Hope’s face contorted. ‘We did not have to do anything until a month ago when Mr Lucas said that we must and he found us a tutor.’
‘Learning is a good thing,’ Lillian countered, gesturing to the book she held. ‘Reading can give you many hours of happiness.’
The children did not answer, but looked at her with uncertain faces. Trying to find some topic that might be of more interest, she happened on the season.
‘Do you make decorations with your governess?’
Both little girls shook their heads. ‘Mrs Wilson tells us that we are too old for Christmas now.’
‘Too old for Christmas?’ Suddenly she felt unreasonably angry towards a woman who would tell two motherless little girls such a fib. ‘No one is too old for Christmas. It is a fact.’
Hope crept closer. ‘Last year we brought a tree in from outside. Mrs Poole let us thread paper to decorate it and she cooked lovely things like plum pudding. But this year it is different. We just have to study because Mrs Wilson tells us we have missed out on so much knowledge.’
Charity nodded behind her, giving Lillian the impression of hearing every word her sister said. So she was not deaf!
Different for Lillian, too, the bare lack of seasonal joy all around this room suddenly rankling. ‘If I was able to find some paper and paint and scissors and glue, would you be able to help me decorate this room?’
‘Now?’
‘As it is only just over a week until Christmas we have no more time to waste.’
Charity’s little head bobbed up and down, the first time Lillian had seen her decide something before her sister and for a second she opened her mouth as if she might speak, but she didn’t, and with her blonde-white hair and pale eyes she suddenly reminded her of someone.
Herself as a young child! Trying to please. Apprehensive. Motherless. She swallowed back sadness, the great wave of grief catching her sideways. She had not cried when her mother had left because her father had needed strength and fortitude, and she had not cried after Rebecca’s death either because by then the ingrained habit of coping had taken hold.
Coping!
How good once she had been at that.
‘We have some silver ribbon and tiny pinecones in boxes in our room, Lilly. Would that be useful, do you think?’
‘Indeed it would be.’ Lillian placed the book she had been browsing back on to its shelf and held out her arms to the girls. When two small warm hands crept into her own she had the sudden thought that she had never before touched a child or even been close to one. And when her own fingers curled into theirs she also realised just how much she had missed out on.
Luc returned just as dusk was falling on the land, the rain that had been present all day as a downpour becoming more like a shower, the drops of it caught in the last shards of light.
Woodruff stood in a rainbow, its lines etched against a leaden sky. Like a treasure, he thought to himself, at the end of a rainbow. Lilly and Charity and Hope.
He pushed the gun he held into the saddlebag and took his knife from where it was hidden in his sock, tucking it in beside the pistol. His sleeve he pulled down too, the deep cut on his forearm so obviously from a blade he wanted no one to see it.
Daniel Davenport had just sat down for a drink in a pub near Fairley when Lucas had surprised him, and the two other fellows drinking with him, who were familiar, their hands filled today with drink instead of the batons in London when they had waylaid him on the city streets.
Davenport had scampered quickly away and Luc swore at the memory of it before looking up. The day was dark though it was barely evening and Christmas was close. Perhaps it was the seasonal tidings, then, that explained his leniency with the others’ lives, discharging the pair into the hands of the local constabulary before making his way back to Woodruff. Even six weeks ago he would have had no compunction in killing them, but the influence of Lilly upon everything seemed to have trickled even into his need for revenge.
‘Damn,’ he muttered as a branch whipped across him, pain marking his face when it dug into his aching arm, where one of the pair had surprised him with a hidden knife. The lights of the house were bright and the sound of music came from within.
Christmas music, he determined as he got closer.
The first pelt of a heavier rain made him grimace as he turned his horse for the stables and prepared to dismount.
They had worked all afternoon on the library, pulling an aged pianoforte from its covers to set it up near the tree Mr Poole had cut for them, which was now adorned haphazardly in red and green and gold and silver. Stars, hearts and twirling paper cut-outs bedecked each branch and plaited chains ran from an angel at the very top: an angel fashioned from an old doll of Hope’s. A roaring fire burned now in the grate and chased the dark shadowed coldness from the room.
Festive and bright, the smell of sharp evergreen was in the air and the sound of crackling chestnuts on the hotplate above the flames.
Not a white or a pale shade on show. Lillian thought of her perfectly decorated rooms at Fairley, so different from this, the expensive trimmings laid in exactly the same pattern each and every year.
Yet here with the children’s governess on the pianoforte, Mrs Poole singing her heart out beside her and the children in their night attire snuggled in, Lillian felt a certain peace of spirit that she had never known before. She had never sung the carols like this at the top of her voice with no care for tune or melody, had never eaten her supper on a tray with mismatched utensils and a flower across the top of the plate that looked as if it had been in a storm for weeks. But Charity had picked it from the garden between the showers and handed it to her shyly, so Lillian had given it pride of place, the lurid blood-red reminiscent of Lucas’s taste in blooms. Hope traced the shape of her wedding ring as the song came to an end, one of the cats trying to lick the icing sugar from her fingers.
‘I do not like your ring much, Lilly. When I get married I shall have a slender band with one single diamond.’
Lillian laughed, the truth of it so naively and honestly given, and at that moment Lucas stepped into the room.
She was laughing, the children beside her in a library that was completely changed. Things hung everywhere, Christmas things, all hand-fashioned, he surmised, and a tree stood where before had been only a chair.
His library. Gone. Replaced by a grotto of light and sound, hot chocolate drinks on the tables and a pianoforte that he had not known was there.
His arm ached and the faces of those he had tracked today danced macabrely before him.
Juxtaposition.
His life had always been full of it. But here tonight it was a creeping reminder of wrongness, a shout from the empty spaces he inhabited and people who made the world a place unsafe.
He tried to smile, tried to feel the warmth, tried to know all that it was he knew he missed, his sodden clothes making him shiver unexpectedly.
‘Lucas.’ Lilly’s voice was soft and the children acknowledged him from her lap.
‘I am wet. If you would give me a moment to change.’
He turned before anyone could say otherwise because shaking began to claim him, deep and strong, the blood loss from his arm, he suspected, combined with the extreme cold on a long ride home. ‘I will be back soon…’ he called the words over his shoulder and when the music began to play again he was pleased.
Something was not right, she could tell it in his laboured gait and in the sound of his words. A hidden sound that she knew well, her own voice having the same timbre in it for all those years.
