One Snowy Regency Christmas: A Regency Christmas Carol / Snowbound with the Notorious Rake. Christine Merrill
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out with breaking it. Take my money and go back to your homes. I have summoned the constable. If you are here when he arrives you will spend Christmas Day in a cell, longing for your families. Now, be off.’
It shamed her to watch the men of the village too on the ground to notice this new threat. They were a proud bunch. In better times they would have thrown the coins back in the face of this stranger rather than accept his charity and his scorn. But the recent economic troubles had left most of the village without work and in need of any money they might find to make any kind of a Christmas—merry or otherwise—for their families.
Her father’s rallying cries were lost in the scuffle as men scrabbled in the dirt for pennies. Barbara pushed through them easily this time, until she could lay her hand upon her father’s arm. ‘Come away,’ she whispered. ‘Now. Before this goes any further. You can speak another day.’
It seemed the mood had left him, passing out of his body like a possessing spirit, leaving him quiet and somewhat puzzled, as though he did not quite know how he had come to be standing here in front of so many people. He would come away with little struggle, and she would have him home before the law arrived. All would be well. Until the next time.
Directly above her, and removed from the chaos, Joseph Stratford observed—distant and passionless, as though he did not know or care for the pain he was causing. When she looked at him all her father’s anger and frustration seemed to rush into her. If the Lord had bothered to imbue her with reason, then why could he have not made her a man, so that other men might listen to her?
She turned and shouted up at the dark man who thought himself so superior to his fellows. ‘You blame the men around me. But you should be ashamed of yourself as well. You stand over us, thinking yourself a god. You are mocking a level of hardship that you cannot possibly understand. You act as if you are made of the same rough wood and cold metal gears that fill your factory. If I could see the contents of your heart it would be nothing but clockwork, and fuelled by the coal running in your veins.’
Just for a moment she thought she saw a change in his face, a slight widening of the eyes as though her words had struck home. And then he gave a mirthless, soundless laugh, little more than a lifting and dropping of the shoulders. ‘And a Merry Christmas to you as well, my dear.’ Then he turned and stepped easily from his perch, dropping to the ground, though it must have been nearly eight feet, and strolling back to his carriage and his nervous grooms and coachman. They came cautiously forwards to open the gates so that the carriage could get through. They needn’t have worried, for the men who had blocked the way had turned for home in embarrassed silence as soon as the money on the ground had been collected.
She pulled her father to the side of the road so that the horses could pass. But there was the signalling tap of a cane against the side of the box as the vehicle drew abreast of them, and the driver brought it to a stop so that Stratford could lean out of the window and look at them.
‘This is not the end of it, Stratford,’ her father said in a quieter voice. Now that the crowd was gone he sounded capable of lucid argument, and quite his old self.
‘I did not think it was, Lampett,’ Stratford replied, smiling coldly down at her father, staring into his eyes like a fighter measuring the reach of his opponent before striking.
‘I will not let you treat these people—my people—like so many strings on your loom. They are men, not goods. They should be respected as such.’
‘When they behave like men I will give them respect. And not before. Now, go. You have lost your audience, and your child is shivering in the cold.’
I am not a child. She was full four and twenty. Not that it mattered. But she was shivering—both from fear and the weather. The slight made her stand a little straighter, and fight the shudders until she could appear as collected and unmoved as her enemy was.
It did not seem to bother Joseph Stratford in the least that the weight of the entire town was against him. They had broken his frames once already and sabotaged the building of the mill at every turn. Still he persevered. Barbara wished she could respond in kind with that careless, untouchable indifference.
The envy bothered her. Perhaps—just a little—she appreciated the man’s sense of purpose. However misguided it might be. When she looked at him she had no doubt that he would succeed. While her father was all fire, he flared and burned out quickly. But Stratford was like stone, unchanging and unmoved. It would take more than a flash of anger to move a man like him once he had set himself to a goal.
She looked again at him and reminded herself that he was proud as well. That sin would be his downfall if nothing else was. He could not succeed if he reduced all men to enemies and herself to a faceless, valueless child.
As she watched the two men, locked eye to eye in a silent battle, she was relieved that her father did not own a firearm. Though she thought she could trust Mr Stratford—just barely—not to shoot without provocation, there was no telling what her father might do when his blood was up and his thinking even less clear than usual. She reached out for her father’s arm again, ready to guide him home. ‘Come. Let us go back. There is nothing more that you can do today. If he has truly called for the constable, I do not wish to see you caught up in it.’
He shook off the embrace with a grunt and stepped back, giving an angry shrug as the carriage moved again, travelling up the road to the manor house. ‘It would serve him right if I was arrested. Then the world would see him for the sort of man he is: one who would throw an old man into jail to prove himself in the right.’
There was no point in explaining that the only lesson anyone was likely to see was that Stratford sat in a mansion at a fine dinner, while Lampett sat hungry in a cell. ‘But it would make me most unhappy, Father,’ she said as sweetly as possible. ‘And Mother as well. If we can have nothing else for Christmas, can we not have a few days of peace?’
‘I will be peaceful when there is reason to be,’ her father acceded. ‘I doubt, as long as that man breathes, we will see that state again.’
CHAPTER TWO
JOSEPH Stratford rode home alone in comfortable, if somewhat pensive, silence. The conclusion to today’s outing had been satisfactory, at least for now. The crowd had dispersed without any real violence. But if Bernard Lampett continued stirring, the town was likely to rise against him. Before that happened sterner measures would need to be taken.
In his mind, he composed the letter he would send to the commander of the troops garrisoned in York. It was drastic, but necessary. If one or two of them were hauled off in chains it might convince the rest of the error of their ways.
His carriage pulled up the circular drive of Clairemont Manor and deposited him at the door—so close that the chill of the season barely touched him on his way into the house. He smiled. How different this was from his past. Until last year he’d frequently had to make do on foot. But in the twelve months his investments had turned. Even with the money he’d laid out for the new mill he was living in a luxury that he would not have dreamed possible in his wildest Christmas wishes.
Joseph handed hat, gloves and overcoat to the nearest footman and strode into the parlour to take the cup of tea waiting for him by the second-best chair near the fire. As he passed the closest seat he gave a gentle kick at the boot of the man occupying it, to get Robert Breton to shift his feet out of the way.
Breton opened a sleepy eye and sat up. ‘Trouble at the mill?’
‘When is there not?’ He lifted his cup in a mock salute and Breton accepted it graciously, as though he owned the house and the right to the chair he usurped. While Joe might aspire to knock away at his own rough edges, affect the indolent slouch and copy the London accent and the facile gestures, he would never be more than false coin compared to this second son of an earl. Bob had been born to play lord of the manor, just as Joe had been born to work. He might own the house, but it was Bob’s birthright to be at ease there.
And that was what made him so damned useful—both as a friend and an investor. The Honourable