Mistletoe Magic

Chapter Sixteen

Lucas was not at breakfast at all the next morning, a fact that Lillian found strange; by the middle of the afternoon she was beginning to wonder just exactly where he was, for he had left in the early evening of the previous day and had been more than a little distracted. She had been glad when he had come to tell her of his need to leave Woodruff for a few hours because the kiss of the afternoon lingered still, clouding every reasonable argument she thought of that might stop her going further.

Her daydreams were vivid and passion-filled. No constraint on imagination after what had happened yesterday. Now her mind followed other paths, unbridled and giddy paths that had no mind for limits and no time for a marriage convened in name only.

The dress she wore today seemed to mirror all her thoughts, the lace trimming it barely covering places that she had always kept well shielded. She had put it on in hope that Lucas would be back to see it, but by midday had given up on that hope and had begun instead to explore Woodruff Abbey.

After a good half an hour she found a room off a conservatory at one end of the house containing a library whose shelves gave the impression of having never being culled since the first literate member of the family had begun to call the Abbey home. Sitting in a chair, she was looking at a book with various lithographs of Bath when she became aware of a rustling behind her, the quick order of quiet that came after it telling her that it was the children that she had met two nights back.

Hope and Charity.

Whilst wondering what mother in her right mind would saddle her children with such names, a small white winter rose hit her on the arm. And then another one.

Playing the game, she rose and picked them up, cradling them in her hand.

‘Why, it is flower snow…’

The whispering stopped to be replaced by silence.

‘Fairies send this to earth to remind children of their manners.’ She looked around, making an effort not to glance in the direction of an old table that she knew them to be behind.

A small giggle could be heard.

‘But this does not sound like a fairy laugh…?’ She moved forwards meaning to take the game further, but Hope’s face poked out before she could.

‘It is us,’ she said simply, like a child who did not have a great knowledge of how to play at make-believe and pretend. ‘We picked the flowers from the garden yesterday before the rain,’ she qualified, looking out of the windows that graced the whole wall of this wide room. Drops distorted the glass, the heavy greyness outside making everything colder within.

Charity came out from behind her, both children dressed in identical matching aprons.

‘You have been doing your lessons?’

Hope’s face contorted. ‘We did not have to do anything until a month ago when Mr Lucas said that we must and he found us a tutor.’

‘Learning is a good thing,’ Lillian countered, gesturing to the book she held. ‘Reading can give you many hours of happiness.’

The children did not answer, but looked at her with uncertain faces. Trying to find some topic that might be of more interest, she happened on the season.

‘Do you make decorations with your governess?’

Both little girls shook their heads. ‘Mrs Wilson tells us that we are too old for Christmas now.’

‘Too old for Christmas?’ Suddenly she felt unreasonably angry towards a woman who would tell two motherless little girls such a fib. ‘No one is too old for Christmas. It is a fact.’

Hope crept closer. ‘Last year we brought a tree in from outside. Mrs Poole let us thread paper to decorate it and she cooked lovely things like plum pudding. But this year it is different. We just have to study because Mrs Wilson tells us we have missed out on so much knowledge.’

Charity nodded behind her, giving Lillian the impression of hearing every word her sister said. So she was not deaf!

Different for Lillian, too, the bare lack of seasonal joy all around this room suddenly rankling. ‘If I was able to find some paper and paint and scissors and glue, would you be able to help me decorate this room?’

‘Now?’

‘As it is only just over a week until Christmas we have no more time to waste.’

Charity’s little head bobbed up and down, the first time Lillian had seen her decide something before her sister and for a second she opened her mouth as if she might speak, but she didn’t, and with her blonde-white hair and pale eyes she suddenly reminded her of someone.

Herself as a young child! Trying to please. Apprehensive. Motherless. She swallowed back sadness, the great wave of grief catching her sideways. She had not cried when her mother had left because her father had needed strength and fortitude, and she had not cried after Rebecca’s death either because by then the ingrained habit of coping had taken hold.

Coping!

How good once she had been at that.

‘We have some silver ribbon and tiny pinecones in boxes in our room, Lilly. Would that be useful, do you think?’

‘Indeed it would be.’ Lillian placed the book she had been browsing back on to its shelf and held out her arms to the girls. When two small warm hands crept into her own she had the sudden thought that she had never before touched a child or even been close to one. And when her own fingers curled into theirs she also realised just how much she had missed out on.

Luc returned just as dusk was falling on the land, the rain that had been present all day as a downpour becoming more like a shower, the drops of it caught in the last shards of light.

Woodruff stood in a rainbow, its lines etched against a leaden sky. Like a treasure, he thought to himself, at the end of a rainbow. Lilly and Charity and Hope.

He pushed the gun he held into the saddlebag and took his knife from where it was hidden in his sock, tucking it in beside the pistol. His sleeve he pulled down too, the deep cut on his forearm so obviously from a blade he wanted no one to see it.

Daniel Davenport had just sat down for a drink in a pub near Fairley when Lucas had surprised him, and the two other fellows drinking with him, who were familiar, their hands filled today with drink instead of the batons in London when they had waylaid him on the city streets.

Davenport had scampered quickly away and Luc swore at the memory of it before looking up. The day was dark though it was barely evening and Christmas was close. Perhaps it was the seasonal tidings, then, that explained his leniency with the others’ lives, discharging the pair into the hands of the local constabulary before making his way back to Woodruff. Even six weeks ago he would have had no compunction in killing them, but the influence of Lilly upon everything seemed to have trickled even into his need for revenge.

‘Damn,’ he muttered as a branch whipped across him, pain marking his face when it dug into his aching arm, where one of the pair had surprised him with a hidden knife. The lights of the house were bright and the sound of music came from within.

Christmas music, he determined as he got closer.

Sing choirs of angels

Sing in exaltation

Sing all ye citizens of Heaven above

The first pelt of a heavier rain made him grimace as he turned his horse for the stables and prepared to dismount.

They had worked all afternoon on the library, pulling an aged pianoforte from its covers to set it up near the tree Mr Poole had cut for them, which was now adorned haphazardly in red and green and gold and silver. Stars, hearts and twirling paper cut-outs bedecked each branch and plaited chains ran from an angel at the very top: an angel fashioned from an old doll of Hope’s. A roaring fire burned now in the grate and chased the dark shadowed coldness from the room.

Festive and bright, the smell of sharp evergreen was in the air and the sound of crackling chestnuts on the hotplate above the flames.

Not a white or a pale shade on show. Lillian thought of her perfectly decorated rooms at Fairley, so different from this, the expensive trimmings laid in exactly the same pattern each and every year.

Yet here with the children’s governess on the pianoforte, Mrs Poole singing her heart out beside her and the children in their night attire snuggled in, Lillian felt a certain peace of spirit that she had never known before. She had never sung the carols like this at the top of her voice with no care for tune or melody, had never eaten her supper on a tray with mismatched utensils and a flower across the top of the plate that looked as if it had been in a storm for weeks. But Charity had picked it from the garden between the showers and handed it to her shyly, so Lillian had given it pride of place, the lurid blood-red reminiscent of Lucas’s taste in blooms. Hope traced the shape of her wedding ring as the song came to an end, one of the cats trying to lick the icing sugar from her fingers.

‘I do not like your ring much, Lilly. When I get married I shall have a slender band with one single diamond.’

Lillian laughed, the truth of it so naïvely and honestly given, and at that moment Lucas stepped into the room.

She was laughing, the children beside her in a library that was completely changed. Things hung everywhere, Christmas things, all hand-fashioned, he surmised, and a tree stood where before had been only a chair.

His library. Gone. Replaced by a grotto of light and sound, hot chocolate drinks on the tables and a pianoforte that he had not known was there.

His arm ached and the faces of those he had tracked today danced macabrely before him.

Juxtaposition.

His life had always been full of it. But here tonight it was a creeping reminder of wrongness, a shout from the empty spaces he inhabited and people who made the world a place unsafe.

He tried to smile, tried to feel the warmth, tried to know all that it was he knew he missed, his sodden clothes making him shiver unexpectedly.

‘Lucas.’ Lilly’s voice was soft and the children acknowledged him from her lap.

‘I am wet. If you would give me a moment to change.’

He turned before anyone could say otherwise because shaking began to claim him, deep and strong, the blood loss from his arm, he suspected, combined with the extreme cold on a long ride home. ‘I will be back soon…’ he called the words over his shoulder and when the music began to play again he was pleased.

Glory to God

In the Highest

Oh, come let us adore him…

Something was not right, she could tell it in his laboured gait and in the sound of his words. A hidden sound that she knew well, her own voice having the same timbre in it for all those years.

‘No, I am all right, Father, I will be down soon.’

If only her father had not believed her. If only he had come in to her room and held her warm against the demons and the regrets and the guilt of everything that had happened with her mother. But he had not and she had got better and better at hiding what she wanted others not to see. Like Lucas tonight!

Settling the children on the pillows and excusing herself, she walked up the stairs to the second floor.

The door to his room was shut, a room she had discovered today on their search for materials to use for the decorations and she could hear nothing inside.

Deciding against knocking, she turned the handle and stepped in.

He lay on his bed fully dressed, one hand across his face, the wetness of the night staining the counterpane dark and he shivered violently.

‘I will be down soon, Lillian.’ He did not remove his hand, did not try to rise or sit or converse further. The skin she could see around his lips was blue.

Fright coursed through her. ‘You are ill?’

‘No, I am c-cold. If you could just leave…’

One golden eye became visible through the slit of his fingers when she did not go. ‘If you could hand me the b-blankets?’ Tiredness ringed his eyes, a crippling desperate tiredness that did not just come from lack of sleep, his speech slurred into a stutter. She noticed how his left arm lay limp by his side, the deeper stain of blood showing at his wrist.

Blood! Hurrying over, she took his fingers into her own. Freezing.

‘I will call a doctor.’

He shook his head and dry terror coated Lilly’s mouth. Not a simple accident, then, if he thought to hide it! Carefully she rolled back the sleeve and the long thin jagged wound took away her breath.

‘Who has done this?

Silence reigned and she had the impression that he was holding in his breath until he could cope with the pain. ‘It was my own fault,’ he finally said and she knew she would hear no more.

‘It looks deep.’

‘Are you very good at s-stitching?’

‘Tapestries. Embroideries. I can sew up the hem of a gown if I have to…’ Suddenly she saw where this was going and her voice petered out.

The side of his lips curled up. ‘I am certain then that th-this will give you no b-bother. But it will n-need to be cleaned first.’

‘With what?’ Lillian felt her teeth clench in worry. She had had no practice of this sort of thing ever. Oh, granted, she had dealt with headaches before and the occasional bruise, but a conserve of red roses and rotten apple in equal parts wrapped in thin cambric did not quite seem the answer here.

‘Alcohol. The more proof the better, and boiling water. If you fetch Mrs Poole, she will know what to do.’

Lillian suddenly felt sick to her stomach. ‘This has happened before?’

He turned away from her criticism, a man only just dealing with the agony of his arm and not up to telling any more of the truth. She jumped up in fright when his eyes turned back in his head and all that was left was the white in them. Quickly he shook himself and burning amber reappeared.

‘If you die, Lucas Clairmont, two days after I have married you, I swear that I will strangle you myself.’

Her words were no longer careful, the shout in them surprising them both.

It made no sense, but she was beyond caring, beyond even the measuring of right and wrong. If he had killed someone today, then the reckoning of his soul would come to him later. Right now she just had to get him better.

With the room warmed by a blazing fire and his sodden shirt removed, Lucas’s shivering finally stopped.

Mrs Poole brought steaming water and sharp scissors and all her movements gave the impression of a woman who had seen such things before.

‘I was with Wellington’s troops, my dear,’ she explained when Lillian asked her. ‘Marched with the drum, you see. It was how I met Mr Poole, for my first husband had been killed in Spain and widows did not stay that way for long.’

‘And you saw injuries such as this one?’

‘Many a time.’

‘And they lived…’ she whispered, ‘those who had this sort of injury?’

‘Of course they did. It’s only if they took the fever after I would worry, though it is a pity he will not allow himself a good swig of brandy, for the ache would be a lot lessened.’

She handed a needle and thread to Lillian. ‘Take little stitches and not too deep. Are you certain you would not like some brandy, my dear?’

Having already refused libation once, Lillian shook her head. She needed to be completely in control for the task in front of her and wished for the twentieth time that Mrs Poole’s eyesight had been better.

Still, with the long explanation as to what the housekeeper could and could not see behind them, Lillian thought it only right that it should be her doing the repair work.

‘I’ve had stitches before,’ Lucas said to her as she readied herself for the task, trying to put it off for as long as she could. ‘I don’t usually weep.’

The tilt of his lips told her that he was attempting to take some of the tension from the moment, though the sweat on his upper lip gave a different story again. Not quite as indifferent as he would have her think! Her heart beat so violently she could visibly see the rise and fall of her bodice and it accelerated markedly again as she learnt that skin was a lot harder than cloth to push a needle through.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered as he winced, the quick spring of red blood from the wound blotted by Mrs Poole as he looked away. Following his glance, she saw that the night outside was still heavy with rain and further afield the bright glow of lightning silhouetted the land.

‘A storm is coming this way,’ he said and Mrs Poole interjected.

‘There is talk of snow, sir. Perhaps it will be a white Christmas after all.’

The weather was a benign topic as the needle sliced through flesh again and again, the stitches neat and tidy and his skin once jagged and open pulled together into a single light red line.

When it was done, Lillian put down her needle and stood, the magnitude of all that had happened washing over her in a flood of shock.

‘Thank you.’ In the soft light of flame his amber eyes were grateful, bleached in fatigue and something else, too.

Embarrassment.

When Mrs Poole bustled out of the room in search of a salve that was missing, Lillian also felt…shy. Wiping her hands against her skirt, the enormity of everything overcame her.

‘If you are in trouble, perhaps I can help. My father has money and influence. If I talked to him and asked-’

‘No, Lillian.’ He winced as he shifted his position on the bed, the pale hue of his face alarming her.

His use of the fullness of her name surprised her as did the tone he used, as serious as she had ever heard him, his accent almost English.

‘When I left you in the Billinghurst ballroom in London, I walked into a trap.’

‘A trap?’ She could not understand at all what he was telling her.

‘Three men jumped me as I made my way home from the ball and the next thing I knew I was on a ship as a prisoner heading for Lisbon. I think Davenport money was used to make me…disappear.’

Lillian put her hand across her mouth to try to stop the horror that was building. ‘I would never…’

‘Not you.’ His smile was gentle, relief showing over tenderness.

‘My father?’ The horror of his confession was just beginning to be felt. Lord, if it were her father…

‘Not him either.’

‘Daniel, then?’

‘And his mother. A woman paid the money and the Davenport coach was waiting at the end of the alley.’

‘Aunt Jean?’ Horror tripped over her question. ‘I cannot believe that my aunt would pay for something so…wrong.’

A flicker of a smile crossed his face, though there was something he was not telling her, something that marked his eyes with carefulness even as he stayed silent.

‘When you did not come back, I thought perhaps you were in hiding, not wanting to be betrothed by force to me.’

He shook his head. ‘I had my lawyer offer marriage as soon as I heard of…of how things were for you.’ Lillian was glad he did not say ruined.

‘And when my father accepted, I could never understand just how it was you persuaded him.’

A shutter fell across amber, the secrets between them there again after a few brief moments of honesty. The thought made her sad as she tidied the sheets on his bed.

‘There are things we need to say to each other, Lilly, but not here like this. I need to at least be standing.’ The corners of his lips pulled up.

‘An explanation for your wounds, perhaps?’ She gestured to his arm and unexpectedly he reached out, the strength in his fingers belying the pain.

‘That, too,’ he added and the brush of his thumb traced the lines of blueness on her wrist. A small caress! Quietly given as the distant storm rolled closer and a single bolt of lightning lit the room with yellow, thunder rattling the panes of glass in a celestial reminder of the paltriness of human construction and endeavour.

When his fingers tightened she did not pull away, liking the warmth and closeness, watching the wind wild-tangled in the trees outside.

He was asleep before she realised it, his face in slumber so different from the watchful guardedness that cloaked him when awake. The scar on his neck was easily seen, his head tipped sideways so that the full length of it was visible, his opened collar making it even more shocking.

A small boy who had left parentless for the new lands across the sea. What had happened to him between then and now? she wondered. What possible excuse could he give for the scraps he was so constantly in?

‘Please, God, don’t let him be…bad,’ she asked quietly of the omnipotent deity that she believed in, and then smiled at her own ridiculous description of Lucas’s character.

Bad?

From whose point of view?

The world she lived in skewered slightly. Never before had she questioned anything. Rules. Regulations. Beliefs. All had been adhered to in the way of one who feared that even the slightest of detours might lead to chaos.

Well it had, here and now, but the feel of his fingers against hers and the sound of his breathing did not feel like anarchy.

No, it felt warm and real and right, the world held at bay by a promise far greater than fear.

‘Love,’ she said quietly into the darkness, the word winding around truth with its own particular freedom as Mrs Poole bustled back with a tray full of salves.