Mistletoe Magic (10 page)

‘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 cele
bration, 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.

N
o 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.’

‘And are you a careful bride, Lilly?’

‘Lillian,’ she echoed, ignoring the true intent of his question. ‘And careful in the way of being certain that John has at least never been a suspect in murder.’

‘Because he plays everything as safely as you do?’

She turned, but he caught at her arm, not gently either, the hard bite of his fingers making her flinch. ‘Perhaps you might wait till the findings of the police are made public before naming me guilty.’

‘Why?’ she retaliated. ‘If you keep the company of gamblers and card sharps and are often covered in the bruises and markings of a man who goes from one squabble to the next, why indeed should I give you any leeway?’

‘Because I hope you know by now, Lilly, that I am not quite as black as you would paint me.’ His accent was soft but distinct, the cadence of the new lands on his tongue.

‘Do I, Lucas? Do I know that?’

It was the first time she had called him by his Chris
tian name and the warm glow in his eyes alarmed her. There was something else there too. A vulnerability that she had not seen before, an unprotected and exposed need that tugged at her because it was so unexpected.

‘Marrying one man because of the faults of another is not the wisest of choices.’

‘So what is it then you would suggest?’

He laughed, the sound filling the empty space around them. ‘Come away with me instead.’

The room whirled, a yearning ache in her body that she was completely astonished by. If only he meant it. If only the laughter that the invitation had been accompanied with did not sound quite so offhand. So casual!

‘And spend the rest of my life wondering when a noose would be placed about your neck?’

‘I had nothing to do with the death of Paget, if that is what you are implying.’

‘You were asked to leave Eton.’

‘I was a boy…’

‘Who stole a watch?’

Again he began to laugh. ‘Such a crime…’ But she allowed his amusement no further rein.

‘I am the only heir to Fairley Manor, Mr Clairmont, and in England we protect our assets by marrying wisely.’

He tipped his head and in the light of the room Lillian saw the beginnings of a reddened scar that snaked from his right ear into the collar of his shirt.

‘A long-ago accident,’ he qualified as he saw her uncertainty.

But she was transfixed. This was no simple wound that would take a day or two to mend. She imagined both the pain and the tenacity needed to recover from such an injury and in her conjecture also saw the wide and yawning gap that lay between them. Who had tended him in his hours of need, wiped his brow and brought him water? She had heard it said he had left for America as a boy, but there had been no mention of any family.

‘Did your parents go with you to the Americas?’

He looked puzzled at her change of topic. ‘My parents?’

‘The Earl of St Auburn implied that you were barely above fourteen when you left Eton and that you sailed from England very soon afterwards.’

‘I had an uncle there already.’

‘So you took passage alone?’

‘Worked my way there actually as a deckhand on the
Joanna.
Forty days was all it took between London and New York—the seas and winds were kind.’

Marvelling at his description, she imagined a child making his way across the world to a different shore, the mantle of being labelled a thief on his shoulders and alone. Why had his parents not gone with him? She sensed he wanted no more questions as he stood there, the candles above setting his hair to a shade of lighter brown amongst the ebony, curling long against his nape.

‘Wilcox-Rice will never make you happy.’ The words seemed dragged from him.

‘Whereas you will?’

He smiled at that. ‘There are things more important than a certain cut of cloth or which fork one uses at a banquet table, Miss Davonport.’

‘You think that is what defines me?’

‘Partly.’

She hated the truth in his words and the answering echo of it in her own mind. ‘The sum of my pieces must be awfully galling to you then, Mr Clairmont, just as the sum of your own is as equally trying to me. I think a passably good kiss in a man who seems to eschew every other moral principle would not sustain a relationship for even as long as a month.’

‘Do you now?’ Ground out. Barely civil.

Lillian stood her ground. ‘Indeed, for it has come to my ears that the whisper of friendship and respect is a most underrated thing in any marriage.’

‘Which unfulfilled brides have told you that nonsense?’

Shock held her rigid. ‘Perhaps it was naïve of me to expect that you might consider such a sentiment with an open mind.’

‘An open mind?’ He laughed. ‘When your own has just condemned me as a murderer.’

‘Paget was a man you seemed to have much reason to hate.’

‘I concede. Put like that my case seems hopeless and if a thought is as lethal as a bullet…’

When she allowed a smile to blossom he took the small chance of it quickly.

‘Stay the night with me, Lillian. See what it is you will miss if you marry John Wilcox-Rice.’

The shock of his question was only overrun by the stinging want in her body. ‘I could start with ruination—’

He broke into her banter. ‘I would never hurt you, at least believe that.’

She saw the way he looked about to make certain no person lay in earshot, saw the way too he kept his hands jammed in his jacket pockets and his face carefully bland. They could for all intents and purposes be discussing the weather should a bystander take the time to watch them.

‘If by some misguided logic I should chance to consider such a risky venture, where would you imagine this tryst to take place? I should not wish to shed my inhibitions in a dosshouse, after all.’

‘Someone has told you my address?’

The dimple in his cheek was deep and she tried not to let the beauty of his face daunt her.

‘Come away with me, then. I have a house in Bedfordshire.’

‘I could not possibly…’

‘You could buy a kiss when you barely knew me. Take that one step further.’

John Wilcox-Rice’s voice sounded behind her. ‘Lillian, I have been looking for you.’ His words were wary and distrustful.

‘Mr Clairmont has just extended an invitation to us
to call in at his house in the country.’ She watched as amber flared, catching her glance in a hooded warning.

‘I doubt we shall be in the district, Clairmont, and I thought I had heard it said that you were taking passage home very soon.’

‘Unless the police have need to keep me in London.’

John stuttered at such nonchalance. A challenge. A provocation. A carefully worded gauntlet thrown into the ring between adversaries and John with no notion at all as to what he fought for.

Her!

The beat of Lillian’s heart thickened in the dawning realisation that she was the prize, a situation that she had not had the experience of since her first year of coming out, and the band of white gold and diamonds on the third finger of her left hand felt tight, a small message of control and limit that constricted everything.

Oh, for the chance of another kiss? No, there wasn’t the possibility for any of it, especially here with her father and aunt close and a fiancé who allowed her not a moment’s respite. If only she might lay her fingers in those of the American opposite and simply walk, now, away from it all.

Like her mother had!

She shook her head and the moment of madness passed, evaporated into expectation and duty. Lillian or Lilly. The white and careful promise of obligation and discretion counterbalanced against the wilder orange flair of excitement and thrill.

The very same choices Rebecca had mismanaged all those years before and look where it had taken her: a deathbed racked with self-reproach and contrition.

She inclined her head as she allowed John Wilcox-Rice to take her arm and lead her out into the ballroom proper, the music of Strauss settling her fears as it swirled and eddied about them. Many in the pressing crowd smiled at them, the illusion of a wondrous young love, not such a difficult one to pass off after all.

John leaned in as they performed the waltz, the ardour that had been apparent at the St Auburns’ the night he had escorted her to her room as obvious here.

She felt his fingers splayed out across her back.

‘This is the dance of lovers, Lillian. Appropriate, don’t you think?’

It took all of her composure not to break his hold and pull away.

‘If you could give some consideration about naming a date for our nuptials, and preferably one in the not-too-distant future, you would make me the happiest of men.’

Lillian faltered. ‘With all the Christmas preparations I have been busy’

‘What of February, then?’

‘I had thought of the summer,’ she returned and his face fell.

‘No, that is too long.’ The forceful tone in his voice surprised her. ‘It needs to be earlier.’

Nodding, she retreated into silence. Earlier? The very word was like a death knell in her heart.

‘If you don’t approach her soon the night will be gone, Luc.’ Hawkhurst’s voice was insistent. Already the clock was nearing the hour of two.

‘I think I made myself more than clear to Miss Davenport an hour or so back, Hawk.’

‘And she wanted none of you?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Well, that’s a first. So you’re going to give up just like that?’

‘I am. She intimated that she thought I had some hand in the death of Paget.’

‘You are here for a month and life becomes interesting again. To my mind, however, Lillian Davenport seems downright miserable and the stuffed shirt of a fiancé looks as though he is hanging on to her arm for dear life. Even her father looks bored with his conversation and that’s saying something.’ He stopped, and Luc didn’t like the way he smiled. ‘Her aunt on the other hand is eyeing you up with a singular interest.’