Miss Lottie's Christmas Protector

by Sophia James

  ‘My sister said that I should also ask if you had a gown that was suitable for such an occasion. If not, I shall procure one for you.’

  ‘A gown?’ Lord, this meeting was getting away from her.

  ‘For the ball. She has contacts.’

  ‘In the fashionable world?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I am not sure if...’

  ‘If you are worried about the motivations behind such an offer, I hope I can reassure you by saying this is merely a way of helping Miss White. My friend’s daughter disappeared five years ago and has never been recovered. I saw what an effect her loss had on him and promised myself if it ever happened again to another I knew I should use the resources I had at my disposal to help and I have plenty of them.’

  ‘I see.’

  And she did. The worth of a shilling to a pauper was a fortune and the cost of a gown to a rich man was a fleeting contemplation. Still she was uneasy and knew if Mama ever was to discover the bargain she was making she might not have been happy. Millie was also in the picture. If it was for her betterment that Lottie had sought this whole meeting with Jasper King in the first place, then she certainly was not giving it much importance now.

  The guilt of that realisation had her stepping back.

  What was she doing? Changing herself entirely for the hope of catching the eye of a man who had made it abundantly clear that he was helping Harriet White for his own personal reasons and that her assistance was required mainly because she could identify Harriet. He would not be interested in her, she was becoming more and more certain of it. Claire had stated the same and Millie had told her years ago that Mr Jasper King was a man who could not settle.

  Which meant her sister might have tried to make it happen. Which also meant that she had liked him a lot more than she had ever let on.

  Lottie felt scattered and a little afraid, the directions her mind and body were taking her so very unknown. Should she allow Jasper to talk her into this scheme of his, or should she cry off and rejoin her sister and her mama in the country, knowing that she might have just had a lucky escape?

  Still, if Harriet should disappear for ever like the daughter of his friend, guilt would be on her conscience as the one who had turned down a man who could have made the only difference in locating her. Surely she had to at least try?

  Today Jasper’s beauty had morphed into menace, the soft velvet in his eyes taking on a harder glint. Not an easy man, not a tame one either. His honesty held sharp edges and hidden truths.

  Gilbert Griffiths, for all his shortcomings, cared for the vulnerable and would make it his lifetime’s work to seek the betterment of those who could not manage it themselves. Jasper had his own agenda. She imagined he barely saw the need on the streets of London town or the souls lost to the vices of extreme poverty.

  Her father would have said Mr King was a toff, a man raised in money and who saw the collection of more and more of it as his God. He’d admitted he was rich. He’d also said that people made their own luck. How condescending was that?

  But then Jasper had never seen Patricia Harris and her three children in the backstreets of the Rookery with asthma sucking the very breath from her lungs and a husband who spent every spare farthing down at the local tavern. Or Peter Bailey with his legs lost in an accident in the Perkins Rents and crawling in the filth to beg for alms, his wife at home, bedridden. Or little Katie Burrows left with her aged grandparents when her mother and father and two siblings had been taken away on a single night from the influenza last winter.

  Harriet White was only one of a thousand young women who had been lured by the promise of riches and trodden the road to ruin in the hope of it. Women who would do so again and again and again, not because they were immoral, but because they had small children to feed or a roof was needed over their heads to keep their families alive and safe.

  This was the truth of life at the Foundation, the truth of living here on the edge of the Irish Rookery. It was the truth of striving for something more than the easier option of simply giving up.

  A turn under the sheets held value and who had the right to judge whether or not such an exchange was sensible business practice? All Lottie did know was that it should be a choice, everybody’s personal pathway, and she doubted that Harriet White had ever been given hers.

  The clock in the corner struck the half-hour. The tea on the table had lost its steam. The sounds outside her windows dimmed in the wind and the house breathed in to see just what she might say.

  ‘If your sister were to help me find a suitable gown, when might I expect her to call upon me?’

  ‘This afternoon around three.’ The answer came back immediately. ‘Meghan will take you to her own seamstress, I expect, for a fitting.’

  ‘I shall agree to what you suggest only on the proviso that when my brother returns from the Americas with his newly made fortune, then you must allow me to pay you back every penny of your expenditure. I do not wish to feel indebted.’

  The smile he gave her harked back a little to yesterday’s meeting.

  ‘Very well, Miss Fairclough.’

  He rifled in his jacket pocket then and brought out a letter. Silas’s letter. She saw his handwriting on the missive.

  ‘I promised you this. I hope it helps.’

  At that he stood and bowed in the manner of one born to the social mores of the wealthy. The dog stood with him as if it, too, might follow and she saw Mr King’s frown as he realised the exact same thing.

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘We are not sure. He was found as a stray and is looking for a home.’

  ‘He seems friendly.’

  ‘He is also clean and quiet.’ Then Lottie thought of his snoring in the night and flushed. ‘But he is a large dog who would need an owner with the means available to feed him.’

  The silence lengthened between them and then he was gone. The space he left seemed so much dimmer than it had been, the vital and mercurial Mr King leaving a void in his wake and a silence that was deafening.

  Lottie held on to the letter he had delivered like a lifeline, perusing the contents before folding it again and placing it into her pocket. When Claire returned to collect the tea tray her frown told Lottie exactly what it was she thought of Jasper’s latest visitation.

  ‘I am glad at least that he did not stay long.’ Her maid announced this as she trounced out, carefully leaving the door ajar.

  After she had left Lottie extracted the correspondence again and sat to read at her leisure. The handwriting was as familiar as the message.

  Richard Jackson, a man Silas had mentioned before in other letters, and her brother were about to sign off for a large stake in a new railway company on the eastern coast of America.

  Her heart sank. This sort of optimism was so true of her brother, for she remembered other times he had sent word of wildly successful schemes that had faltered at the last minute.

  ‘Please God let this one come to something,’ she whispered, for the date on the top was the sixth of September, over three months ago.

  She could see why he had written to Mr King, though, for there was a large passage about the technical capabilities of different railway line gauges. She wondered how he had answered all the queries and resolved to ask the next time she saw him. But for now she folded the letter again and held it close to her heart.

  At least she’d had word that Silas was safe and well and that was more important to her than any dubious fortune. She also hoped the stray dog had made a favourable impression on Mr Jasper King.

  * * *

  Jasper went straight to his club and ordered a stiff brandy, refusing the offer of a cheroot from the footman who waited upon him. His leg ached and his body quivered with the frustration of his last encounter with the impossible Miss Fairclough, for he felt that what he had said had been taken by he
r in exactly the wrong way.

  God. He was usually so much more in charge of situations and so much less in doubt about the outcomes. She made him query everything. His motives. His honesty. His commitment.

  The trouble was she changed every time he met her. Yesterday she had seemed vulnerable. Today she had not. Yesterday her curls were a wild halo about her head. Today they were scrimped and scraped back, the pins visible all along the line of her hair.

  Today when the shawl had slipped he had seen the flesh of her bosom over the plunging neck on her bodice, the blue of her veins just beneath her skin raised in the cold. He noticed, too, that the pulse of her heart in her throat had risen every time he had stepped nearer.

  Was she afraid of him? Did she imagine he might hurt her? The lemon and lavender scent was also muted, a more pungent musky floral warring with the cleaner bouquet. The camphor was there, too.

  Nigel Payne stepped across into his view unexpectedly and took a seat opposite him.

  ‘My God, it is so good to see you, Jasper. Can I get you something to drink?’

  He raised his glass. ‘No, I have enough for now. I’m home for Christmas, but will leave for Manchester in the first week of January.’

  ‘Another new venture? Once I thought perhaps you might never...’ He left the sentence hanging and Jasper took it up again.

  ‘My leg is much better now. It rarely pains me.’ Even he could hear the flatness of deceit in his answer, but it was all that was left to him now.

  Relief filled Nigel’s eyes. ‘I hope that you have received my invitation to a ball on the twelfth to meet my bride-to-be. I had not heard back from you?’

  ‘I am sorry. Yes, I would like to come, but is it possible to bring my sister and a friend as well?’

  ‘Of course, Jasper. You, after all, are the true reason I am still in the world in the first place.’

  ‘Hardly.’ He didn’t want to speak of such a thing, didn’t want to remember, didn’t want a rehash of the whole incident.

  As if understanding his reticence Nigel moved on. ‘You were always diplomatic, Jasper. And clever. I hear you have scorched a trail through the stolid world of civil engineering with your ideas and your billowing worth has those in your shadow talking. Silas Fairclough has been making waves, too, it is said.’

  Now this caught his attention. ‘You know him?’

  ‘Through his sister Amelia. The younger daughter Charlotte was the one I had always hoped to know better, but she made it abundantly clear that she held no interest in doing the same.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Oh, a year or so back. But then everyone loves Lottie, though she never takes the time to realise it. By the expression on your face I see that you, too, have met her?’

  ‘Briefly.’ Jasper schooled in his thoughts and changed the subject. ‘Who is it that you have the pleasure of making Mrs Nigel Payne?’

  ‘Miss Eloise Proctor. A girl from Cheshire whose family is an old one from those parts. They breed horses.’

  ‘She sounds stellar.’

  ‘She is sensible, wealthy, passably good looking and has the sort of hips to easily provide heirs. In short, every requirement I am looking for.’

  Such a list made Jasper frown. Were he to ever note his requirements in a wife he imagined it would include none of the above, save sense perhaps.

  ‘Her uncle is Viscount Harcourt.’

  Payne had always been a man who dropped names into conversations and for this one moment Jasper was glad of it.

  ‘I do not know him. What is he like?’

  ‘Wealthy, energetic, slightly mad, I think, but very charming with it.’

  ‘Is he married?’

  ‘No, and he never has been. He has a plethora of young women who follow him around like lapdogs, but no one permanent. Perhaps he enjoys just playing the field. I know for sure that money flows through his hands like water.’

  ‘Could you introduce him to me at your ball?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Their talk then turned to the projects Jasper had been involved in across the past years and it was another hour before he could get away and make for home.

  * * *

  Once at his town house in Piccadilly he helped himself to a further brandy and sat in his library before a roaring fire to read.

  He wondered how his sister’s appointment with Charlotte Fairclough this afternoon had gone. Had the dressmaker had some luck in fitting a gown that would be sufficient? He had resisted calling in on his way home mainly because he knew Meghan would make a meal over such a thing. Already she was looking at him with sideways glances. To encourage more would be foolishness.

  He remembered the conversation with Nigel Payne and the list of attributes he had attached to his wife-to-be. If he were ever to be married, which he highly doubted, what would his own list look like?

  Joy was the first word that came unbidden. He needed joy to fill up his lonely life. Someone who laughed a lot and helped people. A woman who was beautiful in her own way. Curly hair and whisky-coloured eyes leapt into the mix, shocking him.

  ‘God.’ He swallowed the brandy and put away the decanter so that he would not reach for more. His vices now were tightly controlled things, each one let out only for intermittent moments lest he be persuaded by the darkness to step back in.

  He wouldn’t sleep well tonight because the pain in his leg was building and he already felt sick from it. No one position eased it for long so he simply gave up and stood watching the moon through scudding clouds, the lights of London sprawled before him.

  He remembered the moment it had happened, the sheared-off link pin falling from its shackle.

  He’d taken the thrust of steel himself, the sharp edges ripping across muscle and bone. If he shut his eyes, he could recall the exactness of the agony. Its echo was still there inside him, calling for relief.

  Kindness. He wanted that in a wife. And an ability to see him as the man he once had been despite the scars. A sense of adventure would be welcome and a companion to talk to him about the books he read and the music he listened to. Morality. A woman who would stick to her word in hardship as well as in ease. Softness. A body to hold in the very black of night when memories demanded an audience.

  Love. He could not expect that of her, but liking would be enough. Abiding his touch, understanding his limitations, seeing in the man he was now the one he had been and guiding him back into the light.

  A long and impossible list. Better to stay single because there was no way he could fulfil any reciprocal expectations. Anger and regret beat through his blood like a drum and he could hardly stop it.

  He would be a poor mate for the woman he had conjured up with his foolish and detailed list. A spoiled and blemished groom. He leaned back against the wall to one side of the window and raised his leg, the muscles jumping in protest. Stretch and release. Stretch and release. The nerves burned with such a movement and he took in a breath, feeling the sweat begin to build in the folds of his skin and the heat rising up to claim him.

  Another moment and he would be down. On the floor, unable to carry his body weight, and there he would lie until the dawn when the spasms would finally lessen, the rigours of agony allowing living once again.

  A very good sleeper. A new thought for the list. He did not wish for his would-be wife to ever see this side of his deformity and torment because he knew then he would also see pity.

  A woman who would not gossip. A woman who wanted children. A woman who might take him to her bed without flinching.

  A new crescendo of agony. He held in his breath and felt his heartbeat accelerate.

  A woman who smelt nice. A woman who spoke well. A woman who might pretend that he was a whole man still.

  He lost consciousness just as the mantel clock struck one, the wind outside howling through the bare limbs of th
e English oaks in Green Park opposite.

  Chapter Six

  Charlotte Fairclough’s hair today was curly again and his sister looked more than animated. Meghan had sent a message asking for him to meet them at the teashop on the corner of Kensington Road and it was with trepidation he made the journey.

  He felt hollowed out and exhausted after his night, but at least his thigh was back in some sort of a working order and with a bath and a shave he was ready again to meet the world.

  ‘I hoped you would come, Jasper. I said to Charlotte you are prone to doing your own thing and I was not sure that you would even be here. We have so much to tell you, though, and all of it is good news.’

  Charlotte listened with the same sort of silence he often employed when subjected to his sister’s verbosity, but she was smiling and the gold gown she had on was the same one she had worn to the charity event the day before yesterday. It matched her eyes and her hair and brought out the colour of her skin.

  ‘Meghan has been most kind to me, Mr King, and very patient, for in truth the time it takes to alter a gown is a long one. The seamstress was competent, however, and I learnt a lot from watching her.’

  ‘You sew?’

  ‘I do,’ she returned and gestured to the fabric of her skirt. ‘Mama and I made this dress just a short while ago. My sister Amelia has the very same pattern, but her gown is in a vibrant green, which suits her eyes admirably.’

  ‘I remember you speaking of Miss Amelia Fairclough years ago, Jasper.’ Meghan joined in on the conversation now.

  He tried to smile, but felt that the tightness of the effort failed him somewhat. ‘I knew her only for a short while.’

  His sister sat forward then, observing him intently. ‘You look tired.’ His spirits sank. This was exactly why he had not wanted to come today.

  ‘I am fine.’

  ‘My brother had an accident a few years back and damaged his leg. It pains him sometimes.’ Meghan was explaining this to Charlotte when the waiter arrived, which broke into her unwanted account. Jasper was glad for the interruption.