Lady Lorna Read online

  “I take it you are referring to Lady Lorna’s return?” I asked, my hackles already up.

  “You know? Well, that certainly takes the wind out of my sails,” he said, disappointed, or pretending to be. “I thought I was bringing you a choice item to enliven the ladies’ gossip. We haven’t had a pretender for a few years now. How did you know?” He took a closer look at my expression and exclaimed, “Good God, don’t tell me she had the effrontery to come here.”

  “Of course she came here. Where else should she go when you turned your own sister from the door?”

  “I would welcome my sister with open arms and kill a brace of fatted calves in her honour. The woman who called last night was not my sister, however.” There wasn’t an iota of doubt in his voice, but rather a growing edge of anger.

  “Really? That is an amazing feat of memory, considering that you were all of — what? — seven or eight when she disappeared.”

  “Not that young. I was ten. I was always precocious, especially with regard to ladies.”

  “Precocious is one word for it. Still a bachelor at thirty does not seem particularly precocious to me.”

  “You are suffering under the common delusion that marriage is the be all and end all of relations between the sexes. Sorry to disturb your naiveté, but it is only the ladies who hold that view.”

  “Spoken like a true roué, but it is not your marriage we were discussing.”

  “I noticed how cleverly you turned the discussion in that direction.”

  Acton could always put one on the defensive. I may have harboured hopes of attaching him when I was young and foolish, I had given up on that years ago. “I was merely refuting your claim to precocity. It is your sister we are discussing, not your lechery.”

  “My mistake. I thought it was your house guest.”

  “Come and talk to her, Acton. Surely that is the way to convince you. Ask her questions. You didn’t give her a chance to prove herself last night.”

  “Not necessary,” he said airily. I don’t know who she is, but I know she is not Lorna.”

  “So you refuse to consider the simple and obvious means of settling this. You rely on the dim memory of a ten year old child.”

  “My aunts, you will recall, were older. Aunt Mary is certain the woman is not Lorna. We are all certain, and in my mind, that settles it.”

  “I see. Your opinion settles it. Let me remind you, you are only a lord, Acton. Not God. Mama is certain she is Lady Lorna. She recognized her at once.”

  Acton is not accustomed to being challenged. As the local lord, he gets too much attention and respect. He can be rather intimidating, if you let him. It is the Acton nose resembling an eagle’s beak and the dark slash of eyebrows that can lend him that frightening air. On that occasion the eyebrows were drawn together in a frown, but he didn’t frighten me. Having known him forever, I was accustomed to his little ways.

  “Your Mama, if you will pardon my saying so, is a peahen, Kate. Come out,” he said, in his arrogant way, putting his long fingers on my arm. “I don’t care to meet her again.” We had been talking in the front hall.

  “Don’t worry, she isn’t up yet.”

  “Another hint that she is not my sister. Lorna never slept in past eight o’clock in her life.”

  “She and Mama were up till all hours. Do come in,” I said, ignoring his command to step out and shaking away his hand.

  He grabbed my elbow more forcefully. “No, you come out. She might come down.”

  I was too eager to continue scolding him to insist that we have the discussion indoors. I went out without my bonnet, and though Acton’s smart curricle and team of frisky grays was parked in front we didn’t take advantage of the seats. I led him away from the house as Stubbins, the gardener, was lingering over the simple job of putting flowers in the big iron pots at the front doorway. His sly glance told me Balky had spread the word of last night’s caller and he was eager for the second installment. We walked towards the park and down the road.

  “What did she say?” he asked, with no slackening of pace.

  “She said, though it is difficult to credit, that you all pretended not to recognize her.”

  “Pretended! Hah! We recognized her for an impostor all right! We’ve had half a dozen of them over the past decade. She isn’t the first to come pretending she is Lorna, to get her hands on the money.”

  “Is that why you won’t recognize her, because you want to keep her money? So she is right! You should be ashamed of yourself, Acton. With all your wealth you don’t need her dowry. You have no idea what shifts that poor lady has been put to in order to survive all these years.”

  That stopped his angry pacing. He pulled me around to face him and said, “She actually accused me of that! I might have known.” He gave a tsk of disgust, then adopted a brotherly tone. “You have known me for years -decades, Kate. Do you truly believe I would do a thing like that? I take leave to tell you that woman has bamboozled you, but she didn’t fool me, and she didn’t fool Mary or Maddie either.”

  “They’d say whatever you told them to!” I charged, which wasn’t quite true. They doted on him, but Lady Mary often had the final say. “If you said the earth was flat and the moon made of green cheese, they’d agree. How could you know whether it was your sister? You’re going by that portrait of her when she was sixteen. She has had a perfectly wretched time. Naturally she has changed.”

  “I’m sure she’s worked up some fancy tale to account for not bothering to get in touch with the family for two decades. Do you mean to tell me she never once in all that time had the opportunity to escape, or at least send a note home? Lorna was up to anything. The gypsies couldn’t have held her for twenty-four hours if she wanted to get away.”

  “I daresay your father’s forcing her to marry Lord Edward lessened her eagerness to get away at first.”

  “And did she really believe Lord Edward had waited twenty years for her? I think she might have risked returning sooner.”

  “She tried to get away. It wasn’t easy in a foreign country, and with the war going on. And remember she was penniless. It was horrid, trying to make her marry a man she didn’t like.”

  “I agree. I have no use for arranged marriages, but it is too late to rail at Papa now. I was still a schoolboy at the time, as you have already reminded me. I did not make Sukey, my younger sister, marry a man she disliked. You know very well Sukey married for love.”

  His younger sister Lady Susan, was and still is a good friend of mine, though she removed to Dorset when she married. Before her marriage, any romance in my life was enjoyed vicariously through her Season and various beaux. It was true Acton had put no pressure on her in that respect.

  “It was convenient that she happened to fall in love with a wealthy marquess, was it not? That doesn’t excuse your not recognizing Lady Lorna. Mama recognized her at once. Do you realize she was starving when she arrived at our door last night, without a sou in her pocket? You didn’t even feed her. I couldn’t believe you could be so cruel. Tyrant!”

  Acton just gaped, with his mouth open. “Tyrant!” he howled. “I am hag-ridden by Aunt Mary. Despite your opinion of who rules the roost at the Abbey, I could no more make her say something she didn’t believe than I could make her wear a scarlet gown and paint her face. And she knows that woman is not Lorna.”

  He was earnest now. I could always tell when he was shamming it, or showing off. “Well, even if it was an honest mistake, you ought not to have turned her from the door at night, penniless and starving. You wouldn’t do that to the commonest beggar.”

  “I assure you that woman is no common anything,” he said, but he had the grace to look a trifle disconcerted. “She didn’t tell us she was hungry and penniless. She was well dressed, and by no means emaciated. She just waltzed in as if she owned the place and said how glad she was to be home. And would we just ask Wilson to step up and see that her room was prepared.”

  “Just as you would expect Lad
y Lorna to act, in other words.” He had no answer to that but just tossed up his hands in disgust. “Well, what are you going to do about her?”

  “We’ve done it, given her the heave-ho. She is not my sister. I hope your mama — “ He looked at my angry face, with lips clenched and chin raised. Whatever he had been about to say was not said, for I leapt in to revile him.

  “Lady Lorna is making her home with us until she can convince you she is indeed your sister.”

  “Then I am sorry to tell you your Mama has foolishly taken on a tenant for life.”

  “We shall see about that, milord!” He scowled for a few minutes. When he could think of nothing else to dissuade me, I said, “Why don’t you come in and meet her again, Acton? Surely there are questions you could ask her, things only your sister would know. Bring Lady Mary down. She’s the one who would know what to ask.”

  “It’s not necessary and it would be futile in any case. We all know that woman is not my sister, and that’s an end of it. If she wants to try her hand at persuading gullible ladies she is who she claims to be, let her go to it. She’ll have uphill work convincing me.”

  “In other words your mind is made up, you don’t want to be confused by facts.”

  “I know the facts. She is not Lady Lorna. She’ll catch cold if she thinks to rob the estate of forty-five thousand pounds.”

  “So it is about the money!”

  “Certainly it is about not handing my sister’s dowry over to a crook. That is the only reason she’s undertaken this charade. You may tell her I said so, with my blessings. The law knows how to handle her sort.”

  On this he stomped back to his curricle, hopped up, flicked the whip over the team’s heads and was so disgruntled that he couldn’t drive off in a fine scattering of gravel, but had to turn the team around. In his snit he made sorry work of it too, though he is actually a fine fiddler. He nearly knocked over one of the flowerpots. I returned angrily and sadly to the house to tell Mama and Lady Lorna what he had said. I did not want to believe that Acton was so money-grubbing that he would deny his own sister.

  On the few occasions when he had spoken of her in the past, he sounded sad, as if he loved her and missed her, and would love to see her again. I wondered, too, why he was so positive that she was not Lady Lorna. Was he in dire need of her money?

  In any case it was her money, and we must convince him to admit she was Lorna. Surely if he knew, he would not be so harsh. I had one bit of satisfaction in knowing he would not be dashing off to London any time soon to look over this year’s crop. He wouldn’t dare leave with Lady Lorna pressing her claim. The debutantes and heiresses must do without him for one Season.

  Chapter Three

  Mama and her old friend had come down to breakfast while I was out. Despite her spreading girth, Mama eats lightly at breakfast. It is her sedentary life and the sweets she nibbles through the day that is filling her figure out. Lady Lorna’s plate showed the remains of gammon and eggs. They had either spotted Acton from the window or Balky had told them he had been here, for they were on thorns waiting for my return.

  “What did he want?” Lady Lorna asked before I was quite through the doorway. She used that same direct manner as Lady Mary. She had the Acton nose as well, though a more ladylike version. Fortunately, she had avoided the black eyebrows. The red hair had missed the aunts and Acton, but Sukey had it, as did Acton’s Uncle Nicholas, who had inherited Willow Hall, the younger son’s estate on the River Colne, near Halstead. As Nicholas had no children, that estate had reverted to Acton when his uncle died.

  “He didn’t know you were here until I told him. He came to tell us you were at the Abbey last night. He said very firmly that you were not his sister. He said Lady Mary and Maddie feel the same way, but he gave no sensible reason why they are all so certain. Just that he thought Lorna would have managed to escape sooner. Oh and he said Lorna never slept in past eight o’clock. Just foolish things like that.”

  Lady Lorna gave a satisfied nod. It was Mama who asked, “Did he mention the money?”

  “Yes, he did. He said he wouldn’t hand one penny over to an impostor. There have been various impostors over the years, you see, Lady Lorna.”

  She shook her head and gave a tsk of disgust. “Terrible, what people will do for money. I, though I have known dire poverty, would never do such an underhanded thing. I admit I’ve stolen food from farmers’ fields when I was starving, and a blanket from a clothesline one winter when I was freezing, but only what I absolutely needed to keep body and soul together. I always tried to steal from farms that looked as if they could spare it, never from desperately poor folks. Even then I felt guilty.”

  “That’s completely different,” I said at once.

  “I wouldn’t call it stealing at all,” Mama said bracingly. “We have to convince him you are you, Lorna. How can we set about it? Who else can we get to recognize you?”

  “I hardly know what to say, Lucy. Everyone seems to be dead — Papa, your Charles.”

  “How about Lord Edward Manford? Surely he must recognize you, even after two decades.”

  “Twenty years is a long time. I know I have changed, Lucy. And I was never really close to Edward, you know. In fact, I hardly knew him. I only met him three or four times. It was an arranged marriage, all Papa’s doings. We were not at all the sort who had little love secrets. Is he married, by the way? I forgot to ask you — that is how little he meant to me.”

  “Yes, about a year after you were taken away. He married a lady called Alice Kilmer. Do you know her?”

  “Oh yes, of course. She was always after him.”

  “You are thinking of Alice’s cousin, Jane Kilmer,” Mama said. “Alice did not live near here. She was visiting Jane’s family that year, and met Edward there.”

  Lorna showed no interest in these details of her former fiancé’s marriage. She reached into her suit pocket, pulled out a little pearl ring and smiled sadly at it.

  “I had this of Mama on my sixteenth birthday,” she said. “I used to wear it on a golden chain ‘round my neck as it was too small for me. I wore it the night I was taken by the gypsies. The chain broke and was lost over the years. As the ring was not of much value, I never sold it. I needed something tangible to remind me of home.”

  Her eyes held a sad, faraway look, telling me she was thinking of her mama, and the kind of life she had left behind. Everything of the best, except of course for Lord Edward Manford.

  “A pearl ring!” Mama cried. “Oh my dear, such bad luck. You should have got rid of it, only I wasn’t aware of its evils before you left. Pearls always bring tears.”

  “This one has brought plenty over the years, remembering Mama,” Lady Lorna said, fingering it.

  “Would Acton recognize it?” I asked, hope rising. “It might be good luck this time.”

  “I don’t know if he ever saw it, he was just a child at the time and away at school when he got a little older. Aunt Mary might remember. She seemed as sharp as ever. It has a little inscription on the inside band. LP, EM, enclosed in a heart. It was from an old lover of Mama, which is why she gave it to me. I expect Papa disliked her keeping it.”

  “Well that is something,” I said. “And how about your servant at that time?”

  Lorna looked at Mama. “Is Effie still at the Abbey? She would know me.”

  “No, she left shortly after you disappeared,” Mama said. “I haven’t heard anything of her since. I wouldn’t know where to begin looking for her.”

  “Where was she from?” I asked. “Very likely she went home. Her parents would know, if she is still alive.”

  “She wasn’t a local girl,” Lorna said. “Some little village. It might come back to me. I’ll try to remember.”

  “I expect Lady Mary would know,” Mama suggested.

  “Goodness, don’t mention it to her!” Lorna exclaimed. “She would take steps to make sure we never found her, for Effie would be sure to remember me. We were so close — you reme
mber, Lucy, how she used to help me with my little escapades.”

  “Indeed I do,” Mama said, and mentioned a few occasions when Effie had helped Lady Lorna. Just innocent little things like sneaking food up to her when she was being punished by going without dinner, or bringing her books she wasn’t supposed to be reading.

  We sat over the teacups for an hour, planning how to convince Acton and the aunts to accept Lorna. Mama called her Lorna, and as she was so friendly and easy to please I omitted the “Lady” once or twice by accident. She then asked me to call her Lorna too.

  “I’m so unaccustomed to my title I feel you’re talking to someone else when you say it,” she said. She called me Katie, as I was called when I was young. Mama and my friends have been calling me Kate since Papa died and I took over in his stead.

  After an hour Balky came in and handed me a note. “It’s from himself,” he said, in a very unbutlerish way, his index finger pointing out the crest. “His footman is waiting for an answer.” Balky has been with us since Mama and Papa got married, and feels himself one of the family. He still calls me “Missie” when he feels like it. We all knew who “himself was, even without glancing at the crested paper.

  “What does he say?” Mama asked eagerly.

  Actually it wasn’t from Acton. It was from Lady Mary. I read it aloud.

  “Dear Kate: Would you please come and take tea with us this afternoon at three. There are things we would like to discuss with you, away from the company Lady Simmons is entertaining. Sincerely, Lady Mary.”

  Lorna shook her head sadly. “How they hate me.”

  “I shan’t go,” I said. “They only want to tell me the same things Acton told me this morning.”

  “It is odd they didn’t include me in the invitation,” Mama said to Lorna. “Kate has no memory of you. She was practically a babe in arms when you were snatched away.”

  After a frowning pause, Lorna said. “I think she should go and see what they are up to. Best to be prepared for whatever they have up their sleeves. Now make sure you don’t mention Effie, Katie.”