Mistletoe Magic (17 page)

Her hand fisted tight and he leant to place a kiss on the back of her knuckles, laving the spaces between with his tongue, the trail of coldness making Lillian shiver.

Her husband. A man fashioned by hardship and loneliness and the absence of family that had shaped all of his life.

And now. What was he now? Just at this moment in this room with their skin against the daylight and the feel of each so known?

Lovers? Friends? Two halves of a whole made complete? The beginning of a life that glinted in the red stone on her finger, tantalisingly close.

‘Love me, Lucas,’ she whispered.

‘I do,’ he answered and his mouth came down to claim hers in reply.

He had left when she woke, the dent in the sheets where he had lain, cold and empty.

Her hand smoothed down the creases and she turned towards his side so that she lay watching the window, the smile that played at her lips pushing into the pillow with a shy incredulity.

‘Goodness,’ she whispered, remembering. She had always been so controlled, so restrained, so correct and careful and proper.

But not this morning!! The hours with Luc had cured her of ever being
proper
again, his hands in places she had not dreamed of, and showing her things she could never have imagined. Stretching, she felt elation rise. She was a wife in truth now, and one who knew the secrets of a marriage bed.

A tiny piece of misdoubt remained as she also thought of the marks that crossed his body. No little accidents or paltry cuts. The scar on his leg ran from his groin to his knee and the one at his neck reached the blade of his shoulder. And that was discounting the long wound still beneath the bandage. She frowned. The man who had left England as a boy had had enemies; that much was certain. Still had enemies, she corrected.

Could she ask him about it? Would he tell her? Her father had seldom spoken to her mother of anything of importance. She knew because Rebecca had complained of it again and again to her friends when she thought Lillian was not listening.

Was this the way of marriage? She shook her head and played with her ring. In the light the stone shone red against the sheets, and in the newly cleaned yellow gold she saw markings. Slipping the bauble off, she brought it up to her eyes and read an inscription of three words held within the band.

Whither thou goest…

Lillian finished it off from memory in a whisper. ‘…I will go: and where thou lodgest I will lodge.’

She sat up, the declaration of devotion from the Book of Ruth making her heart thump. Did Lucas know these letters lay within the ring? Had he meant them for her? The band was an old one, fashioned, she imagined, some time in the last century, the worth of it considerable. Had it been only recently engraved or was it an ancient troth given between other lovers? His grandmother’s, he had said, and the only worldly tie to a family lost to him. Slipping it back on, she clenched her hand inwards, the value of gold and precious stone as nothing compared to the worth of the words.

A shimmer of hope crossed her heart like a kiss beneath the magic of mistletoe or the first dusting of fine snow when the Christmas bells rang true.

New! Exciting! Full of promise!

Pushing back the sheets, she stood, donning a nightgown left on the oak chest at the foot of his bed, the material holding the smell of Lucas and the folds of fabric easily reaching to her feet. With care she pulled the bedding upwards so that the prying eyes of the maids she
summoned would not see the chaos that such loving had wreaked and then she waited for a hot bath to be filled.

There were two men in the library with her husband when she went to find him a few hours later. Two men who looked nothing like refined country folk or city gentlemen.

Dangerous.

The word came out of nowhere and made her stop, fright replacing all that had been there a moment earlier, and Lucas’s expression daunted her further.

‘Lillian.’ His tone was distant but polite as he moved in front of the visitors, shielding them from her gaze. ‘I am busy now. If you could wait until later?’

‘Indeed?’ She could not keep the question from her response, though nothing showed on his face save guardedness.

Looking further on to the desk, she noticed a pile of paper bank notes of the larger denominations and beside them lay a gun. Not the elegant shape of a duelling pistol, either, but the serious contours of a lethal shooting tool. The small Christmas tree that Charity had made him as a present sat squarely beside it, its red and silver stars the reminder of a season of goodwill and peace.

Not here though!

Not in this room!

Not with men who looked like foreign sailors or thieves, their eyes falling away from her own even as
she glanced at them. Her right hand crossed her left, feeling for her ring.

‘I will await you in the blue salon,’ she added frostily, accepting her husband’s help with the door as she sailed through it, the wide sway of her gown breaking the growing silence with its own particular music.

Once outside she stopped and took stock. Lucas’s arm was out of the sling Mrs Poole had fashioned for him, and the clothes he wore were riding ones. Could he have been out already?

Eight days until Christmas and her house was filling up with guns, blood money and ruffians of a foreign persuasion, not to mention the chilling anger that had dwelt in her husband’s eyes before he had been able to hide it.

She took three deep breaths and heard the sound of a squeal from the stairs.

Rounding the corner, she saw Hope and Charity playing with a puppy who looked nothing like any other dog she had ever seen. And Hope was calling to it, as it leapt to try to take a ball.

Lillian walked forwards. ‘Where did the puppy come from, poppet?’

‘Mrs Poole brought it over early this morning and Mr Lucas said we could keep it because Royce is getting to be so old. Can we, Lilly?’ This entreaty, given her husband’s promise already made, was so unexpected that she could not help but nod. Charity’s head was bobbing up and down, too, and Lillian thought for a
second that the child might even speak, for she pursed her lips in the way of a ‘please’.

This morning could not possibly become any stranger, she thought. A husband sequestered with men who looked like pirates and a puppy dog with baby fat showing through the ample folds of its pink-and-white skin.

But when Stephen Hawkhurst suddenly burst through the front door in full riding kit and without knocking, she revised her opinion.

It just had!

‘I
need to speak to Lucas!’ he shouted, the anger in his words causing the children and the puppy to cower behind her.

Her glance took in the sword in his scabbard and the holster containing a gun.

‘Why, what on earth could be wrong—?’ she began.

‘Lillian, I have been lodging at the inn in the village in case of trouble. Tell me where Luc is, for the others are right behind me and there are many of them.’ The anguish in his tone was unmistakable though his words petered out as her husband strode into the room.

‘What the hell is happening?’

Stephen’s eyes widened with relief. ‘They are here, Luc.’

‘You’ve seen them?’

‘From the hill beyond the village! A group of six men coming this way. They will be here within a few minutes.’

Crossing the salon in three strides, Luc pulled her and the children towards the stairwell, depositing the frantic puppy into Hope’s arms.

‘Go up to our bedroom, Lilly, and lock the door. There is a gun in the drawer. Do you know how to use a gun?’

She shook her head.

‘Then pretend you do,’ he answered back, not phased at all by her ignorance. ‘If anyone comes into the room, point it at their chest and buy some time.’

‘Time,’ she parroted, the whole idea of what it was he wanted beginning to make her shake, but already he had turned away and the men she had seen in the library were priming their own weapons.

‘Come on, girls,’ she said in a tone that she prayed was reassuring. ‘We have many more Christmas decorations to make.’

When she saw her husband smile at her, the warmth in her heart warred with the whole terrible possibility that she, Lillian Davenport, had married a murderous and unrepentant stranger whose very soul was in utter and mortal danger.

Lucas took a breath as he watched his wife leave, her ridiculous comment about making Christmas decorations wringing a kind of respectful disbelief in him, the power of a woman’s ability to shield children from anything dangerous so intrinsic in feminine virtue.

Virtue!

When had virtue deserted his life? At fourteen, perhaps, when he had worked out a hard passage to
America and learned things no youth should ever know. At twenty when the land he was breaking in demanded the sweat of a man twice his size and when the bank had no time for an injury that had nearly killed him? Or when Elizabeth had died in the mad dash to the midwife in Hampton while in labour with Daniel Davenport’s child?

Consulting his uncle’s watch, he checked the time. Something prosaic about that, too, he thought as he did it, given that Stuart Clairmont had long since run out of the same commodity.

The stealth of vengeance stilled him and he flipped a coin.

‘Heads I get the gateway.’

Stephen smiled. ‘Tails, you have the front door.’

When the florin showed the face of Victoria, Luc pushed open the portal and ran for it. He breathed in when no gunshots were heard, relief overcoming everything as his fingers tightened on the stock of the gun.

The beat of his heart and the sound of his breathing in the damp closeness of the day were all he could hear, save the wind in the trees on the far side of the gardens as he made his way around the pathway. The orange rosehips of the winter roses hung from their brown branch. If he came out of this he would pick them on his return and take them up to his wife. And then he promised himself he would tell her exactly who he was.

Lillian set the little girls the task of making a list of Christmas games that they would dearly like to play. She
had instructed Hope to write out the rules so that they knew exactly how each game went and for Charity to make an illustration of it.

‘Will Mr Lucas be all right, Lilly?’ Charity’s voice? Perfectly formed words with a voice that was slightly husky.

Lilly dropped to her knees in front of the child, tears behind her amazement. ‘You can speak, Charity?’

‘Oh, she always could, to me.’ Hope was dismissive of such a momentous occasion. ‘But she loves you, too, and so she chose to speak. When our mother died she just stopped, but with you here just like our mama…’

Lilly’s hand went out to the little girl’s face, brushing her fingers against one pale soft cheek.

‘Thank you, Charity. Will you speak to Mr Lucas, too?’ A shy little nod confirmed that she would and Lillian took her into her arms. As a mother would cuddle a child. Her child. Her children. Lucas and her and Hope and Charity. When the little girl broke away after a moment and returned to her drawings, Lilly moved across to Lucas’s desk, surreptitiously wiping away her tears of gladness.

His drawer was full of pens and pencils and to one side she recognised the red-wax stamp of the Davenport family on a letter.

Why would he have that? She did not dare to unfurl the seal in case she could not rejoin it, but she could see Daniel’s writing on the outside. Placing the letter down, she dug deeper into the drawer and brought out a set of
soldier’s medals carelessly tangled and engraved with the name of Lieutenant Lucas Clairmont from the 5th Regiment of Infantry of the New York Militia. A date stood out. 1844. Counting backwards, she determined that would have made him all of twenty-four when he had received them.

To one side of his desk on a sheet of paper she saw her cousin Daniel’s name scratched out beneath another. Elizabeth Clairmont, Lucas’s first wife. Had they known each other in America? Could this be the reason for their feud and for the letter here with the Davenport seal?

Lord! She could barely understand any of it.

Had she made love to a man who would tell her nothing of the truth of his life, his whispers of something different more questionable now as she wondered if she was a part of the same charade? No. She would not think like that. She would not talk herself into the wronged woman until she had spoken with her husband and given him at least the chance to explain it all. When the shouts of anger from beneath the window drifted upwards she told Hope and Charity to stay down on the floor and peeked most carefully out from the very corner of the window.

To see a man take a shot at Lucas from the closest of distances!

‘Damn it,’ Luc swore as the bullet mercifully missed his head by the breadth of a farthing on its edge. ‘You should have taken a body shot,’ the soldier in him
chided, though the man opposite was already re-cocking his pistol and he had no more time to lose.

His own bullet went true as the large man fell and a voice sounded out across the distance of the drive.

‘If you don’t come out now, I will shoot your friend.’

Daniel Davenport’s voice, and then Stephen’s!

‘Don’t do it, Luc. He will shoot me anyway—’

Hawk’s voice was suddenly cut off. Not a shot, though. He had not heard that. The butt of a gun or the sharper bite of a sword? For Stephen’s sake he prayed for the former.

Doubling back around the house, he had a good view of Davenport standing over Stephen and was pleased to see Lillian’s cousin had absolutely no notion of him being there.

‘Ten seconds or he dies. Nine…eight…seven….’

On the count of six Luc fired, the man to the left of Davenport falling without a fight.

‘Damn,’ he muttered, re-sighting his pistol and seeking the protection of the thick bough of a yew tree.

How many more men had Davenport brought and was Stephen still alive?

Looking around for anything he could use to his advantage, he found it in the heavy swathe of a hawthorn bush less than twenty yards away. If he could reach it, the plant would allow him an excellent cover to see around the whole side of the building.

Lillian saw Lucas meant to make a run for it, meant to leave his shelter and make for a spot further out and
one that would allow him to see exactly where Lord Hawkhurst was. Goodness, if he should try she knew that he would never make it, the guns of those who held Hawkhurst firing before he would get there. If that happened they would be up the steps to the house next and she had very little wherewithal with which to protect the girls.

Could she open the window further and chance shouting out their positions? What if she threw something out to distract the men, to draw their fire this way whilst Lucas ran? The small solid wooden table next to her, for instance. She measured the width of the glass and, surmising it to fit, ordered Hope and Charity behind the sofa on the other side of the room.

Then she threw the piece of furniture with all her might, simply heaving it towards the middle of the glass and letting it go.

The shots came almost instantly, a wide round of them right at the window, pinging off its frame though one veered from the trajectory.

She felt it as a pinch, a tiny niggling ache that blossomed into a larger one, the red circle small at first and then spreading on the white of her dress. Breathing out, she sat down, her legs giving way to a dizzy swirling unbalance.

She heard the girl’s screams through the numbing coldness and tried to take their hands, tried to reassure them, tried to tell them to stay down behind the sofa and out of harm’s way.

But she couldn’t because the dark and deepening blackness was leaching light from her world.

And then she knew nothing.

Luc was running, guns blazing past the hawthorn and around the corner, two men falling as he turned and another backing away.

Daniel Davenport. Today he looked nothing like the man from the drawing rooms of London and certainly nothing like the English lord who had held Elizabeth under his spell. No, today the fear in his eyes was all encompassing as the gun he cocked at Luc clicked empty.

His wife’s lover.

Stuart’s tormentor.

Retribution.

Pull the trigger and that would be the end of it. But he couldn’t. Not in cold blood. Not with a man who looked him straight in the eyes.

‘Kill him.’ Stephen’s words from the ground were said through pain and anger.

Lucas shook his head as Davenport spat at him, egging on a different and easier ending. But Luc merely smiled.

‘Ruination to a man like this can be worse than death. When Society hears of your assault on my family home, you will never be welcomed in it again.’

The redness of Lillian’s cousin’s pallor faded to white, but Luc had more pressing matters to attend to. Giving the gun to Stephen and the gathering Woodruff servants he told them to lock Daniel up in the storeroom
before he ran for the house and for Lilly, with every breath he took, praying she had not been hit by a stray bullet, though the girls’ screams suggested otherwise.

‘Lilly?’ Her name called from a distance, a tunnel of blurred colour and a face close.

“Lilly.’ He tried again and this time Lucas stood above her, dressed in the clothes he had been wearing when she…fell asleep? That wasn’t right. It was nighttime, and her curtains were shut, a lamp throwing the room into shadow.

‘Thirsty.’ She could barely croak out the word and when water was brought to her lips she tried to take big sips, but he drew it back.

‘The doctor said just a little water and often.’ Putting the glass on the table, he stepped back.

‘Girls?’

‘Are asleep after I promised them they could come to see you in the morning. Charity is chattering now even more than Hope. She sent you “a thousand kisses.”’

‘And Lord Hawkhurst?’

‘Stephen is in the room next door with a bandaged head and two missing teeth.’

She nodded, the hugeness of all that had happened too great to contemplate right now. Lucas did not touch her, did not take her hand, did not sit on the empty chair beside the bed or fluff up her pillows. He looked angry, distracted and worried all at the same time.

Swallowing, the dryness in her mouth abated slightly
from the liquid, but she did not even want to know what had happened to her until she could cope.

Closing her eyes, she slept.

He was still there the next time she awoke. He slumbered on a chair, one leg balanced on a leather stool with a picture of an elephant engraved into it. His hands were crossed over his midriff, his wedding band of gold easily seen, his chin shadowed by the stubble of a day’s growth of beard.

As if he knew that she watched him, his eyes opened. Sleepily at first and then with great alarm.

‘Lilly?’ His word was loud, quick, the sound of desperate horror and then relief when she blinked. ‘I thought you were…’

He did not finish the sentence, but she knew exactly what he meant.

‘I’m that ill?’

‘No.’ He leant forward now, the bulk of his shape shading out the lamp behind him so that she could no longer really see his face.

‘How long have I been asleep?’

He looked at his watch. ‘Twelve hours.’

She wriggled her toes and her fingers and tried to lift her head.

‘I was shot?

‘The bullet passed through the flesh on your side. Another inch and…’ He didn’t finish.

‘I found Daniel’s name beneath that of your wife’s…’
She closed her eyes tight, the tears she wanted to hold back squeezing past and running down her cheeks into her hair. ‘You risked everything for revenge?’

The look on his face was strained and tired, guilt marking gold eyes as plain as day. Turning away as he hesitated, she burrowed into her pillow, not wishing to hear anything else that he might say.

Hope and Charity came with Mrs Wilson in the late morning, the steaming porridge and freshly made bread they brought whetting an appetite that she had thought might never return again.

She could eat, she could smile, she could hold the girls’ hands and pretend to them that all the violence and horror of yesterday was quite an adventure.

She did not ask where her husband was or where her cousin was. She did not dwell on what had happened to the bodies of those who had come to Woodruff with Daniel, or that when Lucas had aimed he had not meant to merely wound. He was a soldier trained for other things!

What else he was she did not know, did not want to know. He had lied and lied and lied and even for the time she had lain with him soft in the daylight with all the hours in the world to tell the truth, still he had not.