Mistletoe Magic (12 page)

Behind the velvet curtains her hands shook so much that she could barely remove the garment; when she looked at herself in the mirror it was like seeing a
stranger, eyes large from the weight she had lost in the past week and dark shadows on her cheeks. Taking three deep breaths, she prayed for strength, her maid’s shy call on the other side of the curtain heartening her further.

‘Can I help with the stays, Miss Davenport?’ she queried, her face full of worry when Lillian bade her enter and her fingers were gentle as she pulled the boned corset into position and did up the laces.

When they came from the room the group was still there however, the oldest lady stepping into her path as she tried to leave.

‘I am sorry for your plight, Miss Davenport.’

Her plight.
Just what was she to say to that?

‘Thank you.’ Her words were a ludicrous parody of good manners. Ever the gracious lady even in ruin!

‘But at twenty-five you really ought to have known better.’

‘Indeed I should have.’ Another inanity.

‘If I could offer you some advice, I would say to go to Wilcox-Rice cap in hand and beg his forgiveness! With a little luck and lots of genuine apology, perhaps this situation could be remedied to the benefit of all those involved.’

‘Perhaps it may.’

Perhaps you should mind your own business. Perhaps you should know that your son has propositioned me many a time in a rude and improper manner.

Layers.

Of truth. One on top of the other and all depending on the one beneath it.

And Luc Clairmont. What was his truth? she wondered, as she walked out on to the pavement, carefully avoiding meeting the eyes of anyone else before entering the waiting carriage and glad to be simply going home.

Lucas awoke to the sound of water, the deepness of ocean waves, the hollow echo of sea against timber and wind behind canvas sails. He was in the hull of a ship! Trying to swallow, he found he could not, his mouth so dried out that it made movement impossible.

An older man sat on the table opposite watching him.

‘Ye are thirsty no doubt?’

Luc was relieved when the fellow stood and gave him a drink. Brackish water with a slight taste of something on the edge of it! When he lifted his hands to try to keep on drinking, he was pleased that his captors had not thought to bind him. The rattle of chains, however, dimmed that thought as he saw heavy manacles locked on his ankles.

‘Where are we?’ His voice was rough, but at least now he could speak.

‘My orders were ye are not to be told anything.’

Luc attempted to glean from his fob watch some idea of the time, but the silver sphere was gone. Gone, like his boots and his jacket and cravat. Glancing across at a porthole at the far end of the cabin, he knew it to be still dark.

A few hours since they had taken him? Or a whole
day? He had no way of determining any of it. His head ached like the devil.

‘You hail from Scotland?’ He tried to make the question as neutral as he possibly could, tried to get the man talking, for in silence he knew he would learn nothing at all.

‘Edinburgh, and before that Inverness.’

‘I’d always meant to go north, but never did. Many say it to be a very beautiful land.’

‘Aye, that it is. After all this—’ he gestured around him ‘—I mean to go back, to live, ye understand.’

‘If you help me off this ship, I could give you enough money to buy your own land.’

The other frowned. ‘Ye are rich, then?’

‘Very.’

The Scotsman eyed him carefully as if weighing up his options, the pulse in his throat quickening with each and every passing second. The sly look of uncertainty was encouraging.

‘Are you a good judge of men?’ Luc’s question was softly asked.

‘I like to think I am that, aye.’

‘Then if I told you I am an innocent man who has done nothing wrong at all, would you believe me?’

The answer was measured.

‘Any murderer could plead innocence should his life depend on it, but I’ve yet to see a man brought to this ship in the middle of the night who has not walked on the shady side of the law.’

Luc smiled. ‘I would not expect you to do anything more than to look away for five minutes after unlocking these chains.’ He gestured to the manacles at his ankles.

‘I’d be a dead man if I did that.’

‘Throw them overboard after me, then, and say that I jumped in.’

‘Only a fool would attempt to swim while bound.’

‘A fool or a desperate man?’

Silence filled the small cabin.

‘When?’ One small word imbued with so much promise!

Luc answered with a question of his own. ‘Where are we headed?’

‘Down to Lisbon.’

‘Through the Bay of Biscay?’

‘We have already sailed through those waters and have now turned south.’

‘The warmer currents, then, off the coast of Portugal? If I jumped, I’d have a chance.’

‘And my money?’ The thread of greed was welcomed.

‘Will be left at the Bank of England in Thread-needle Street, London, under my name.’

‘Which is?’

‘Clairmont. Lucas Clairmont. You could claim it when you are next back in England and then leave the ship for your hometown.’

‘If ye die during this mad escape, I cannae see much in it for me.’

‘Go to Lord Stephen Hawkhurst and tell him the
story.’ Luc pulled his wife’s ring from his finger and placed it on the ground in front of him, the gold solid and weighty in the slanting shaft of light from the porthole. ‘I swear on the grave of my grandmother that he will pay you five hundred pounds for your trouble, no matter what happens to me.’

When a cascade of expletives followed Luc knew that he had him. Still, there was more that he might be able to learn.

‘Who brought me on to this ship?’

‘Three fellows who paid the captain for your passage. There was some talk of a woman who wanted ye gone from England if memory serves me well.’

Closing his eyes against the stare of the other, he tried to focus and re-gather his strength whilst thanking the James River for its lessons in swimming from one wide edge of it to the other.

Not Davenport money, he hoped. Not Lillian regretting her intimacy in the alcove at the Billinghurst ball, a dangerous stranger who would be menacing to her? A few pounds and an easy handover! No, for the very life of him he could not see Lillian ever performing an illegal act no matter what duress she might be under. Her aunt Jean, then? Lord, that made a lot more sense. Perhaps he was on the same ship she had bought a passage on for him, though he knew the paper in his pocket to be gone.

Already the man had brought the key from the table and unlocked the manacles. The chains fell limply around his ankles as he stood, towering over his shorter captor.

‘What usually happens to those you take on the ship under the cover of darkness?’

‘At a rough guess I’d say Lisbon would be the last place they ever saw in this life.’

The choice was made. Luc stripped off his shirt and tied it about his waist. He wished he could have picked up the wooden chair near the table and dashed it to pieces, taking the largest piece as ballast. But he did not dare to, for fear the noise would attract others who would not be as willing to barter.

‘How do I leave the ship?’

‘If you follow me, I will show you, but be quiet mind.’ Lifting the chains, the Scotsman muffled their sound in the folds of his jacket as Luc followed him out into the darkness.

T
he tapestry in Lillian’s hands was almost finished, an intricate design of fish and fowl wrought in the tones of grey and cream. The belated completion of half-finished projects such as this had been one of the positive things to come out of her enforced isolation and other embroideries still to be done lay in the basket at her feet.

Two weeks now since she had had any word from Lucas Clairmont. Fourteen days since her life had been changed completely by a man who had never wanted anything more than a dalliance. She hated him for it, and hated too the sheer and utter waste of effort it took to loathe him, a depression of spirit all that was left of wonder. From love to hate in fourteen days, tripped in an instant into a ruin she could barely comprehend.

Tears pooled behind her eyes and she willed them away, the picture before her blurring in sadness, though a commotion at the front door made her stand, voices
shouting and the raised anger of her father and cousin. Another voice too, lower, familiar, the sound of a tussle and running feet.

‘Lucas?’ His name was snatched from her lips in a whisper as she ran, through the blue drawing room and into the hall, threads of grey and cream trailing in her wake.

Blood was everywhere, across Luc Clairmont’s nose and eyes swelling shut under the fist of her cousin and his friend and he was not fighting back, the crack of his head as he fell on the marble leaving him dazed upon the floor.

‘What is happening?’ Her voice. Loud in the ensuing silence.

‘He deserved it.’ Patrick’s explanation, the grazes on his fists bleeding anew even as he wiped them against the white linen of his shirt.

Did he? Does he? The question flared in her eyes as she stood between her father and her cousin, the opened door of the house letting in the stares of those servants who worked the gardens and also the wet of the driving western rains. She did not come forwards. She could not, two weeks of anger and hurt unresolved even in his re-appearance and a stiffening distance widening between them.

When he coughed and his amber eyes hardened before sliding away from her own, she knew that she had lost the chance of atonement, the feelings that had been between them withered into the unknown, two strangers brought to this place by circumstances that now seemed almost unbelievable.

She did not understand him, had never known who he was or what he wanted, an outlander who had strode into her life with the one sole purpose of disrupting it. And still was!

Her father’s distress added to her own and with a sob she turned away, the silence left behind her telling. Lucas Clairmont did not call her back or try to stop her, the sound of her running feet against marble the only noise audible save for the frantic beating of her heart.

An hour later her father knocked on the door. He had changed his clothes, she saw, his shirt removed for a clean fresh one and his jacket and cravat in place.

Very formal for a country evening and no guests expected. Her mind began to turn.

‘Lucas Clairmont would like to speak to you.’

‘I do not think—’

‘He is in the blue drawing room and I have told him you will be down immediately.’

Her glance went to his, but she could learn nothing there. ‘I can see no point in prolonging what we both know will be the outcome of any meeting, Father.’

‘You need to hear him out, Daughter. I have told him that after you have seen him he must leave and he has given me his word that he will.’

Still another barb to her heart! One last meeting. One final goodbye. Her fingers threaded through the hair that had fallen from its place beneath the shell comb at her nape and she tucked the strands back.

‘Very well. I will be down in five minutes.’ Her father’s relief at her decision was faintly irritating, but she would not change or tidy herself up further. She would not stand there to be dismissed with her heart on her sleeve, and the weight of a ruined reputation between them. This was his fault every bit as much as hers and she would be the first to let him know it.

He looked worse than he had done an hour ago, new wounds upon his left cheek and fresh blood encrusted around the nails of the hand that she could see.

‘Lillian.’

A sign, for he had seldom before called her that. There was flat anger in his glance.

‘Your father has told me of the circumstances that have brought you and your family here and I would like to say that I am sorry—’

She could not let him finish. ‘There is absolutely nothing to be sorry about, sir. We erred and we will pay. Society’s rules are most explicit in that regard and any apology you might now wish to ply me with is by far and away too late.’ The brisk distance in her voice pleased her, made her stronger.

‘The price perhaps for you personally is rather steep and in that regard I would like to offer—’

‘Oh, please—if it is something more permanent that you now feel compelled to tender, know that I should never accept it.’

He frowned, but remained silent, his hands now
firmly jammed in a jacket borrowed from her father. She recognised the cut of cloth and colour. Too small on him, the seams straining at the stitching on his side. His lack of argument fortified her.

‘We barely know each other and what little we are cognisant of has resulted in disaster. My reputation is as ruined as your face! A truce of sorts! Surely now we should own up to what was never meant to be.’

‘You would give up that easily?’ His voice broke any polite restraint that she thought to hold on to.

‘Give up what, sir? You are a mystery to me. A man who flirts with the affairs of the heart with no true understanding of what it all means. I trusted you, Mr Clairmont. I thought that you may have cherished what I had so senselessly offered, but you did not and then I understood. You are a gambler, a stranger, a liar and a cheat. It could never have worked between us, never, for I, unlike you, feel a certain responsibility to the titles I have inherited and to the rules and regulations that govern this land.’

‘So in effect what you are saying is that I am not rich enough for you, Miss Davenport, not as well born as you have come to expect, and that that does matter?’ The swollen flesh around his lips made the words slurred, a small vulnerability that she did not wish to notice.

‘I am saying that you should go. That we should place this…madness into the slot to which it belongs.’

‘Untenable?’

‘Exactly.’ Lillian’s fervour broke as he looked up at
her and the word wobbled into a silence caught between then and now.

Then there was a chance and now there was not.

‘And you would have no wish to know why I was away from London for these past weeks?’

‘I would not. It is beyond the time for excuses and explanations and nothing you could say would make me believe that you did not realise that I was so badly compromised when you left the Billinghurst ball.’

‘Nothing?’ The word was phrased in a way she could not quite understand. ‘I see.’

‘I am glad that you do.’ She shook her head, and tried to push back a rising grief. This was it. He would leave, hating her. Biting her top lip, she whirled around and made for the door, ignoring his plea to stop as she flew up the stairs and away.

Ernest Davenport read the documents laid out on his desk, the lawyer David Kennedy watching him from across the library with interest.

‘So you are telling me that the man, far from being a pauper, has a series of large estates in Virginia and enough money to buy me out five times over?’

‘Even that may be a conservative estimate.’

‘You are also saying that this proposal of marriage comes with the distinct proviso of allowing none of this information to be leaked to my daughter should I choose to accept it.’

‘Well, not you personally, you understand. This is not
the dark ages where a recalcitrant daughter is dragged screaming to the altar, after all. But I put it to you that your daughter’s reputation had been…sullied and that this is the quickest and most beneficial way of making certain she is once again accepted back into society. I would also say that my client is most anxious that the lady not marry him just for his money, which accounts for the secrecy.’

‘Why would he do this? Why would Lucas Clairmont want a betrothal to a woman who has much reason to hate him?’

‘The motives of clients are something in my fifteen years at the bar I have never yet truly understood, sir. I am but the messenger, the simple emissary of news and deeds.’

‘You are also held by a retainer, I should imagine?’

‘That is correct, but I never accept a client without express knowledge of the honour of his character.’

‘So you are saying he is not a charlatan?’

‘I am, sir. I would also say that, as a father myself, I should be very cautious about turning down such a fortune.’

‘Indeed.’

‘My client also has a desire to have this union quickly completed.’

‘How quickly?’

‘It is my client’s hope that Miss Davenport would be his bride by the beginning of next week. To that effect he has procured a special licence enabling the marriage to take place anywhere and at any time.’

Ernest lifted his pen, the nib carefully inked as he bent to it.

‘Tell him that she agrees. Tell him that the wedding shall take place in the chapel here at Fairley Manor and tell him that if he hurts her again I will seek him out and kill him.’

‘I shall relate each word to him, sir.’ A small sense of the absurd was just audible.

‘You do just that, Mr Kennedy.’

‘You did wha-aa-at?’

‘I accepted Mr Clairmont’s proposal of marriage on your behalf, Lillian, because I think as a parent it is the only wise and proper thing to do.’

‘Proper? Wise? He is a pauper and a liar, let alone a gambler. Are you telling me that you are happy to place the very future of Fairley into the hands of a man who will in all likelihood bleed it to death?’

‘I am.’

‘You are mad, Father. You cannot mean to do this, to tie our fortune to one who has proven to be so very untrustworthy.’

‘I think, Lillian, that you besmirch his character too harshly. I think if you could find it in yourself to look upon this match as something that might indeed be of benefit to you both—’

‘No!’

‘The licence has been procured and the wedding is set for Monday.’

Monday for wealth

Tuesday for health

Wednesday the best day of all…

The ditty of days to marry turned in her head like some macabre promise.

‘I do not believe this. Is he blackmailing you or threatening you in some way?’ The horrible realisation made Lillian feel faint. This was not her father. This was not the careful and prudent man who would cut off his right arm rather than let the estate of Fairley Manor pass into the hands of an unsatisfactory groom.

‘If he were, I should instruct you to turn him down.’

‘And if I do just that, regardless?’

‘Then we shall be for ever marooned here in Hertfordshire, neither a part of society or of village life because of your one unmindful mistake.’

Her mistake! The sacrifice of herself or of her family?

‘If you force me into this travesty, Father, I will not forgive you for it and I will never understand it.’

‘I beg to disagree, Daughter, for honestly in time I think that you will.’

She made no real effort with her wedding gown. In fact, at the very last moment she chose to wear a cream organza gown from her last Season because the new dress from Madame Berenger suggested an exertion that she felt far from making. In her hands, however, she held fragrant white winter daphne from the Fairley
glasshouse because a small part of her could not quite abandon all form of good taste.

Lucas Clairmont stood at the top of the aisle watching her. She had not seen him since she had stormed away from him and the bruises were today a lurid green and yellow, his left eye still largely swollen. The way he held his right hand against his ribs also suggested substantial pain. His whole life seemed to tilt between contretemps, she thought, never settling into the easier peace of a comfortable and gentlemanly existence.

The tears that had not been far from her eyes all week banked yet again, the differences between them boding ill for any future they might be able to fashion.

The guests on her side of the chapel were packed into the pews with standing room only at the back. On his side, however, two couples sat. The St Auburns and Lord Stephen Hawkhurst, accompanied by a very old man.

Concentrating on the vase of flowers on a table behind the font, she noted them to be aged white carnations, some relative’s clumsy touch evident in the overdone blooms and the fussy paper decorations around all the pews. She wanted to rip them away as she walked, but her dress was taking all of her attention, the wide skirt requiring a certain walk so that the material did not snag on the overhangs of the oak seats.

When the music stopped she stopped too, beside her husband-to-be, his clothes today surprisingly well tailored. Had Lord Hawkhurst leant him a frockcoat? she wondered, and then dismissed the whole thought.
It did not matter what he wore or how he looked. It did not matter that today he had made an effort with his attire she had not seen him make before. Perhaps he felt with the windfall of her dowry he had to be more careful to fit in, though when she took a quick peep at him he hardly looked overawed by a congregation of people far and away above him in rank, position and finances.

Even with his cuts and bruises he looked…confident. A man in the very place that he wanted to be!

Would she ever understand him? Would he ever know just how much he had hurt her? Her father obviously had some idea, the worry on his face making him look old and tired.

The clergyman raised his Bible. ‘We are here today to marry Lucas Morgan Clairmont and Lillian Jewell Davenport.’

Lillian Clairmont! As the service continued the words that the priest wanted from her were difficult to say.

‘…to love and to cherish from this day forward until death do us part.’