Christmas Betrothals. Sophia James

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.

      Life went on despite a wife who had betrayed him and an uncle who had died well before his time.

      Stuart Clairmont!

      Even now the name was hard to say and he ground his teeth together to try to stop the sorrow that welled up over the thought. A man who had been the father his own never was. A man who had loved and nurtured a lost child newly come from England and given him back the sense of purpose and strength that had been leached away from him under the punitive regime of a father who thought punishment to be the making of character.

      He still bore the scars of such bestial brutality and still hated William Clairmont with all the passion of a young boy who had never stood a chance.

      Where was Lilly? he wondered, the news of her engagement angering him again. She would marry a man who was patently wrong for her, a man who neither kissed her with any skill nor fought with a scrap of dexterity. He remembered the feeble slap Wilcox-Rice had given Paget before he had intervened, the breathless sheen on his face from the effort of doing even that, pointing to a spouse who would not protect a wife from anyone.

      The flaws in his argument pressed in. John Wilcox-Rice was a man who would not have enemies, his life lived in the narrow confines of an untarnished society. Why should he need to be adept at the darker arts of survival, the things that kept a man apart and guarded? As he was!

      The number of differences between Lillian and him spiralled upwards as he ran for the omnibus, and as the conductor inside issued him a ticket for the cramped and smelly space he was certain that the permitted twenty-two passengers was almost twice that number.