A Lady in Name (30 page)

Lady Dorothea grunted.
‘About time. No patience with all the shilly-shally girls get up to these days. What else is a marriage for, if not to produce heirs?’

‘Very true, ma’am.’

Lucy threw Stefan a grateful look, trying for a measure of composure. She had not foreseen that an elderly woman whose sight must be in question would so readily note the resemblance. It could not but touch upon the wound of her reason for being here in the first place. She threw out the first thing that came into her head, anxious to deflect the old lady from any further investigation into her true identity.

‘I understand you never married, Lady Dorothea.’

The eyeglass thankfully dropped. ‘I was not permitted to ally myself with the man I would have chosen, so I refused to marry at all. In my day, we did the bidding of our parents.’

‘Except that you did not,’ Stefan pointed out.

‘Because I did not choose to marry another? Poppycock. My father washed his hands of me. Turned his attention to my sister instead.’

‘How very sad,
’ uttered Lucy impulsively.

‘Marriage ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, my girl.
Pennington knows that, I’ll wager.’

Stefan laughed.
‘On the contrary, Aunt. It happens I have the most ardent desire to be married.’

Up went the eyeglass, this time thankfully directed upon Stefan.

Lady Dorothea snorted. ‘What you mean is you’ve fallen in love with some hopeless ineligible. Nothing ardent about an earl’s marriage plans, boy.’

The uncanny accuracy of Lady Dorothea’s statement threw Lucy into disorder.
How in the world was she to live with a creature as embarrassingly outspoken as this? She dared not look at Stefan, and could only be glad he came down on the side of prudence and said no more.

The old lady once more let her eyeglass fall, but her oddly riveting gaze remained fixed upon Stefan, and her look became direful.

‘You ain’t going to fall into the same foolish error young Beves made, are you, boy? He was lucky, for the creature died and he was never called upon to confess his misdeeds. Shocking misalliance. My brother would have crucified him.’

Stefan felt as if his mind was tucked behind a veil of gauze, numbed with bated shock.
Had his ears deceived him? He glanced at Lucy and found her wide-eyed and rapidly paling. As well she might.

He found his tongue.
‘I beg your pardon, ma’am, but what are you saying?’ His tongue ran dry and he was obliged to swallow and start again. ‘Are you saying my uncle Beves married a second time?’

Lady Dorothea looked pained.
‘Something wrong with your understanding, Pennington? Did I not just say so?’

Stefan let out a half-laugh of incredulity.
‘Yes, but it is so unexpected, I could not be sure I had heard you correctly.’

‘
When
?’

The painful intensity of Lucy’s single utterance told him more vividly than any words how vital to her was the answer.
He wanted to reach out and seize her hand. Instead, he reiterated her question.

‘When, Aunt?
When did this marriage take place?’

The old lady sat back, her chin going up as she contemplated the ceiling, as if she sought there for the answer.
‘I am not certain of the time. My brother yet held the earldom.’

‘You mean Grandfather Fulbert?’
Stefan put in, desperate to have all clear.

‘I had only one brother who was Earl of Pennington.
Of course your Grandfather Fulbert,’ snapped Lady Dorothea irascibly.

‘Do you say my uncle Beves confessed all this to you?’ pursued Stefan.

‘He wouldn’t tell anyone else,’ she said, as if they ought to have known. ‘Had to tell someone, I suppose. I advised him to confess it to his father and take the consequences. But before he could do so, word came the woman had fortuitously died.’

‘Leaving a child whom my uncle refused to recognise,’ burst from Stefan without will, springing from his seat in a sudden access of fury.

The abrupt movement tugged Lucy out of her stupor. The words had flowed to and fro across the room, and all the while the only thing she was aware of was the slow and heavy pumping in her chest. Bemused, she watched Stefan pacing, his fists tightly clenched. The possibility just opened up was so impossible she knew not how to look it in the face. She was hardly aware of speaking, her words addressed within her own mind only.

‘He wed
ded her. Then he left her. Friendless and alone. But he did wed her.’

‘Scoundrel,’ growled Stefan, turning to glare across the room at Lucy, as if she were at fault.
‘I thought I had known the worst of him when you came to me, Lucy, but this beats all!’

‘What in the world are you talking about, Pennington?’

Lucy’s eyes were drawn to the old lady, whom they had both forgotten in the press of this precious intelligence. Lady Dorothea was sitting bolt upright, her stance showing no sign of her advanced years, her snapping eyes travelling from Stefan to Lucy and back again.

She saw Stefan’s glare turn upon his great-aunt, and quickly cut in.

‘I am Lucy Graydene Ankerville, ma’am. I thought I was the late Lord Pennington’s illegitimate daughter. But now…’

Her voice failed as the enormity of the news came home to her.
Her eyes pricked, her throat worked and she put her hands over her face.

She heard Stefan’s gritty tones.
‘Now, ma’am, it is borne in upon Lucy that, so far from being my uncle’s natural daughter, she has been cheated of her rightful heritage.’

Lady Dorothea’s response to this was utter
ly unexpected. ‘So I was right. You are about to contract a misalliance, Pennington.’

‘On the contrary,’ said Stefan drily.
‘I am going to marry my legitimate cousin. Not that I wouldn’t have done it before I knew of this, for I had every intention of wedding Lucy regardless of what anyone may say. But at least now Lucy will not fight me.’ He turned to Lucy, who had regained command of herself and was lowering her hands from her face. ‘Will you, my sweet?’

Lucy’s heart leap
t, and then juddered into a ragged beat. ‘There is no proof.’

Stefan’s brows snapped together.
‘I was rather forgetting that.’ He turned back to his great-aunt. ‘Had my uncle any marriage lines?’

Lady Dorothea was looking anything but reconciled.
‘How in the world should I know? Do you suppose I asked him to show them to me?’

Stefan seized Lucy’s hands and pulled her to her feet.
His eyes were alight with purpose. ‘Then there is nothing for it but to go in search of the church where the marriage is registered.’

A surge of hope thrust a flutter of excitement into Lucy’s breast.
Yet she could not but protest. ‘There must be fifty churches at least in the immediate vicinity of Upledon, never mind the whole of Gloucestershire.’

‘Then we will search all their registers until we find it,’ Stefan promised.
He drew her towards him, and a tender smile curved his mouth. ‘We must find it, for I know you too well, my dearest, to suppose you will consent to marry me without. However long it takes, to me it will be time well spent.’

* * *

It felt strange to be once again scouring the area around her old home for evidence of her past. Stranger still to Lucy to be doing so in a spirit of unbridled hope. So much hung upon this journey, she was near overwhelmed with the sense of its urgency.

Stefan had left her at his great-aunt’s overnight, Lucy regretfully agreeing it was already too late to set out.
Indeed, since the morrow was a Saturday, she had begun to chafe at the notion of potentially wasted time.

‘It will take us all day to get there, and then it will be Sunday.
How can we enquire at any church on the busiest day in the Anglican week?’

‘What better day?’ had argued Stefan.
‘When we may be sure of discovering the incumbents in their churches.’

He had returned to fetch her the following morning, driving, to her surprise, his curricle, and accompanied only by his groom.

‘I believe it will suit us better not to be burdened with Dion’s presence on this occasion.’

Lucy had cried out at this, protesting Dion was not a burden.
‘And I am astonished she agreed to be excluded.’

Stefan had laughed.
‘It was not accomplished without argument, I assure you. Dion is naturally delighted at the outcome of events and wanted to be in at the kill, so to speak, but I managed to persuade her of the futility of leaving Corisande in charge with Paulina and her infant fixed in the house.’

Lucy could not but appreciate the justice of this, though she had entered a caveat.
‘But who is to chaperon me?’

‘There is no impropriety in your travelling about the country with your affianced husband,’ Stefan had pointed out, with a lurking twinkle.

Lucy had frowned down the leaping flame set alight in her veins at the thought of being quite alone with him whenever they must rack up at an inn for the night.

‘That depends,’ she said severely, ‘if the gentleman in question is disposed to behave himself.’

Stefan’s eye had gleamed. ‘His conduct will be impeccable.’ He had leaned to whisper in her ear. ‘In particular in the matter of never neglecting opportunity.’

Lucy had flushed both inside and out, and abandoned the subject for fear of his saying anything more outrageous.
In the event, however, the purpose of the journey became ever more prominent until Lucy could think of nothing else. She was glad of the speedy curricle, for there was no need to spend a night upon the road, although it was excessively late by the time they entered into Gloucestershire at Preston and located a likely hostelry. It was all Lucy could do to remain awake long enough to partake of a makeshift meal before falling into bed, no thought of amorous undertakings so much as crossing her mind.

On the Sunday, Lucy was yawning as she ate a desultory breakfast.
It occurred to her she’d had but little rest during the last few days, so intense and relentless had been the march of events. But she was eager to start, and waited with ill-concealed impatience while Stefan tucked away a mountainous breakfast.

They began with
Preston vicarage, went on to the rectory at Broomsberrow, doubled back to the vicarage of Dimmock, and then checked the churches at Kempley and Pauntley, and finally took in Oxenhall vicarage. By which time they had travelled more than fourteen miles and wasted hours in fruitless questioning.

Despondent, Lucy hung back from re-entering the cu
rricle. ‘We will never find it. I don’t believe it exists.’

Stefan put his arm about her.
‘Take heart. We have covered a mere five or six churches as yet.’

‘Six,’ stated Lucy flatly.
‘There are six in the immediate environs of Upledon.’

‘They are beginning to look the same to me,’ said Stefan ruefully, releasing her and casting a frowning glance at the sky.
‘One more, and then I think we must look for a likely inn and bespeak rooms for the night. Where shall we go next?’

Despite Lucy’s upbringing, her acquaintance with the incumbents of churches further afield was slight.
‘Corse, I suppose, though we must cross the Severn to reach it.’

Detecting her drooping spirits, Stefan tried to cheer her.
‘We could not expect to be as lucky a second time as we were in discovering Alice’s family. Recollect we have no notion where my uncle and your mother might have met, let alone run off to.’

Lucy sighed.
‘Perhaps it was out of the county altogether.’

‘Unlikely, I think.
Alice would not have ended in Upledon, and as it seems clear my uncle abandoned her soon after the ceremony, there can be little doubt it took place within a not unreasonable distance of Mr Graydene’s vicarage.’

‘Begging your pardon, my lord, but seems to me as there’s one place as you might try Miss ain’t said nothing about.’

Stefan looked to where the groom was holding the horses’ heads. ‘Where’s that, Cobbold?’

‘Much Marcle.’

‘Much Marcle!’ exclaimed Lucy. ‘I never even thought of Much Marcle. It is outside the county.’

‘Aye, miss.
It’s what you said made me think of it. I bent the ear of the landlord at Preston, in hopes of turning up a place where we might get a change of horses, and he said as the nearest were the Rose and Crown at Much Marcle as might be able to hire out at need.’

‘In that case,’ said Stefan decisively, ‘we’d best head off there.
Let’s hope they have rooms enough to put us up. How far is it?’

‘You’ll have to go back to Kempley,’ Lucy put in.
‘I imagine it is not much above six miles. But it must be nearly as far to Corse.’

‘Up with you then.
We can take in Corse tomorrow.’

Bundled into the curricle, but with little hope of discovering anything at this journey’s end, Lucy’s thoughts turned again upon the trials of her birth mother.