Ten Lords A-Leaping: A Mystery (Father Christmas) (3 page)

“
T
om Christmas.”

In the corona of light from the tent’s open flap the face fell in shadow. But the voice—pleasant, assured, faintly nasal in that North American way—was recognisable. “Jane Allan. How very good to see you again.”

“The last time we met you had a black eye.”

“I’m not normally accident-prone, I don’t think.” Tom frowned down the length of his supine form, past the right trouser leg pushed up to his knee, towards his elevated and naked foot. His swollen ankle was encased in a cold compress. “That time”—Tom wiggled his toes absently—“I got in the way of someone’s busy elbow.” He was referring to a graveside service at Thornford months earlier that had turned into a bit of a melee. “This time—”

“I heard.” Jane let the flap fall behind her and stepped farther into the tent’s stuffy interior, brushing a few damp strands
from her brow. Her features resolved into the warm, reassuring eyes, the delicate but determined jawline, and the lean little apostrophe of a nose that Tom remembered from their last meeting. “I gather your radio didn’t work.”

“Still, we did take the training and I might have descended to earth with more finesse.”

“Your first time?”

“And likely last. I doubt I shall have the opportunity again,” he hastened to add, not to appear fainthearted before fair women. He struggled to rise onto his elbows on the narrow cot. In truth he was still suffering a bit of shock. In the second before his frangible body embraced the planet’s inflexible surface, he wondered with a strange detachment which bones might crack, which ligaments might tear. But he was, as the St. John Ambulance volunteer told him, very lucky. His feet, not his posterior nor his hands, had met the chalky grass, as prescribed in the training, but his right foot had inverted sharply, taking his full weight as his body careened awkwardly and collapsed in a sideways heap. The pain had been skewering, as if an arrow had pierced him. He couldn’t help but cry out and in a thrice Miranda was at his side, tugging and pulling at the nylon that had rolled over him in soft waves. But after being rushed in a van to the St. John Ambulance tent tucked by Eggescombe Hall, he had been diagnosed with that most banal of sports injuries, a sprained ankle.

“Jamie’s suggested I take the opportunity sometime—skydiving seems to run in the family a bit.” Jane tucked her dark hair behind her ear. “But I’ve told him I’ll wait until our kids are old enough to better cope with being motherless.”

“As opposed to fatherless.”

Jane smiled. “I’ve rarely brought ours to these Leaping Lords events, for that very reason. I know the boys do good works, but I’m not sure how popular skydiving really is with wives and girlfriends and mothers.” She glanced at the third figure in the tent, an older woman who had silently and efficiently attended Tom earlier. “We camp followers don’t always follow.”

“But here you are.”

“Well, I thought I would like to come down to Devon.” She shot Tom an enigmatic glance. “Jamie had an Old Salopian event to attend at Exeter before the Leaping Lords on Saturday, and so Hector and Georgina invited us to stay over a few days. Our two are in Scotland with Jamie’s parents. By the way, I met your daughter coming out of the tent just now. She looks well. Settling in okay?”

“Yes, actually. Miranda’s quite fiercely independent.”

“So is Olivia, my daughter. They’d make a fine pair. And you’ve met Marguerite, I see.” She nodded towards the other woman, who turned and smiled in acknowledgement.

“Marguerite?” Tom glanced at the third in the tent.

“Hector’s mother.”

“I am sorry. I didn’t realise.” He had been attended to by the Dowager Countess Marguerite, Lady Fairhaven. Fuzzed with pain, he had rather wondered why the two lime-and-orange-kitted St. John folk had melted from the tent after a few words with the mufti-clad figure.

“I should have introduced myself.” Marguerite’s voice was resonant, chesty, as if fashioned by ten thousand Gauloises. She was wearing a man’s white shirt, tails knotted in front,
sleeves rolled up her arms, and loose-fitting white linen trousers. But it was her peerless blue eyes undimmed by age—only the fan of lines from each corner proclaimed the dowager countess surely in her sixties—and her wide sensuous mouth that held Tom’s attention. Here was great beauty, not diminished, but somehow refashioned by time. Tom sensed this was a woman much used to lingering glances.

“And I am trained, as is Jane here,” Marguerite continued. “If one lives in the country, as I do, the St. John course proves quite useful. Doctors aren’t always to hand.”

“Marve.” Jane turned. “This is the Reverend Tom Christmas, vicar of St. Nicholas’s in Thornford Regis.”

“Yes, I made that deduction. You wear your dog collar even beneath a jumpsuit. I believe you’re the son of Mary Carroll and Iain Christmas. Am I correct?”

Tom nodded.

“I thought so,” Marguerite said. “There’s something at my cottage I should like to show you.”

Tom looked down at his foot helplessly.

“Later, of course,” she said briskly. “When the swelling goes down a bit, we’ll put your ankle in a compression wrap. There are crutches somewhere in one of the attic rooms. You’ll find walking a bit tender. We can try getting you up later.” She frowned in thought. “A cast boot, perhaps, though your sprain isn’t severe.”

Tom made a noise somewhere between a groan and grunt.

“Pain returning?”

“No, it’s quite numb now. I was thinking how inconvenient this all is. I’ve plans to drive with my daughter to Exeter this
evening to visit my sister-in-law and then go on to London in the morning.”
For my birthday celebrations
, he didn’t add. “I expect I won’t be able to drive the car.”

Marguerite tapped his compress with a slim finger. “I have a brilliant idea. Why don’t you convalesce here at Eggescombe for a day or two?”

“Lady Fairhaven, I couldn’t possibly—”

“Nonsense.”

Tom flicked a glance at Jane, who was regarding the older woman with an interest bordering on curiosity.

“I should point out I have my daughter with me—”

“Splendid! She’ll be good company for Max, my grandson … and I believe your housekeeper is visiting with Hector and Georgie’s housekeeper this weekend.”

“Well … yes, she is,” Tom responded, thinking how remarkably informed the dowager countess was. He glanced again at Jane for some kind of adjudicating signal. Jane and her husband, Jamie—Viscount and Viscountess Kirkbride—he had met once, under somewhat fraught circumstances, but they had proved easy and delightful company, and, unprompted, of great service: It had been Jamie who had offered and organised the talents of the Leaping Lords to raise funds for St. Nicholas. The others at any Eggescombe weekend house party, however, would be unknown to him.

Jane flashed Tom a reassuring smile. “Yes, stay over, Tom. It would be good to have your company.”

“We’re only a few family this weekend,” Marguerite continued, “Hector and Georgina and the adorable Max, of course. Georgina’s brother will likely leave tomorrow or Monday.”

“Oliver.” Jane supplied the name.

“And Jane and Jamie. Quite a small party. You won’t be overwhelmed.”

“But …” Tom groped for a kind excuse. He felt very much the interloper. “Clothes!”

“Ah, yes, I hadn’t thought of that.” Marguerite’s doubt lasted only a beat. “But weren’t you on your way to London? What were you planning to wear when you got there?”

“Of course! Our luggage is in the boot.”

“Then it’s settled. I’ll have Gaunt fetch your things from your car.” Marguerite frowned. “You haven’t a service tomorrow?”

“I’m on a fortnight’s holiday.”

“Good. Now I’ll change the ice along your ankle and we’ll wheel you out of here. You must keep your feet elevated for a while longer. I asked them to keep you on the trolley, so you could be pushed out onto the lawn. You don’t want to miss the show, do you? Jane, pull the tent flap back.”

Moments later, Tom emerged semi-upright like a pasha amid a pile of propped-up hospital pillows onto Eggescombe’s sleek and sunlit south lawn. A few heads turned, all recognisable. Half of Thornford, it seemed, had motored to Eggescombe Park for the fund-raiser, and a smattering of clapping and cheering—half in good-natured mockery—followed. Faintly mortified, glad Miranda wasn’t witness (he couldn’t see her), Tom bobbed his head and waved in imitation of a world-weary monarch. He got a laugh.

Eggescombe’s grounds were festooned as if for a summer fête. As he was trundled down the gently sloping grounds, the countess and viscountess straining a bit so he wouldn’t slip off the trolley and fly over the ha-ha, he noted a few of the traditional
amusements for children, the bouncy castle and face-painting stall, among the usual homely carnival distractions. Hector and Georgina, Earl and Countess of Fairhaven, had given over their house and grounds for the day for this charitable event, for which Tom was most grateful. Cream teas amid the rich foliage of summer with, as backdrop, a rose-pink palace of gables and chimneys twisted into shapes a confectioner would envy was a great enticement to the villagers, especially as the Hall itself, usually closed the first two weeks in August when the family was installed, was open-to-view for the day. Electric carts took people between the Hall and the landing field, so visitors could admire those with the gumption to jump from an airplane, but the pièce de résistance was the Leaping Lords, a pool of peers of the realm who lent their time and talents a few times in the year to worthy causes. Ten lords were on tap this season and they would soon leap into the blue, not from the mingy few thousand feet that Tom and the novices had, but from a gasp-making twenty thousand—Tom shuddered anew thinking about it—free-falling through the air not only with the greatest of ease but for a heart-stoppingly long time, too, before gravity’s inexorable pull obliged them to open their chutes. Formation skydiving was the Leaping Lords’ claim to fame, feats of aerobatics and athleticism, the linked peers together shape-shifting in the sky, all of which would be as flying ants if it weren’t for closed-circuit television.

“This should do,” Marguerite said as she and Jane twisted the trolley around to face a giant television screen set by the ha-ha’s stone border.

“Thank you both.” Tom studied their distorted reflections in the glossy ebony lozenge. There were three other TVs—two
on the terrace off the drawing room and another farther along the ha-ha—framing the lawn like a set of brackets.

“Shouldn’t be long, I don’t think.” Marguerite glanced at her watch. “Now, however do they do this? Someone wears a camera on his head, I think. Jane?”

“Someone they hire stays in the plane with a camera and films them through the open door. And one of the skydivers wears one on his head, so we get different views of the same thing. I think it’s to be Jamie. He’s done it before. He says the videographer always …” Jane’s voice trailed off. Tom noted her eyes slitting as she peered into the middle distance, towards the cluster of striped café umbrellas on the terrace. “… always has to be conscious of where he’s aiming his head … Marve, is that Lucinda?”

Marguerite turned to look, and Tom’s eyes followed. What he saw was a tall and slender young woman with fair floating hair and a light diaphanous skirt striding with an assured gait down the terrace steps onto the shimmering lawn, an immense straw hat in one hand. Even at a distance, he could make out the translucent skin, the slim neck rising from the plunging keyhole opening of her simple blouse. He rather wished he wasn’t, in his awkward state, stirred by this beauteous vision, but he was.

“Yes, it is Lucinda.” Marguerite’s tone seemed to contain multiple shades of meaning though her expression gave none away. “I thought she summered in Cap Ferrat. I’ll go and say hello, shall I? Georgina’s probably in her bedroom with a cold cloth on her forehead.”

Tom leaned a little to the left, as Marguerite’s moving figure was blocking Eggescombe’s newest attraction.

Jane noted the gesture and said, half amused: “She’s very beautiful, Lucinda.”

“Yes, she is,” Tom responded primly, straightening himself against the pillows.

Jane laughed. “Vicar, you’re allowed some frailties.”

“Am I? All right then. She’s quite stunning. Who is she?”

“Georgie and Olly’s sister … well, half sister. Lady Lucinda fforde-Beckett. Lucy, to family.”

“And is he her husband?” He studied the slim, pale man with modishly long fair hair following a step behind and recognised that a little envy had crept into his voice. Jane didn’t seem to notice.

“No,” she replied. “Lucy’s already shucked two husbands, and she’s only in her mid-twenties. That’s … it’s a little complicated. That’s Dominic fforde-Beckett. He’s Lucy’s cousin—and Oliver’s and Georgina’s, too, of course. They’re all related on the fforde-Beckett side.”

“Doesn’t seem too—”

“The complication, Tom, is that Lucinda and Dominic are both cousins
and
half siblings.”

“How—?”

“Oliver and Georgina’s father, Frederick, late Marquess of Morborne, had two wives. His first wife was my husband’s aunt, Christina. Got that so far?”