Miss Lottie's Christmas Protector

‘Can you tell us of the crest, its design or anything on it that caught your eye?’ Jasper had asked this question and Lottie waited for the answer.

‘There was a helmet and stripes of red and gold, I think. I only saw it briefly, mind, and so it might have been something else.’

‘Thank you.’ Jasper passed over more coins to Twigg and stood, helping Charlotte up as he did so. ‘If there is any news of the girl, could you send me word here? You would be well remunerated.’

A card was placed on the table.

‘Of course, Mr King. I shall make certain that you know of it.’

Outside Lottie lifted her skirts slightly to step across the drain, pleased that they were leaving the place as she breathed in deeply, the smoke of the tavern a thickness in her throat.

A minute later they were inside the King carriage and as the door closed behind them Lottie let out a sigh of part-relief.

‘Thank you for accompanying me. I could never have managed that alone.’

‘I am glad I could be of help, Miss Fairclough, and if I hear anything at all from Twigg I will be in touch.’

‘You do not think the man in the carriage will hurt her?’

She did not like his lack of answer.

‘It is a disaster,’ she continued as her imagination raced. ‘These awful things happen all about us and we can only watch them unfold until there is nothing left to do. People simply disappear and never come back. Young girls. Good girls. Girls who have no one there to watch over them and make certain they are safe.’

Dread consumed her. Harriet was not the first girl to be lost into the world of prostitution and would not be the last either. Lottie felt hopelessly unprepared and impossibly adrift in her anxiety.

She pulled Jasper’s handkerchief from her pocket and wiped her nose, pleased that at least for the past half an hour she had not suffered another coughing fit. She wondered if she should give it back to him or if she should take it home to be laundered. She decided on the second option and tucked it again into her cloak.

She could not think of one other person who would have helped her as this man just had. Oh, granted, he had castigated her for the actions she had planned to take, but he had also supported her need to find Harriet when he realised that he could not stop her and ventured without further complaint into places that were foreign and difficult. It had been his coin that had greased the wheels for information without a doubt.

‘I shall pay you back,’ she suddenly uttered.

‘For what?’ His eyes were upon her, sliced in puzzlement.

‘The payments for information. I cannot expect you to take the burden of that.’

He laughed. ‘I assure you, Miss Fairclough, that I can afford it.’

At that she blushed because, conversely, he knew that she could not. The day was running down now into the evening, the night-time darkness coming in early at this time of the year, and she felt a desolation that was all-consuming.

Would she ever see Jasper King again or would he disappear to the far-off places that were the domain of a successful civil engineer and be lost to her altogether?

The visage of the beautiful blonde woman came to mind. She knew he was not married, but did he have someone who he was fond of waiting for him at home, some mistress of the same ilk as the ones who had gazed at him with longing at the afternoon’s charity event?

He would hardly be running to Charlotte’s side again after all this. Still, she could not give up the hope of it entirely.

‘I shall be at the Foundation for another week before I leave to join my mother and sister. If anything were to come up that concerned Harriet White’s whereabouts, I would be most eager to know of it.’

‘You shall be the first person I inform, Miss Fairclough.’

‘Thank you, Mr King.’

The formality was back, as was the distance.

Already her street was in view and the brick walls of the Foundation could be seen. Another minute and he would be gone.

Impulsively she took his hand in hers, surprised by the warmth of it.

‘I should like to say that I am most grateful and that without your help, Mr King, I doubt I would have achieved anything at all.’

‘It is music to my ears to be hearing such a turnaround,’ he replied, his mouth twitching.

‘My family would probably say that, too,’ she returned, and knew it to be true.

Mama would like Jasper King. He was strong and determined and his own man. There were secrets there, she supposed, his leg for one and why he had not married.

She had heard once he was engaged to be wed and wondered what had happened to that relationship. She remembered Silas saying Jasper’s father had been sick for a very long time as well and that father and son were close.

All snippets of Jasper’s life were fascinating and she wished she knew more. None the less, she had survived today finding out that her brother was still alive and that Harriet White had been carried out of Old Pye Street in a crested carriage which was a clue that could be followed up to find her. She hadn’t had a coughing fit for at least an hour and the tightness in her chest that had begun this morning was starting to loosen.

All in all, it had been an unsettling day and almost every emotion she had experienced had something to do with the enigmatic Mr Jasper King. She felt uncertain as to what she felt about him and resolved to leave the letter she had written of her sister’s need for a husband in her pocket and see how the rest of it played out. Jasper King did not seem like a man who might be persuaded to do anything he did not want to and the thought of him falling at the feet of her beautiful sister and offering marriage was not at this moment as appealing as it once had been.

When the carriage pulled up in front of the Foundation and he opened the door she saw that he was saying goodbye without coming in. Then he called the driver on.

In another moment he was gone altogether.

His sister Meghan arrived at his town house an hour later and her face was full of questions.

‘Who on earth was she, Jasper? I have met her before, I know it, and she said she’s from the Fairclough Foundation, but I cannot quite place her face.’

He knew who she spoke of but played along, not particularly wanting the advice he knew she would be doling out next.

‘Miss Susan Seymour. She was a friend of Verity Chambers.’

‘Not her.’

His sister swiped at his arm and finished her drink, dropping herself on the sofa opposite his chair and holding her glass out for another.

‘The one with the wild curls and the golden eyes. The interesting one.’

‘Miss Charlotte Fairclough.’

‘Oh, my, of course. I met her a year or more ago at some event and she charmed everyone there. Isn’t she just so very beautiful?’

Jasper got up to cross to the drinks cabinet, wincing as his leg caught.

‘It’s sore? Your leg? I have told you again and again to go back to the doctor. I am sure after all this time medical science has moved along and, who knows, there could be a cure for your problems.’

At least talk of his leg had diverted his sister from extolling the charms of Charlotte Fairclough though he knew also that state of affairs would not last for long.

‘I’m fine, Meghan.’

‘No, Jasper, you are not, but you were always stubborn and have become even more so with age. How on earth did you meet Miss Fairclough?’

‘I know her brother Silas—you may remember we took him on as an apprentice some years ago—but today was the first time I have spoken with her.’

‘That ghastly Susan Seymour was so rude, wasn’t she? As rude as Verity Chambers could be at times, in my opinion, and God knows you should have been thrilled to be untangled from her wiles. I know I was certainly pleased to hear of it despite your feelings for her.’

Jasper smiled at his sister’s loyalty. At the time he had been heartbroken and very sick. A collapse of spirit and body had been a hard thing to recover from. Now he agreed with his sister. A marriage between Verity and himself would never have worked but that thought, too, had been a long time in coming.

‘I worry about you, Jasper. I worry that you are too alone, too isolated and too hardened to see that truth. If Papa was here—’

He didn’t let her finish. ‘Well, he isn’t.’

‘He wanted to die in the end. Did you know that?’

This was new.

‘After your accident, when you could not care for him and I came up, he said that four years was long enough for you to be his nursemaid. He wanted you to travel to all those places you’d dreamed about and instead…’ She stopped. ‘Instead you were glued to his side providing all the care that I could not because he would not leave Liverpool and come to London.’

‘It wasn’t quite that simple, Meg, and you know it.’

‘Then how was it, Jasper? It seemed to me that he was selfish and you were the one who took the whole brunt of it.’

‘He was sick and forgetting things and you had lost baby after baby and were just about as ill. He wouldn’t have coped somewhere new and you could not have managed with all his needs. Then when I was no longer there—’

His sister did not let him finish. ‘He’d had enough when I came up to stay that last time. He said that he was proud of us. But I’ve told you all that?’

‘Probably.’

Jasper couldn’t remember this, but then he couldn’t remember much about that terrible time. Meghan had arrived in Liverpool just as their father was dying and a matter of months after his own accident. The beginning of the years of hell. The dreams that he’d had across that time still came sometimes and he woke sweating.

‘Will you see her again?’

The constant change in topic was a hallmark of his sister’s conversation.

‘Miss Fairclough? I doubt it. She is very busy at her Foundation, saving lost souls.’

‘Then she should be an expert in saving yours,’ Meghan shot back, ‘and God knows you could do with an angel.’

They had always been close, Meghan and himself, her five years on him having the effect of making her almost like a mother. She gave him advice on everything.

‘You need someone you can love, Jasper, someone kind and true and sensible. Someone who can give you children and make up for all those lonely years…’

He stopped her. There were some things that were private between them and this was one of those. Such a thought cut close to the bone and he finished his own drink in one swallow. He wouldn’t have another.

‘I am off back to Liverpool after the Christmas season and won’t be back in London for at least a few months. There is a job in Manchester that is complex.’

Meghan frowned noticeably. ‘I see.’

‘I know that tone. What do you see?’

‘That you do not wish to talk of Miss Charlotte Fairclough with me, which in itself is surprising because it leads me to surmise two things…’ She stopped with a pregnant pause.

‘And what are they?’

‘That the woman is more important to you than you make out she is and that you are running away from anything that might add up to commitment.’

‘Meghan?’

‘Yes, Jasper?’

‘Have another brandy and tell me about Sarah.’

Of all the topics in the world this was the one that always succeeded in shifting Meghan from one thought across to the next.

‘She is almost taking a step—did I tell you that? She was leaning on the big floral chair in my sitting room and I turned away and the next moment I saw her let go and hover there, trying to understand the motion…’

Half an hour later his sister was gone, hurrying back to her house to see the child who was the love of her life. Jasper frowned at the way she almost never mentioned her husband in his company and wondered if things were as rosy with Stephen as she had once painted them. Meghan had her secrets, too, but at least she had a daughter whose very existence lit up her world and for that he was glad.

The rain still fell outside and the fire in the grate was burning bright. He watched the sparks at the back of the chimney flare and die and then reappear elsewhere. He wondered if Charlotte Fairclough was warm enough in the big and draughty Fairclough Foundation building on Howick Place. He remembered it as austere and spartan, any luxury stripped from the place in the overriding need to provide for so many desperate people. The family had had a small abode at the back of the place in the days when he knew Silas, but it had been as humble and sparse as the main building.

God, the woman had got under his skin and that was unusual. He’d never met someone so infuriating and so vulnerable all at the same time.

Verity Chambers had sent yet another note and this one had caught him at a time when he had deigned to open it, their shared hopes from the past spilling out on paper and her own apology at such appalling behaviour.

Once he might have drunk the words like a man does water lost in a desert, but now all he could feel was the hurt, pain and guilt. She had crucified him with her easy deceit and he would never allow anyone to do so again.

The clock in the corner boomed out the hour of seven and far off he could see flashes of lightning, the undulating outline of the distant hills of Surrey showing up. He counted the seconds until the thunder came. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. A long way off, then.

He wished for a moment he might have had a dog to sit by the hearth with him, a warm and breathing body that he could love. But his life was too nomadic, too uncertain and he could not abandon an animal like that into the care of his servants for months at a time as he travelled the country. Still, the idea stuck as he imagined a loyal haughty Newfoundland or a finely bred English bloodhound sitting there watching him. It would be well behaved…unlike Miss Fairclough.

Today had been an adventure and the sort of day he would remember for a long time. As he dozed he pictured fine brown curls and golden-brown eyes and he smiled. It had been a while since he had felt this happy.

Hours later Jasper was sweating when he jolted himself awake, his heart beating at twice its normal speed and the cramps in his right leg making him nauseous. He had not had such intense and inescapable dreams for a while now, the blackness all around and the depraved imaginings fuelled by his experiences with laudanum, opium and morphine. He’d spent two years after his accident in the opium dens trying any sort of narcotic that became available to banish the pain in his thigh: lost years, debauched years, years of misery and ruin. He was not proud of such a fall. Sex, violence and excess were the codes of his life until he had fallen into a coma and Meghan had brought him home.

He owed his sister his life. His new life. The life of strict principles and few vices. He hadn’t even been fully present for the last month of his father’s existence much to his eternal regret, the cocktail of drugs taking him away.

He needed water, but couldn’t make himself get up and he did not want to ring for a servant. So he sat there breathing deeply and trying to find a steadiness and a normality.

He couldn’t understand why the dreams were back with such a force.

Fear, perhaps, or the knowledge of some fundamental change within him. His sister’s words were there, too, tangled in honesty, snarling with truth.

‘I worry that you are too alone, too isolated and too hardened…’

He was, but he couldn’t get back, couldn’t make himself care about much of anything.

A knock at the library door ten minutes later found him sitting and he pulled his leg down from the ottoman on which it rested.

His butler, Larkin, stood there with yet another message in his hands.

‘If it is from Miss Verity Chambers, take it away.’

‘It is not, sir. The man who delivered the missive said he came under the instructions of a Mr Twigg from Old Pye Street.’

That had Jasper interested and he held out his hand even as he saw the curiosity of his servant.

‘That will be all.’

The message was simple.

The man you be wanting is Viscount Harcourt. He came in to the pub briefly last evening with a friend of his and I recognised the crest on the carriage and asked after his name.

Jasper did not know the fellow at all, but he was suddenly mindful of an invitation he had received ten or so days ago. A colleague he’d known once, Nigel Payne, was to be married to a girl who was Harcourt’s niece and had asked Jasper to a celebration party in three days’ time. He’d placed the invitation in a drawer, having no intention at all of attending, but now he knew it to be a great opportunity to find out more about Viscount Harcourt.

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