Free Ten Lords A-Leaping: A Mystery (Father Christmas) by C. C. Benison Page A

daughter’s absence. The flying cork had found its target in Oliver’s face.

CHAPTER SIX
     

 
    T om prepared to slip between the cool sheets. Someone, Gaunt most likely, had placed on the bed a pair of crisply pressed and folded pajamas as white as a bride’s gown, but they weren’t his. Tom’s own sleepwear was informal—a T-shirt and cotton lounge pants most times—and almost always mismatched, frayed, and inelegant, and he guessed Gaunt had thought him lacking proper sleepwear—or any sleepwear at all—when he had unpacked his bags. The evening held its warmth, the room, too, so he hopped across the room to a daybed and set the pajamas down unmolested, returning to plunk his naked self down on the edge of the bed, an exotic four-poster with scarlet hangings, a japanned and gilded frame, surmounted by a pagoda roof with winged golden dragons at each cornice. His eyes travelled from the dragon’s lewdly curling tongue down to the lacquered lattice-backed chairs to the ornate mirror frame over the fireplace tothe delicate cream silk wallpaper with foliate motifs. Tom supposed it was all very lovely, if out of character with the rest of the house’s Jacobean gloom, but somehow it reminded him more of a high-class tart’s boudoir, not that he had ever been in such a place. He eyes fell to the carpet—unadorned and green, like a lawn—and to the terminus of his right leg.
Oh, my poor little foot
. Alice contemplating hers when she’d grown nine feet tall came to his mind.
Will I be able to put a sock and shoe on you tomorrow?
    Not bloody likely
.
    If his wife were alive, she would be a helpmeet, though it would be a day or two at least before the compression wrap could come off and she could fit him into a shoe. But Lisbeth was gone, lo these several years, he thought wistfully, and a little sleepily. Perhaps this was why he was thinking of Alice: She had ingested something—Was it a piece of cake? A pill? He couldn’t remember—that had made her open out like a telescope. He had ingested a sleeping tablet, which was making him shut down like the same instrument. Lady Fairhaven had suggested it for the discomfort he was sure to have sleeping. She herself took fifteen milligrams of zopiclone to sleep. By her tone, it sounded like the done thing at Eggescombe. And as she had taken the trouble to come to his room with it and remained while he fumbled on the bedside table with the water carafe, refusing had seemed impolite. Lady Fairhaven’s mother-in-law, the dowager countess, had been the one to lead him to his room earlier, and she had said sweetly, echoing Alice, “You must manage as best you can, but you must be kind to it.”
    His foot, that is.
    So the pill was a kind of kindness, he supposed, though he had managed surreptitiously with his fingernail to break it in half before swallowing. Fifteen milligrams sounded much too much.
    Perhaps he might favour his foot with new and unique footwear, like Alice. Sent by carrier. And how odd the directions will look!
    TOM’S RIGHT FOOT, ESQ.
     HEARTHRUG,
         NEAR THE FENDER,
           (WITH TOM’S LOVE).
     
    He yawned deeply. The Opium Bedroom contained no hearthrug. His watering eyes roamed up his legs, past his thoroughly bored penis, to the accordion crinkle of his stomach. He absently pinched an inch of flesh. Two inches. More. How dismaying. In less than an hour it would be Christmas Eve, his family members’ jokey private name for the day before their birthdays—this year, for him, a milestone birthday that he had been approaching in slithering trepidation with little prayerful increments, like someone sidling up to a woman in a wine bar. Really, another birthday shouldn’t matter. He’d given the previous ones little mind. And he did indeed thank the Lord for the gift of life, for the gift of his daughter, his mothers, his friends, for the precious years he’d had with Lisbeth, for all the good things about life