Читать книгу Christmas Betrothals - Sophia James - Страница 13

Woodruff Abbey, in Bedfordshire, was old, a house constructed in the days when the classical lines of architecture had been in their heyday, early seventeenth century or late sixteenth. Now it just looked tired, the colonnades in the portico chipped and rough and numerous windows boarded in places, as though the glass had been broken and was not able to be repaired. The thought puzzled him—the income of this place was well able to cover expenses towards the upkeep and day-to-day running, according to Thackeray, his lawyer. Why then had it been left to look so rundown?

At the front door he stopped and looked at the garden stretching from the house to the parkland below and the polluted business of London seemed far away. Breathing in, he smiled, and the tense anger of the past few years seemed to recede a bit, the faded elegance of the Abbey soothing in its dishevelled beauty.

The door was suddenly pulled open and a man stood there. An old man, whose hat was placed low upon his head and whose eyes held the rheumy glare of one who could in truth barely see.

‘May I be of assistance, sir?’ His cultured voice was surprising.

‘I am Lucas Clairmont. I hope that Mr Thackeray has sent you word of my coming.’

‘The lawyer? Clairmont? Lord! You are here already?’

‘I am.’ Luc waited. The man did not move from his place in the middle of the doorway, his knuckles clutching white at the lintel as though he might fall.

‘The Mr Clairmont from America?’

‘Indeed.’ He bit back a smile. Was he going to be invited into his own house or not?

‘Who is there, Jack? Who is at the door? Tell them that we need nothing.’

A woman appeared behind him, a woman every bit as old as he was, her shawl wrapped tightly across a thin frame, spectacles balancing on her nose.

‘It is Mr Clairmont, Lizzie. Mr Clairmont, this is my wife, Mrs Poole’

Her eyes widened behind the glasses and the frown that had been there when he first saw her thickened.

‘We had word, of course, but we had not thought …’

Her words petered out as she stood beside her husband, both of them now looking across at his person as if they could not quite believe he was there.

‘May I come in?’

The request sent them into a whirl of activity and as the door was thrown wide open they stepped back.

The wide central portico was open to the roof, and the oversized windows let in a generous amount of light. He noticed that the floors were well scrubbed and that the banisters and woodwork had been polished until they shone. Not an unloved house, then, but one strapped by the lack of cash.

‘We are Jack and Lizzie Poole, sir,’ the woman said once the door was again fastened, ‘and we have served this estate for nigh on a century between us.’

Luc nodded, easily believing the length of time stated.

‘And where are the other servants who help you?’

‘Other servants, sir?’ Puzzlement showed on their brows.

‘The cook and the governess, the maids and the grooms. Where are they?’

‘It’s only us, sir, and it has been for a very long time.’

‘But there are children here?’

Both their eyes lit up. ‘Indeed there are. Miss Charity and Miss Hope and good girls they are at that.’

‘Who teaches them, then? Who sees to their lessons?’

‘There is nobody else.’

‘So I am to understand that it is just you and the two girls who live here and have done so for some months?’

‘Almost twelve months, sir, since the money stopped coming and they all up and left! Not us though, we could not stand around and see the wee ones homeless.’

Luc took in a breath and he swore he would visit Thackeray the instant he returned to town in order to get to the bottom of just where the funds had gone.

‘Where are the children? Could they be brought down?’

‘Down, sir?’

‘From the nursery?’

‘Oh, goodness gracious, they are seldom there. If it is a fine day they will be down by the lake, and if it is a wet one in their hut near the trees.’

This time he did laugh. Two little girls without the weight of the English society rules upon them promised to be interesting indeed. His own childhood had been much the same, a violent father whom he saw only intermittently and a mother who was never well. Perhaps these old people would have been an improvement!

A noise from one end of the hall had them turning and a child stood there. A thin pale child with the shortest hair he had ever seen on a girl of her age and large blue eyes.

‘Charity,’ Mrs Poole said as she walked forwards. ‘You are back early. Come and meet Mr Clairmont, dear, for he is just come from London.’

The girl’s teeth worried her bottom lip and her light glance was full of anxiety, but she allowed the woman to shuffle her forwards.

‘She does not speak as such since the passing of her mother, sir, but she will certainly know you.’

Did not speak? He had had little to do with children in his life and was at a loss as to how to deal with this one. Still he tried his best. ‘I would like to see your tree house one day.’

She nodded. At least she understood him without lip reading, her eyes trained upon the floor.

‘Her sister, Hope, will not be in till after dark. Will you be staying, sir?’

He wondered what Hope did for all of the hours of daylight, but with the lack of concern on all the faces before him refrained from asking the question.

‘I have not booked passage back to London until the morrow and I think there is much to discuss about this situation.’

Lizzie Poole looked at her husband and Charity clutched the old lady’s hand tighter, Luc calculating in a second that although there was not a lot here in the way of material richness, love was apparent. For that at least he was glad.

‘Jack here will see you to your room, Mr Lucas, and I will go to the kitchen to prepare some dinner. Charity love, will you give me a hand?’

When the child smiled the sun came out, her deep dimples etched into her cheeks and blue eyes dancing with laughter. A beauty, he thought suddenly, and Lillian Davenport came to mind. This girl had her sort of timeless elegance, even dressed as she was in a gown about two sizes too small and patched everywhere. He wondered what the sister would look like as he followed Jack Poole up the solid oak staircase.

Dinner consisted of two tiny cooked carcases he presumed to be wild fowl, a bowl full of boiled potatoes and a handful of greenery that looked like the watercress farmers in Virginia grew by the James.

‘The land provideth and the Lord taketh away,’ Mrs Poole told him sagely as they sat at a table in the kitchen, the fire in the oven behind a welcome asset to keep out the cold.

Hope was still outside, he presumed, as her place was empty. Charity sat next to him, her hands folded in her lap as she waited for grace to be said. A long and complex prayer of thanks it turned out to be too, a good five minutes having passed as Lizzie Poole gave acknowledgement for all the things that God had sent them, for their health and hearth and laughter, for the fuel which fed the fire and the earth which supported them. To Luc’s mind she seemed a trifle generous in her praise, the fowl in particular looking like they had seen but three months of life and barely eaten anything in that time. Still, it was refreshing to see gratefulness in small blessings and he wondered what she might say of the overladen London tables should she ever see them.

Just as they had finished the kitchen door banged open and an older child walked in. She looked nothing like her sister, except for her thin build, her hair a wild tangle of long deep brown curls and her skin darkened by the sun.

‘I am sorry to be so late, Lizzie,’ she said, stopping as bright emerald eyes met his own. Another beauty, but of a different mould.

‘This is Mr Lucas Clairmont, Hope. He has come from London today to see you and your sister.’

Hope’s eyes went to Charity’s and a communication passed between them. A silent language of perception and accord.

‘Very pleased to meet you, sir.’ She curtsied in a way reminiscent of another age.

‘Mrs Poole tells me you spend a lot of time outdoors. What things do you do there?’

‘We fish sometimes for the dinner table, and collect this cress. If we are lucky, we bag hares or wild birds and in the spring we steal the eggs from the nests that are low in the hedgerows.’

‘So this bounty is your doing?’ he replied, gesturing to the food on the table.

‘Some of it is, sir. Winter is the most difficult time to gather, but come spring we can find all sorts of berries and mushrooms and even wild tomatoes.’

‘So your sister helps you?’

‘Of course.’ She flashed a smile and the other nodded. Tonight Charity appeared a lot more worried than she had a few hours ago but Hope picked up quickly on her fright, settling herself on the other side of the girl and again that wordless communication that excluded everyone in the room.

‘They are very close, sir. If anyone were to split them up …’

‘I have not come here to do that.’

‘This house is the only home they have ever known and were they to be thrown out …’

‘I have not come to do that, either.’

‘Their mother was perhaps a trifle wild, I realise that, but Charity and Hope have never caused us even a moment’s worry.’

Luc placed his eating utensils down and laid his hands on the table. ‘Thackeray led me to believe the girls were being looked after in the manner my late wife would have wished them to be. If I had had any notion of the lack of finance you have put up with for the last God knows how many months—’ he stopped as the old lady winced at his profanity ‘—for the last months,’ he repeated, ‘then I would have been up here a lot sooner.’

‘So we can stay?’ Hope asked the question, the same emotion as her name easily heard in her voice.

‘Indeed you can, and I will see to it as soon as I return to London.’

He left Woodruff Abbey with all of its inhabitants waving him goodbye and a handful of warm potatoes wrapped in cloth that Charity had given him.

The first thing he did when he arrived in the city was to tell the elderly Horatio Thackeray that his services as his lawyer were no longer needed, and set an investigator on to the trail of finding where the money had gone. In his stead he hired a younger and more compassionate man whose reputation had been steadily rising in the city.

‘So you wish for Woodruff Abbey to be kept in trust for the children?’ David Kennedy’s voice contained a tone in it that could most succinctly be described as incredulous.

‘That is correct.’

‘You realise of course that once the deed is filed it is binding and you would have no hope of seeing your property back should you change your mind at a later date?’

‘I do.’

‘You also wish for the monies from the estate to be placed in a fund to see to the running of the Abbey, and for a specified number of servants to be hired to help the older couple?’

‘That is right.’

‘Then if you are certain that that is what you want and you have understood the finality of such a generous gesture, you must sign here. To begin the process, you understand. I shall get back to you within the month when the deeds are written.’

A quick scrawl and it was done. Luc replaced the ink pen in its pot and gathered his hat.

‘There is one proviso, Mr Kennedy.’

The lawyer looked startled.

‘The proviso is that you tell no one of this.’

‘You do not wish others to know of your generosity?’

‘I do not.’

‘Very well, sir. Will that be all today?’

‘No, there is another thing. I am transferring funds from an account I hold here in London, which shall stay in place in case of any shortfall. Under no circumstance at all do I wish for the inhabitants of the Abbey to go without again. If indeed there is any problem at all, I expect to be contacted with as much haste as you could muster to remedy the matter.’

‘That shall be done, sir. Might I also say how pleased I am to have the chance to do business with you—’

‘Thank you,’ Luc cut him short. He had a card game he could not miss that was due to start in just over two hours and he needed to take the omnibus to Piccadilly.

Lillian tucked her diary away in the small console by her bed and told herself that she should not write of her thoughts of Lucas Clairmont.

She had heard that he had been away from London for the past five days, travelling according to Nathaniel Lindsay’s wife, Cassandra, who was the sister of Anne Weatherby. Where, she had no clue, though according to Anne he had left his lodgings and given no idea of when he expected to return.

Presumably it would be before the house party on Friday. She wondered who he knew in England to take him away for such a period and remembered the Countess of Horsham’s scandalous gossip. Lillian shook her head. Surely a man of little means and newly come from the Americas would not have the wherewithal to house any children, let alone those born out of wedlock?

Lucas Clairmont was a mystery, she thought, his accent changing each time she saw him and some dark menace in his golden eyes. Not a man to be trifled with, she decided, and not a man whom others might persuade to take any course he did not wish to, either.

She made her way down to the library on the first floor of the town house and dislodged a book on the Americas that her father had bought a few years earlier. Virginia and Hampton and the wide ragged outline of Chesapeake Bay was easily traced by her fingers and there along a blue line signifying the James River lay Richmond, surrounded by green and at the edge of long tongues of water that wound their way up towards it. What hills and dales did he know? What towns to the east and west had he visited? Charlottesville. Arlington. Williamsburg and Hopewell. All names that she had no knowledge of and only the propensity to imagine.

A knock on the door brought her from her reveries and she called an entry.

‘Lord Wilcox-Rice is here, ma’am, with his sister, Lady Eleanor. He said something of a shopping expedition.’

‘What time is it?’ Lillian asked the question in trepidation.

‘Half past three, miss. Just turned.’

Rising quickly, she was glad that her day dress was one that would not need changing and pleased, too, for the bright sky she could now see outside.

‘Of course. Would you show them through to the blue salon and let them know that I shall be but a moment whilst I fetch my bonnet and coat.’

Ellie Wilcox-Rice was one of Lillian’s favourite acquaintances; in fact, it was probably due to her influence that Lillian had allowed even the talk of an engagement to her friend’s brother to be mooted.

As they walked along Park Lane she laughed at Ellie’s rendition of her Saturday evening at a ball in Kensington, a wearying sort of affair, it seemed.

‘I should have much rather been at the crush of James Cholmondely’s ball.’ Ellie sighed. ‘Jennifer Parker said she had the most wonderful time and that she had danced with an American with whom she fell in love on the spot.’

‘Probably Mr Lucas Clairmont,’ John said, waiting as the girls looked at a shop window, beautifully decorated for the approaching Christmas season. ‘He has all the ladies’ hearts a-racing, I hear, and no one has any idea of who exactly he is.’

‘Does he have your heart a-racing, Lillian?’ Ellie’s laughter was shrill.

‘Of course he doesn’t,’ John answered for her. ‘Lillian is far too sensible to be swayed by the man.’

‘Jennifer thinks he is rich. She thinks he has land in the Americas that rival that of the Ancaster estate. Hundreds and thousands of acres.’

‘Did he say so to her?’ Lillian was intrigued by this new development.

‘No. It is just she has a penchant for Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice and imagines Lucas Clairmont in much the same mould.’

‘A peagoose, then, and more stupid than I had imagined her.’ John’s outburst was unexpected. Usually he saw the best in all people.

‘Jennifer also said that you had a waltz with this man, Lillian.’

‘Indeed I did, and he is a competent dancer, if I recall.’

‘But he made no impression upon you?’

Looking away, Lillian hated her breathlessness and her racing heart. To even talk of him here …

‘Why, speaking of the devil, I do believe that is him coming towards us now. With Lord Hawkhurst, is it not?’

His sister laid her hand upon his. ‘John, you absolutely must introduce me to him and let me make up my own mind.’

The two men walked towards them, both tall and dark, though today it appeared as though Luc Clairmont laboured in his gait and when they came up close Lillian could well see why. Today he looked little like he had last time she had met him, his left eye swollen shut and a cut across the bridge of his nose. When her glance flickered to his hands she saw that he wore gloves. To cover the damage to his knuckles, she supposed, and frowned.

‘Wilcox-Rice.’ Lord Hawkhurst bowed his head and the exchanges of names were made. When it was her turn for introduction, however, Luc Clairmont made no mention of the intimacy of their meetings so far, tipping his hat in much the same way as he did for Eleanor.

Today the light in his one good eye was dulled considerably, his glance almost bashful as she looked upon him. He barely spoke, waiting until Hawkhurst had finished and then moving along with him.

‘Well,’ said Eleanor as they went out of earshot, ‘it looks as if Jennifer’s prince has had an accident.’

‘Been in another fight, more like it,’ John interjected. ‘There was talk of a scuffle at the Lenningtons’ the other week.’

‘Really.’ Ellie turned to look back and Lillian wished that she would not.

‘Who would he fight?’

‘The gambling tables have their own complications.’ John was quick to answer his sister’s question. ‘Your cousin, by the way, Lillian, is numbered amongst those who have had more than a light dab at the faces of others.’

‘Daniel?’ Ellie questioned, grimacing at the name. ‘But he dresses far too well to fight.’

Despite herself Lillian laughed at the sheer absurdity of her friend’s statement as they made their way into Oxford Street.

‘I can well see why Jennifer Parker is so besotted. Have you ever seen a more dangerous-looking man than Lucas Clairmont?’

When John frowned heavily, they decided that it was prudent to drop the subject altogether.

Christmas decorations were beginning to appear in more of the shops and a child and an elderly woman stood by the roadside selling bunches of mistletoe from a barrow.

Ellie rushed over dragging Lillian with her, carefully separating the foliage until she found a piece that she wanted.

‘They say if you kiss a man under mistletoe you will find your one true love. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Perhaps you might kiss my brother? Here, Lillian, I will buy a sprig for you.’

Eleanor gave the woman some money and was handed two brown parcels, the greenery contained in thick paper and string. As they went to leave a young couple came up to the barrow. They were not well-to-do or dressed in anything near the latest of fashion, but when the man held the mistletoe up to the woman there was something in their eyes that simply transfixed Lillian.

Laughter and warmth and a shining intensity that was bewitching! She saw love in the way their hands brushed close as he handed her the packet and in the breathless smile the woman gave back to him as she received her gift. Only them in the world, only the small circle of their joy and happiness, for the bliss between them was tangible to everyone that watched.

Yearning overcame Lillian. Yearning for what she had just seen, the mistletoe a reminder of what she had never found and would probably never have. She glanced at John, who was castigating his sister for wasting her money on such frippery and a heavy sadness settled over her.

Christmas with its hope and promise had a way of undermining rationality and logic, replacing it with this mistletoe magic and a great dollop of hunger for something completely untenable.

‘I do hope you are not swayed by my sister’s nonsense, too?’ John said, and with the shake of her head Lillian placed the brown packet in her bag and averted her eyes from the couple now walking on the other side of the street.