Christmas Betrothals. Sophia James

      Everyone laughed at the run of questions, except Lillian, who suddenly and dreadfully saw exactly what she had done. Not just she now and John, but her family and Eleanor and a group of people whom she did not wish in any way to hurt.

      Taking a breath, she firmly told herself to stop this introspection and, finishing the champagne, bent to the task of answering the many questions Ellie was pounding her with.

       A sensible and prudent husband …

      The five words were like a mantra in the aching centre of her heart.

      They had finally gone. All of them. Her father to his club and her aunt to a bridge party at an old friend’s house. Eleanor and John had returned home to see if their parents had arrived from the country.

      Four days ago she had fancied herself in love with one man and today she was as good as married to another. The very notion of it made her giggle. Was this what they termed a hysterical reaction? she wondered when she found it very hard to stop. Tears followed, copious and noisy and she was glad for the sturdy lock on the door and the lateness of the hour.

      Carefully she stood and walked to the book on the shelf in which she had pressed one orange bloom. The flower was almost like paper now, a dried-up version of what it once had been. Like her? She shook her head. All of this was not her fault, for goodness’ sake! She had made a choice based on facts, a choice that any woman of sound mind might have also made.

      The Davenport property was a legacy, after all, one that needed to be minded by each generation for the next one. The man she would marry had to be above question, reputable and unflinchingly honest. He could not be someone who was considered a suspect in a murder case. Besides, Luc Clairmont had neither called on her in town since she had made her ridiculous confession nor tried in any way to show he reciprocated her feelings.

      Her fingers tightened on the flower. She was no longer young and the proposals of marriage, once numerous, had trickled away over the past year or two.

      Caroline Shelby’s exuberant youth was the embodiment of a new wave of girls, a group who had begun to make their own rules in the way they lived their lives.

      Poor Lillian.

      The conversation from the retiring room over three weeks’ ago returned in force.

      Everything had changed in the time between then and now! A tear traced its way down her cheek, and she swiped it away. No, she would not cry. She had made the right and only choice, and if John Wilcox-Rice’s kisses did not set her heart to beating in the same way as Luc Clairmont’s did, then more fool she. Marriage was about much more than just lust, it was about respect and honour and regard and surely as the years went by these things would gain in ascendancy.

      Feeling better, she placed the flower back in the book and tucked it on to the shelf. A small memento, she thought, of a time when she had almost made a silly mistake. She wondered why her hands felt so empty when the orange bloom was no longer in them.

      His father’s face was above him red with anger, the 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?’