One Candlelit Christmas

by Julia Justiss

  ‘You maintain the pretence that he is my child, then? Is it not rather cruel, even for you, to lie to your own son?’ He was amazed that he managed to keep his voice level when he felt such blistering anger. If he’d had the strength he would have been on his feet, pacing the floor and shaking his fists at her. Instead, he bit out, ‘It is quite impossible that he should be mine, since you and I have never slept in the same bed.’

  ‘We did not sleep, no,’ she admitted. ‘B-but on our wedding night I came to your room, to try to tell you—’

  He shook his head vehemently. ‘I woke on the library sofa the morning after our wedding day.’

  ‘You got up straight after,’ she said, her face going bright red. ‘You looked…appalled at what we had done. You said—’ she gulped, looking not at him but at a damp spot on the wall behind where he was sitting ‘—that you needed another drink. Although you had already had far more than could have been good for you.’

  He had been drinking steadily all day, he acknowledged. Not yet twenty, and leg-shackled to a scheming harpy, he had wanted to blot the entire fiasco from his mind.

  He had almost succeeded.

  But every now and again he had the most disturbing dreams about his bride…

  He would dream she came to him with her face alight with love and hope. She was always wearing a lacy white nightgown that left her arms bare, with blue flowers embroidered about the neckline. And when he lowered his head to kiss her it was like sipping at nectar. She always promised him the earth and gave him a taste of heaven.

  But at that point the dream always changed. The sweetness of the experience gave way to feelings of being trapped, and tricked, and then he was running—running away from a piercing light towards a clammy darkness that threatened to swallow him whole. He usually awoke at that point, with a feeling of profound relief at having narrowly escaped a dreadful fate.

  The first time he’d had that dream had been on their wedding night. He’d awoken from it horrified that she had featured in a dream of such an explicit nature. And had realised she was far more dangerous to him than he could ever have imagined. If he could have a dream like that about her, when he was so determined to remain aloof…Of course he had been able to recall the very moment his hostility towards her had begun to abate. She had looked so scared of him in church, as she had stammered her vows, that he had experienced a twinge of pity. Not that he hadn’t every right to be angry at what she’d done, but he wasn’t a brute! He had decided he would have to at least assure her she had nothing to fear from him. All through the wedding breakfast he’d darted covert looks at her as he’d sought for the words to explain himself, and discovered he had, albeit accidentally, married an uncommonly pretty girl.

  Was it surprising he had dreamed about what it could have been like? What it should have been like when he married?

  His fury redoubled, he had stormed up to her room and reiterated his decision, as much to himself as to her, that just because he had gone through a public ceremony she was not to imagine he would ever permit her to share any part of his private life!

  And she had stood there in silence, looking at him much as she was looking now.

  Just as Harry had looked at him in the garden.

  Harry, who had seemed so like his youthful self that when he’d woken that morning it had been like looking in a mirror.

  ‘What were you wearing?’ he grated, suddenly feeling horribly sick. He more than anyone should know what tricks the mind was capable of playing on a man. What if those dreams had their basis in some fleeting memory? A memory he had been trying in vain to suppress?

  ‘On our wedding night?’ She frowned. ‘It was a nightgown I borrowed from Lucinda.’

  ‘Yes, but what did it look like? Tell me some details. See if you can spark any form of memory if you really want to convince me this coupling took place!’

  She was shocked to see what looked like agonised self-doubt in his eyes. Her heart picked up speed. Was he at long last offering her a chance to vindicate herself?

  ‘What colour was it?’ He slammed his clenched fist into the sofa cushions.

  ‘Wh…white.’ She screwed up her face in an effort to recall some specific detail of the night that had brought her so much pain she had done her level best to forget it. For if she could finally convince him he really had made her his wife that night, maybe he would listen to her about all the rest of it too.

  An image shot into her mind.

  ‘When I put my arms round your neck the sleeves slid back,’ she told him. ‘Right up to my shoulders. The gown was too big for me, really. Lucinda was much larger than me.’

  Her cousin Lucinda had loved pretty things. She’d had at least three layers of ruffles sewn onto the hems of all her garments. And flowers embroidered onto everything.

  ‘Take this for luck,’ she had said, handing over a nightdress so worn from repeated washing it was almost transparent. ‘It is old, you are borrowing it, and the flowers on it are blue.’ And then, with a snigger that had made it quite impossible for anyone to construe the gesture as springing from a spirit of generosity, ‘You are going to need all the luck you can get.’

  ‘It had lots of lace all round the cuffs,’ Nell told Carleton. ‘And flowers embroidered at the neckline. Forget-me-nots, I think they were supposed to be. Blue, with little yellow centres…’

  ‘Then that boy is mine,’ he groaned, lowering his head. ‘Mine. The minute I clapped eyes on him I felt…I sensed…’

  He ran a shaky hand over his closely cropped hair. ‘More than ever now I need to understand why you are not living at Lambourne Hall. That is where my son should be growing up!’ He lifted his head to glare at her. ‘With servants, and tutors, and decent clothes on his back—not those rags I saw him in today! Why have you hidden him away here, Helena? Is it because he looks like me? Is that it? You are punishing the son for his father’s sins?’

  ‘I am doing no such thing…’

  ‘You must have deliberately concealed him from my mother,’ he continued, as though she had not spoken. ‘She would only have needed to take one look at him to know he was mine. If you really believed I was dead, then Harry should be the new Viscount, and Peregrine should hold the position of trustee. Why did you not insist…’

  ‘Do you really think, after you did such a good job of convincing everyone I was a whore, that your mother would have me or my son anywhere near Lambourne Hall? Or listen to anything I had to say? When you left England I stayed in the hunting box where you left me, shunned by your whole family until Peregrine stepped into your shoes when it seemed you had been executed. He was not content to leave me be. Just one more of your mistakes he had to clean up, he told me when he came to deliver his judgement upon me.’ Her mouth twisted into a bitter line. ‘Though he did not, as your mother and sister urged him, turn me quite out onto the streets.’

  ‘They would never have done anything so harsh…’

  ‘Of course they would!’ she scoffed. ‘They said it was all my fault you had left the country, apparently. If I had not entrapped you into a miserable marriage, and then played the whore, you would not have felt you could not hold your head up in London society and you would have stayed at home. You would not have died. No punishment was too harsh for the instigator of your downfall, believe me!’

  He shook his head, as though he did not want to hear any more.

  ‘Peregrine claimed, however, in that sanctimonious way he has, that he bore me no ill-will personally, and very graciously let me have this cottage, rent free, since Mrs Green had died. He even gives me an allowance!’

  ‘An allowance?’ Carleton felt completely baffled. Why did Peregrine say he was making her an allowance when he himself had made perfectly adequate provision for her in the event of his death?

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Nell continued. ‘Thirty pounds a year is most generous for a woman you would have allowed to starve on the streets!’

  ‘Thirty pounds a year?’ He looked appalled.
‘I used to pay my valet more than that.’

  ‘Yes, but I suspect you valued his services.’

  Carleton scarcely reacted to her jibe at the battleground that had been their marriage. It was becoming increasingly obvious to him that Peregrine had somehow managed to swindle Helena out of the money he had willed her. As obvious as it was to anyone with eyes in their head that Harry was his son.

  ‘How dare he condemn my son to this sort of poverty?’ he roared.

  ‘He did not condemn your son to this,’ she flung back at him. ‘You did it yourself! You were the one who went round telling everyone he could not possibly be yours!’

  ‘I did no such thing!’ he gasped. ‘It was bad enough to have to deal with the mockery of the ton for getting duped into marrying a schoolgirl. Do you really think I would have gone round telling everyone you had made me a cuckold into the bargain? When I heard you had given birth to a son I left England, for God’s sake, rather than have to face the physical proof of what you had done. I did not want to even think about your baby!’

  ‘But I always thought you…’ She sat down rather heavily. ‘You did not brand me a whore, then? You did not declare Harry a bastard and go to the continent as a sign that you had repudiated the marriage?’

  ‘No.’

  Nell’s face creased in perplexity. ‘Well, then, how did that story get about? According to Peregrine, the scandal was all over London. If you did not start up the rumour, then who did?’

  Carleton cast his mind back to the evening when Nicholas Malgrove had strolled up to him in White’s and said, ‘I believe congratulations are in order. I hear your lady wife has been delivered of a strapping baby boy. Your son and heir.’

  As the man had raised his glass in an ironical toast Carleton had seen red. He had once caught Nicholas sneaking out of Helena’s room. Now it seemed they must still be lovers, since Nicholas had news of the birth before he did.

  ‘You, of all people,’ Carleton had drawled, too proud to reveal how humiliated he felt, ‘must know that the child cannot possibly be mine.’

  Only now did it occur to him how rash it had been to make such a statement while standing within the hearing of any number of other gentlemen. But in any case Malgrove himself would have taken great pleasure in spreading such a juicy titbit of gossip far and wide.

  ‘I confided my supposition to one person only,’ he admitted uncomfortably. ‘I would never have intentionally dragged my family name through the mud.’

  ‘Your family name? Is that all that concerns you?’ Nell seethed. Even if he had not deliberately ruined her reputation and disinherited his own son, the only reason he had not was out of concern for his family’s honourable name. Not out of consideration for her feelings, or what effect such a statement might have upon her future.

  ‘I am very concerned,’ he countered, ‘by the fact my son has been brought up in far from ideal circumstances. Why, in God’s name, did you not make more of an effort to persuade me the child was mine before he was born?’

  ‘And how exactly was I supposed to do that? How could I persuade you of anything when you refused to have anything to do with me? I did not know where you were to tell you when I discovered I was with child. The letters I wrote were returned unopened, and when I tried to get someone to take me to see you I was told they were not allowed to! I was practically imprisoned in that hunting box! So don’t you dare try to thrust the blame back onto me, or tell me he lacks for anything! Look at how healthy Harry is! He has good food and clean clothing…boots on his feet, unlike some of the village boys. And he can read and write…’

  ‘But can he ride a horse? Does he know how to fish? Shoot a gun? How could you have let him grow up like this?’

  ‘Because you did not want to know. None of your high and mighty family wanted to know. And do you know what?’ She leapt to her feet, her eyes flashing defiantly. ‘He is better off with me than learning to be cold and proud and cruel, like your horrible relatives. If you had not been such a drunken sot you would have remembered your wedding night. And even if you had not remembered a thing, if you had been a decent man you would have made an attempt to reach some kind of agreement with me about how we should live—instead of just running away and trying to pretend I did not exist!’

  ‘If you had not set up a situation where you were so badly compromised I was forced to marry you,’ he retorted, ‘none of this sorry mess would have happened! Are you surprised I resorted to the bottle to get through that farcical wedding day? I was barely out on the town and knew nothing of the world. I should not have had to even think of marriage for years, let alone to a girl from a background like yours. I could have looked as high as I pleased for a bride when I was ready to marry!’

  ‘Then you should have been more careful, should you not, Carleton? Why did you mingle with people like my uncle and aunt if you thought they were so far beneath you? Why did you drink so much you did not know what day it was, never mind where you were or who you were with?’

  She slammed the soup bowl onto the tray, whisked it off the table, and marched across the room to the door.

  ‘You are still acting like a spoiled child,’ she shot over her shoulder. ‘You are trying to blame everyone for the mess you have made not only of your life but of mine and Harry’s too, instead of being a man and accepting responsibility for your actions!’

  With that, she stormed out of the room, kicking the door shut behind her.

  Dusk was falling before she returned. Carleton had spent the rest of the afternoon before the fire, feeding it from the supply of logs that sat in a basket on the hearth, feeling thoroughly wretched. The room in which he had previously felt so secure now resonated with echoes of their quarrel.

  Even the way Helena was banging pots about in the kitchen spoke of shattered vows and bitter regrets.

  Once he heard the clatter of boots on the garden path that presaged the homecoming of his son. His heart sped up, and a yearning sensation twisted in his gut. Last time the boy had been in the cottage he had come in here, asked him to stay and be his father.

  Now that he knew he really was his father, he did not even deign to poke his head round the door to see how he fared.

  Carleton lowered his head to his hands. The boy was his. He had no doubts on that score any longer. Harry had seen it too, earlier, when they had been eavesdropping on Peregrine’s plans to dispose of him. Had looked at him with disgust and run off.

  He had a son who hated him.

  ‘My God, Helena, what have you done?’ he groaned.

  She might not have had the opportunity to poison his soup just yet, but she had spent the last six years poisoning his son’s mind against him.

  Not that he could entirely blame her, he supposed. Not now he accepted that his recurrent dream was no dream at all, but a hazy memory that had kept on trying to break through. He felt outraged even now to think of the ease with which she’d seduced him into her bed, when he’d never had any intention of consummating the marriage. No wonder he’d fled the scene and attempted to blot it out in alcohol. He would have been furious at her attempt to curtail his liberty.

  Liberty! A bitter laugh escaped his lips. Only a man who had spent years as a prisoner of war could know what loss of liberty was really like.

  He rubbed at the deep furrows ridging his forehead. And yet far from living it up at Lambourne Hall, as he had been imagining, Helena had been languishing on the verge of destitution herself. A condition she had spent years blaming him for, since she seemed to believe he had deliberately blackened her name and then left her penniless.

  Hearing her light tread in the passage, he sat up straighter, his eyes fixed upon the door. She avoided looking directly at him as she marched across the room. The tray went down on the table with a slap that sent soup slopping over the rim of the bowl and wetting the handle of the spoon.

  ‘Broth again?’ he asked. She seemed to have a never-ending supply of it.

  She glared at him. ‘That is the
last of it, and it is mostly vegetables now. I will have to kill another chicken tomorrow if you want meat.’

  ‘You look,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘as though it would give you a great deal of pleasure to kill something.’

  Nell flinched as though he had struck her. ‘I never enjoy killing anything. Even though I have to sometimes, to survive.’ Her eyes slid away from him. ‘Perhaps I could prevail upon Reverend Byatt to give me a ham tomorrow. He is a most charitable man…’ She shook her head, the angry frown returning as she became aware of his gaze resting speculatively upon her.

  ‘Not that you are interested in my problems, so long as your belly is filled,’ she added waspishly.

  ‘You have no idea what interests me.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Just what I say.’ Carleton had been steadily applying himself to the bowl, and now his meal was nearly all gone. ‘Would you like to know?’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘What interests me?’

  ‘Not particularly. I just want you to leave.’

  ‘So different from the first time we met. Then, you did all in your power to make sure I would never leave.’

  ‘I have told you before—I did not!’

  ‘You deny staying in a room with me all night, and arranging for your aunt and various other house guests to discover us together the next morning?’

  ‘Absolutely!’ She lifted her chin, staring him down.

  To her surprise, this time he did not begin to berate her for lying. Instead, he laid the spoon down in the empty bowl and said, ‘Then how do you account for the fact that you and I were in that room all night, and that we were discovered?’

  ‘Will you listen to me this time?’ she asked, her knees suddenly growing weak. ‘Will you really let me tell you how it came about?’

  ‘This time?’ He frowned. ‘To my recollection we have never discussed that event.’

  ‘Because you would not listen! You would not come anywhere near me until the day we met in church to get married. And then that night, when I tried to tell you how sorry I was, you just…grabbed me. I thought it was going to be all right after all.’ But after he had slaked his passion he had reared back, a look of horror on his face. She felt her eyes sting with stupid tears. Angrily she blinked them back. She was done crying over this man.