There stood his employer. The elderly Marquess of Blakely was solid and ever so slightly stooped with age. If one were boasting in a tavern, the man might have seemed the most respectable master, the sort that any employee would feel proud to serve. When William had first arrived, he’d spun a fantasy in which his keen mind and meticulous work made him indispensable to the marquess. In his dreamworld, he’d been granted promotions, advances in wages. He’d won the respect of everyone around him.
That dream had been exceedingly short in duration. It had lasted a week from the day he was hired—until he’d met the man.
The old marquess was a tyrant. In his mind, he didn’t employ servants; he grudgingly shelled out money for minions. The marquess didn’t merely demand the obeisance and courtesy due his station, he required groveling. And, every so often, instead of raising a man up for skill and dedication, he chose an employee and delved into his work until he found an error—and no worker, however conscientious, was ever perfect—and then let the man loose. William and his fellow servants went to work every day swallowing fear for breakfast.
Fear did not sit well on a belly and heart as empty as William’s was today. He stood frozen in the old marquess’s gray-browed sights.
“Ah.” Old as he was, the marquess’s gaze did not waver, not in the slightest. It was William who dropped his eyes, of course, bobbing his head in hated obeisance. He fumbled hastily with his hat, pulling it from his head. For a long while the elderly lord simply stared at him. William wasn’t sure if he should offer the insult of turning his back so he could hang up his hat, or if he must stand icebound in place, headgear uncomfortably clutched in his hands.
The marquess turned his head, looking at William side on. With that shock of graying hair, the pose reminded William of some dirty-white bird of prey. The image wouldn’t have bothered him quite so much if William hadn’t felt like so much worm to the other man’s raptor.
His lordship glanced away, and William gulped air in relief. But instead of moving his attention to another man, the marquess simply pulled a watch from his pocket.
“Whoever you are,” he announced, “you’re a minute late to your seat.”
I wouldn’t have been had you not glowered at me. But William held his tongue. He couldn’t afford to lose his position. “I apologize, my lord. It won’t happen again.”
“No, it won’t.” The marquess gave the words a rather more sinister complexion. “Blight, is it?”
“Actually, it’s White, my lord. William White.”
He should not have offered correction. Lord Blakely’s eyes narrowed.
“Ah, yes. Bill Blight.”
He spoke as if William had not worked for him these three years. As if instead of names, his employees were possessed of empty pages, and the marquess could fill those bleak tablets with any syllables he found convenient.
“Come into the back office,” the marquess said calmly. “And do bring the books you’ve worked on for the last two years.”
An invitation to the back office was as good as a death sentence. It felt like an eternity that William stood, fixed in space. But what good would it to do to scream or shout? If he went quietly, Mr. Dunning might help him find another position when he was sacked.
How ironic, that he’d divested himself so unthinkingly of those ten pounds, when he might find them of such immediate use. No—not ironic. It was the opposite of ironic.
Perhaps it was appropriate that he’d been singled out. He wasn’t fit for polite society, after all. Not after what he’d done to Lavinia. How could he ever make it up to her? Maybe this, finally, was the censure he’d been expecting all morning. He’d accept whatever came his way as his just due.
Once inside the back office, the marquess picked one of the books at random. He thumbed through it slowly, his fat fingers pausing every so often, before moving onward. William stared past him. The room’s furnishings could well have been as old as the marquess. The wallpaper had long gone brown, and dry curls of paper at the edge of the baseboard were working their way off the wall.
Finally the lord lifted his head. “You seem to do good work,” the old Lord Blakely said. Said by anyone else, it would be a compliment. But William’s employer twisted the sentence in his mouth, giving a slight emphasis to the word seem. By the ugly glint in his eye, William knew he was adding his own caveat: I am not fooled by your apparent competence.
“Tell me,” the marquess continued. “On September 16, 1821, you entered three transactions related to the home-farm in Kent. I’d like a few specifics.”
Fifteen months ago. The man focused on transactions made fifteen bloody months ago? How could William possibly recall the details of a transaction more than a year in age? One did not keep books so that one could browbeat the person who entered a transaction.
One didn’t unless one happened to be the Marquess of Blakely.
“It is the first transaction, for two pounds six, that I—”
The door opened quietly behind them, interrupting his speech.
The old marquess looked up. His fists clenched the account book, and his eyes widened. He drew himself up, undoubtedly to castigate the fool who had the temerity to interrupt this ritual sacrifice. William drew his breath in, thinking he’d won a reprieve. If he had, the intruder would undoubtedly take on William’s punishment. Whoever it was walked forward, steady, heavy footsteps crossing the room. A mixture of shame and relief flooded William. Perhaps he might keep his position—but it was a sorry man who hoped his carcass would be saved because a shark choked on another fish first. It was an even sorrier man who hoped so, knowing that of all the fellows in the office, he was most deserving of punishment.
But instead of one of William’s fellow clerks or the estate manager, the young man who came abreast of William’s chair was the one person the old marquess could not sack.
It was his eldest grandson. William had seen the man only once, and at a distance. But he’d been accounting for the details of the man’s funds for three years. Gareth Carhart. Viscount Wyndleton, for now. The man was a few years younger than William. He had attended Harrow, then Cambridge. He had a substantial fortune, received a comfortable allowance from his grandfather, and he would inherit the marquessate. William almost felt as if he knew the fellow. He was certain he held the young, privileged lord in dislike.
The young viscount might have had a hundred servants available to do his bidding. But incongruously, the man was carrying his own valise. He set this luggage on the ground and placed his hands gently on his grandfather’s desk.
No thumping, no shouting, no untoward drama of any sort. Had William not been a mere foot away, he would not even have detected the rigid tension in the muscles on the backs of his hands.
“Thank you very much.” The viscount’s words were quiet—not unemotional, William realized, but so suffused with emotion that only that flat, invariant tone could contain his disdain. “I appreciate your telling the carriage drivers not to take me to Hampshire. I applaud your decision to bribe—how many was it? It must have been every owner of a private conveyance in London, so that they would not take me, either. But it took real genius on your part to outright purchase the Hampshire coach lines in their entirety, five days before Christmas.”
“Well.” The old Lord Blakely preened and examined his nails. Of course, the man did not find anything so uncouth as dirt near his fingers, but he nonetheless brushed away an imagined speck. “How lovely of you to admit my intelligence. Now do you believe that I was serious when I told you that if you did not give up your foolish scientific pursuits, you would not see that woman?”
William might have drowned in the sea of their exchanged sarcasm. Neither man seemed to care that he was in the room. He was invisible—a servant, a hired man. He might have been etched on the curling wallpaper, for all the attention that they paid him.
The young viscount lifted his chin. “That woman,” he said carefully, “is my mother.”
William
felt a twinge of satisfaction. He ought not to have reveled in the other man’s pain, but it was delicious to know that even money could not buy freedom.
“I’m leaving,” Lord Wyndleton continued.
“No, you are not. What you are doing is throwing a tantrum, like a child demanding a boiled sweet. It is long past time that you gave up that natural philosophy nonsense and learned to manage an estate like a lord.”
“I can read a damned account book.”
“Yes, but can you manage seventeen separate properties? Can you keep a host of useless and unmotivated servitors bent to their tasks?”
The young viscount’s gaze cut briefly toward William. William felt himself analyzed, cataloged—and then, just as swiftly, dismissed, an obstacle as irrelevant and underwhelming as a dead black beetle lying in the middle of a thoroughfare.
“How difficult can it be?”
“Bill Blight, why don’t you explain to my grandson what I had planned for you?”
“You were, I believe, going to look through my work until you found an error. My lord.” And then you were going to turn me off.
“Blight, tell him what I really intended.”
William pressed his lips together. “You were going to sack me to induce terror in your staff.”
That sort of sentence—bald and unforgiving—ought to have gotten him tossed out on his ear.
Instead, the marquess smiled. “Precisely so. Wyndleton, how do you suppose I managed to thwart your ill-fated flight this morning? I assure you, I did not need to bribe every driver in London. I keep my staff in line—and that means they do as I say, what I say, no matter the cost.”
The young viscount’s nostrils flared.
“You think you can be a marquess? Like that?” The marquess snapped his fingers. “Get your valise. Spend these two days with me—do as I say—and you’ll start to learn how it’s done. Someday you might even get to thwart me. Or you would, if you had the money to do it.”
Still Lord Wyndleton did not move. He stood next to William, his arms rigid, his fingers curving into the desk like claws.
“Come along,” the marquess said. “I shouldn’t have to spoon-feed you these lessons. If you’ll listen to me, I’ll have the carriage take you over late Christmas Eve.” The old man stood up and walked to the door. He didn’t look back.
After all, William thought bitterly, what else could mere mortals do but jump to perform his bidding? The thought almost put him in charity with the man standing nearby. The viscount slowly straightened.
“What I don’t understand,” William said quietly, “is why you don’t buy your own carriage.”
Lord Wyndleton turned to him. This close, William could see the golden brown of his eyes—predator’s eyes, or at least, a predator in training. Like any wolf cub caught in a trap, he snapped in anger at anything that came near.
“He’s holding the purse strings, you idiot.” He straightened and wiped his hands on his sleeves. “My grandfather is sacking you, yes?”
“He’ll get around to it.”
Gareth Carhart, Viscount Wyndleton, picked up the valise. He nodded sharply. “Excellent,” he said, and then he walked out of the room.
THE END OF THE DAY ARRIVED, but Lord Blakely and his grandson still had not returned. This meant that William had still not been sacked.
Winter struck directly through William’s coat as he left his place of employment. Yes, he’d had a reprieve—albeit a temporary one. He knew the marquess’s tactics. Once he got a man in his sights, he did not let up. Today William survived. Tomorrow…It was going to be another damned cold night, one in a string of damned cold nights stretching from this moment until death.
“Mr. White.”
William turned. There, in virulent yellow waistcoat, burgeoning over an ample belly, his locks pomaded to glossy slickness, stood Mr. Sherrod’s solicitor. The corner of William’s lip turned up in an involuntary snarl.
“Do you have another taunt to deliver on your late employer’s behalf?” William pulled his coat around him and started walking away, brushing past the unctuous fellow. “As it is, I must be on my way.”
The solicitor’s hand shot out and grabbed his wrist. “Nonsense, Mr. White. I’ve come to a realization. A profitable realization. I wanted to…to share it with you.”
William stared at the chubby fingers on his cuff, and then carefully picked them off his sleeve, one by one. The digits felt greasy even through his gloves.
“Adam Sherrod,” the man said, “left the bulk of his fortune in his final testament to the serious little stick of a woman who served as his wife. Given the informal agreement he made with your father, you might contest the disposition of his estate. I had, in point of fact, hoped that you would. You accepted your fate with surprising grace the other day.”
“Is there any chance of overturning the testament? I assume the document was valid and witnessed. And it was only an informal agreement between the two men, after all. I’ve heard that excuse often enough.”
“Hmm.” The man looked away and rubbed his lips. “To speak with perfect plainness, you could claim he was not in his right mind. You see, before he married, he actually had intended to keep his word. He’d left you half his fortune, five thousand pounds. It would be easy to argue that he did not see sense. After all, he did marry her. Overturn his latest version of the will, and you stand to win a great deal.”
In William’s experience, any time someone claimed to speak perfectly plainly, his words were rarely plain and never perfect. First, Adam Sherrod had been merely despicable, and not mad. Even setting aside this tiny detail of reality, the solicitor’s suggestion felt as oily as his hair. It took William a moment to pinpoint why he was uneasy.
“You’re his solicitor,” he accused. “You’re the trustee of the estate, are you not? This advice of yours cannot be in the estate’s interest. Why are you giving it?”
The man licked his lips. “Mr. White. Must you ask? I don’t like to see an upstanding young man deprived of what ought rightfully to be his. It doesn’t sit well with my conscience.”
The solicitor bounced on his toes and lifted his chin, unburdened by anything so heavy as a sense of right and wrong. William kept silent, staring at the man. The man rubbed the back of his neck uneasily. He shifted from foot to foot.
That dance of guilt was all too familiar to William. He’d felt that itch. The knowledge that he’d made an irretrievable error had nestled deep in his stomach all day. He’d known what he’d done to Lavinia had been wrong as he was doing it. He’d done it anyway.
“At what point in your legal apprenticeship did you acquire a conscience, then? And when did you first betray it?”
“Well. It’s not so much a betrayal as…as a renegotiation, if you will. If you must know the truth, if you could tie up the estate in Chancery, the fees to the trustee from administration of her estate would be substantial. It’s a profitable plan for us both. I’ll protest, naturally, for form’s sake. And you—you’ll be able to strike an open blow at the man who had you put out on the streets when you were fourteen. You could have him declared mad, and destroy his reputation.”
Greasy though the man was, he knew how to tempt William. There would be a delightful symmetry in ruining Mr. Sherrod’s legacy just as William’s father’s had been ruined.
“And then what?” William demanded.
“Well, after a short, insignificant delay in the courts of Chancery—really nothing to speak of—you’ll get his five thousand pounds.”
“A short, insignificant delay,” William said drily. “Naturally. Chancery being known for its alacrity. And you must mean, five thousand pounds minus the tiny fees for estate administration that would accrue over that infinitesimal delay.”
The solicitor bowed. “Precisely so.”
It would hardly be so smooth. The process might take years. Still, the money called out to him. Five thousand pounds. Five thousand pounds in the safe four-percent funds translated into a goo
d two hundred a year.
As if sensing William’s temptation, the solicitor continued. “Think on the money. You could buy your own home. You would not need to labor like a common man. You could buy yourself a new coat.”
The solicitor reached out and flicked William’s sleeve, where the fabric had become shiny with age. William recoiled.
“Mr. White, you would need never feel cold again.”
The man misunderstood the nature of temptation. It wasn’t himself he clothed in new finery. Instead, his breath caught, thinking what he could give Lavinia. She could have any dress she wanted. Every last penny she deserved. He could fashion himself into a gentleman. He could become a man she would respect, instead of one she gifted with her virginity out of pity.
He need never feel cold again.
But then, there was a catch. There was always a catch, and this one stuck in his skin like some barbed thing. He’d have to enter into a collusion with this unnatural creature. He would have to lie to the court. He’d have to cheat Adam Sherrod’s widow—his innocent widow—and dispossess her of funds that she deserved.
What did a little thing like his honor signify? He’d toss his own grandmother to hellhounds if it meant he could have Lavinia.
He’d won a reprieve from the marquess. Now he’d gotten this offer. A little oil, a little grease. What was a little extra dishonor, atop the mountain he’d already constructed for himself?
The solicitor jogged William’s shoulder. “Don’t take too long. It took me weeks to track you down. The time for filing an appeal is disappearing. Stop by my office tomorrow morning to go over the details.”
William opened his mouth to say he’d do it. The words filled his mouth, bitter as rancid lard, but they would not come out. I’ll do it, he thought. I’ll do it.
He conjured up the thought of Lavinia—but he could not imagine how she would forgive him, promise of money or no. And with the money…if he agreed to this scheme, he’d not be able to wash the stench of this bug of a solicitor from his skin. How could he beg for her absolution if he could not even face himself?
The Heart of Christmas Page 22