he had done in months.

‘On reflection I don’t think it was all her fault. Towards the end I liked her as little as she did me.’ Honesty was a double-edged sword and Luc wished he could have had Hawk’s black-and-white view of the picture.

‘When did you become so equitable?’

Unexpectedly Lillian’s face came to Luc’s mind. She had tempered his anger and loneliness and despair and replaced his feeling of dislocation with a trust and belief in goodness that was … staggering and warming all at the same time.

‘It’s age, I think.’ He smiled as he said it and knew that his words were a complete lie. As the first birdsong lilted into the new morning Stephen stretched and yawned.

‘I have to go to sleep. Goodnight, Luc.’

‘Goodnight, Hawk.’

When his oldest friend simply curled up at the bottom of his bed and was soon snoring, Lucas smiled. There were definitely advantages to being back in England and Stephen was one of them.

The following morning he left Stephen still asleep in his lodgings and walked along the Thames, the winter whipping the river into grey waves that swelled up the embankment and threatened to engulf the pathway. He didn’t want to go to a club or a tavern or even to the Lindsay town house where he always felt welcome. No, today he simply walked, on past the Chelsea Hospital and down the route that the body of Wellington must had been taken during his state funeral last November. A million people had lined the streets then, it was said, and they would again at the next funeral, the next celebration, the next public function that caught the fancy of a nation.

Life went on despite a wife who had betrayed him and an uncle who had died well before his time.

Stuart Clairmont!

Even now the name was hard to say and he ground his teeth together to try to stop the sorrow that welled up over the thought. A man who had been the father his own never was. A man who had loved and nurtured a lost child newly come from England and given him back the sense of purpose and strength that had been leached away from him under the punitive regime of a father who thought punishment to be the making of character.

He still bore the scars of such bestial brutality and still hated William Clairmont with all the passion of a young boy who had never stood a chance.

Where was Lilly? he wondered, the news of her engagement angering him again. She would marry a man who was patently wrong for her, a man who neither kissed her with any skill nor fought with a scrap of dexterity. He remembered the feeble slap Wilcox-Rice had given Paget before he had intervened, the breathless sheen on his face from the effort of doing even that, pointing to a spouse who would not protect a wife from anyone.

The flaws in his argument pressed in. John Wilcox-Rice was a man who would not have enemies, his life lived in the narrow confines of an untarnished society. Why should he need to be adept at the darker arts of survival, the things that kept a man apart and guarded? As he was!

The number of differences between Lillian and him spiralled upwards as he ran for the omnibus, and as the conductor inside issued him a ticket for the cramped and smelly space he was certain that the permitted twenty-two passengers was almost twice that number.

Chapter Eleven

No one was speaking to Lucas Clairmont, Lillian saw as she walked into the Billinghurst soirée that evening and found it was divided into two distinct camps.

Oh, granted, the Earl of St Auburn and Lord Hawkhurst leaned against the columns on his side of the room, the smiles on their faces looking remarkably genuine, but nobody else went near him.

It was the death of Lord Paget, she supposed, and the fact that much was said about the card games Lucas Clairmont was involved with. Gossip that did not quite accuse him of cheating, but not falling much short either.

‘Mr Clairmont does seem to inspire strong feelings in people, doesn’t he?’

Lillian looked around quickly, trying to determine if her friend was including herself in that category.

Lucas Clairmont looked vividly handsome on the other side of the room, dressed in a formal black evening suit that he looked less than comfortable in.

‘If he is here and not languishing in a London gaol, my guess would be the police thought him to have no knowledge of Lord Paget’s death.’

Anne Weatherby at her side laughed at the summation. ‘You are becoming quite the defender of the man, Lillian. I heard it was your testimony at the St Auburns that had the Pagets fleeing in the first place.’

‘And for that I now feel guilty.’

‘Well, your husband-to-be seems to have no such thoughts. He looks positively radiant this evening.’

John crossed the room towards them, Eleanor on his arm, and indeed he did look very pleased with himself.

‘I have it on good authority that Golden Boy is set to run a cracking first at Epsom this year and as he is a steed I have a financial stake in the news is more than pleasing. Is your father here, Lillian? I must go and impart the news to him.’

Eleanor watched as her brother chased off again across the room and entwined her arm through Lillian’s.

‘I do believe that John loves your father almost as much as he loves you. He is always telling me that Ernest Davenport says this and Ernest Davenport says that. My own papa must be getting increasingly tired of having the endless comparisons, I fear, though in all honesty John hasn’t seen eye to eye with him for a very long time. The inherent competition, I suspect, between generations so closely bound. I often wonder if a spell in India or in the army might have finished my brother off well? Pity, perhaps, that that avenue is no longer available.’

Lillian tried to imagine John in the wilds of the Far East and found that she just could not. He was a man who seemed more suited to the ease of the drawing room.

Lucas Clairmont on the other hand never looked comfortable confined in the small spaces of London society. Oh, granted, he had a sort of languid unconcern written across him here as he conversed with his friends, but he never relaxed, a sense of animated vitality not quite extinguished. He also always stood with his back against the wall, a trait that gave the impression of constant guardedness. The guise of a soldier, perhaps, or something darker. She had read the stories of Colquhoun Grant and there was something in the character of Wellington’s head of intelligence that was familiar in the personality of the man who stood opposite her.

As if he sensed her looking at him, his eyes turned to meet her own, dark gold glinting with humour. Quickly she looked away and made much of adjusting the pin on her bodice. When she glanced back, he no longer watched her and she squashed the ridiculous feeling of disappointment.

Turning the ring John had given her on her betrothal finger, she tried to take courage from it as she listened to the conversation between Anne and Eleanor.

‘I hear that congratulations are in order,’ he said in a quiet tone as they met an hour later by one of the pillars in a largely deserted supper room. ‘Your groom-to-be must have made great strides in the art of kissing a woman.’

‘Indeed, Mr Clairmont,’ Lillian replied, ‘and although you may not credit it, there are, in truth, other things that are of much more importance.’

‘There are?’ His surprise made it difficult to maintain her sense of decorum.

‘A man’s reputation for one,’ she bit back, ‘is considered by a careful bride to be essential.’

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