Sophia James: Mistletoe Magic

‘Your colour is rather high, Lillian,’ her aunt Jean said as she joined her. ‘I do hope you are not sickening for something so close to the Yuletide season. Why, Mrs Haugh was saying to me just the other day how her daughter has contracted a bronchial complaint that just cannot be shaken and…’

But Lillian was listening no more, for Lucas Clairmont had just walked in from the balcony, a tall broad-shouldered man who made the other gentlemen here look…mealy, precious and dandified. No, she must not think like that! Concentrating instead on the mark around his bottom lip that suggested another fight, she tried to ignore the way all the women in his path watched him beneath covert hooded glances.

He was leaving with the Earl of St Auburn and a man she knew to be Lord Stephen Hawkhurst. Well-placed men with the same air of menace that he had. The fact interested her and she wondered just how it was they knew each other.

As they reached the door, however, Lucas Clairmont looked straight into her eyes, tipping his head as she had seen him do at the Lenningtons’ ball. Hating the way her heartbeat flared, Lillian spread her fan wide and hid her face from his, a breathless wonder overcoming caution as a game, of which she had no notion of the rules, was begun.

Once home herself she placed the crumpled orange pyracanthus in a single bloom vase and stood it on the small table by her bed. Both the colour and the shape clashed with everything else in her bedroom. As out of place in her life as Lucas Clairmont was, a vibrant interloper who conformed to neither position nor venue. Her finger reached out to carefully touch the hard nubs of thorn that marched down its stem. Forbidding. Protective. Unexpected in the riot of colour above it!

She wished she had left it on the balcony, discarded and cast aside, as she should be doing with the thoughts of the man who had picked it. But she had not and here it was with pride of place in a room that looked as if it held its breath with nervousness. Her eyes ran over the sheer lawn drapes about her bed, the petit-point bedcover upon it in limed cream and the lamp next to her, its chalky base topped by a faded and expensive seventeenth-century tapestry. The décor in her room was nothing like the fashion of the day with its emphasis on stripes and paisleys and the busy tones of purple and red. But she enjoyed the difference.

All had been carefully chosen and were eminently suitable, like the clothes she wore and the friends she fostered. Her life. Not haphazard or risky, neither arbitrary nor disorganised.

Once it had been, once when her mother had come home to tell them that she was leaving that very afternoon ‘to find excitement and adventure in the arms of a man who was thrilling’. The very words used still managed to make her feel slightly sick, as she remembered a young girl who had idolised her mother. She was not thrilling and so she had been left behind, an only child whose recourse to making her father happy was to be exactly the daughter he wanted. She had excelled in her lessons and in her deportment, and later still when she came out at eighteen she had been daubed an ‘original’, her sense of style and quiet stillness copied by all the younger ladies at Court.

Usually she liked that. Usually she felt a certain pride in the way she handled everything with such easy acumen. But today with the berries waving their overblown and unrestrained shapes in her room, a sense of disquiet also lingered.

Poor Lillian.

John Wilcox-Rice and his eminently sensible proposal.

Her father’s advancing age.

The pieces of her life were not quite adding up to a cohesive whole any longer, and she could pin the feeling directly to Lucas Clairmont with his easy smile and his dangerous predatory eyes.

Standing by the window, she saw an outline of herself reflected in the glass. As pale as the colours in her room, perhaps, and fading. Was she her mother’s daughter right down to the fact of finding her own ‘thrilling and unsuitable man’? She laid her palm against the glass and, on removing it, wrote her mother’s initials in the misted print

Rebecca Davenport had returned in the autumn, a thinner and sadder version of the woman who had left them, and although her father had taken her back into his house he had never taken her back into his heart. No one had known of her infidelity. The extended holiday to the Davenports’ northern estate of Fairley Manor was never explained and, although people had their suspicions, the steely correctness of Ernest Davenport had meant that they were never even whispered.

Perhaps that had made things even harder, Lillian thought. The constant charade and pretence as her mother lay dying with an ague of the soul and she, a child who went between her parents with the necessary messages, seeing any respect that they had once had for each other wither with the onset of winter.

Even the funeral had been a sham, her mother’s body laid in the crypt of the Davenports with all the ceremony expected, and then left unvisited.

No, the path Rebecca had taken had alienated her from everybody and should her daughter be so foolish as to follow in those footsteps she could well see the consequences of ‘thrilling’.

John Wilcox-Rice was a man who would never break her heart. A constant man of sound morals and even sounder political persuasions. One hand threaded through her hair and she smiled unwillingly at the excitement that coursed through her. Everything seemed different. More tumultuous. Brighter. She walked across to the bed and ran a finger across the smooth orange berries, liking the fact that Lucas Clairmont had touched them just as she was now.

Silly thoughts. Girlish thoughts.

She was twenty-five, for goodness’ sake, and a woman who had always looked askance at those highly strung débutantes whose emotions seemed to rule them. The invitation to the Cholmondeley ball on the sill caught her attention and she lifted it up. Would the American be attending this tomorrow? Perhaps he might ask her to dance? Perhaps he might lift up her hand to his again?

She shook her head and turned away as a maid came to help her get ready for bed.

Luc spent the morning with a lawyer from the City signing documents and hating every single signature he marked the many pages with.

The estate of Woodruff Abbey in Bedfordshire was a place he neither wanted nor deserved and his wife’s cries as she lay dying in Charlottesville, Virginia, were louder here than they had been in all the months since he had killed her.

He did not wish for the house or the chattels. He wanted to walk away and let the memories lie because recollection had the propensity to rekindle all that was gone.

Shaking away introspection, he made himself smile, a last armour against the ghosts that dragged him down.

‘Will you be going up to look the old place over, Sir?’

‘Perhaps.’ Non-committal. Evasive.

‘It is just if you wish me to accompany you, I would need to make plans.’

‘No. That will not be necessary.’ If he went, he would go alone.

‘The servants, of course, still take retainers paid for by the rental of the farming land, though in truth the place has been let go badly.’

‘I see.’ He wanted just to leave. Just to take the papers and leave.

‘Your wife’s sister’s daughters are installed in the house. Their mother died late last year and I wrote to you-’

Luc looked up. ‘I did not have any such missive.’

The lawyer rifled through a sheath of sheets and, producing a paper, handed it across to him. ‘Is this not your handwriting, sir?’ A frown covered his brow.

With his signature staring up at him, Luc could do nothing else but nod.