O Night Divine: A Holiday Collection of Spirited Christmas Tales

by Kathryn Le Veque

  “But you didn’t fail me!” Josiah blinked back tears. “I’m the failure, Papa. I let you down. It was my fau—”

  “Enough!” He stepped forward and touched Josiah’s face. “Enough, Joe. You’ve come home, and that’s all that matters to me. I’ve missed you. We have all missed you.”

  “I’ve missed you too, Papa.” Josiah brushed a tear from his father’s cheek. “Please don’t cry.”

  “I’m not,” his father replied, sniffing. “I have something in my eye.”

  The welcome home had been warm. Tears, especially from his mother, had flowed for a time, as expected. But afterwards everyone had made merry. Not for one moment had Josiah felt out of place, or been treated like some kind of oddity. It was as if he’d been gone only a short while, the difference being, of course, the notable change in his siblings, specifically Louisa. No longer a girl, but a beautiful young woman about to begin her second Season. Still as headstrong as ever, it seemed.

  “Mama and Aunt Juliana are set on making a decent match for me,” Louisa had muttered to Josiah, “but I refuse to be pushed into a marriage I don’t want.”

  The twins, too, were no longer children, but on the cusp of womanhood. With their dainty stature, however, they reminded Josiah of two little dolls. “Don’t underestimate them, Joe,” young Arthur had said, shielding his mouth with his hand. “It would be a huge mistake. They’re not nearly as fragile or as sweet as they look.”

  Julian, of course, had already been an adult when Josiah had left. He was now more mature, perhaps. More urbane. Still serious on the surface, Josiah thought, but there was now a twinkle in his eye. Or maybe it had always been there, invisible to Josiah’s younger self. Certainly, due to their mutual maturity, the two-year age gap was far less evident.

  After dinner, his mother had taken him aside. “Will you come with me to light the candle, Josiah?”

  He had gone, of course, his mother shedding another tear as he’d put the flame to the wick.

  “There was a time, not so long ago,” he said, “when I never thought I would look upon this window again.”

  “And I never gave up believing you’d come home,” she said, tucking a strand of hair behind his ear. “I prayed for you, Joe. Every night.”

  Much later, when his siblings and his mother had retired, Josiah stood at the console table and gazed upon his painting. Everyone had complimented him on it. Except his father.

  “It’s remarkable that you painted it from a dream,” his mother had said, earlier. “The man looks like a young version of your Great Uncle Percival. And the boy does look very much like Arthur. Or perhaps as your father might have looked when he was a boy. The detail is quite lovely.”

  Josiah quickly realized who he’d painted. He also realized that no one truly understood what it meant. Except his father.

  Now, alone with him at last, Josiah waited.

  “You know the story of how I met your Uncle Julian and the subsequent misunderstanding about your mother.” With a glass of port clutched in his hand, his father came to stand beside him. “I told it one Christmas Eve several years ago. Do you remember?”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “Well, the scene you’ve painted is from the day of that misunderstanding. The boy is me. The man is my Godfather.”

  “Great Uncle Percival.”

  He nodded. “I swear the man understood me better than my father did. He realized I was troubled and asked if I was keeping something to myself. And I was, of course, but I denied it. I’ve no doubt he knew I was lying, but he didn’t persist. If there’s ever anything troubling you, he said, you can always come to me. I’ll never judge you. It was a brief moment in my life, but one that has stayed with me. I remember feeling very much alone that day. Isolated in my despair. But Uncle Percival let me know that I wasn’t alone. That if I needed him, he’d be there for me. No matter what. We all need someone like that in our lives, Josiah. And that, I think, is a message he wanted me to pass on to you.” He raised his glass to the painting. “That all this detail came to you in a dream is beyond extraordinary, I must say.”

  Josiah heard a hint of amused skepticism in his father’s voice. “Maybe you told me about this encounter once before, Papa, and it stayed with me too.”

  “Maybe I did.” He placed a hand on Josiah’s shoulder and squeezed. “It’s of no consequence. I’m off to bed, son. Tomorrow, we’ll decide where to hang the portrait. I’m leaning toward the library.”

  “Yes, that would be a good place for it.”

  His father regarded him for a prolonged moment. “I shall sleep well tonight,” he said at last, “knowing my son is back under this roof.”

  Josiah smiled. “I expect I shall sleep well too.”

  “Merry Christmas, Joe.”

  “Merry Christmas, Papa.”

  A little later, Josiah opened the door to his room and stepped inside, the lamp on his bedside table casting a cozy glow over the space. It was exactly as he remembered, with his blue-canopied bed, his mahogany dresser, and Uncle Julian’s ship-in-a-bottle atop the writing desk.

  Some clothes had been placed on his chair—donated by Julian no doubt—and a nightshirt had been laid across the bed. The bed had been turned down, and the outline of a warming pan could be seen beneath the counterpane.

  A warm bed. Josiah felt a sudden, unexpected prickle of tears, and he silently swore never to take anything for granted.

  He wandered over to his window and moved the curtain aside to gaze out across the moor. “I’m home,” he whispered, as the image of his ghostly companion arose in his mind. “Merry Christmas, Great Uncle Percival. And may God bless you.”

  The prequel to this upcoming series, describing how Aldous and Grace met, is called ‘A Solitary Candle’ and was written under my other pen name, Avril Borthiry.

  About the Author

  Author of Victorian and Regency romances. Charlotte is also the alter-ego for author Avril Borthiry, who writes medieval and fantasy romance.

  Tidings of Comfort

  Elizabeth Ellen Carter

  “Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.”

  —Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

  Author’s Note

  Tidings of Comfort is a vignette set in the context my 2018 Christmas story, Father’s Day, featuring Heart of the Corsairs hero Kit Hardacre.

  Chapter One

  November 1818

  London

  The cold bit into Kit Hardacre’s damaged leg, gnawing away at his good humor. The aggrieved limb took his weight nonetheless as he climbed up into the carriage. He lowered himself into the seat, biting back a muttered curse.

  At least, he thought he did a good job of preventing the profanity from leaving his lips, but the frown of mild disapproval from his wife told him otherwise.

  The carriage lurched into motion. The statue of Mayor Richard Whittington in the courtyard of St. Thomas’ Foundling Hospital disappeared into the thickening fog, just like his hopes of finding out something about his past.

  “That was very encouraging,” his wife ventured.

  Kit relaxed his features to rid it of the scowl he knew lurked there, before turning to her.

  “Do you think so?” The mildest of skepticism colored his tone.

  She drew her coat more closely around her before burying her hands into the sable muff in her lap. “Did you expect a different outcome?”

  Parry, thrust.

  Her smile was almost beatific, blunting the edge of his annoyance.

  Sophia.

  His beloved, his conscience, his North Star.

  Kit sighed heavily, playing with his cane, shifting it from hand-to-hand, the round, silver pommel glinting in what was left of the dwindling afternoon l
ight.

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “If Dr. Mathewson finds nothing of your mother and father, then you will have lost nothing.”

  “Except a very generous six-hundred-pound endowment to the hospital,” he grumbled.

  “Which will make a tremendous difference to poor young women and their children,” she countered. “Kindness is its own reward.”

  He didn’t begrudge the amount. He imagined what his own mother might have felt, pregnant out of wedlock, alone and scared. Kit had been alone and scared enough times in his life to not wish it on another soul.

  Or, at least, on another soul who did not deserve it.

  As a cabin boy turned child captive of the Barbary Coast corsairs, he had experienced things no man, woman, or child should have to endure. More than one morning in those years, he’d awaken surprised that he had survived the night before.

  As the carriage traveled down the cobbled streets of Southwark, he wondered what lurked down those alleys around St Thomas’. His mother could have chosen another path, to knock on the door of the backyard abortionists who could be counted upon to successfully end at least one life, if not her own in the process.

  Kit shuddered. It wasn’t from the cold.

  His mother had chosen to give him life. And, as hard and soul destroying as his childhood had been, he did not regret having been born.

  Once he had escaped his captors – and his lust for revenge – he had gained more than he’d ever dreamed possible. He had a flourishing business as a trader with a growing fleet of ships, good friends, and business partners who had journeyed to hell and back with him. More importantly, he was married to a woman who loved him despite his scars – all the ones she could see and all the ones she could not.

  Kit watched her look out of the window and stifle a yawn behind her gloved hand, although it couldn’t be any later than five in the afternoon.

  There was something amiss, and it wasn’t just caused by his peevishness on the way to St. Thomas’. He reached across to the other seat and picked up the blue woolen blanket to settle it over her knees. He put his arm around her, urging her to rest her head on his shoulder.

  “Perhaps we should go directly back to the house instead of visiting the markets this evening.”

  “No, no,” Sophia protested around another yawn. “I want to go; just a little nap, and I’ll be refreshed.”

  It wasn’t the first time she’d told him that. He bit his tongue to prevent himself from asking about her health. She’d only offer exasperated assurances that she was quite well. The truth was, Sophia didn’t seem ill. In fact, she looked even more beautiful than ever. Glowing, even.

  This was where his attention should be – in the present, on the things he could control, not on the past. Things he could control? Who was he kidding? It was not his decision to leave his home in Sicily and return to London, but with a major order for coffee from a mysterious new client, and his associates distracted by new parenthood, there had been no other choice.

  And once he was here, Sophia had persuaded him to make the most of it. To delve into the past. His past.

  Putting his weight on the good leg, Kit lifted his right one, stretching it out as much as he could in the confines of the carriage. He rotated his ankle, feeling the joint crack with the movement. It was a reminder that he better preferred the temperate climes of Sicily. Damp, cold England in late November made him feel much older than his thirty-four years.

  As Sophia dozed, melancholy settled like hoar frost on his shoulders, returning his thoughts back to the parents he never knew.

  “Have you ever imagined who they were?” she had asked earlier, while waiting for the superintendent.

  “A scullery maid and a second footman.” It was a joke, but not quite. He had laughed at Sophia’s not-quite amused expression. “I’m being serious. I’m not from the upper classes. You know that.”

  “But someone thought well enough of your mother to have her come here for her lying-in, and to then have you sent to the Foundling Hospital.”

  “I know you keep hoping for some romantic tale.” He’d clutched a hand to his breast in theatrical fashion. “The ill-fated romance between a second son of a duke and the daughter of a poor but honest family who has a secret inheritance waiting, but – alas! – if only if the true heir can be found!”

  Sophia had laughed at his performance. And he was glad because it stopped her from demanding he take the subject seriously. It suited him to think he was different, a man without a past. He could be anything he wanted to be then. A chameleon, a changeling.

  To know who his mother and father were would anchor him to a past he could not change. Kit wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He tried to tell himself he was ambivalent, only going along with Sophia’s search for his parentage because it seemed to matter more to her than it did to him.

  Why? He suspected it was because, like him, she, too, was orphaned. But she was ten when they died. At least she had known her parents. She loved them and they loved her. Kit wasn’t sure he could feel the same about his own mother and father.

  The last of the afternoon light had been swallowed by the lowering fog by the time the carriage slowed to a stop outside the Hardacres’ rented townhouse in St. James’ Park.

  Kit lightly caressed Sophia’s cheek, brushing away a lock of ebony black hair from her perfect olive skin. He loathed to wake her when she slept so soundly.

  A footman opened the door, silhouetted in the lamplight from the entrance behind him. Kit gently woke her before carrying her into the warmth of the house. She hid another yawn behind her hand and snuggled into his chest.

  Kit instructed the butler to send a tray up to their suite. The fact Sophia didn’t contradict him on the location of supper reinforced his belief that there was something wrong. If she was still out of sorts in the morning, he would insist on a doctor.

  “I only need to rest for a little while,” she told him again when they reached the bedroom.

  Kit poked at the fire in the grate to coax more heat from it.

  “No. We will visit the markets in the morning,” he answered.

  Instead of calling for a maid, he helped her take off her coat and removed her boots to see that she was comfortably settled by the fire. He saw how she watched his features carefully.

  “You’re not disappointed?”

  Kit remained kneeling before her, picking up her hand and kissing it once more. How typical that she would consider his feelings.

  “Of course not.”

  “Kit… go. Go to the markets tonight.”

  He raised an eyebrow. Sophia’s slow smile became a grin and then a giggle that warmed him from within.

  “You’ve been like a flea in a bottle all day,” she said. “If we were at home, I would tell you to go visit Elias and Jonathan, and the three of you would find some activity to do.”

  “But in London, I am expected to behave like a well-born gentleman.”

  “And I can see how it chafes you, my love. If it were by day, I would suggest you walk, but London is not safe at night. At least in the Christmas markets, there will be a crowd.”

  “Are you sure that’s any safer?”

  The color was returning to Sophia’s cheeks, which pleased him. He rose, bringing with him the small switchblade he habitually carried in the side of his boot.

  “I think I’ll be safe enough,” he said, turning the knife in his hand.

  “That’s such a little blade.”

  Oh, there was the wicked glint in her eyes that suggested she had recovered from whatever ailed her.

  “You should see what I can do with it,” he answered.

  Her laughter returned. “I much prefer your longer blade.”

  Kit twisted the pommel of his cane that turned it into a sword stick, and partly withdrew the rapier blade. “You mean this one?”

  “I remember when I first saw you with that cane.”

  “You were mad at me then.”

&nbs
p; “I had every reason to be.”

  The blush on her cheeks brought back vivid memories of his own. He swept down to brush a kiss onto her cheek.

  “I love you, carissima,” he whispered.

  She turned her head and met his lips with her own.

  “I love you, too.”

  Chapter Two

  Kit found the further he walked, the less his leg pained him. He was drawn by the raucous tune of a hurdy-gurdy above the sounds of hawkers. Lanterns were festooned between lamp posts, and light spilled out from shop windows as hopeful merchants attracted customers to buy goods and trinkets.

  Christmas was still four weeks away, but St. Nicholas’ Day was only a sennight hence, as the spruikers proclaimed loud and long. It was never too early for gift giving.

  The aroma of roasting chestnuts brought him closer to a vendor. Kit handed over a coin in exchange for a paper cone filled with the morsels. He popped one of the buttery treats into his mouth, nearly burning his tongue in the process.

  The rest he stuffed into the pocket of his green greatcoat where it kept his hand warm.

  It was not so late that Kit didn’t see groups of children running in packs – some enjoying the excitement of the street entertainments, others no doubt intent on mischief.

  He settled himself near a brazier for warmth and to ease the dull ache in his leg. He reached in his pocket for another chestnut when one particular trio of boys attracted his attention. One, blond-headed and sharply featured, was a head taller than the rest. He appeared to be the leader, full of the braggadocio and charisma that Kit recognized in himself. He would even guess at the boy’s name – Trouble.