Mistletoe Magic

Chapter Eighteen

‘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.

A dangerous man, a stranger, a husband who had risked his home for something that she didn’t understand. She would not forgive him this. Ever.

She unclenched her fist as she saw Charity looking at her whitened knuckles and smiled.

She had to leave this place now, even with her side aching and the tiredness pulling her down.

‘Would you both like to come with me today to see my house? My room has many toys that you might enjoy.’

The children’s governess frowned deeply, but kept her counsel and for that at least Lilly was grateful.

The girls’ quick smiles and nodding heads were much easier to deal with.

They reached Fairley Manor by lunchtime and her father was waiting for the coach with her aunt even as it came to a halt.

‘Lillian.’ He folded her in his arms and held her there, his familiar strength and honesty a buffer against all that had transpired.

After a moment she pulled away and introduced the girls, pleased when her father asked one of the servants to take the children to the kitchens and give them a ‘treat’.

In his library he closed the door and helped her to a seat. When Lillian caught her reflection in the mirror, she was astonished by her paleness and could see why her father looked as worried as he did.

Pride stopped her saying anything. Ridiculous pride, if the truth be known, given that the story must be all over the countryside by now, though her father did not seem to have heard the gossip. For that she was glad.

‘Can we stay here, Father?’ she ventured instead and the line of worry on his brow deepened.

‘For tonight?’ He seemed to be testing the waters.

‘For for ever,’ she returned and burst into copious tears.

She felt better after a brandy and a Christmas tart, the seasonal joy having its own way of dulling her problems.

‘I should never have forced you into this marriage-there has been nothing but problems ever since. In my defence I might add that Lucas Clairmont charmed me.’

She smiled. Her first smile since lying in bed with her husband clad in nothing save air. She shook away the thought.

‘Then we are alike in that,’ she returned.

‘Perhaps if we filed for divorce to the Doctor’s Commons under the name of insanity, and then went to the House of Lords with a suit? Though then, of course, we would need an Act of Parliament to enable you to ever marry again.’

Lillian frowned. Goodness, to get into a marriage was so easy, but to get out of one…?

She could not think of it, not now. She needed to get stronger first and build up her courage.

Reaching over, she took her father’s fingers in her own. Sorrow filled her, for him, for them and for a future so uncertain now.

‘Are the children his?’

‘No. He is their guardian. They are his wife’s sister’s girls.’

‘Yet you brought them here? Does he know that you have?’

She shook her head. ‘I did not speak to him about it, but they need a home without violence. They need to be loved and cherished and protected. I can do that.’

Her father smiled. ‘I believe that you can, my daughter. Welcome home.’

Lillian watched the driveway religiously all that evening and all the next day, but Lucas did not come. Nor did Daniel. She wondered if she should say something of her cousin’s part in the whole fiasco to her aunt and then decided against it, for what exactly could she say?

Your son is a murderer just like my husband.

Christmas was now four days off and the house was dressed in its joyous coat for the children’s sake as Hope and Charity dashed from this tree to that one, oblivious to every adult nuance that passed above their heads, the delight of wrapping presents and setting out gingerbread men and marzipan candies a wonderful game. Twinkling lights now hung on fragrant boughs and garlands of fresh sprigged pine bedecked the mantel, the children’s hand in everything.

And then finally Lucas came at dusk on the second evening.

She met him on the front steps, glad that her father had gone with his manager to look at some problem on the property, for at least she did not have to worry about his reactions.

Gesturing for her husband to accompany her upstairs, she took him to her bedroom, the intimacy of it affording her no problem with her state of mind.

‘You lied about everything?’

He had the grace to look disconcerted. ‘I did not tell you everything because I didn’t want you involved-’

She stopped him, jumping in with such a shout the back of her throat hurt. ‘Involved? When I am watching Lord Hawkhurst lying in a pool of blood whilst you shoot at my cousin like some wild-west gun-toting cowboy. And what of Hope and Charity? Two little girls exposed to fighting and shouting. I should not worry about that, I should not be involved?’

Pain crossed his face. ‘Are the girls well?’

When Lillian nodded he looked so relieved that the anger she felt inside her was squashed down a little.

‘I cannot even begin to understand a motive that would bring a man from America to England with the express purpose of killing another.’

‘My wife had an affair with your cousin. I think that the child she carried was his.’

‘Child?’ The question spluttered to nothing on her lips.

Stopping, Lillian saw his heartbeat gather pace in the tender flesh at his neck.

‘If he had been sorry I might have understood, could have forgiven. But he wasn’t.’

He swiped his fingers through his hair.

‘I was a soldier once.’

Lillian wondered as to his hesitancy in telling her of his involvement in a profession that was after all a noble one.

‘I was seconded into intelligence work in my third year and I learned and did things that were not in any army rulebook. Once you know how to kill a man and do, you cross over a line. Whether or not it is for king and country you cross a line and you never come back from it. From that moment you are different…isolated, and the choices that are easy for every other person are not quite so for you.’

‘You killed others in America?’ The horror in his voice told her that he had.

‘Not for fun or gain or glory. Not for that, you understand, but I have killed people. People who died because they believed in things that the military did not and sometimes they were good people…’ He stopped again.

‘Did you kill Daniel at Woodruff?’

‘No.’ She felt the relief at this denial until he continued, the world around her condensed into breath and heartbeat and pure raw fear!

‘I wanted to, though. I came here to do just that, but found that I could not. When my uncle died, your cousin’s name was the last thing on his lips. He had swindled him out of some land, you see, and made a fortune out of Stuart’s infirmity. Paget had a hand in the bargain, too.’

‘So when you mentioned the subject that night at the dinner table…’

‘He knew that I knew.’

Vengeance. Retribution. Reprisal. The words shimmered in the air between them, harsh words actioned by a hardened man, used to blood and danger. A life for a life…She waited as he went on.

‘The strangest thing about all of this is that it was not revenge in the end that saved me, Lillian. It was you.’

‘Me?’

‘I was married once to a woman who could not be happy, not with me, not with life, not with anything. The night she died her child was trying to be born…’ The tremor in his voice was steadied by pure will-power. ‘She would not stay at the house for she believed the midwife couldn’t be trusted.’

‘So you took her with you?’

‘And overturned the carriage when she opened the door and threatened to jump out while shouting out the name of your cousin. I did not know exactly what that meant at the time, though now of course…’ He shook his head. ‘She died as I reached her.’

‘My goodness! Were you hurt?’

‘This scar…’ His fingers traced the mark from his ear down to his collarbone. No slight injuries for him either, then, and a wife and child lost in betrayal.

‘When I recovered and got back to the farm, I began to drink heavily. To forget.’

Water! She had never seen him touch anything stronger. The small pieces of a puzzle clicking into place. An explanation of what made a man complex. No easy choices. No one reason.

The truth. Not laundered. Not tampered with. Not piecemeal. There was beauty in a man who did not try to hide behind illusion.

The silence stretched, boundless, and it was Lucas who broke it first.

‘When I saw you at the Lenningtons’ you were…perfect. Perfect in a way that I was not, had never been.’

‘Perfect?’ She shook her head. ‘No one can be that.’

‘Can they not?’ His eyes were softer now, not as glitter-sharp as they had been, the anger in them dimmed by honesty and relief. ‘There is a cherub on the chapel ceiling at my home with eyes and hair just your colour. Beside it is a sinner who is being…saved, I would guess, saved as you have saved me!’

There was violence in his words, desperation in the way his fingers reached out to the bare flesh of her arm.

‘I am not a bad man, Lilly, and I need you. Need you beside me to make sense of the world and to shape my own.’

He tipped her chin up so that her eyes met his, direct and hard, no denial in the movement, no gentle easy ask.

‘I would never hurt you, Lillian. Never. I would only ever love you.’

The words were not soft either, tumbling from nothing into everything.

Love.

You.

Overwhelming need and fear mixed with waiting.

Only them in this fire-filled cold winter’s evening, three nights before Christmas, bound in troth for ever, the silence of the house wrapped around them.

Waiting for just one movement.

Towards him.

She simply stepped into his arms, her tears wetting the front of his jacket, the buttons old and mismatched and the elbows patched with leather.

He was perfect for her, too.

They stood there for a long time, listening to the heartbeats between them and feeling the warmth, not daring to move towards the bed for fear her father would knock on the door and find them. No, not wanting anything to be ruined again by violence and hostility.

Finally her father came, the sound of his steps in the passage and then a knock on the door. He came through quietly, waiting as they parted though their hands were still joined.

‘I have been told what has happened.’ His glance caught Lillian’s. ‘You are all right?’

‘Yes.’

His face creased into a smile. ‘And he has given you his secrets.’

‘Not quite,’ Luc said and his fingers tightened around her own. ‘I am a wealthy man, Lilly. My estates are numerous in Virginia, for timber is a lucrative trade.’

‘Wealthier than my father?’

‘I am afraid so.’

‘Then the flowers did not break you?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Your bunch of flowers! I thought at the time they must have cost you a small fortune so I saved one and dried it to show you.’

He shook his head. ‘If you wanted a roomful, I could afford it.’

‘But I don’t,’ she said solemnly and walked in to his waiting arms. ‘All I want is you.’

The bells rang out from the village near Woodruff, tumbling Yuletide bells with joy on their edge, though they were muffled by the snow that had fallen all day, filling the windows with white and making ghosts of the trees in the garden.

They had eaten and danced and sang, and the sweet smells of cinnamon and spices hung in the air, the last of the visitors to Fairley finally gone and the big Bible in the front parlour closed from the many different readings. The whole day had been noisy and rushed and wonderful. None of the silent ease of Christmases past but all of a building excitement and joy, with the squeals of delight of Hope and Charity.

Goodness, she had changed completely in these few weeks, for she could not imagine again a pale and ordered Christmas, nor a home with as few guests as she had always cultivated.

Charity and Hope had made up games to play, Stephen had organised charades and Patrick had shadowed Lucas all day with questions of Virginia and its riches.

Her father had spent a quiet moment with her in the early afternoon, taking her aside to give her his present, the pearls that she knew had been her mother’s.

‘She was a person who made one wrong choice, Lillian. But before that she had made many right ones. You, for instance,’ he said and kissed the tip of her nose.

It was the first time she had heard him talk of Rebecca since her death, and that gift was as important to her as the double strand of matched pearls that were strong in her memory.

‘You told me once, Father, that I would thank you for this marriage and I do.’

‘Lucas has let Daniel leave the country, so his stupidity shall not be the ruin of the Davenport name after all. I think even Jean understands the generosity of Lucas’s gesture and has elected to go along with Daniel.’

She smiled at her father’s relief, the burden of the family reputation one he had always taken so very diligently to heart.

‘You look better than you have in a long while, Father.’

He smiled. ‘I believe I am well because you are happy, my love.’

And much later when the moon hung high she smiled again as Lucas placed a kiss on her stomach where candlelight played across her skin.

‘I want lots more children, Lilly. Sisters and brothers for Hope and Charity.’

The ruby caught in the light as she brushed the length of his hair from his face.

‘I wanted to ask you about the inscription inside the ring.’

‘I had it engraved in London for you.’

‘But you did not know then that I would even marry you!’

‘“Whither thou goest, I will go.” I knew that after our first kiss in your drawing room.’

‘It was always just us then?’

‘Just us,’ he whispered back and, bringing a sprig of mistletoe from the cabinet beside the bed, held it above them, a wicked smile in his dancing amber eyes.