Page 22 of How the Belle Stole Christmas

Silas now found himself in a barren tenement room, so small that the entire space would have fit in his dressing room.

Grace sat in a rickety rocking chair, her fragile silhouette framed against a cracked window.

She looked tired and sad—a far cry from the woman he’d just seen rushing to meet his younger self in the garden.

A lone piece of greenery tied with a faded red ribbon sat upon the table, and he realized this was yet another Christmas Eve in the past.

Two women stopped on the street outside, openly staring at her through the window. Their whispers of scorn drifted through the paper-thin walls, rising above the steady hum of distant machinery.

“They say she’s come down in the world,” one of them sneered. “Used to be an upstairs maid in an earl’s country house.”

“I heard that her child is the young lord’s by-blow,” another added, tugging her shawl tighter as if scandal were a contagion.

Silas flinched, his breath catching. Only then did he realize that Grace was not alone. She cradled what he, at first, had thought was a bundle of rags against her chest but now realized was an infant, perhaps six months of age.

“I’ll not let them break us, my darling,” Grace whispered, her voice cracking. She stroked the baby’s soft cheek, and the child babbled happily.

“Is that my child?” Silas asked, turning to the ghost with wild eyes. Dear God. He hadn’t known. How had he not known this?

The spirit merely pointed a glowing hand back at the mother and child, insisting that Silas look more closely. He couldn’t even imagine what horrors still lay ahead. This was Christmas, after all.

“I didn’t know,” he muttered. “If I’d known that she was with child…”

“What would you have done?” the ghost asked pityingly. “Would you have defied your father for the sake of duty when you didn’t for love?”

Would he have? Silas swallowed the bile that had risen in his throat as the gossiping women finally drifted away. He wished he could defend himself and the choices he’d made, but how could he? He’d hurt Grace.

And their child.

“My father told me he’d made arrangements for her,” he said weakly. “That she was in service at the country estate of a friend of his. That she’d been glad to leave me. That she’d never loved me, only the life she thought I could give her.”

The ghost gave a slight shake of its head. “He threw her out with nothing but the clothes on her back and a few shillings. He told her that you asked him to do it. That you never truly cared for her at all.”

“That bastard,” Silas snarled, wishing his father’s ghost were before him again so that he could shout his fury and pain to the man who had taken the one person who had been precious to him and ruined her so irrevocably.

But even as he had the thought, he knew this was not his father’s fault; it was his own.

He turned his gaze to Grace and their child once again. Despite her lowly circumstances, she was not defeated.

“All will be well, Emmaline,” Grace breathed, rocking the baby with gentle insistence, but her eyes misted with tears as she stared unseeing at the dingy, crumbling wall.

Emmaline. The child was a girl. He had a daughter.

Grace must have felt so betrayed. So alone.

He stared at the child, delicate and impossibly small, and his world tilted. She is mine. They are mine. Yet I threw them away as if they didn’t matter. The weight of that truth pressed hard against him, crushing yet undeniable.

The Ghost of Christmas Past stood beside him, a silent sentinel, its ethereal glow delineating the grim scene. It hovered, neither condemning nor forgiving, simply showing, with cruel honesty, the life that Silas had turned away from.

Silas reached for Grace, the motion raw and desperate, but his hand found only empty air. The image shattered like glass, scattering the pieces of his heart across his grand yet empty bedchamber.

The spirit had left him, giving no indication if he’d passed or failed its test.

He stood motionless, every muscle strained with resistance, as if to move would acknowledge his own helplessness. In the mirror, his green eyes were haunted, his dark hair mussed.

The stark room was freezing, the meager fire struggling against the darkness. The clock ticked, the sound echoing loudly in the silence.

He was alone. And for the first time in years, he felt a howling sense of isolation.

He closed his eyes, remembering Grace’s cramped, dingy quarters. She and Emmaline had not a single comfort in the world, but she’d showered that baby with all the love that was missing from his own life.

He reopened his eyes to his bleak surroundings, opulent yet sterile, lacking even a hint of warmth or beauty.

The harsh contrast stabbed at him, and he could not escape the knowledge of how completely he had failed.

Every whispered promise he’d ever made to Grace—of love, of his protection, of a future where she wouldn’t have to work her fingers to the bone—had been a lie.