Christmas Betrothals. Sophia James

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СКАЧАТЬ strap in his hands biting into thin bare legs. Further off his mother sat, head bent over her tapestry and not looking up.

      Screaming when silence was no longer possible, William Clairmont’s beating finally ceased, though the agony of his parents’ betrayal was more cutting than any slice of leather.

       ‘Another lesson learnt, my boy,’ his father said, trailing his fingers softly down the side of his son’s face. ‘We will say no more of this, no more of any of it. Understood?’

      Luc woke up sweating, trying to fight his way out of the blankets, cursing both the darkness and the ghost of his father. If he had been here now, even in a celestial form, he would have made a fist and beaten him out of hiding, the love that most normal fathers felt for their children completely missing in his.

      As fury dimmed, the room took shape and the sounds of the early morning formed, shadows passing into the promise of daylight. He hadn’t had this particular dream for years and he wondered what had brought it on. Nat’s mention, he supposed, of the Eton fiasco, and the events that had followed.

      The knock on the door made him freeze.

      ‘Everything in order, Luc?’ Stephen Hawkhurst’s head came around the portal, the fact that he was still in his evening clothes at this time of the morning raising Luc’s eyebrows.

      ‘You’ve been out all night?’ The smell of fine perfume wafted in with him.

      ‘You refused to join me, remember? Nat had an excuse in the warm arms of his wife, but you?’ He came in to the small room and lay across the bottom of the bed, looking up. ‘Elizabeth has been dead for months and if you don’t let the guilt go soon you never will.’

      ‘Nathaniel’s already given me the same lecture, thanks, Hawk.’ Luc didn’t like the coldness he could hear in his own words.

      ‘And as you have not listened to either of us I have another solution. Leave this place and move in with me and I’ll throw the grandest ball of the Season and make certain that anyone who is anyone is there. Properly done it could bury the whispers of your past for ever, and as the guest of honour with Nat and me beside you, who would dare to question?’A smile began to form on Stephen’s face. ‘You’re a friend of Miss Davenport’s. If we can get her and her fiancé to come, then all the others will follow.’

      ‘She is engaged to Wilcox-Rice!’ Luc tried to keep his alarm hidden.

      ‘I heard it said this evening and on good authority that the wedding will be after Christmas …’

      ‘The devil take it!’ Luc’s curse stopped Hawkhurst in his tracks.

      ‘What did I miss?’

      ‘Nothing, Hawk,’ Luc replied, ‘you missed nothing at all, and I should have damned well known better.’

      A whoop of delight made his heart sink. ‘You are enamoured by Miss Davenport? The saint and the sinner, the faultless and the blemished, the guilty and the guiltless. Lord, I could go on all night.’ Hawk was in his element now, fingers drumming against the surface of the blankets as he mulled over his options. Luc sat up against the headboard and wished to hell that he had said nothing.

      ‘I suppose you could always hope that Wilcox-Rice will bore her to death?’

      ‘I could.’ From past experience Luc knew it was better to humour him.

      ‘But with the wedding planned for early next year that probably won’t give you enough time.’

      ‘That soon?’

      ‘Apparently. Davenport is her cousin, you know that, don’t you, so when you wrap your arm around his neck next time, best to do it out of sight of your lady.’

      ‘She isn’t my lady.’

      ‘An attitude like that won’t effect any change.’

      ‘Enough, Stephen. It’s early and I am tired.’

      His friend frowned. ‘Nat and I were the closest to brothers you ever had, Luc, so if you want to talk about anything …’

      ‘I don’t.’

      ‘But you would not be adverse to the ball?’

      ‘You were always the problem solver.’

      ‘Oh, and another thing. When I was out tonight I heard from a source that the police have determined Paget’s death as suicide and we both know what that means.’

      ‘I won’t be had up for his murder!’

      ‘If you stopped harassing Davenport and quit the gambling tables, you wouldn’t be a suspect and, to my mind, Daniel Davenport isn’t worth the trouble no matter what he has done to make you believe otherwise.’

      ‘My wife might have disagreed.’

      ‘Elizabeth knew him?’ Surprise coated the query.

      ‘If the letter Davenport sent her was any indication of the feelings between them, she knew him very well.’

      ‘Hell.’ Luc liked the shock in Hawk’s word, for he had begun to question his own reactions to all that he was doing.

      ‘If you kill him, you’ll hang. Better to do away with him on some dark night far from London’

      ‘Shift the blame, you mean?’ He laughed as Hawk nodded and felt the best he had done in months.

      ‘On reflection I don’t think it was all her fault. Towards the end I liked her as little as she did me.’ Honesty was a double-edged sword and Luc wished he could have had Hawk’s black-and-white view of the picture.

      ‘When did you become so equitable?’

      Unexpectedly Lillian’s face came to Luc’s mind. She had tempered his anger and loneliness and despair and replaced his feeling of dislocation with a trust and belief in goodness that was … staggering and warming all at the same time.

      ‘It’s age, I think.’ He smiled as he said it and knew that his words were a complete lie. As the first birdsong lilted into the new morning Stephen stretched and yawned.

      ‘I have to go to sleep. Goodnight, Luc.’

      ‘Goodnight, Hawk.’

      When his oldest friend simply curled up at the bottom of his bed and was soon snoring, Lucas smiled. There were definitely advantages to being back in England and Stephen was one of them.

      The following morning he left Stephen still asleep in his lodgings and walked along the Thames, the winter whipping the river into grey waves that swelled up the embankment and threatened to engulf the pathway. He didn’t want to go to a club or a tavern or even to the Lindsay town house where he always felt welcome. No, today he simply walked, on past the Chelsea Hospital and down the route that the body of Wellington must had been taken during his state funeral last November. A million people had lined the streets then, it was said, and they would again at the next funeral, the next celebration, the next public function that caught the fancy of a nation.

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