O Night Divine A Holiday Collection of Spirited Christmas Tales - Kathryn Le Veque Page 0,42

‘why’?”

“I mean,” he said, “why did you feel that was your only option? Was there no one to help you at all?”

She shuddered and then sighed heavily as she walked deeper into the recesses of the building. The walls were up, all bare plaster and empty doorways. “My father disowned me. I told you that. But I was determined to care for her and I worked so hard. I had managed to obtain a position as a seamstress, work that was backbreaking and difficult but at least respectable. But to do my work, I had to leave her with another woman who lived in the same hovel I’d managed to land in. And every day, I worried whether or not she was actually being cared for. But I had no choice.”

“Of course, you didn’t,” he said.

“But there were other things… thinks about Marchebanks… I made the mistake of attempting to use what I knew to blackmail him into at least providing for Lillian and me. It didn’t work. It created a situation that was infinitely worse. If I hadn’t left Lillian when I did, both of us would have met a terrible fate. He’d have seen us both dead.”

Oliver said nothing. What could he say, after all? The world was a vicious and cruel place and crueler to no one than to a woman alone in the world. But to be hunted by your own family, that was a new low. “And you had no one… your parents had abandoned you and the father of your child had shown just how dishonorable a man can be. I’m sorry for that. More sorry than I can ever express.”

“He sent her away to a school in the north,” she continued. “It was a wretched place. But I had followed her there. I took a job as a teacher under an assumed name. It allowed me to be close to her and to keep an eye on her in a way that would see us both safe from my cousin… and then William arrived one day to bring another of his offspring. Wilhelmina, Lillian’s half-sister. He saw me and that was the end of it. I was banished from the school. I tried every day to find out how Lillian was, but there was a terrible outbreak of cholera… I became ill and when I was able to go back to the school and inquire after her, I was told she had died. That both the girls had. In fact, both she and her half-sister had been rescued by Miss Euphemia Darrow and brought to London as the first students in her new school. But I didn’t know… when I found myself face to face with Lillian while meeting with Viscount Seaburn to discuss being employed as a companion for the dowager duchess—it was a difficult meeting. There is a great deal of hurt and resentment that Lillian still has for me. And I understand it. I don’t wish to jeopardize our relationship further by making her more a topic of gossip than she already is.”

“And yet, here we are, two unmarried and unchaperoned people of the opposite sex… locked in a building alone,” he pointed out. “It’s hardly ideal for someone who wishes to reclaim respectability.”

Elizabeth’s expression became grim. “Yes, I know. It’s like so many things in my life. In an attempt to avoid one difficult situation, I’ve put myself in another that is infinitely worse. She will never forgive me.”

“There is another option.”

Elizabeth laughed, but it was a sound without humor, sounding bitter instead. “And what, pray tell, is that?”

“We could marry,” Oliver offered, his tone completely calm and his expression as blank as he could manage. It wasn’t that he questioned it. He didn’t. From the moment he’d first encountered her only the night before, he’d been aware that she was extraordinary. He’d also been quite aware that no other woman, in all his life, had ever affected him in the way that she had. He could, with complete and utter confidence, say that Elizabeth Burkhart had made him believe in love at first sight. Funny that he’d questioned the possibility more when drunk than when sober. And while he imagined there was some not quite divine intervention in bringing them together courtesy of their mysterious spirit, Burney, he’d take all the help he could get if it meant being with her forever.

“You can’t possibly be serious,” Elizabeth protested.

“There’s a reason we met. There’s a reason that a spirit