One Snowy Regency Christmas. Sarah Mallory

      Then he rose and went ahead to open the door for her, standing respectfully to the side so that she might pass. She forced herself to stifle the unquiet feeling that it gave her to have him at her back—even for a moment.

      It was possible that this latest offer masked something much darker. Perhaps he had designs upon her virtue. For, this close, she could not deny the virile air that he seemed to carry about with him, and the sense that he had a man’s needs and would not scruple to act upon them. She gave a small shudder, barely enough to be noticeable.

      ‘Is the house too cold for you?’ he prompted. ‘If so, I could have a servant build up the fire, or perhaps bring you a wrap …’

      ‘No, I am fine. I suspect that I took a slight chill on the moors.’

      ‘Your clothing is still damp from the fall. And I took you away from the tea I had promised.’ He frowned. ‘But I wished to speak alone with you for a moment, so that you might know I bear you no ill will because of recent events.’ He rubbed his brow, as though tired. ‘One can hardly be held responsible for the actions of one’s parent. I myself have a troublesome father.’

      He stopped.

      ‘Had,’ he corrected. ‘I had a difficult father. He is dead now. For a moment I had quite forgotten.’

      ‘I am sorry for your loss,’ she said politely. ‘I assume the passing is a recent one, if you still forget it?’

      He looked away, as though embarrassed. ‘Almost seven years, actually. It is just that he has been on my mind of late. He was a weaver, you see.’

      ‘You are the son of a weaver?’ she said.

      ‘Is that so surprising?’ There was a cant to his head, a jutting of the chin as though he were ready to respond to a challenge. ‘With all your father’s fine talk of supporting the workers, I did not think to find you snobbish, Miss Lampett.’

      ‘I am not snobbish,’ she retorted. ‘It merely surprises me that my father would need to tell a weaver’s son the damage automation does to the livelihoods of the men here.’

      ‘What you call damage, Miss Lampett, I call freedom. The ability to do more work in less time means the workers do not need to toil from first light to last. Perhaps they will have time for education, and those books your father finds so precious.’

      ‘The workers who are put from their places by these machines will have more time as well. And no money. Time is no blessing when there is no food on the table.’

      He snorted. ‘The reason they are without work this Christmas has nothing to do with me. Was it not they and their like who burned the last mill to the ground and ran off the mill owner and his family? Now they complain that they have no source of income.’

      ‘When men are desperate enough, they resort to desperate actions,’ she said. ‘The owner, Mr Mackay, was a harsh man who cared little for those he employed, taking them on and casting them off like chattel. It is little wonder that their spirits broke.’

      ‘And I am sure that it did not help to have your father raising the rabble and inciting them to mischief.’ He looked at her with narrowed eyes.

      ‘That is a lie,’ she snapped. ‘He had nothing to do with that argument. He did not support either side, and worked to moderate the cruelty of the one with the need of the other.’

      Stratford scoffed. ‘He saves his rage for me, then, who has not been here long enough to prove myself cruel or kind?’

      ‘He was not always as you see him,’ she argued. ‘A recent accident has addled his wits. Until that night he was the mildest of gentlemen, much as you see him now. But of late, when he takes an idea into his head, he can become quite agitated.’ When he recalled the scene she had come upon at the mill, just a short time ago, he must know that ‘agitated’ was an understatement. ‘Mother and I do not know what to do about it.’

      ‘You had best do something,’ Stratford said. ‘He appears to be getting worse and not better. If you had not come along today …’ He paused. ‘Your arrival prevented anyone from coming to harm, at least for now.’

      From his tone, it did not seem that he feared for his own life. ‘Are you threatening my father, Mr Stratford?’

      ‘Not without cause, I assure you. He is a violent man. If necessary I will call in the law to stop him. That would be a shame if it is as you say—that the rage in him is a thing which he cannot control. But you must see that the results are likely to be all the same whether they proceed from malice, madness or politics.’

      ‘Just what do you propose we do? Lock him up?’

      ‘If necessary,’ Stratford said, with no real feeling. ‘At least that will prevent me from having him transported.’

      ‘You would do that, wouldn’t you?’ With his understanding behaviour, and his offers of tea and books, she had allowed herself to believe—just for a moment—that he was capable of understanding. And that if she confided in him he might use his ingenuity to come up with a solution to her family’s problems. But he was proving to be just as hard as she’d thought him when she’d seen him taunting the mob of weavers. ‘You have no heart at all to make such threats at Christmas.’

      Joseph Stratford shrugged. ‘I fail to see what the date on the calendar has to do with it. The mill will open in January, whether your father likes it or not. But there is much work I must do, and plans that must be secured between then and now. I will not allow him to ruin the schemes already in progress with his wild accusations and threats of violence. Is that understood, Miss Lampett?’

      ‘You do not wish our coarseness and our poverty to offend the fancy guests you are inviting from London,’ she said with scorn. Everyone in the village had heard the rumours of strangers coming to the manor for the holiday, and would be speculating about their feasting and dancing while eating their meagre dinners in Fiddleton. ‘And you have the nerve to request that I chain my father in our cottage like a mad dog, so that he will not trouble you and your friends with the discomfort of your workers?’ She was sounding like her father at the beginning of some rabble-rousing rant. And she was foolish enough to be doing it while alone with a man who solved his problems with a loaded pistol.

      ‘There was a time when I was little better than they are now,’ he snapped.

      ‘Then you must have forgotten it, to let the people suffer so.’

      ‘Forgotten?’ He stepped closer, his eyes hard and angry. ‘There is nothing romantic about the life of a labourer. Only a woman who has known no real work would struggle so hard to preserve the rights of others to die young from overwork.’ He reached out suddenly and seized her hands, turning them over to rub his fingers over the palms. ‘As I thought. Soft and smooth. A lady’s hands.’

      ‘There is no shame in being a lady,’ she said, with as much dignity as she could manage. She did not try to pull away. He could easily manage to hold her if he wanted to. And if he did not respond to her struggle the slight fear she felt at the nearness of him would turn into panic.

      His fingers closed on hers, and his eyes seemed to go dark. ‘But neither is there any pride in being poor. It is nice, is it not, to go to a soft bed with a full belly? To have hands as smooth as silk?’ His thumbs were stroking her, and the little roughness of them seemed to remind her just how soft she was. There was something both soothing and exciting about the feel of his fingers moving against hers, the way they twined, untwined and twined again.

      ‘That does not mean that we should not feel sympathy for those less fortunate than ourselves.’ He was standing a little too close to be proper, and her protest sounded breathless and excited.

      ‘Less fortunate, eh? Less in some ways, more in others. Without the machines they are fighting I would be no different than they are now—scrabbling to make a living instead of holding the hands of a beautiful lady in my own great house.’

      It was not his house