His Lordship's True Lady (True Gentlemen #4)(65)
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.”