Читать книгу Christmas Betrothals - Sophia James - Страница 18

‘There is some evil afoot, Lillian,’ her father said quietly as she lifted the first of the Christmas garlands into place around the hearth in the blue salon. ‘Lord Paget has been found dead at his house this morning.’

Lillian fastened the bough of pine before turning, trying to give herself some sense of time.

‘But he was with us at the weekend at the St Auburns.’

‘Which brings me to the very reason that I mention it. Some are saying that his death is suspicious for there was an argument, it seems, between him and Clairmont. The American has been taken in for questioning.’

‘But Mr Clairmont did not cause the argument, Father, he tried to stop it.’

‘Oh, well, no doubt the constabulary will get to the bottom of what happened and it’s hardly our problem. From all accounts the man is a renegade and why he continues to frequent the soirées of the ton eludes me. I for one would not give him the time of day.’ Standing beside her, he put his hand up to the greenery. ‘That looks lovely—will you place one on the other side too?’

Lillian nodded, though the Christmas spirit had quite gone out of her as she thought back to the weekend.

Luc Clairmont had already left when she had finally risen on the Sunday morning, accompanying Lady Caroline Shelby back to London! He had not stayed to find out more about her hastily whispered promise of feeling ‘something’ and had not tried to contact her since.

Could he have murdered the man? For an insult? Her whole world was turning upside down and she had no way of stopping it doing so.

The pile of decorations she had had the maid bring down from the attic lay before her, a job she usually enjoyed, but now … She looked over at the tin soldiers and varnished collages, the paper cornucopias all waiting to be filled and the hand-dipped candles that she had so lovingly fashioned last year. A pile of gay Christmas cards lay further afield and the dolls she used every Yuletide in the nativity scene beneath the tree were neatly packed in another box. All waiting!

When a maid came to say that there was a caller and gave her the card of Caroline Shelby, she was almost relieved to be able to put off the effort of it all.

‘Please show her up,’ she instructed the girl and Lady Shelby appeared less than a scant moment later.

‘Miss Davenport! I am so sorry to intrude, but I have come on a matter of a most delicate sort.’

Gesturing for the newcomer to sit, Lillian took the chair opposite and waited for her to begin. ‘It’s just I do not know what to do and you are so sensible and seem to know just exactly what next step to take about everything.’

Lillian smiled through surprise and felt a lot older than the young and emotional girl opposite.

‘The thing is that I have found myself becoming increasingly attracted to Mr Lucas Clairmont from Virginia and I came because I heard you talking to him when you were recovering after your faint.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Of everything Caroline Shelby might have said this was the most unforeseen, and she hoped her own rush of emotion was not staining her face.

‘At the St Auburns’. I heard you say that you felt something for him.’

Lillian made herself smile, the danger in the girl’s announcement very alarming. ‘Perhaps you have made an error, Lady Shelby, for I am about to be engaged to Lord Wilcox-Rice.’

The woman looked uncertain. ‘I had not heard that.’

‘Probably because you were too busy fabricating untruths,’ she returned. ‘John and I have been promised to each other for the past three weeks and my father has given us his blessing.’

Caroline Shelby stood, placing her bag across the crook of her arm. ‘Oh, well then, I shall say no more about any of it and ask most sincerely for your pardon of my conduct. I would also ask you, in the light of all that has been revealed, to keep the words spoken between us private. I should not wish any others to know.’

‘Of course not.’

She rang the bell and the maid came immediately.

‘I bid you good afternoon, Lady Shelby.’ Lillian could hear the coldness in her words.

‘Good afternoon, Miss Davenport.’

Once the woman had gone she sat down heavily on the couch. Gracious, could this day become any worse? She did not think that it possibly could although she was mistaken.

Half an hour later John Wilcox-Rice arrived beaming.

‘I have just seen Lady Shelby and she led me to believe that you had had second thoughts about our engagement.’

Lillian looked at him honestly for the first time in weeks. He was an ordinary man, some might even say a boring man, but he was not a murderer or a liar. Today his eyes were bright with hope and in his hands he held a copy of a book she had mentioned she would like to read whilst staying at the St Auburns’. She added ‘a thoughtful man’ to her list.

‘Perhaps we should speak to Father.’

Ernest Davenport broke open his very best bottle of champagne and poured four glasses, her aunt Jean being summoned from her rooms to partake in the joyous news.

‘I cannot tell you how delighted I am with this announcement, Lillian. John here will make you a fine husband and your property will be well managed.’

Her aunt Jean, not wishing to be outdone in gladness, clapped her hands. ‘When did you think to have the wedding, Lillian?’

‘We can decide on a date after Christmas, Aunt,’ she replied, the whole rigmarole of organising the occasion something she did not really wish to consider right now.

‘And a dress, we must find the most beautiful gown, my dear. Perhaps a trip to Paris to find it might be in order, Ernest?’

Her father laughed, a sound Lillian had not heard in many months and her anxiety settled. ‘That seems like a very good idea to me, Jean.’

John had come to stand near her, and he took her fingers in his own.

‘You have made me the happiest of fellows, my dear Lillian, the very happiest.’

My dear? Goodness, he sounded exactly like her father. What would she call him? No name at all came to mind as she went over to the drinks table and helped herself to another generous glass of champagne, turning only when Eleanor was shown in by the maid, a look of surprise on her face.

‘I have just been given the news,’ she said, ‘and so I have come immediately. Mama and Papa are returning from the country tonight so the timing could not have been better.’

With a smile she enveloped Lillian in her arms. ‘And you, sister-in-law—’ the words rolled off her tongue in an impish way ‘—I didn’t have an idea that you two were so close and you let me know nothing! Was it the sprig of mistletoe that settled it? When shall the ceremony take place? Do you already have your bridesmaids?’

Everyone laughed at the run of questions, except Lillian, who suddenly and dreadfully saw exactly what she had done. Not just she now and John, but her family and Eleanor and a group of people whom she did not wish in any way to hurt.

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.