A Country Affair (19 page)

The Reverend Mr. Stanhope, however, seemed to be reminded by her question to preserve the formalities now. He raised one inquiring brow her way.

Selina curtsied again and introduced herself.

"Payley. Payley," the vicar mused, turning her name over on his tongue, before his eyes lit. "I knew that name sounded familiar. This parish was quite peopled by Payleys not so many years ago. Though—" he corrected himself—"my concept of years may not be quite the same as one so young as yourself, not steeped in antiquities to the degree that I am."

Selina could not restrain a smile at his turn of phrase, though his words had made her heart skip a beat. "And what might the phrase mean to a gentleman steeped in antiquities, such as yourself?" she asked.

The vicar chuckled in a deprecating way. "Oh, I daresay a century or two would not seem very long. But, you have a purpose for coming, if I am not much mistaken." He invited her to take the chair beside his desk. "I shall bring the registers to you. I am afraid there is more than one volume. It might be helpful if there were a particular date you had in mind."

Finding herself quite willing to trust such a kindly gentleman, Selina told the story of the valentine. When he asked whether she had brought it, she pulled it from her deep cloak pocket.

Mr. Stanhope looked it over with a pair of crooked pince-nez held to his eyes. "Most remarkable," he muttered, with a scholarly tone of interest. "Yes, one would think the seventeenth century, both by the spellings and the intricate hand, wouldn't one? And remarkable as it seems, our registry has survived since those troubled times." He gave her a sharp, conspiratorial look over his lenses. "Hidden, you see, throughout the Protector's reign. Would to God, we could find some more appropriate title for such a wretched villain! Protector, indeed!

"Though—" he shrugged and sighed —"history must be preserved, I suppose."

Surprising her with this angry aside—which, Selina guessed, was not an entirely unexpected sentiment for a man of his beliefs—he handed her back the valentine. Then he said, "If you will be so good as to wait, I shall bring that volume to you."

"Was that the same one requested by the other gentleman?"

"Oh, dear me, no. He asked to see them all. Said he would not require my assistance in the least."

"I see," Selina said, but her pulse had already started an agitated tattoo as she wondered what Wilfrid had found. There was nothing she could do but read the registers and see, but the fact that Wilfrid had not given the vicar his name seemed rather suspicious.

A pair of simple explanations did present themselves. The vicar could have been so absent-minded that he had merely forgotten Wilfrid's name, or it was possible that Sir Wilfrid Bart was so arrogant, he had seen no reason to supply it. But Selina's instincts strongly urged her not to trust Richard's cousin or his story.

The vicar returned presently with a large, ancient tome, which he insisted upon dusting with his own ink-stained handkerchief. Then, before leaving her to peruse it, he begged her to rise so that he might draw her chair closer to the fire. "For if you will forgive my mentioning it, my dear, I could not help noticing that your hand was rather cold, and there is such a nasty draught from the windows . . . ."

As he fussed about her, making certain that she was comfortably settled and offering her a cup of tea, Selina could hardly keep tears from welling in her eyes. The dear man had remarked the chill of her fingers, but seemed perfectly willing to ignore the red and callused look of her hands, which would have sunk her beneath the notice of many a less charitable gentleman.

By the time he had left her to go in search of his housekeeper to beg a tea tray for her, darkness had fallen. Selina did not know where she could possibly spend the night, but she thought Mr. Stanhope could be trusted to find her a place.

Putting that worry behind her, she started through the big tome, turning the stained and tattered pages with reverence.

It was not long before she came across the surname Payley, tied to various and sundry given names. Mysterious ancestors, she supposed, whom she did not know. They were repeated one after the other in birth, marriage, and death. Some deaths hard on the heels of their baptisms, others trailing many years behind.

When she discovered the baptism of one Joshua Payley in l633, her heart leapt with hope. With trembling fingers she leaned forward to look for a date that would correspond to his young manhood, but after flipping the succeeding pages back and forth a number of times, she could not seem to find any entries between the years 1637 and 1662.

Frustration raised a lump in Selina's throat and curled her fists into angry balls. Whether or not Cromwell had managed to defeat all his enemies in the years of his rule, it seemed he had destroyed enough to spoil her hopes now.

By the time Mr. Stanhope intruded upon her silence to ask whether he could be of any assistance to her, Selina had composed herself. "No, I thank you, sir. It would appear that my ancestor was wed during a time no records were kept."

"Dear me, how odd," Mr. Stanhope uttered mildly. "I can recall no period in which some record or other was not kept. I cannot pretend that all my predecessors were men of letters, but at least in matters of the registry, they seemed to take their duties seriously enough."

Selina sighed inwardly. The vicar, for all his sweet intentions, could not possibly expect to know how well all the records had been kept. "I am afraid, in this instance, there was no predecessor, or if there were, he must have feared for his life. No records at all were kept for a period of more than twenty years."

His head jerked up at that, his seemingly habitual expression of foggy benevolence changed to one of deep concern. "But that cannot be, my dear. Oh, dear me, no. You must be mistaken." He reached for the volume. "May I. . . ?"

Selina wearily handed it over. It was plain to her what had occurred, which would make it useless for her to go to another church with her search. She had found Joshua Payley's parish, the record of his birth and even his death in l688. But there was nothing in between—a period of great strife, when Cromwell's men were attacking both established Church and pagan custom. And there would be nothing Selina supposed she could find without tracing Miss Anne Trevelyan's family. And she had no clue where to begin on the Trevelyan side.

Mention of some Trevelyans had been made in the parish registry, but there was nothing to say whether the name she was looking for had come from this branch of the family or another.

"Dear me!" The vicar's distressed tone grabbed her attention.

"This is not right." He shook his head. "It is not right at all."

"Vicar?"

Raising his troubled gaze to hers, Mr. Stanhope spoke sternly. "My dear, it would appear that some pages have been cut from this registry."

Doubting, Selina said, "But I saw no pages torn." She went to stand beside him. "See. All the edges are clean."

"Yes, and they would be if a whole signature of pages had been cleanly extracted from the binding. See how loose it is." The vicar shifted the binding back and forth in his hands. "You can tell that something is missing, else the threads would not be so exposed."

Selina could see what he meant. With the pages folded and sewn in signatures, she would not have noticed that a whole section were missing if it had been completely cut out. "That would explain why so many years were missing. A page might contain a year of events—perhaps even two or three—but a whole signature would have many years' recordings."

He nodded, and Selina was surprised to see anger again on his kind old face. "This is most reprehensible. To deface a valuable document such as this—and Church property, too— Why, the man should be drawn and quartered!"

"But, Mr. Stanhope—how can you be certain when it occurred, if indeed, you can be certain it occurred at all?"

"Because I know these registries were complete. I read them all the year I took over as vicar of this parish."

Selina stared. His indignation was immense. And his certainty was not to be denied.

"You read them all?" Her question was not one of disbelief, but fascination.

"Yes, I—" Her interest had made him suddenly self-conscious. "I have already admitted to being something of an antiquarian, and as such, you must realize, I find it impossible to overlook any document over a particular age.  You will think that a church registry might not afford much in the way of an intellectual stimulus—and indeed, one would not take the time to commit one to memory as one might a more intriguing document—but I can assure you, Miss Payley, that I would have remarked and remembered a gap of some twenty years."

With a sinking heart, all the more defeated by the particular depth of Richard's perfidy, Selina had to acknowledge the truth. The evidence of her ancestor's marriage to a Trevelyan had existed. It had been destroyed quite thoroughly, and most efficiently by Wilfrid, probably when his gentle host had gone in search of refreshment for him.

Tired and drained, Selina tried to marshal her fury, but it abandoned her when needed most. There was nothing she could do, but return to Uckfield with her tail between her legs and live as they always had lived. She might work her fingers to the bone and her back to the shape of a gnarled oak tree beaten down by the wind, but she would never be able to better their situation. And she would never be able to send Augustus to school as he deserved.

Gathering the remnants of her dignity, which now lay in tatters around her, she thanked Mr. Stanhope for his help and expressed her sorrow that a family affair of hers could result in damage to his parish register.

"There, there, my dear. It is not your fault."

When Selina would have confessed that it was her application to the Garter that had set the series of events in motion, he would not hear her self-blame. "No, no, my dear," he said, closing the registry with a softly final thud. "It is very easy to see who is deserving and who is not. When you try to save men's souls on a frequent, if not daily, basis, you soon come to recognize the good from the bad.

"But, come—" he began to usher her from the room—"Mrs. Simmons, my most excellent housekeeper, has made you up a room and a bed. For, if I am not much mistaken, you have traveled too far today to think of returning tonight. And dinner in your room on a tray . . . ?"

With the fatigue of hopelessness, Selina allowed the gentle man to shepherd her to rest.

Richard would have been cheered to know that someone, at least, was taking care of Selina in his absence. The pleasure of telling her of his discovery, which he hoped to have soon, would have to wait on his more immediate task—that of extracting a full confession from Wilfrid.

To that end, he summoned Wilfrid with a note that left no room for misinterpretation, though Wilfrid might try to pretend that it was nothing more than a friendly invitation. He appeared the next morning, unrepentant, and Richard saw it would not be easy to shake him from his complacency.

The skin on Wilfrid's face was a shade of delicate pink, achieved, no doubt, by the liberal use of rouge. Richard promised himself that by the time their chat was concluded, it would appear a sickly green instead.

"I had a most enlightening conversation the other evening," Richard began in a cordial voice, leaning back in his chair. "With a friend of yours, I believe."

"Really, dear boy?" Betraying only a mild interest, Wilfrid played with a fan he had tied to his wrist. "I did not know that you was become intimate with the Carlton House set?"

"Oh, this is not one of Prinny's friends. And I daresay 'friend' was not the precise word I should have used. He was rather an old acquaintance of yours. One of your schoolmates, in fact."

A pause in Wilfrid's fidgeting told Richard that he had hit his mark. "An old playmate of mine? Are you sure?"

"He seemed to think so. Sir Henry North was his name."

Braced already, Wilfrid barely winced before trying to cover his recognition. "North? Sir Henry North?" he repeated, addressing the air. "I suppose there might have been someone by that name at Eton, but I cannot be absolutely certain after so many years."

"Come come, now, Wilfrid. You tried that trick once before. Do you recall? When I inadvertently showed you the letter from the Garter and you disavowed all knowledge of William Payley."

An ugly smile spread slowly over Wilfrid's features. "There now, Richard, is where I am afraid you will find you are quite mistaken. I never disavowed a William Payley, for I was not asked about a William Payley. I believe Augustus was the name mentioned in the letter I read."

The sheer effrontery of his statement made Richard seethe, but he smiled, hiding his emotions. "Yes, I quite see. You were ever the truthful one."

"Precisely."

"To the letter, in fact, if not the intent. Oh, you're a clever one Wilfrid. I even believed your quite touching testimonial of your devotion to my family name. Enough, in fact, to send you racing up to Cuckfield. I suppose it was rather like setting the fox to watch the hens."

Richard's outward appearance of amusement had achieved the effect he wanted. Wilfrid was gazing at him smugly, obviously content with his work. If he had been smoked, which he obviously had, then he wanted to enjoy his triumph.

"Why did you so particularly wish me to eschew that connection, Wilfrid?" Richard casually asked. "Did you object so strongly to sharing a few hundreds of pounds? After all, Miss Payley had only made her application to the Garter in order to secure her brother's acceptance as a King's Scholar. But, of course, you could not know that."

Wilfrid's smile fell from his face, but was soon replaced by another, just as smug. "You are quite right, cuz. If I had known, I might not have been quite so energetic in your cause. But, do you know, I think my efforts were not wasted at all. No—" he paused—"the more I think about it, I am sure they would have been needed at some point, so it is well it were done."

"You refer, I suppose, to the fact that some evidence certainly existed linking the Payley name to mine."