A Lady in Name (13 page)

Lucy bridled.
‘My decision has nothing to do with Lord Pennington. And I have not had my head turned!’

Mr Waley looked startled.
‘Such heat, Miss Lucy. Pray be calm.’

‘I said you did not know me,’ Lucy retorted, not without a touch of satisfaction.

He put up both hands in a gesture of peace. ‘I make every allowance for the agitation of mind attendant upon a state of bereavement.’ A new thought seemed to occur. ‘Is it that, perhaps? Have I been too precipitate? I would not have broached the matter thus early were it not for the invidious nature of your situation.’

Lucy felt as if a hole suddenly opened in her chest, preventing her from breathing.
Her mind blanked of all but the dreadful possibility that Papa had betrayed her.

‘You know.’
A mere whisper on her breath.

Mr Waley coloured and fidgeted, reaching to push his spectacles back up his nose and sniffing in the process.

‘He told you,’ Lucy pursued. ‘Papa told you it all.’

One of his hands flew up and he shook his head, jiggling the spectacles.
‘No, indeed, it was not Mr Graydene.’

‘Aunt Harriet!’

Lucy knew by his face it was true. Her flesh crawled. Behind her back, an arrangement had been made. He had been told the truth, but without her knowledge or consent. She gazed at the curate with a new eye.

‘You knew, and yet you persisted in this determination to marry me.
Was there a bribe, Mr Waley? What do you get out of it?’

She knew he was both angry and shocked by the way he drew back, his thin features pinching in so tightly he might have had parchment for skin.

‘I had not thought to hear you speak with so little moderation or thought for what you say. I am dismayed, Miss Graydene.’

‘But I am not Miss Graydene, am I?
And yet you were willing to accept me for your wife. You will forgive me if I suppose there must have been some strong inducement held out to you.’

He shook his head.
‘None whatsoever, I do assure you.’

‘Then you are sorry for me, is that it?’

‘Miss Lucy, you mistake me utterly,’ he said, a note of ill-usage creeping into his voice. ‘My attachment to your dear father might be reason enough, but—’

‘You will marry me for my father’s sake then?’ interpolated Lucy, too upset to be rational.
‘Even though he is not my father.’

‘Not at all.
My regard for you is sincere. If you require proof, pray understand I would never have brought up this matter had you not divined I had knowledge of it.’

‘And I would never have agreed to marry you if I had not told you of it.’

Lucy caught herself up in mid-career, suddenly recognising the incongruity of her words. Mr Waley appeared fully aware of the anomaly.

‘You will not marry me without telling me, yet you are angry
that I have been told?’

‘By my aunt
. Can you not see the difference?’ Remorse gnawed at Lucy. She had treated the curate abominably. On impulse, she reached out and seized his hands. ‘You are a good man, Mr Waley, and you do me great honour. But I am not the creature you think me.’ She released his fingers. ‘We would not suit, believe me. And I must find my own way out of this dreadful predicament.’

‘But what will you do?’

Lucy shrugged. ‘That I don’t yet know.’

Mr Waley leaned closer.
‘You have been taken by surprise. I must beg you not to make too hasty a decision. A little time to reflect, and your mind may alter.’

‘I do not think so.’

He held up a hand. ‘Say no more. I will say only this. Let my offer remain upon the table. I could not reconcile it with my promise to our poor dear Mr Graydene to have it otherwise. If you find yourself in want of a suitable situation, you have only to apprise me of it. I will marry you, Miss Lucy, whatever your circumstances.’

* * *

There was virtual silence in the curricle for the first mile or so. Since her interview with the curate, Lucy had been edgy and evasive. Stefan had no difficulty in recognising the signs of her upset, as if he had known the girl for an age. He felt acutely attuned to her moods, a state of affairs he found less than comfortable.

She had refused to allow Dion to draw her on the subject of her conversation with the wretched Mr Waley, and Stefan had
—not without a stretch of resolution—refrained from putting in his oar. Not that he meant to let the matter lie. Instead, he wove a careful plan to the end of holding Lucy captive where he might question her with impunity. She could do little to avoid the issue perched upon the seat of his carriage, and with no listening ears up behind. Dispensing with his groom had not been accomplished without challenge.

‘We are going alone?’

Lucy had eyed him with suspicion. Stefan maintained, he hoped, his bland expression.

‘Have you any objection?
I cannot think it much matters for so short a journey.’

She had looked frowningly at the empty perch behind.
Stefan had made a deliberate business of throwing up his eyes.

‘Pray use a little sense, Lucy, do.
It is by far more improper to be leaving Dion alone in a public inn, and as we cannot seat three abreast, I have no choice but to leave Cobbold here.’

‘You consider a groom an adequate chaperon?’

‘Yes, when the groom in question has known Dion from a child and guided her first lessons in riding.’

Either the words or his tone of faint boredom served to allay whatever suspicions she was harbouring and Lucy at last allowed him to hand her up and tuck the carriage rug about her legs.
A sharp frost had left a chill in the February air.

Bent upon lulling her, Stefan confined his remarks to asking for directions to Corse where the vicarage maid was now resident.
Once they were well on the road, however, he felt it safe to embark upon his purpose.

‘You have said nothing of what passed between you and Mr Waley, Lucy.
Are we to wish you happy?’

He caught a frowning glance as he turned his head to look at her briefly.
For a moment, Stefan thought she would not answer.

‘No.’

The bald monosyllable hung in the air, its echo filled with the cause of her evident depression.

‘I see.’

Stefan waited. He might not have known his cousin long, but he believed he had her measure. There was too much spleen bottled up inside her to be long contained. Sure enough, in a few moments, his patience was rewarded.

‘My aunt betrayed me to him.
He knew of my background all along.’

The gruff tone concealed nothing of her pain.
Stefan did not make the mistake of referring to it. ‘Yet he still made you an offer?’

She did not answer immediately.
And then it came out in a rush.

‘I made sure he had been offered some sort of compensation, but he denied it.
He would have me believe he would marry me for Papa’s sake and my own.’ She stopped, her emotions apparent from the shortness of her breath. ‘I behaved badly. I shocked him. Even so, he says he will marry me.’

Stefan cursed under his breath, and muttered savagely.
‘Oh, no, he will not!’

Lucy swept him another of her frowning glances.
‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Nothing,’ Stefan said hastily.
‘What was your answer?’

‘I refused him, of course.’

‘Why of course?’

‘Do you suppose I could marry a man who had been somehow coerced into acceptance?’
The passion was ill-concealed now.

‘But did you not say you might consider marrying him if he knew the truth?’
Stefan ventured.

‘Yes, if I had told him myself.
I might then be in a position to see just how he took the news, and know that if he overcame whatever shock or horror he felt, it was not through any coercion or bribe. I may not be respectable, but I have my share of pride.’

More than her share, Stefan thought, but he refrained from saying so.
It said much for her sense of honour that she would throw away the chance to secure her future for a mere scruple. Stefan did not know many women who would have done as much. And then she ruined all with a thunderbolt.

‘But Mr Waley was firm that I must regard his offer as remaining open, so if I cannot settle myself suitably, I may still choose to marry him.’

‘You will do no such thing,’ uttered Stefan, forgetting his intention to remain upon cordial terms.

Predictably, Lucy took him up on the instant.
‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I said you will do no such thing,’ repeated Stefan with emphasis.
‘I won’t have you marrying that man under any circumstances. In fact, I forbid it.’

‘
You
forbid it?’

For a moment Lucy stared at Stefan’s unyielding profile in total disbelief.
Then she let fly.

‘This is beyond everything!
You behave as if I am your chattel. How many times am I to repeat that you have no rights over me? You take too much upon yourself, my lord. For all you know, we may not even be cousins. All you have is the letter from your uncle, and upon that you appear to base a relationship which permits you all sorts of licence. It is absurd. What is more, it is utterly unacceptable.’

She ran out of breath and had to pause to recover.
Stefan did not appear at all chastened by her tirade.

‘Have you finished?’

Lucy did not think she had, but the discharging of her spleen had done much to lessen the sense of injustice under which she had been labouring. She let her breath go in something between a sigh and a giggle.

‘Yes!’

‘Capital,’ said Stefan in congratulatory accents, and Lucy found herself laughing. She looked at him.

‘You are, without exception, the most infuriating man I have ever met.’

‘Since you can’t have met many, that is not saying much,’ he returned.

Lucy eyed him as he took his eyes off the road for a moment to look at her.
‘I believe you did that on purpose.’

Stefan uttered a short laugh.
‘I assure you I did not. I meant it. As for my rights, Lucy, I don’t care what they may be or why. I still would not permit you to throw yourself away on a fellow with whom you have nothing in common and for whom you cannot possibly feel the sort of regard necessary to a marriage. If that is autocratic and high-handed, as you choose to term my decisions, then so be it.’

Lucy knew not how to respond.
How did Stefan manage to make his interference sound so reasonable? As if he truly had her interests at heart. Why should he when he hardly knew her? A tattoo fluttered in her breast. It was curiously endearing to have him so vehement against her possible union with Mr Waley. Almost as if he were jealous? It had crossed her mind before, but it must be absurd and impossible. Lucy was nevertheless conscious of a warm feeling inside.

A large cluster of oaks appearing ahead to one side of the road, she recognised abruptly where they were.

‘There is Corse Copse. We are but a half mile from Jenny’s new abode.’

So it proved.
Stefan tooled the curricle into a straggling village, and turned off the main road at Lucy’s direction. Presently, he was able to set her down at a neat cottage standing by itself alongside a row of workers’ dwellings.

Stefan was necessarily obliged to remain with the curricle while Lucy went inside, but he had not walked the horses for more than a couple of turns before she emerged in company with a stout dame in country clothes with an apron over all, whose advanced years were evident in a heavy tread and the slowed pace of Lucy’s normally deft motions.

‘Jenny insists upon seeing you for herself,’ Lucy explained with a comical grimace reminiscent of his sister.

‘Aye, sir, I do that,’ said the elderly female, fixing him with a penetrating eye.
‘I’d not have courage to face our sainted vicar, if I’d let our Miss Lucy go off with a wrong ’un, not if he was ever so much a lord.’

Amused and rather touched, Stefan returned her deep look without flinching.
‘You may be sure of Miss Lucy receiving the best of care and everything which may add to her comfort. It is not dependent upon me, you know. She has my mother and sister to look out for her.’

He had struck the right note.
Jenny nodded sagely.

‘Aye, it’s that way with the gentry.
I weren’t taken with her purpose in going to you, sir, but if she’s landed on her feet, I’ll feel my duty done.’

‘You have no need to fret over me, Jenny,’ Lucy said soothingly.
‘Besides, you have nearer cares to worry over now.’

‘My poor sister, aye.
As you’d not come home when you said, Miss Lucy, I reckoned I’d best be off. If I’d known when you was coming, I’d have come back for you.’