Page 19 of A Lady in Name

“I don’t know. I feel alien in this place.”

“As you would do anywhere,” Stefan said gently. “Lucy, I am not ordering you. I am asking you. Please stay. At least for long enough to take stock and decide what you want to do.”

What she wanted to do? Not what he wanted her to do. Lucy could not prevent a rise of suspicion.

“Why are you being like this? Is it to trick me?”

He sighed. “I can’t blame you for thinking so, but no. Let me help you, if I can. If, after a time, you still wish to go your own way, then so be it.”

She eyed him. He appeared wholly sincere. If only his attitude had not been so unlike all she had known of him earlier, she might be induced to believe in a change of heart. She took refuge in prevarication.

“I cannot stay here. I have no clothes, for one thing. For another, I have to complete arrangements at the vicarage.”

“What arrangements?”

“There are some more of Papa’s things to be disposed of, and my own to be packed up and stored — somewhere.”

For a moment he said nothing, merely looking at her in a fashion suggesting he was thinking of something else. Then he nodded with an air of decision.

“Very well. We shall journey to your home as soon as may be and I will help you complete your arrangements.”

Shock suspended Lucy’s mind. Then she said the first thing that came into her head. “I cannot travel with you alone!”

Stefan grinned. “I hadn’t thought of that. We will take Dion along. She will make an adequate chaperon. Besides, I have no doubt at all she would refuse to be left behind.”

February had arrived by the time the expedition finally set off on the following Monday. For this delay, Stefan blamed both the Lord’s Day, upon which he surmised Lucy would not care to travel, and his secretary.

“Barnsley will not suffer me to depart without settling a number of matters requiring my attention.”

Lucy, who had recovered her composure, if not her suspicions of his lordship, could not forbear a dig at this. “I am surprised you allow Mr Barnsley to dictate to you, my lord.”

She was niggled by the amused gleam in his eye that was rapidly becoming familiar to her.

“I may get my way with everyone else, Lucy, but to my secretary I am as a cypher. He commands, and I have but to obey.”

“That I refuse to believe,” stated Lucy.

“My lord,” he put in, grinning at her. “You must always add that in when addressing me, or I shall begin to think you accept the relationship between us — cousin.”

Lucy could not help a choke of laughter. “Well, I am not used to your brand of informality.”

“Yet. I feel sure you will become accustomed.”

Lucy rather thought he was right. Her ruffled feathers had been thoroughly soothed by the change in his attitude towards her, so much so she was in a fair way to accepting the move to Pennington Manor as permanent — a frame of mind which she tried to avoid falling into. It was all very well in the intimacy of the family circle, but what of a wider frame of reference?

She had brought up the subject after dinner on the evening before their departure. “As you are in mourning,” Stefan had pointed out, “you need not meet anyone outside the family circle.”

“Quite so,” agreed Dion, adding her mite. “Even when we begin to entertain, which will not be for a few weeks yet, you have the perfect excuse to absent yourself.”

But for how long? News of her advent, if not her antecedents, was bound to leak out. Lucy had not grown up in a village without understanding the apparently endless capacity for gossip of the general populace. Well before this could occur, she was resolved on having settled her future to her own satisfaction, which did not include battening upon the Ankervilles.

The only other hitch which threatened to delay them had been the sudden intervention of the Honourable Mrs Corisande Ankerville. “You are going where?”

“To take Lucy to complete her arrangements and fetch her belongings,” Stefan said fluently.

The large gaze focused upon Lucy’s face. “Does that mean you are coming to live with us, Lucinda?”

“No!”