Page 11 of A Lady in Name

She shrank a little. “I do not know.”

“Your father — Mr Graydene — made no provision for you?”

Lucy flared. “He had no time. It was all so sudden. Papa had no thought of an early demise. He had not attained his fiftieth year. It was the furthest thing from his mind.” She recalled the will, hastily-drawn up as Papa lay swiftly dying. “He left me what money he had on hand, which enabled me to pay for the funeral.” She had to struggle to command her voice. “There was also the doctor’s fee — this mourning garb of mine.”

Her funds were rapidly dwindling, and Lucy had known there was no earthly hope of having the wherewithal to set up house for herself. Papa had known as much, for he had commended her to the care of his curate — a duty that could only be fulfilled in marriage. The Reverend Mr John Waley had shown himself willing to undertake the task. But Lucy, labouring under the double blow, had resisted his tentative advances.

A few guarded questions had convinced her Mr Waley was not privy to the circumstances of her birth. To do as Papa wished, she must either tell him and risk his drawing back, or live a lie. It had not taken much cogitation for Lucy to realise she sought to pursue neither of these courses.

What she did want became daily more confused. But out of the well of grief and despair arose one coherent desire: to find and confront the author of her disreputable origins. Instead, ensconced in his house, she was confronting his heir. She looked up to find Lord Pennington’s peculiarly penetrating gaze upon her face.

“I presume Mr Graydene made no formal adoption? Was no document found to that effect?”

“None. I looked through everything before the executor took his papers away. Papa had directed me to the letter from Lord Pennington, but he mentioned no other.”

“What precisely did he tell you?”

Lucy strove to calm the disturbing bubble of upset and frustration rising within her, which had plagued her on and off since the vicar’s revelations. She had spent so many weeks trying not to think about it, evading the churn of discontent which turned every remembrance into dust motes floating away on the air. What had she left to believe in?

“Come, Lucy, it does not do to keep from talking of it.”

She stared across the desk. Lord Pennington’s tone had been gentle, but with a note of implacability. It might have been Papa speaking. She was hardly aware of responding to it, as she had done all her known life.

“The woman who came to him was in the late stage of her confinement. She had wandered for some distance. Papa could not find out from where she had come for she was in a state of semi-delirium, he said. She was ill and in much pain and could do little more than moan and beg for sanctuary.”

Stefan watched the play of emotion in the girl’s face, though her voice was dull and lifeless. She must have expended a good deal of effort in keeping in check the natural agitation attendant upon the receipt of such tidings. He was conscious of a growing sense of admiration as she resumed her tale.

“She did not speak of the father of her child at first. Only after the birth did she beseech Papa to send to him.”

“She mentioned him by name? Pennington?”

Lucy looked sharply at him, wondering at the curtness of his tone. She had almost lost awareness of his presence, caught in the memory of Papa’s voice relating her story. She struggled to recall his exact words.

“Not by that name, I think.” She put a hand to her head, pushing at the hair piled into a knot under a plain cap. “It is difficult to remember. I was in a state of shock. Much of what he said is a blur in my mind.” A fleeting thought caught at her. “Stay! Was it Ankerville? It might have been. I know Papa had not at first any knowledge of the man’s station in life. He must have had a time of it to find it out. But it was Lord Pennington, for you must have seen in his letter he makes no attempt to repudiate the relationship.”

Stefan was obliged to concede this point. “Is there no record of the letter your father wrote to my uncle?”

“Surely you must have it rather than I? Papa made no copy. Was it not amongst his correspondence?”

Stefan shook his head. “I shouldn’t think he kept it.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “What else do you know of your mother?”

A slight shudder shook her frame. “Nothing at all.” She clasped her hands tightly together and Stefan noted a pinched look appear in her cheeks. “I cannot think of her in that light. I had always supposed my mother to be the late Mrs Graydene. I have thought and thought since I heard all this, and I cannot find Papa ever said so. I merely assumed it, and he did not correct me. It never even occurred to me to discover the date of her death. When I did — when I knew…”

A pang of compassion smote Stefan. At a stroke, the girl had lost both father and mother, regaining a most unpalatable truth instead.

“She had died before you were born, I take it?”

Lucy nodded, beset again by the misery of discovery. “Until that moment, I had no quarrel with Papa’s wisdom. But when I knew, I could have wished he had not permitted me to weave a fantasy to suit my purposes. But he said never a word. Of course he could not have done, without revealing the whole.”

“It must have been painful for him to be obliged to tell you.”

Yes, she had known as much. “Yet he must have told me in the end, even had he not perished so precipitately.”

“Why so?”

She let out a sigh. “How else was he to explain his reluctance to have me wed? At the time, I supposed he needed me to be with him, to keep house, perhaps to care for him as he grew older. But I see now it wasn’t so. I was not fit for marriage, and he knew it.”

Stefan discovered in himself a lessening of respect for the deceased Reverend Graydene. No doubt his reasons were sound in his own mind, but Stefan could only condemn a weakness which must permit Lucy to continue in an unknown lie. The harshness of knowledge, coming as it had on the back of a natural grief, must have hit much harder than if the girl had grown up with it. Stefan wondered if her anger had been misdirected upon the author of her wrongs because she could not in conscience visit it upon her dead adoptive father.