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 light.
“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