Mistletoe Magic

Chapter Fourteen

It was almost four o’clock and Lucas knew that the time had come to take his bride and go home to Woodruff Abbey, an hour and a half away on the Northern Road.

He had toyed with the idea of paying for a room at the Elk and Boar Inn, a point that broke the journey halfway, but with the indifference marking Lillian’s face had decided that being cramped together in a small space might not be the wisest thing to do.

Indeed, he even wondered about the carriage ride and wished that Hawk and his uncle had made plans to stay at Woodruff until the morrow. Such a desperate thought made him smile and as he did so he caught his wife looking at him.

‘If you are ready to leave, I thought we might go?’

‘Go where?’ Her astonishment gave him the impression that she had expected to stay at Fairley Manor.

‘My home is in Bedfordshire. A place called Woodruff Abbey.’

‘And it is yours?’

He could not help but hear the catch of surprise in her voice. ‘I only recently came into the inheritance.’

The interest that crossed into her eyes was tempered by disbelief, the whole charade of whom and of what he was here in England mirrored in pale blue uncertainty.

He hoped that Lillian would not hate the Abbey, would not demand the perfection of Fairley, would not turn up her nose at the shabby beauty of a house that was coming to mean a lot to him.

Lord, let her like it!

The emptiness of his last few years made him swallow and he knew that he could not survive should this marriage prove as disastrous as his first.

Ernest Davenport, seeing their intent to leave, came up to speak, his eyes watering a little as he held the hand of his daughter.

‘I shall journey to see you for Christmas, Lillian.’

Lucas noticed how his wife’s fingers curled about that of her parent as if she was desperate not to let him go. ‘If you would wish to come sooner…’ she began, but Davenport stopped her.

‘Nay, the first weeks in a new marriage are for you and your groom alone. But I would just speak to your husband privately, for a moment?’

Lillian made a show of bidding her remaining family goodbye as Luc walked to the window with her father.

‘This unconventionality of telling my daughter little about the state of your finances will be obeyed by me only until I see you again in a fortnight. Do you understand?’

Lucas nodded. Davenport had kept his word thus far and he was thankful for it, but with Christmas less than two weeks away he knew that he was running out of time.

‘And if I hear that there has been anything untoward happening…’

‘I would never hurt your daughter.’

‘Your lawyer gave you my message, then?’

‘He did, sir.’ Lucas remembered David Kennedy’s less-than-flattering summation of Ernest Davenport’s parting words.

‘I notice that she is not wearing her wedding ring?’

‘No, it is here in my pocket.’ He had retrieved the band from Hawk’s uncle once the old man had lost interest in it.

‘It does not look like a piece that my daughter would be fond of. If I might offer you some advice, having it reset completely may be the wiser option.’

Lilly’s father and Hawk felt the same way?

Luc felt a strange sense of kinship with the man opposite. He was, after all, a father just trying to do his best by his daughter.

‘I shall certainly think about it, sir.’

Lillian shifted in her seat when the carriage began to slow almost two hours later, pulling off the road and slipping through intricate wrought-iron gates. It had been a silent trip to Woodruff Abbey as two of her maids had shared the space with them, the lack of privacy allowing nothing personal at all to be said and slanting rain the only constant noise of the journey. When they rounded the last corner, she saw that the house before them was like something from another century.

‘It needs a lot of work,’ Luc declared as he leaned across to look at it and Lillian thought she detected a hint of apology in his voice.

In the growing darkness she could only just make out the newly weeded verges around the circular drive and the piles of pruned branches heaped to one end of a low-lying addition. Could this have been where her husband had been in the last weeks? Trying to make something of his windfall?

‘The lines of the building are beautiful.’ In all her hurt she found herself reassuring him and was rewarded with a smile as a footman drew down the steps, Lucas’s hand coming to assist her after he had alighted.

Lillian was surprised by the bareness of the place as they walked in, though there was a certain beauty in the ancient rugs and the few pieces of furniture that were on display. An old dog roused itself from beneath a table and stretched, before coming to see just who the new arrivals were and three long-haired cats watched them from a small sofa placed by the stairway.

‘This is Royce, the mongrel,’ her husband said as he bent to pat the dog, its tongue licking the inside of his palm with a considerable force. For Lillian, who had never had much contact at all with animals inside a house, the plethora of pets was alarming. ‘He is at least fifteen years old, although Hope believes him to be older still.’

‘Hope?’

Lord, she thought, the tale she had heard of his children ensconced in some house suddenly taking on a frightening reality.

‘You will meet her and her sister tomorrow.’

Before she could answer an old man appeared, a similar-aged woman behind him pulling away the strings of a well-used apron as she too shuffled forwards.

‘Mr Lucas,’ she said, taking his arm with delight. ‘You are back already?’ Her glance took in them both. ‘And with your lady wife, too?’

‘Lillian Clairmont, meet Mr and Mrs Poole, my housekeeper and head butler.’ The appellations seemed to please the older couple and she was astonished by the fact that her husband kept up such friendly terms with the serving staff that he would introduce them like equals. The Americans were odd in such ways, she surmised, giving the woman a polite but reserved smile.

‘Well, I have your room ready, sir, and the eiderdown I embroidered myself over the winter months is just this week finished, so no doubt you will be warm and toasty.’

Your room? Warm and toasty? These words implied exactly what Lillian did not wish to hear at all, though the small squeeze her new husband gave her kept her mute.

‘I am certain everything will be well prepared, but as we are tired would it be possible to send up a tray with some food?’

Goodness, in England these words were never used to serving staff-they implied a great deal of choice on behalf of the paid attendants. As a new landlord and employer, Lucas Clairmont had a lot to learn. The sneaking feeling that he could well be getting duped with his household expenses also came to mind, though the couple before her did not, in all truth, look like a dishonest sort, but merely rather strange and doddery.

The same headache that she had been cursed with all day suddenly began to pound and despite everything she was pleased to be led upstairs by her husband and into a bedroom on the second floor.

It was a chamber like no other she had ever been in, bright orange curtains at the windows and a red and purple eiderdown proudly slung across a bed that was little bigger than a single one.

On a table were bunches of wildflowers in the sort of glass jar that jam was usually found in and beside that lay a pile of drawings. Children’s drawings depicting a family in front of a house, two small girls in pink dresses before a couple holding hands.

‘Charity likes to draw,’ her husband explained, picking up the sheath of papers and rifling through them. ‘I think she has a lot of talent.’

He held up another picture of the same black-and-white dog downstairs, though this time Royce sat in a field of wildflowers, the sun above him vividly yellow. With no idea at all of the stages of refinement in a child’s artistic ability, Lillian had to admit to herself that it seemed quite well done. Indeed, the artist had exactly copied the slobbery mouth and the matted coat, though the angel complete with halo perched before it was an unusual addition.

‘Charity always draws her mother in these things,’ Lucas explained when he saw her looking. Finding the first drawing, he alerted her to the same angel balanced on the only cloud in the sky.

‘Her mother was your first wife?’

He shook his head and the whole picture became decidedly murkier. ‘No, their mother was my wife’s sister.’

Lillian sat down. Heavily. ‘You dallied with your wife’s sister?’

‘Dallied?’ His amber eyes ran across her face, perplexity lining gold with a darker bronze. ‘I did not know her at all.’

‘I thought-they say you are their father. How could you not have known her?’ Lillian no longer cared how her voice sounded, perplexity apparent in every word.

A deep laugh was his only answer. The first time she had heard him laugh since…when? Since he had held her in the drawing room in London and shaken away her feebly offered kiss. The chamber swirled a little, dizzy anger vying with horror as she realised well and truly that she was now married to a man who appeared to have absolutely no moral fibre. And that she still wanted him!

‘The children are my wards. I am not their father, but their guardian.’

‘Oh.’ It was all that she could say, the rising blush of her foolish deduction now upon her face as he crossed the room to fill a glass of water from a pitcher and drank it.

‘Do you want one?’ he asked as he finished and when she nodded he refilled the same glass and handed it to her.

Married people shared beds and houses and glasses of water, she ruminated, and the thought made her suddenly laugh. A strange strangled sound of neither mirth nor sadness. She imagined that if she could have seen the expression on her face she might look a little like the baffled angel in Charity’s drawings-a woman who found herself in a position that she could not quite fathom.

Unexpectedly a tear dropped down her cheek and Lucas moved forwards, his thumb tracing the path of wetness with warmth.

‘I know that this is all different for you and that the house is not as you may have hoped it to be, but-’

She shook her head. ‘It is not the house.’

‘Me, then?’

She nodded. ‘I do not really know you.’ She refused to look at him as she said it, and refused to just stop there. ‘And now this room with one bed between the two of us…’

‘Nay, it is yours. Tonight I shall sleep elsewhere.’

The relief of that sentence was all encompassing, and she swallowed back more tears. She never cried, she never blushed, she had never felt this groundless shifting ambivalence that left her at such a loss, but here, tonight, she did not even recognise herself, a quivering mannerless woman who had made little effort with anyone or anything for the whole of her wedding day and was now in a room that looked like something out of a child’s colourful fairytale.

And yet beneath everything she did not want her pale and ordered old life back, and it was that thought more than anything that kept her mute.

She looked as if she might crumple if he so much as touched her, looked like a woman at the very end of her tether and the fact that the water in the glass had stained the front of her cream bodice and gone unnoticed added further credence to his summations.

His new wife was beautiful, her cheeks flushed as he had never seen them before and her skirt pushed up at such an angle that he could glimpse her shins, the stockings that covered shapely ankles implying that the rest of her legs would be just as inviting.

The direction of his thoughts worried him and to take his mind off such considerations he took the wedding ring from his pocket and laid it in his hand.

‘I retrieved this from Lord Alfred.’

She remained silent.

‘Though I have had advice that the setting may not be quite to your taste?’

A look of sheer embarrassment covered her face. ‘No, it is perfectly all right.’

Manners again, he thought, and it was on the tip of his tongue to insist otherwise when she stood and put out her hand.

‘I am sorry for the careless way I treated your ring.’

She did not say that she liked it, he noticed, as he took her left hand into his own, the fingers cold and her nails surprisingly bitten down almost to the quick.

At the very end of her forefinger was a deep crescent-shaped scar, the sort of mark a knife would make, but he said nothing for fear of spoiling the moment as he slipped the band back upon her finger.

A sign that things could be good or a shackle that held her to him despite every other difference?

‘How old was your wife when she died?’ The question unsettled him, but he made himself answer.

‘Twenty-four. Her name was Elizabeth.’

‘And you met her in Virginia?’

‘She was the daughter of an army general who was stationed near Boston.’

‘Nathaniel said that she was killed in an accident?’

The anger in him was quick, spilling out even as he tried to take back the words. ‘No. I killed her by my own carelessness. It was a rain-filled night and the path too difficult for a carriage.’

‘Did you mean for her to die?’ Lilly’s voice was measured, the matter-of-factness within it beguiling.

‘No, of course I didn’t.’

‘Then in my opinion it was an accident.’

Light blue eyes watched him without pity. Just an accident. In her view. Perhaps she was correct? The hope of it snatched away his more usual all-encompassing guilt and he breathed out, loudly.

‘Are you always so certain of things?’ This was a side of her he had not seen before.

The answering puzzled light in her eyes reminded him so forcibly of the time that he had kissed her in London he had to jam his hands in his pockets just to stop himself from reaching out again.

Not now. Not yet. Not when she so plainly was frightened of him.

‘Certain? I used to think I was such, but lately…’ The shadows of the past week bruised her humour, and because of that he tried to explain even just a little of what lay unsaid between them.

‘When I left London the night of the ball I had no notion that anyone had seen us, and I should like to explain just what happened next-’ He stopped as she shook his words away.

‘My ruination was as much my fault as it was yours. More, perhaps, for at least you had the foresight to stop it at a touch.’

‘You wanted me to keep going?’

The very thought of it had the blood rushing to places that he knew would show and he turned. Lord, suddenly he wanted all the promise of a wedding night, all the whispers, soft words and touches, the burning pleasure of release and elation.

‘I do not know…perhaps…?’

Given as a gift of honesty. The squeeze of relief in his heart made him giddy. Not at all like Elizabeth then, he thought, for she had seldom been truthful when it suited her not to be.

A knock at the door allowed the entry of two young maids who efficiently set out steaming dinners on trays at the table. A bottle of water was added to the fare just before they left.

‘You do not drink wine?’ she asked as they sat down to the supper.

‘After the carriage accident I drank too much…’

‘And then you met my cousin, whom you seem to dislike?’

Luc felt himself tense up. Lord, how was he to tell her anything, a woman who had been cocooned by a genteel and refined upbringing? He could see it in her skin, in the softness of her hands, in the worry of her eyes and in the shake of her voice. Tonight was her wedding night, damn it, and she could not wish to hear anything so sordid. Forcing a smile, he raised his glass to her. ‘There is much in my life that has been more difficult than your own, and there are things that I have done that I am now sorry for.’

‘Things?’

He laughed, more out of sheer unease than anything else, and hated the way her smile was dashed from her eyes.

‘Things that I am not proud of now, but were at the time necessary.’

‘To survive?’

He nodded. ‘Survival here is a simpler process. Break the rules in England and you are banished. Break them in Virginia and you are left fighting for your life.’

‘As you have been?’ Her eyes deliberately ran across the scar on his neck. He saw the fear in them and his hand caught hers, his fingers running along the inside of her opened palm, stroking, asking.

For a chance, for a second chance, the softness of her skin against his just a small reminder of all that was different between them.

Lilly closed her eyes and felt. For this one moment in her wedding day she just felt what it was other brides might, the trail of his fingers evoking a thrall in her she had only ever known once before. With him.

Was this an answer?

An easy ending to everything that was different between them. A bride and groom thrown together not by love, but by ruin.

She knew nothing of his life or his beliefs, nothing of his family or his country or the things that he knew as right and wrong. If they made love here and now it would be just that, bodies touching where minds could never follow, a shallow knowledge of desire that had nothing to do with the heart.

When she pulled away he let her go and stood with his hands by his side, watching, a man of honour and constraint, but one with enough questions in his eyes to make her understand what it was he asked.

If not now, then when?

The fire of his appetite was easy to interpret. Such a masculine simplicity! For a second the very sincerity of it made her pause, no pretence or artifice, no false posturing at something else either.

Not love, but need, his man’s body bristling with something she did not understand yet, but knew enough to be wary about.

‘If you could be patient.’

He nodded stiffly, the bronze in his eyes brittle. All of a sudden the sheer and utter amazement of sharing a meal at night and alone was scintillating. Exhilarating.

No longer single, but married.

The very idea of it seeped through her body in an unexpected warmth, as her memory of the one kiss he had given her began to tug at a power deep inside. It overwhelmed her, this newness of being here, and she could barely take breath as a hot flush of what he might do to her again surfaced. Too raw. Too quick after such a day. A single trail of sweat ran between her breasts and the cream dress was not thick enough to hide what she knew with horror was suddenly on show.

Her nipples stood proud against the silk, pressing and swollen. What was it that a husband did to a wife in a marriage bed beneath the sheets under the cover of darkness?

She did not know. Had never known. Until now. Until a knowledge that was as old as time itself began to wind itself through an aching anticipation, the thickening throb of her womanhood making her languid, heavy.

If he saw he did not say anything, a man who had spent the day balancing her unhappiness, her cousins’ anger and her father’s uncertainty like juggling balls as he tried to get through a wedding he could hardly want, either.

Her mind remembered Lord Hawkhurst’s uncle’s words. A happy and long marriage? She wished suddenly that she could be brave enough to ask right here and now of his movements across the last weeks and of his hopes for the future, but she did not want to in case the answers were nothing like the ones she needed to hear.

The longing in her body was replaced by a wooden fear of everything. Two strangers sharing a meal without any idea as to who each other was, their wedding clothes and rings only a ludicrous parody.

Just silence.

And then another sound.

‘Mr Lucas. Mr Lucas.’ A child’s voice from afar and as the door was flung open a small dark-haired girl bolted into the room, stopping briefly as her eyes sensed Lillian’s presence, but then regrouping.

‘You are home again. Mrs Poole said that we should wait until the morrow, but-’

‘We?’ He looked around just as she did and there at the door stood a more timid child, hair so blonde it was almost silver and eyes a wide pale blue.

‘Charity wanted me to wait, but she is so much slower I could not.’

The other child came forwards, a shy smile of gladness gathering on her lips.

‘Charity and Hope, this is Lillian Clairmont.’

Hope smiled at her, but the other child looked away.

‘We were married today at her country home of Fairley.’

‘This is your ring?’ Hope’s finger traced the band of gold on the hand that held her.

‘Indeed it is.’

‘Look, Charity. Isn’t it lovely?’ the dark-haired girl exclaimed and the smaller child nodded.

‘And the lady wore that…?’ A thread of something akin to disappointment startled Lillian, although Lucas did not seem to notice any criticism.

‘She did and she looked very beautiful.’

‘I will wear lace and silk and a tiara when I get married and I will have flowers in my hair.’

The appearance of a harried-looking governess at the doorway curtailed the amusements.

‘I am so very sorry, sir. The girls were told to stay in their room and I thought that they were there until I heard footsteps and followed the sound.’

‘Please could you come and tuck us in? Please, Mr Lucas.’

He looked at the time. ‘If you do not mind, Lillian, it is late and the girls…’

‘Indeed,’ she answered back, trying to keep her tone light. ‘They would obviously like you to settle them and I am very tired.’

He seemed to hesitate at that, as though he might have wanted to say more, but then thought again.

‘Then I shall bid you goodnight.’

‘Goodnight,’ Hope parroted, and they were all gone, just the bustling sound of them receding into silence.

Lillian stared at the closed door with a growing amazement. Goodness, she thought, and turned to lift the lurid purple eiderdown around her shoulders, the quilting on the back of it catching her eye with the very fineness of detail.

A movement to one side of the room made her start as a large grey-and-white cat padded towards her.

‘Shoo,’ she said, but the word did not seem to change the animal’s direction one bit as it lurched itself up on the bed, the sound of purring distinct and deep. Tentatively her hand went out, running across the thick fur, a quiet delight enveloping her.

‘I said shoo,’ she repeated, allowing the cat on to her lap even as she said it, the warmth of its body comforting in the cold of the evening. Soft paws pushed into her thighs, kneading the layers of silk and organza. Almost tickling.

The whole day had been a skelter of emotion. Up and down. This way, that way. Touching and distance. No true direction in any of it. She closed her eyes and breathed in, the ugly ring on her finger winking up at her with its bright deep red.

Damn, damn, damn, Luc thought, after he had tucked in the two children and gone back to his own room. The wilting ache of his body was as out of place here as his desperate attempt at ignoring the hard outline of Lillian’s breasts against silk.

Take it slowly, he thought. Give her the time she wants!

‘If you could be patient.’

But even now he wanted to go back, wanted the promise of what could be, wanted to see the beauty of what lay beneath her dress, her nipples puckered with yearning. But he could not.

Careful, he thought. Go carefully. The reason for his ordeal at sea still worried him and the truth was not as yet such an easy path to follow.

He had married Lilly to save her reputation and any other feelings that were as yet unresolved lingered in a place he had no wish to explore. Had she had any hand in his disappearance? Had Jean Taylor-Reid acted alone? Did the woman have any true idea of the danger she had placed him in? Perhaps she genuinely thought she had bought passage for him to the Americas, an easy way of dealing with a problem that was becoming more and more complex.

The whole puzzle of it made him swear and he was tempted to open the brandy standing on his desk. But he didn’t.

He needed to trust Lilly and she needed to trust him.

If he took her virginity in the guise of a man who was not exactly as he promised he was, he knew she would never forgive him.

Damn, he said again as the knowledge of what he could have just missed out on settled in his stomach like a stone.

Taking a drink of Mrs Poole’s freshly made lemonade, he settled down to read the final part of Dickens’s Bleak House, the title appropriate for all that he was feeling tonight.