the American opposite and simply walk, now, away from it all.
Like her mother had!
She shook her head and the moment of madness passed, evaporated into expectation and duty. Lillian or Lilly. The white and careful promise of obligation and discretion counterbalanced against the wilder orange flair of excitement and thrill.
The very same choices Rebecca had mismanaged all those years before and look where it had taken her: a deathbed racked with self-reproach and contrition.
She inclined her head as she allowed John Wilcox-Rice to take her arm and lead her out into the ballroom proper, the music of Strauss settling her fears as it swirled and eddied about them. Many in the pressing crowd smiled at them, the illusion of a wondrous young love, not such a difficult one to pass off after all.
John leaned in as they performed the waltz, the ardour that had been apparent at the St Auburns’ the night he had escorted her to her room as obvious here.
She felt his fingers splayed out across her back.
‘This is the dance of lovers, Lillian. Appropriate, don’t you think?’
It took all of her composure not to break his hold and pull away.
‘If you could give some consideration about naming a date for our nuptials, and preferably one in the not-too- distant future, you would make me the happiest of men.’
Lillian faltered. ‘With all the Christmas preparations I have been busy’
‘What of February, then?’
‘I had thought of the summer,’ she returned and his face fell.
‘No, that is too long.’ The forceful tone in his voice surprised her. ‘It needs to be earlier.’
Nodding, she retreated into silence. Earlier? The very word was like a death knell in her heart.
‘If you don’t approach her soon the night will be gone, Luc.’ Hawkhurst’s voice was insistent. Already the clock was nearing the hour of two.
‘I think I made myself more than clear to Miss Davenport an hour or so back, Hawk.’
‘And she wanted none of you?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Well, that’s a first. So you’re going to give up just like that?’
‘I am. She intimated that she thought I had some hand in the death of Paget.’
‘You are here for a month and life becomes interesting again. To my mind, however, Lillian Davenport seems downright miserable and the stuffed shirt of a fiance looks as though he is hanging on to her arm for dear life. Even her father looks bored with his conversation and that’s saying something.’ He stopped, and Luc didn’t like the way he smiled. ‘Her aunt on the other hand is eyeing you up with a singular interest.’
‘She probably wants to chastise me on behalf of her son.’
‘No, the glance is one more of a measured curiosity.’
‘Then perhaps she was a particular friend of Albert Paget and is trying to work out how I did away with him.’
‘Well, no doubt we will discover the truth in a moment. She seems to be heading this way.’
‘Alone?’
‘Very.’
‘Mr Clairmont.’ Jean Taylor-Reid’s voice carried across the room around them and, ignoring Hawkhurst altogether, she went straight to the heart of what was worrying her. ‘I think my niece seems to have taken up your cause as a man who needs improvement and so I have come to warn you. There are many here who say that the misdemeanours of your youth would make it difficult for you to fashion a future here in London.’
‘Is that what they say, Lady Taylor-Reid?’ He looked around pointedly. ‘England has long since ceased to frighten me with its obsession with the importance of family name and fortune.’
‘Then you are inviting problems for yourself.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
Ignoring his perplexity, she carried on. ‘The protection offered by a family name is irrefutable and the name of Davenport is one I should wish to keep untainted. If my son Daniel has done anything to offend you…’ She swallowed back tears and stopped, and Luc, who could not for the life of him work out where she was going with this, remained silent.
‘I would plead with you to ignore him. He may not be the easiest person to like, but if he should die…’ Her voice petered out, but, taking a breath, she continued more strongly. ‘I would, of course, offer you something in return. There are whispers, you see, that you are more involved in the Paget death than you let on. Perhaps this might be a wise time to simply return to America-slip out on the next tide, so to speak. There is a ship leaving for Boston in the morning that has a berth which is paid for.’ She pressed a paper into his hands. ‘You will find all the details here, Mr Clairmont, and the captain is amenable to asking no questions.’
‘Leaving both your son and niece safe from my person?’
‘I think we understand each other entirely.’
She did not wait to see if he agreed, but moved away, back to the side of Lillian’s father who watched with open anger. A small greying woman with a slight stoop and the iron will of a doyenne who would do anything to protect the reputation of her family.
‘Perhaps Davenport learned the art of getting his own way in everything from the unlikely breast of his mother.’
Luc laughed at Stephen’s reflection, though Lilly pointedly looked away from him, the tip-tilt of her nose outlined against the wall behind.
Beautiful. And careful. A woman whose life was lived and measured by the right thing to do. He should take note of Jean Taylor-Reid’s warning, should leave Lillian Davenport to the faultless standards of an exacting
He finished his glass of lemonade and placed the container on a low-lying table beside him. If he did not act tonight, tomorrow might be too late, the aunt’s proclivity to interference worrying and his own problems with Davenport throwing him into a no-man’s land of wait and see.
He had never let anyone close, his wife’s death a part of that equation in a way he had not understood before. Lillian was drawing something out of him that he thought was gone, shrivelled up in the miserable years of both his youth and his marriage. But it had not. Tonight as he watched her across the room in her white dress and with the candlelight in her hair, the hard centre of his heart had begun to thaw, begun to hope, begun again to feel the possibility of a life that was…whole.
Swearing to himself, he turned away from Hawk and strode out on to a balcony near the top of the room.
The strains of Mozart rent the air, soft, civilised, a thread of memory from an England that had never quite left him. A great well of yearning made him swallow. Yearning for a home. Yearning for Lilly and her goodness, and sense and trust and honesty.
In the window of a salon downstairs he could see a Christmas tree glowing, the candles on its bough promising all that was right and good with the world. Elizabeth had never fussed with such traditions, preferring instead an endless round of visiting. A woman who found solace in the busy whirl of society.
He ran his hand through his hair. If he was honest he had married her for her looks, a shallow reason that he had had much cause to regret within the first year of their life together. But he had been nearly twenty-seven and the land he had spent breaking in with Stuart had taken much of his time since first arriving in America. When she had come after him with her flashing eyes and chestnut curls he had been entranced.
He had never loved her! The thought made him swear because even in his darkest hours he had not admitted it to himself. Why now, though? Why here? He knew the answer even as he phrased the question. Because in the room beside this one a woman whom he felt more respect for than any other he had met in his life laughed and danced and chatted.
The old woman’s voice rang true in his conscience as he opened the door and searched the space inside, and as luck might have it Lilly separated herself from her family group and retired to a small alcove at one end of the
