She barely tolerated Oscar; she loved Hessian Kettering.
“Walter Leggett is my uncle, my mother’s brother.”
A night breeze caught the curtains. Hessian closed the window and tied the curtains shut. “You are a by-blow?”
Lily seized on the question for the invitation it was. “My mother was newly widowed, not newly widowed enough, and I was conceived. She could not marry the man with whom she’d faltered, so she traveled. I was born in Bern. The first language I learned was German.”
Still, Hessian remained in the shadows across the room. “Go on.”
He’d be fair, then, hearing her out, or perhaps he was simply appeasing his curiosity. Lily owed him—and only him—an explanation.
“When I was three, Mama found a vicar and his wife in Derbyshire whose discretion she trusted. For the next six years, I was raised as their distant relation. My mother visited when she could and brought my half-sister with her most of the time. I was not unhappy.”
Lily got up to pace, and to be nearer to the man she was losing. “My sister treated me as a curiosity. She was more than two years my senior, and though much indulged, she grasped that my circumstances were not as comfortable as hers. Then Mama died.”
Oh, how the words hurt. “I’d lived for those visits from Mama, for her letters. I never knew when she was coming, and I never knew what to say to her. She’d hug me so tightly, then tell me to play with my sister, and I could feel a weight, always, of love, but also frustration, hers and mine. A mother and child should not be parted, but she’d tell me to be good and leave.”
Hessian held a square of white linen out to her, at arm’s length.
Lily took his handkerchief and dabbed at her cheeks. “I never cry, but then, I never talk about this.”
“I lost my mother when I was a youth. I miss her still, and my papa.”
“Mama had told me, and Vicar had told me, that I’d be provided for if anything happened to her. Six months after Mama died, Vicar and his wife both succumbed to influenza. They’d not been young, and there I was, nine years old, proficient at French, German, Latin, Holy Scripture, and keeping quiet. Only the charity of the next vicar kept me from the poorhouse.”
All over again, the terror of that time struck her, the pitying looks from wealthy congregants who had a coin for the poor box, but no place in their nursery for old Vicar’s little niece.
Hessian took her by the wrist and led her to the fire. “This is why Daisy trusts you, because you know the abandonment she’s experiencing.”
He sat Lily down in the reading chair and took the hassock for his own seat. The air was warmer, the light better, but he made no move to hold her or touch her.
“I know the grief she faces. I wrote to my sister, and I saw the housekeeper post the letter for me. I have guessed that Uncle found me because of that letter. When Annie never replied, I concluded she was ashamed of me, and gave up.”
Hessian held his hands out to the fire. “Are you ashamed of yourself?”
Was Lily supposed to say that yes, she was ashamed of the decision she’d made as a frightened fourteen-year-old? Ashamed of being unable to outwit Walter Leggett and a posting inn full of footmen, stable boys, guests, tinkers, coachmen… a horde of masculine dishonor all charging straight for her safety and her virtue?
“What do you want me to say, Hessian? Uncle made it plain that I must choose, and if I was despoiled by some passing university scholar or merchant—which had become a daily possibility—I was no use to Walter. I had one chance to step into my sister’s shoes. The alternative was disgrace, penury, disease, and very likely death—for me and for any child I might conceive.”
Disappointment settled on Lily, a surprise nearly welcome for the shame it replaced.
Why wasn’t Hessian Kettering reeling with outrage at how Walter Leggett had treated a vulnerable poor relation? Why wasn’t his almighty lordship appalled that a duke’s granddaughter had ended up emptying chamber pots and dodging unwelcome hands?
“Then what happened?”
“Then I died. The chambermaid Lilith Ferguson was taken away from the coaching inn by a wealthy London gentleman. Uncle sent word back to Derbyshire a few months later that I’d taken ill and not survived. The headstrong heiress Lillian Ann Ferguson departed for finishing school in Switzerland.”
Hessian checked his pocket watch.
“Am I keeping you from some card party?” Lily asked, for this recitation was making her angry, and Hessian was the only available target. “Is there a debutante who expects you for her supper waltz?”
Her questions met with a fleeting smile. “I am exactly where I planned to be, though the activity on the agenda is not at all what I had envisioned. Is your half-sister dead?”
“I assume so. She did elope with a Mr. Lawrence Delmar, Uncle’s house steward. I know not if they married, but Uncle told me their coach overturned in the midst of a storm.”
Hessian remained silent for some moments, staring into the fire.
Why did he have to be so attractive? His looks would change little over the years, his hair would fade from blond to wheat to white, his eyebrows might grow more fierce, but he’d weather rather than age.
“How old would she have been when she eloped?”
“Seventeen.”
“So your approaching birthday is not your birthday, much less your twenty-eighth birthday?”
“Correct.” Though Lily herself had stopped noticing when her true birthday went by, and that added to her anger.
Another silence grew, while the wrongness of Lily’s life assailed her. “My birthday is not my birthday. I can barely scrape out a tune at the keyboard, though I love to sing. I have a companion in part to tend to my correspondence, because I cannot match my sister’s hand despite years of trying. I cannot use half the cobblers in Mayfair because my left foot is slightly larger than my right, while hers were the opposite. She abhorred pets, while my cat Hannibal is my dearest comfort. Daily, I am confronted with the reality of not being the person I pretend to be.”
“You are not her,” Hessian said, “so who are you?”
He was watching her now, and Lily had the sense that her answer would decide everything. Whether Hessian remained in her life, whether she went to jail, whether she had a life.
“I had hoped to be Lady Grampion.” The first sincere hope Lily had expressed in years.
Hessian rose. “You must know that is an impossibility now.”
He was so tall, staring down at Lily. His expression was severe, an angel of judgment. Lily stood, because she would not be looked down upon by any man, least of all one who’d claimed to care for her.
“I have wondered, Hessian, if my tale outrages you on behalf of that fourteen-year-old girl, who was friendless, preyed upon, exhausted, and alone.”
“You are no longer fourteen.”
He seemed to be puzzling that out for himself as he spoke.
Lily was not puzzled, an unexpected and thoroughly satisfying revelation. “I am no longer fourteen, but finally, I am outraged, and you are free to go.”
* * *
Part of Hessian wanted to leap out the window and fly right back to his acres in the north, back to a life of napping in duck blinds and making up the numbers at the neighbors’ dinner parties.
The rest of him wished that he and Lily—if that was her name—were in the nearby bed, anticipating their vows, which proved only that his plodding, orderly mind had not grasped the complexity of the upset Lily had dumped in his lap.
“Might I remind you,” Hessian said, “if you purport to marry anybody using a name other than the one your mother gave you at birth, the ceremony will be invalid.”
Lily subsided into her chair, her indignation dropping away as a sudden shift in the wind leaves even a seventy-four-gunner adrift.
“Invalid?”
“You are not Lily Ferguson.”
She drew her feet up under her, something a lady would never do when enter
taining a caller. “But I am. I was born Lilith Ann Ferguson. My sister was Lillian Ann Ferguson. We were both named for Mama’s favorite aunt, Lilliana. All my life, I have been Lily Ferguson, while my sister went by Annie with me to avoid confusion.”
Which relieved Hessian only a little. “On the registry, on the special license, the full, correct name must be used. If I misstate so much as my baronial title, my marriage can be invalidated, provided the right bishop is bribed. The bride’s name must also be correct in every detail.”
Lily tucked the hem of her dress over her slippers. “I can’t marry anybody? Ever?”
“You certainly can’t marry that strutting donkey’s arse you call a cousin.” Much to Hessian’s relief.
Lily gazed up at him, though Hessian had the sense she wasn’t seeing him or the bedroom where she’d slept for years.
“I can’t marry a peer of the realm either,” she said. “At any point, Walter could take a notion to have the marriage declared invalid, me sent to jail, and my children declared illegitimate.”
Hessian paced over to the window. He’d intended that her children be his children too, more fool he. “I hate messes. I loathe, despise, abhor, detest… This is the mess to end all messes.”
Lily worried a nail. “You hate me.”
Curled by the fire, she looked young and dispirited. Her bun sagged to one side, and she still clutched Hessian’s handkerchief.
“I could never hate you, but this is a muddle.” Like Daisy’s muddle: Good girls ended up beneath the churchyard; bad girls were sent away.
Lily could not marry him, and she could not remain in Walter Leggett’s avaricious grasp.
Hessian took the dress from the bed and rehung it in the wardrobe, along with a plain brown cloak, straw hat, and mended gloves. The smooth white counterpane was a reproach to him, for charging headlong into a courtship despite all sense to the contrary.
He’d hoped to again disport with a woman to whom he was neither engaged nor wed, when in truth, he hadn’t even known her true, legal name. What had he been thinking?
Nothing at all, that’s what. He hadn’t been thinking. He’d been wallowing in wishes and dreams, animal spirits, and selfish pleasures.
“I have seventy-eight pounds,” Lily said. “I can make that last a long time. I am conversant in French, German, and Italian, and my Latin, history, and sums are good. I can be a governess or companion. If nobody will have me in those roles, I’m not above honest labor. I’ve worked in the kitchen, the dairy, the laundry, the stables, and the garden. I’ve been a chambermaid, scullery maid, and everything in between. I know the New Testament as well as any curate, and I l-like children.”
She abruptly bent her head, as if ducking a blow.
Hessian went to her and took her in his arms, despite messes, muddles, and anything resembling rational thought. She’d been worked nearly to death, a household drudge at some busy inn, then taken away from everything and everybody she knew and cast into a scheme not of her making.
At fourteen, Hessian had still considered females an exotic species, of no more import to him than penguins. Females had a natural habitat, a place in the order of creation, but with the exception of one sister, they thrived in environs he did not frequent. That had suited him, for he’d had butterflies to collect and poetry to memorize.
At fourteen, Lily had feared for her virtue and her safety. “I promise you,” he said, “you will not be thrust alone into the world again.”
She lifted her head from his shoulder, her eyes glittering in the firelight. “I cannot marry you. Walter will learn of it even if we go to Scotland, even if we live in France. You are a peer, and I am a felon.”
Hessian scooped her up and sat in the reading chair. Accusations of criminal wrongdoing could turn a muddle into outright pandemonium. He’d taken his turn serving as magistrate and knew of what he dreaded.
“How are you a felon?”
“Walter says that impersonating a dead person to earn their inheritance is fraud, and he’s read law.”
A man who detested untidiness of any variety excelled at untangling knots and restoring order. Hessian put that part of his brain to work, which was oddly easier when he was holding Lily.
“You are Lily Ferguson. You haven’t impersonated anybody. You are Walter Leggett’s niece, the daughter of his deceased sister.”
“But I’m not the right Lily Ferguson. I’m not Lillian Ann.”
“You never said you were. If Walter represented that you were Lillian, he did so out of your hearing. As for earning an inheritance, you’ve told me you haven’t even pin money, and your sister’s inheritance has been under Walter’s control since her death.”
Lily scooted off Hessian’s lap to sit on the hassock. “You’re saying Walter is committing the fraud? Aren’t I an accessory? I’ve benefitted from his scheme. I’m not emptying chamber pots or scrubbing floors sixteen hours a day.”
Starting at the age of nine, after years in a vicarage, for God’s perishing sake. “Nor shall you do so again.”
Hessian wanted to say more, to assure Lily that he could sort all of this out, but he’d made his last headlong charge where she was concerned. Caution, deliberation, and thorough preparation would be the order of the day henceforth.
Then too, the part of him that had cringed at his reckless courtship of Lily was braced for another quagmire: Did she esteem him honestly, or had she seen him as a way out of Walter Leggett’s household?
Something of both? And what if—heaven forefend—she’d already conceived a child?
Hessian’s penchant for considering every iota of available information offered him a morsel of comfort: Lily had had at least one opportunity to compromise herself with him—with him and Apollo Belvedere—and she’d not taken advantage. She’d freely admitted Walter Leggett’s desire to ingratiate himself with Worth. She’d conveyed this daft scheme to marry her to her cousin at the first opportunity.
Instinct and evidence both prodded Hessian to give Lily the benefit of the doubt. “When is your ostensible birthday?”
“Seventeen days hence.”
How to free Lily from her uncle’s control without exposing Leggett’s scheme to public scrutiny in seventeen short days?
Hessian touched Lily’s earlobe, the one that had never been scarred in the first place. “I could elope with you.” Though an elopement was scandal on the king’s highway and a sure way to provoke all manner of accusations from Leggett. Then too, a trip to Scotland meant hundreds of miles of travel, during which any number of mishaps could occur.
“We can’t get a special license?”
“One typically waits up to a week for the license to be prepared. If a license for Miss Lillian Ferguson and a license for Lilith Ferguson are applied for within days, the coincidence is bound to be noted.”
Though Lily was perched on the hassock not three feet away, Hessian again sensed she was physically present and mentally elsewhere.
Why hadn’t he stayed in Cumberland, where he knew his place and his neighbors, where he’d been the dullest excuse for a widower and resigned to the inevitable approach of middle age? He’d come south mostly out of boredom and to put a stop to Worth’s chiding and hinting.
Worth, of course, would chide endlessly over this situation. “Something bothers me,” Hessian said.
“I’m no end of bothered. I should have told you the truth sooner, but now that I have told you, it hasn’t made anything better. I thought about eloping with you, but that would add intrigue to dishonesty. Then there’s Daisy, who must not be made to suffer any more upset. She’s just finding her feet again, and more drama would set her back considerably.”
Good God, Daisy. “Daisy trusts you.”
Lily peered at him. “Am I to apologize for that?”
Hessian made himself think rather than offer some lordly platitude. “Regardless of your proper name, regardless of your dealings with me, you have been genuinely kind to the child and gone out of your way
to help her. You have my thanks for that.”
The realization steadied him. Lily had taken an interest in Daisy when most other women would have patted Hessian’s arm and instructed him to hire more nursery maids. Even the ladies bent on becoming his countess asked about Daisy only in passing.
That Daisy trusted Lily suggested Hessian had been precipitous yielding his heart, but not a complete fool.
“We will not allow this imbroglio to affect Daisy,” he said, “but what bothers me is your sister. When did she die?”
“I’m not sure. I was approaching my fifteenth birthday when Uncle came for me. He’d already put the story about that his niece was off to finishing school in Switzerland. He brought Tippy with him, my sister’s governess. I’d met her on Mama’s last visit. I was so glad to see Tippy again…”
“Is Tippy extant?”
“She lives in Chelsea,” Lily said, climbing back into Hessian’s lap. “Ephrata Tipton. Uncle keeps an eye on her too.”
Despite the utter chaos of the situation, Hessian’s body was all too pleased that he was holding Lily, and that would not do. Dear Uncle, conscientious warden that he was, might send a maid by with the evening’s last bucket of coal, or Lily’s companion might decide to borrow a hair ribbon.
“I cannot think clearly when your hair tickles my chin, madam.”
“Good. I haven’t been thinking clearly for more than ten years.”
An ugly thought emerged from the facts and suppositions in Hessian’s head. “Lily, has your uncle mistreated you?”
She scooted around to untie her slippers, while Hessian lectured himself about untoward thoughts and animal spirits.
“I should tell you that no, Uncle has never denied me a meal or laid a hand on me in anger. But he left me at that inn for more than five years. Do you know how an orphaned tavern maid is treated? A girl upon whom anybody can heap a task, whom anybody can slap, pinch, or scold?
“Uncle did that,” she went on, setting her slippers aside. “And my mother had assured my foster parents that I’d been provided for. Mama either wrote a provision into her will, or she entrusted my care to Walter. When Walter found me—or bothered to find a use for me—he assured me that I was dependent upon him for every crust of bread. I made my peace with him, faced what awaited me at the inn, or found a handy ditch to die in.”
His Lordship's True Lady (True Gentlemen Book 4) Page 20