Ten Lords A-Leaping: A Mystery (Father Christmas) (5 page)

“
H
ello. Are you off to a fancy dress party?”

“No,” the boy replied fiercely.

Tom regarded the diminutive figure curiously carapaced in well-tailored evening wear: black jacket with shawl collar, low-cut waistcoat, black silk bow tie, and patent-leather Oxfords glinting in the evening sunshine. If there were anyone on the terrace better dressed for a weekend country house party, it was this bright young thing in full formal fig. He was wearing a monocle, too.

“Aren’t you a little young to be smoking?”

“They’re Turkish cigarettes.”

“I’m not sure that answers my question.”

The boy placed the cigarette against his lips, affected to take a long drag, then waved his hand away, raising his head to the sky to release a long plume of imagined smoke.

“Where did you get that?” A woman’s voice sounded sharply behind the open French doors, startling them both.

“Uncle Olly gave it to me.” The boy edged away.

“Yes, and that’s precisely how it begins.” A moment later a sandaled, tanned foot slipped onto the terrace to the tinkle of ice cubes, followed by the figure of Lady Lucinda fforde-Beckett, pale skin flushed, though not, Tom considered, by the roseate refraction of sunlight on Eggescombe’s red brick. She curled her glass against one arm and brandished the other arm at the boy. “Give it to me.”

“Darling, have you a light?” The boy put the cigarette again to his lips and waggled one eyebrow in a saucy, come-hither fashion.

“Maximilian!”

“Oh, darling, you
must
have a light.”

“Stop it, Maxie.” Whatever ill temper Lucinda had brought with her to the terrace now evaporated like mist drenched by sun. A tiny smile twitched at the corners of her mouth, setting a kindling light to her deep blue-violet eyes.

“What do you think? Is it me? Is it
one
, rather?” The boy struck a number of mannequin poses, all with the cigarette in hand.

“It would be, if you weren’t eleven years old.” She laughed, with a quick confiding glance at Tom. “Now give that to me.”

Max ignored her through a couple more poses, then said with exaggerated effect, “Darling, I’ve run out of cigarettes, why don’t you have this one?”

“Thank you, darling,” Lucinda responded, now Gertrude Lawrence to Max’s Noël Coward, taking the offending item.
“I’m Lucy fforde-Beckett”—she turned to Tom, fixing him with her remarkable eyes—“and this is my nephew Max, who may have a career in theatre.”

“And you’re the Reverend Tom Christmas,” the boy said, offering a hand. “I’m
so
pleased to meet you. I’ve been having a splendid time entertaining your charming daughter. Don’t get up.”

“I don’t think I’m allowed,” Tom replied from his sun lounger, taking the small hand in his own. “Your grandmother is insistent I stay off my feet for a while.”

“Mr. Christmas is spending the weekend.” Lucinda rolled the cigarette thoughtfully between the fingers of one hand and raised her glass to her lips with the other.

“I say, how wizard! I’m so pleased. I have a theological question I should like to ask you.”

“Oh?” Tom replied.

“For instance, if Pater’s emergency parachute hadn’t opened—”

“But it did open, Maxie.”

“If it
hadn’t
opened,” Max continued, ignoring his aunt, “and he had died, would his soul have gone to hell?”

Tom started. “Well—”

“Maxie, for God’s sake, surely you have enough RE at Ampleforth.”

“Yes, but I should like to have Mr. Christmas’s views.” Max adjusted his monocle and explained, “We’re Roman Catholic.”

“Ah, yes.” Tom knew that from a spot of Googling. “I believe the Catholic conception of the afterlife teaches that those who die in unrepentant mortal sin go to, well, hell. But
I’m sure there’s no danger of your father …” He stopped, troubled at the wave of uncertainty that rippled across Max’s features.

“Perhaps Pater was given the wrong kit. Perhaps someone
wanted
him to die.”

“Max, don’t be horrid.” Lucinda contemplated her now empty glass. “Why would you think such a thing?”

“I heard … Miranda and I heard,” the boy amended, “someone say so.”

“The emergency chute opened,” Tom said gently.
Though it took a bloody frighteningly long time
. “They almost never fail. Your father made a perfectly safe landing. He’s very practised at this, of course. He was an officer in the Parachute Regiment.”

“Long before you were born,” Lucinda added unnecessarily.

“If Pater died, then I would become eleventh Earl of Fairhaven, wouldn’t I.”

“Max, darling, buzz off.”

The boy flashed his aunt a faltering glance before straightening himself and brushing an invisible dust mote from his jacket. “Yes, I really must see to my guest. I left Miranda in the drawing room.”

“Gruesome child,” Lucinda laughed when he had disappeared behind the French doors.

“ 
‘Wizard’?
”

“The antique slang, you mean? I suspect his grandmother’s influence. Sending him copies of Enid Blyton to read. Or what are those old books about that silly pilot …?”

“Biggles.”

“Or perhaps Wodehouse. Saki? I’m not sure. Anyway, he seems to have a healthy dose of the fforde-Beckett gene.”

“For … theatricality?”

“No, for a certain cold-bloodedness. Look us up. Not
Burke’s
. Try the
Daily Mail
. I think I will have this cigarette,” she added, placing her empty glass on the balustrade. “Do you have a light?”

“I’m afraid I don’t smoke. Do you? You seemed adamantly against it.”

“I’m not adamantly against anything, really, but I’d rather my nephew’s innocence not be poisoned by my brother.”

“Which brother?” Tom asked without thinking.

“Oliver, of course. ‘Mad’ Morborne, as he likes to call himself. The one who gave Maxie the cigarette.” She raised a shapely eyebrow. “Then you know a bit about the twisty twigs on the fforde-Beckett family tree.”

“Only a bit. Lady Kirkbride kindly filled me in.”

“My two brothers are only halves—to me. A good half and a bad half,” she added glumly.

“I expect you could get a light over there.” Tom gestured towards the other end of the terrace where a wreath of smoke floated lazily above heads in the evening’s luxuriant light. With the boy gone, he allowed himself a more candid appraisal of Lady Lucinda fforde-Beckett, of whom he had only been vouchsafed glimpses through the afternoon from the prison of his sickbed in the middle of the lawn. The simple, creamy frock cut low across the shoulder seemed to hug the curve of her body, an invitation for his eyes to linger then follow as she waded through the human sea of villagers and children, her half brother Dominic, similarly attired in off-white,
in tow. There was something alluring, too, in her bearing, with its athletic fluidity and self-confidence, and he realised, as his eyes roved around the lawn in search of her, that he was enduring an uncomfortable spurt of lust.

Now as she looked over towards the group of men at the other end of the terrace, he could behold her more properly. With the earlier flush subsided in her cheeks to tiny strawberry patches, her skin was revealed almost translucent, fine and white, in the Elizabethan ideal, even after months of summer sun in the south of France. There was a fineness, too, to the bones of her face, to the graceful jaw, and to her hair, tousled filaments of gold and auburn. But her eyes trounced all these measures of female delicacy. Heavy-lidded, under high-arched brows, they were immense, remarkable and bold, and somehow managed to seem both challenging and withholding. As she looked towards the knot of casually dressed men, Tom saw those eyes harden with a flashing hint of some strong emotion. At the same time, one of the men, Oliver, distinguishable by his embroidered African-inspired shirt and coloured kufi hat, turned his head, as if inexorably drawn to do so. He was at the centre of the men, a passel of other peers, winding up some story with a burst of chortle and boom, his right eye screwed up against the smoke ascending from the cigarette bobbing on his lips. He scowled, his left eye telegraphing a beam of such contempt that Tom caught himself suppressing a gasp. Brother and sister held each other’s gaze for a time longer than was decent. And then Lucinda turned back, her face altered by a thin veil of loathing. She flicked the cigarette over the balustrade.

“Do you have a family, Mr. Christmas? Of course you do.
Maxie is entertaining your daughter. Where then is Mrs. Christmas this weekend?”

“I’m a widower, as it happens.”

“Oh?” Doubt shaded her voice as she glanced at his hands.

“I am, truly. Yes, that is a wedding band, but I’ve put it on my right hand. A little hard to let go completely.”

Lucinda regarded him speculatively for a moment. “Have they put you in the bachelors’ corridor then?” She smiled. “I expect not. Far too many stairs.”

“It’s only a light sprain,” Tom protested. “Lady Fairhaven has kindly supplied me with a pair of crutches.” He gestured to an antique dark oak pair leaning against the brick.

“Marguerite?”

“Your sister, actually, though I think Dowager Lady Fairhaven went looking for them.”

“Really? Georgie lifted a finger to help someone?” Lucinda’s smile tightened. “I’m sorry. Do go on.”

Tom blinked, uncertain whether to pursue the subject of her sister. “Apparently an ancestor of Lord Fairhaven’s in the nineteenth century had an accident similar to mine.”

“He couldn’t possibly have fallen from the sky.”

“No, I think he fell rather badly over a croquet hoop. He was an early enthusiast for the game.”

“Ah, then you’re in the Opium Bedroom on the ground floor. Whoever Hector’s ancestor was, he had it redecorated for his short convalescence. It really is the most splendid bedroom in the house. I am sorry about your wife.” Lucinda canted her head slightly. “Was it—?”

“Sudden? Yes, very. She was killed.”

“How awful.” The words were anodyne, but an eyebrow twitched with curiosity.

Tom was used to it. “Murder. By person or persons unknown. We were living in Bristol at the time.”

Lucy glanced again down the terrace towards the grouping of men. “At the time,” she murmured. “You don’t—”

“We live—my daughter and I—live at Thornford Regis now. I’m the vicar of St. Nicholas Church, have been for about the last year and a half.”

“Of course. It’s your church that today’s event was for. But your wife—”

“It will be four years in November.”

“Do you get lonely?”

Her candour gave him pause. “From time to time.”

“I don’t like being alone. I expect that’s why I forced Dominic to drive me down from London. Dominic’s my good half brother.”

“I know. Well, I know at least that he’s your half brother.”

“They
have
been talking about me.”

“No, not really.” Tom spoke honestly. All he had sussed was a vague air of concern wrought by her relatives’ reactions to her unexpected presence—Jane’s warning tone, Marguerite’s dash to the terrace, now Oliver’s cold glance.

An amused light in Lucinda’s extraordinary eyes suggested she didn’t believe him. “You don’t have a drink.”

“I did, a G and T, but someone scooped up the glass.”

“The redoubtable Gaunt, I expect. I’ll get you another.”

He watched her trim figure stride down the terraced steps, the back view as captivating as the front view had been earlier
in the day, but he quickly sent his eyes elsewhere, through the falling light, across the dusky expanse of the park, lest he be caught out in an unvicarly oglefest. He noted the borders of the lawn, highlighted against the darker mass of trees, dotted with the detritus of the afternoon’s event, the tents and stalls, all waiting for tomorrow’s disassembly, soon to disappear into creeping shadow. He shifted his glance nearer, to the drooping bunches of wisteria along the balustrade, mauve in the afternoon, now, he observed, plum purple in evening. But he couldn’t help his eyes searching out Lucinda, though she was largely obscured by the stonework and floral array as she busied herself at a drinks table. More visible was Gaunt, Lord Fairhaven’s butler-valet, ramrod-stiff in his impeccably neat black suit and white shirt, ministering to a very large gas barbecue—untroubled, judging from his impassive expression, by spurting flames—from which the smell of cooking beef wafted gorgeously into the evening air. The peerage sipping gin on the terrace, however—Tom couldn’t help noticing—appeared little distinguishable from those undoubtedly quaffing ale this fine summer evening outside Thornford’s Church House Inn, many in short trousers, all in knit shirts, men dressed as boys, in the modern and universal fashion. He looked down at himself, still in clerical shirt, clerical collar, and long dark trousers. He felt out of place.

With his head turned again towards Lucinda, who seemed to have fallen into conversation with one of the lords, he failed to notice the figure bending down towards him until a silver tray dotted with canapés slid under his nose.