A Christmas Letter: Snowbound in the Earl's Castle

Marcus frowned. ‘Sometimes one doesn’t have that luxury,’ he said, his tone bare. ‘Sometimes you just have to do without.’

That was what he’d done after his father’s death. No one had really known the truth of what had happened. He’d tried very hard to believe what people had said—that it had just been an accident—but the collapse of the family firm had started him questioning everything about his father, and he hadn’t been able to shake the cynical little voice inside his head.

‘Of course hard evidence is preferable, but it’s not always there. Sometimes you just have to take a leap and hope you’re jumping in the right direction,’ he added.

Faith gave him a weary look. ‘Unfortunately the academic community don’t share your faith in gut instincts.’

‘Have you found anything more about the other painting? Hope, wasn’t it?’

She shook her head. ‘Not much. The family who own it aren’t ones for sharing. I can’t even find a picture of it. They also own any sketches and documents pertaining to the original commission, so it’s unlikely I’ll get any confirmation from that source.’ She opened the rolltop of an old bureau that had previously been blocked by a hatstand, and coughed as the dust flew into the air. ‘That’s why finding something here at Hadsborough is so important. It could be my only chance.’

As she searched a small smile curved her lips. He instinctively knew she was thinking about something that amused her.

‘What?’

She rolled her eyes. ‘A goofy coincidence. It’s just that the names of the three paintings are almost a match for me and my two sisters.’

Marcus’s eyebrows lifted. ‘Faith, Hope and Charity?’

She walked towards him slowly. ‘No, my littlest sister would have gone nuts if that was the case. Mom switched Charity to Grace.’

‘What are the odds?’ he muttered. ‘Are you the oldest?’

She shook her head and leaned against the desk next to him. ‘Mom never was one for sticking to convention. I’m in the middle. We all used to complain about our names, of course. Can you imagine the teasing we got at school?’

He made a wry face. ‘I went to an all-boys boarding school. If that’s not an education in just how abominable children can be, I don’t know what is.’

She nodded in sympathy. ‘Grace complains the most, even though I think she’s got the best end of the deal.’ She gave him a devilish little grin. ‘But when we were younger Hope and I had a way of shutting her up.’

‘Oh, yes?’

She nodded, then smiled to herself at the memory. ‘We used to tease her that Gram had talked Mom out of calling her Chastity, so she could have had it a whole lot worse!’

He couldn’t help laughing, and she grinned back at him before hopping up and sitting at the other end of the table. They weren’t touching. Quite.

She’d forgotten to put those barriers back down, hadn’t she? Even though they’d veered off the subject of the window and onto something more personal. He should say something to kill this moment, move away …

But he didn’t. Just a few more seconds to find out what really lay beneath Faith’s high walls. The chance might not come again, and he’d be safe once she retreated behind them once more. She always did.

‘It sounds as if you’re close,’ he said.

Faith’s smile disappeared. ‘Not really. Not any more. It all changed after …’

He shifted so his body faced hers more fully. ‘After what?’

‘You don’t want to know. It’s too …’ She shook her head and closed her eyes. ‘Your family…they’re so different to mine.’

He guessed she was talking about somebody having misbehaved. ‘You’d be surprised what the rich and powerful get up to just because they can,’ he said, a dry tone to his voice. ‘The second Duke was a bigamist, the third Duke had more illegitimate children than he could count and the fourth Duke lost Hadsborough in a drunken game of dice and won it back again the next night. And those are just the highlights. There are plenty more stories to tell about the Huntingtons.’

Faith shook her head, but she was smiling. ‘Not the same, and you know it. All those things make your family sound dashing and exciting. My family just makes people shake their heads and look sad.’

A stab of something hit Marcus square in the chest. Suddenly Faith wasn’t the only one on the edge of revealing something big.

‘Oh, mine make people shake their heads and look sad, too,’ he said.

‘No, they don’t …’ Faith began, laughing gently, assuming he was teasing. But when she met his eyes the laughter died. ‘They do?’ she said, blinking in disbelief.

They did. And he found that for the first time in over eighteen months he wanted to tell someone about it. Someone who wasn’t connected. Someone who didn’t care, who wouldn’t invest. He suddenly realised that Faith’s walls made her the perfect candidate.

‘I worked for my father until just before he died,’ he said, his voice deceptively flat and unemotional. ‘He’d started up an investment company thirty years before, and things were going really well…At least I thought they were.’ He shook his head. ‘I should have seen it coming. He was always so sure of himself—too sure—as if he thought he was indestructible. It made for great business when the markets were good. He liked to take risks, you see, and they often paid off.’

She nodded, waited for him to continue.

‘But in the last few years, with the way the financial climate had been—’ he made a face ‘—being daring didn’t cut it any more. In fact he lost a lot of people a lot of money. But my father was gripped by the unswerving belief that he could turn it around. He kept risking, kept gambling, kept losing…The company went bust. People lost their jobs.’ He looked her straight in the eye. ‘I knew what he was like, even though I didn’t know the extent of his recklessness. I should have done more. I should have stopped him.’

‘It wasn’t your fault, Marcus, what your father did. He made his own choices.’

Marcus swallowed. That was what he’d been afraid of.

Not on the business front. People had called Harvey Huntington a swindler, but that hadn’t been true. He’d just had an unshakeable belief in himself, hadn’t thought he could fail so badly. And when he had…Well, the unshakeable man had been shaken to the core. He’d never quite recovered.

‘About a year later they found his car wrapped round a lamp post,’ he added baldly.

Faith gasped and her hand covered her mouth. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘The inquest ruled it an accident,’ he said, nodding to himself. ‘He’d been drinking, and he never did like to wear his seat belt. But there were rumours …’

Faith’s eyes grew wide. ‘You mean that he’d meant to do it?’

Marcus just looked at her. ‘That’s about the gist of it.’

‘You don’t believe that, do you?’ she said, horrified. ‘I try not to.’

Faith reached over and laid her hand on his arm. He looked down at it. They hadn’t touched since their first meeting, and that one simple, spontaneous gesture completely arrested him. He looked back at her face—really looked at her—and saw warmth and compassion and gentle strength. Instead of climbing back behind her walls, he could feel she was reaching out to him, and it made him ache for her in an entirely new way.

No. He couldn’t want this. Shouldn’t.

But he could feel himself slipping, forgetting why.

‘You can’t take the blame for this, Marcus. It was nothing to do with you.’ She shook her head as she talked. ‘You can’t carry this round with you, believe me. For your own sanity you have to find a way to separate yourself, to disconnect.’

That pulled him up short. She was good at that, wasn’t she? He needed to remember that.

‘Is that what you did?’

She stopped shaking her head. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Disconnect?’ he said. ‘I might be too wrapped up in my family, but you seem cast adrift from yours. Is that how you cope? Running away? Living in a different country? I can’t do that, Faith. I have to stay and fight—for Bertie, for my children and their children.’