A Lady in Name (14 page)

‘No need.
I have his lordship’s sister to help me with the packing, and we will shut up the house and leave the key with Mr Waley. You can fetch your things at any time, for the new vicar will not be there yet awhile.’

Stefan could not forbear a glance at her as she mentioned the curate, but Lucy gave no sign of thinking of the fellow as anything other than a trusted friend.
He was obliged to wait for a further period after Lucy disappeared into the cottage again with the old retainer, but within a short time, the curricle was bowling back in the direction of Upledon.

Lucy was silent for so long, Stefan began to be concerned.
At last he felt obliged to break into her ruminations.

‘A penny for them?’

She jumped, turning towards him with a look of startled enquiry in her face. Stefan was abruptly struck with a sensation like a barb in his chest. He put his attention back on the road, but the image of Lucy’s face stayed in his mind even as she spoke.

‘What did you say?’

With difficulty, Stefan kept the blandness in his tone. ‘I was wondering what was so absorbing to hold your attention for so long.’

To his surprise, she answered without hesitation.
‘I have been puzzling and puzzling over the names Papa mentioned.’

The intensity of her utterance caught at him, akin as it was to the occasional whisper of tragedy which characterised her.

‘Which names?’

‘Of the woman’s family.
My real mother. I ventured to ask Jenny if she could tell me anything about her, but she was unable to remember. Or perhaps she is too harassed by her sister’s plight.’

‘All too likely, I imagine,’ Stefan responded.
‘Can you remember?’

‘What papa said?
Vaguely. Something like Oak or Oades.’

‘I see.
Well, I can understand your wishing to know more.’ Without will, he gentled his tone. ‘What troubles you, Lucy?’

‘I have found my father’s kin.
But what of my mother’s? Who are they? From what manner of people have I sprung?’

He glanced at her again and found her eyes upon him, rich with the curse of her unsubstantiated ancestry.

‘Who am I, Stefan? Who am I really?’

* * *

Lucy surveyed the closed and banded trunks and the three portmanteaux containing her personal and most needed belongings.

‘Is anything forgotten?’ asked Dion, poking about behind the chairs in case something should have fallen unnoticed.
‘Stefan will be here with the carrier soon.’

Over luncheon at the Half Moon, it had been decided to hire a carrier for the heavy luggage.
When Lucy demurred about its destination, she had been speedily brought to a common sense frame of mind.

‘If it is not sent to Pennington Manor,’ asked Stefan drily, ‘where do you propose to have it stored?’

‘It is not as if there is no room,’ had added Dion with her characteristic giggle.

Lucy had given in, and was by now so exhausted, she was ready to abandon everything to the carriers and beg them to take it to the ends of the earth, as long as she had not to pack one more item.

‘We have scoured the house,’ she said in answer to Dion’s query. ‘There cannot be anything left. And if there is, I don’t care if I never see it again.’

As Dion gurgled, the door bell sounded.
‘That will be Stefan.’

So it proved, and for some little time the two women were fully occupied in directing the activities of the men who came with the carrier,
and who engaged to assist Stefan’s coachman to deliver the three portmanteaux to the Half Moon. When the last of the luggage had been despatched and Stefan was conferring with the carrier, Lucy stood in the hall looking about her, gripped by a sudden feeling of unbearable loss.

She found Dion beside her.
‘Dear Lucy, don’t be sad. It is hard to say goodbye, I know. Papa was wont to encourage us to look forward.’

Lucy nodded, unable to speak for the tightening at her throat.
The urge took her to look one last time upon Papa’s beloved study. She touched Dion’s arm.

‘Pray excuse me for a brief moment, Dion.’

Aware of the husky note in her voice, she hurried away to the study door and seizing the handle, slipped quickly into the room.

It was strange to see it bare of all possessions that had made it home to her.
For here had been her true home, here where Papa had worked and read and welcomed her in. The glass-fronted bookcases were empty of his many volumes; the desk, once cluttered with papers and books as well as his leather-lined blotter, his inks and his pens, was bare. In the side drawer he had kept his seal with his motley collection of half-used sticks of wax. And the carved chair with its leather seat was imprinted with the shape of his back, shadowing wear against the wood.

Lucy went to the desk, setting her fingertips down upon its surface, running them along the groove she had made on a day when she was but three years of age.
Left for a moment, she had climbed on the chair, taken up the knife Papa used to mend his pens, and tried to draw a picture. Jenny had filled the groove with polish, but it had never truly mended. She saw again Papa’s laughing countenance, once he had removed the treacherous knife from her tiny grasp.

‘I shall keep this picture of yours, my child, and when you have children of your own, I will tell them the tale.’

He had not said it then, but later when she was old enough to understand. But he never would tell the tale. If she ever had children, he never would see them. Papa was gone, and her life was irrevocably changed.

‘Come, Lucy, yo
u cannot be moping here all day.’

She jumped, turning quickly.
Her cousins were standing just inside the door. Stefan’s tone had been rough and curt, driving across the near collapse of her mind into irretrievable melancholy.

Lucy sniffed back the threatening tears, hardly hearing Dion’s hissing admonition.

‘How can you be so unkind, Stefan?’

He came striding forward, wholly ignoring his sister.
‘It must be near time for dinner. If you are not hungry after your afternoon’s labours, you should be.’

Lucy tried to smile.
‘I am indeed. I am only sorry to have delayed you both.’

‘Fiddlesticks!’
Dion was beside her, positively glaring at her brother. ‘Nothing of the sort. Stefan has been talking to the carrier forever, if you must know, and has but just come in.’

Lucy did not believe this for a moment.
She realised now there had been a presence for some little time, and could not doubt but that one, if not both, had been watching her.

She managed a smile.
‘I am done here. Let us go.’

She moved with Dion towards the door, but suddenly Stefan seized her wrist and halted her.

‘Go on, Dion. We will be with you in a moment.’

His sister had not noticed, but at this she stopped, looked back, cast a glance from one to the other, and then slipped out of the room.

Lucy looked at Stefan. His features were set and hard, and he spoke in a lowered tone.

‘Did my manner upset you?
If so, I am sorry for it.’

A feeling like
molten liquid ran through Lucy. Her eyes caught with his, and there was no will behind her words.

‘It was just the bracer I needed.
I was on the point of disgracing myself.’

He did not speak for a moment, and Lucy became aware of the pressure of his fingers about her wrist.
‘You are the most extraordinary girl, Lucy.’

Lucy smiled involuntarily.
‘I hope that is a compliment. May I ask you for the return of my hand?’

His gaze left hers and went to the wrist he was holding.
Instantly he dropped it, as if it were red hot. Lucy rubbed it where he had gripped it.

‘I beg your pardon.’

From the hallway, Dion’s voice called out. ‘Are you two coming?’

Lucy felt as if she dragged her eyes away from Stefan.
And then she was heading for the door.

‘Lucy!’

She checked, one hand on the edge of the door and looked back. Stefan’s tone had been entirely different. ‘Yes?’

‘Did you think to look if there was anything related to your mother?
Papers? A notebook perhaps?’

Lucy blinked.
In the press of packing she had forgotten her despondent mood earlier in the day. She shook her head. ‘No, but there will be nothing. All Papa’s papers were taken by the executor. If there were anything it would be in here, but I packed this room before I came away. There is nothing.’

‘No records of any kind?’

She shook her head and was surprised to see disappointment in his face. As if compelled, she looked for something to dissipate it.

‘There are only the parish records.
She was not of this parish, but perhaps her death was set down somewhere.’

Stefan frowned.
‘Did you never think to look?’

Lucy gave a half-shrug.
‘There was no time. Besides, I was more exercised by Lord Pennington’s part in the business to begin with.’

‘Yes.’

Dion appeared outside the door, arms akimbo and exasperation written all over her. ‘What in the world are you two doing?’

Stefan moved.
‘We are coming.’ He reached Lucy’s side. ‘What about the church?’

A slow beat started up in Lucy’s pulses, a sliver of excitement running in her veins.
‘The vestry! We may try the vestry.’

* * *

The light was failing by the time the little party made its way into the church. The place was empty, but it stood open as it always had.

‘We can’t go into the vestry without permission,’ objected Dion as Lucy followed Stefan’s purposeful march down the aisle.

‘There is no one here to give permission,’ her brother pointed out. ‘Besides, if anyone has a right to go in there, it is the vicar’s daughter.’

‘But what are you looking for?’

‘We are not sure,’ Lucy told her, glancing back. ‘Anything that may tell me something of my mother.’

Dion brightened.
‘Gracious, why did one of you not tell me we are unravelling a mystery? I am perfectly ready to invade any number of vestries in such a cause.’

Lucy’s laughter echoed hollowly in the empty building.
‘I hope we may not be obliged to invade more than one.’

By this time, Stefan had reached the door leading beyond the public area of the church into the domain of the priest.
He pushed open the door and looked inside.

‘No one here.
And the light is better. Now all we need do is find the registers. Do you know where they are kept?’

‘On the wooden shelf in that recess.’
She pointed, excitement stirring in her breast. ‘Yes, look. There they are. I know Papa was wont to record everything that occurred in his church, but whether he set down everything in the same book I have no notion. We may have to search in several.’

It did not take above a moment for Stefan to extract the first of the big tomes, which proved to be a register of marriages.

‘Ah, now let us see.’

Dion peered over his shoulder.
‘We need a christening, don’t we?’

Stefan closed the volume.
‘This is too recent. How old are you exactly, Lucy?’

‘Three and twenty.
My birthday is on April the fifteenth.’

Dion’s eyes popped.
‘Gracious, Lucy, I did not realise you were as old as that.’

‘I did tell you I was of age.’

‘Yes, but I did not think you were so much my senior. Why, it is near six years.’

Stefan glanced back from his task of sifting through the volumes in search of one closer to the required time.
‘You will have to treat Lucy with more respect in future.’

‘Fiddlesticks!
She would hate it.’

‘Yes, I should.
Stefan, have you found the right year?’

He had spread one of the volumes out and was intently studying the pages.
‘This is closer to the time, yes. Ah, here we are.’

Lucy watched in anxious silence as he ran his eye down the page, following one finger that traced a line from one entry to the next.
The rhythm of her heart went out of kilter again, and she felt the rise of apprehension mingled with hope. Dion was peering over Stefan’s arm again, but fright kept Lucy from doing likewise.

Stefan was shaking his head.
‘Nothing so far. I have passed into May, and there is nothing.’

‘Does it show christenings as well as weddings?’

Lucy was grateful to Dion for asking what she dared not.

‘Not in this book, in any event,’ said Stefan.

He began to lift off the books, one by one, checking the dates at beginning and end and reading random entries to discover if these records held anything more than marriages. Lucy’s nerves were in shreds by the time he had finished.