Ready Set Rogue

by Manda Collins

  Picking up the journal she’d been reading, Daphne opened it and began to read aloud:

  I know my family will think me mad for it, but I am determined that my life’s work will not go to waste. That the books and artifacts and art I so painstakingly purchased, piece by piece, in an effort to expand my own knowledge of the world, will serve to further the education of women with the good sense and intelligence to put their minds to good use. I am confident that the young ladies I have my eye on will only be a credit to their sex and their chosen disciplines. It is my hope that once they realize how important this is to me that my nephews and niece will understand and let my heirs do what they were put on earth to do without causing them grief for it.

  Perhaps because the way in which my own pursuit of scholarship was discouraged by my parents, I know all too well how difficult the way can be for those of us who were gifted with intellectual ability, but had the misfortune to be born women. One day I hope that it will be possible for anyone with the requisite talent—be they rich or poor, male or female, aristocrat or serf—to pursue her true calling. But until that day, I will do my part to open the door for these four, whom I hope will prove themselves worthy of my gift.

  The silence in the library was so thick you might have heard a feather fall. And Ivy found that her own eyes were damp. “Oh, I wish I could have met her just once,” she said, feeling the loss of their benefactor more keenly than ever. “If only to thank her for choosing me. Though I cannot imagine what set me apart from the countless other lady scholars out there.”

  “Me too,” said Sophia, also a little misty.

  “I want to find whoever killed her,” Daphne said, her earlier sentiment gone now, leaving in its place a grim determination. “Not only did he rob us of the chance to meet Lady Celeste, but he also took her from the place she loved best in the world. Against her will.” Her fists clenched. “I dislike it above all things when a woman is forced to do something against her will.”

  Ivy got the feeling that there was something more than just mourning the loss of Lady Celeste behind Daphne’s declaration, but she decided to speak with her about it later.

  She was about to suggest that they get back to work, when Gemma spoke up. “Why didn’t she send for us? When she knew she was dying, I mean?” The younger Hastings sister, who was generally the least likely of the quartet to take something to heart, seemed to be particularly upset at their benefactor’s decision. “I know it can’t have been pleasant,” she went on, “but we would not have cared about that. So long as we’d been able to meet her. To thank her.”

  Serena, who had been silent up to now, cleared her throat. “I think I might be able to shed some light on that,” she said sadly. “I think it’s easy not to guess, when all you’ve known of her has been her hopes and dreams set forth in these journals. Or the individual messages she left for each of you upon your arrival here. But I knew Aunt Celeste, as did Maitland and Kerr, from the time I was little. And despite her intelligence, and zeal for reform, she was, in point of fact, a bit shy.”

  “You aren’t telling us that she didn’t call us to her because she was afraid of meeting us, surely?” Sophia looked skeptical in the extreme. “Because I won’t believe that the same woman who defied her family and left her entire estate to four strangers was too timid to actually see them at least once.”

  But Serena shook her head. “No, not in so many words. It was more that meeting people—even those she knew she would enjoy getting to know—was hard for her. After a dinner party once, she took to her bed for a week. ‘Refilling the well’ she called it. And as much as she would have loved meeting you, I think in those last few weeks she was using every bit of strength she had to fight off her illness. And then, by the time she knew it was hopeless, it was too late.”

  “It did take a lot out of her,” Quill confirmed, his eyes reflecting his own sorrow at the loss of his aunt. “Meeting people. She could be as animated and witty as can be, but she didn’t have an endless supply of energy. And I can well imagine her thinking she had all the time in the world to meet you only to find out she was wrong.”

  “I want to know who it was,” Gemma said fiercely. “I want to know who killed this remarkable woman.”

  Ivy agreed. “I think we all wish to find out who did this. So, let’s dive back into the journals and find something. There has to be some clue here that will tell us something useful.”

  With murmured assent, they all got back to perusing their portions of the journals.

  She was nearing the end of the volume from the summer after Celeste’s debut when Ivy reached a notation that had her heart quickening with excitement. Celeste had fallen in love with a man named Ian. And when Ivy moved on to the next journal, she found another mention of Celeste’s passion for Ian, followed by a lament about the unfairness of the parents who wouldn’t let them be together. But it was the description of their thwarted elopement along with vague but unmistakable descriptions of what had occurred between them on their single night together that had Ivy convinced that she’d discovered something that could be the clue they were looking for.

  She read the tear-stained words of the page Celeste had written some three months after the elopement:

  My dearest love has been sent away, but God has given me something to remember him by. If only I can manage to convince Mama and Papa to let me keep the child. Surely even they cannot be so cruel as to wrest a babe from its mother’s arms—especially when it is entirely their doing that its father is rotting away in some country parsonage in Yorkshire.

  Then, ten months later, again in tear-stained script, she’d written:

  It is done. They have taken the only real things I’ve ever loved from me. I only hope that my dear little girl will have a happier life than the one I’ve been given. I will never forgive Father for his perfidy. He might have agreed to give me Beauchamp House outright as a peace offering, but there will never be peace between us again. And I will never be happy again.

  Ivy brushed away her own tears at the thought of what Celeste had endured at such a young age. That she’d been separated from the man she loved—a clergyman it sounded like, so likely not smart enough for the Duke and Duchess of Beauchamp to allow to court their daughter—was one thing, but to also have the child born of that love torn from her very arms? Well, Ivy would not have blamed Lady Celeste a bit if she’d become a bitter, cold, unfeeling woman after that. And yet, from all appearances, she’d gone on to make a name for herself in scholarly circles and to amass one of the most impressive collections of books and artifacts in Europe, let alone England.

  “Lady Celeste had a child,” she said aloud, eliciting gasps and shocked sounds from her fellow readers. “A girl who was cruelly taken from her when it was but a month old.”

  “Oh, poor Celeste,” Serena said, her lovely features contorted with sadness. “I knew our grandparents were cruel, but I had no notion they’d do such a thing.”

  “What makes you think they were responsible?” Maitland asked his sister. “I’m not disagreeing about their character, mind you, I just wish to know what makes you think it was they who did this.”

  “I always had the sense from Aunt Celeste,” Serena explained with a sad smile, “that she’d once had a great love but for some reason they’d been separated. She never came right out and said so. But she told me when I was foolish enough to elope with Fanning that I must follow my heart. That she’d tried to do so herself but had been cruelly thwarted. Of course, it turns out that eloping with Fanning was far from the great love story I’d wished it to be, but that’s neither here nor there.”

  “You never told us this,” Quill said, looking hurt that his cousin hadn’t taken him or her own brother into her confidence.

  “I forgot about it after Fanning,” Serena admitted with a sigh. She’d confided in the four bluestockings about the horrors of her marriage, so it wasn’t surprising to Ivy to learn that her attention had been focused solely on her own safety
and that of her child during that period. That Quill’s cousin had managed to regain a sense of her own self-worth and power after the way she’d been treated was a testament to Serena’s strength. And it was something Ivy admired about her wholeheartedly.

  “He had a way of demanding all my attention,” Lady Serena continued. “Then when Jeremy was born, and Fanning died, Celeste was adamant that I should come to her. And she said something the first time she held Jeremy that should have told me, but again I was awash with my own thoughts. She said that it had been over twenty years since she’d held a baby. I thought she meant any child at all, but of course she meant her own.”

  “But who was the father?” Quill demanded. “I always thought Celeste never married because she preferred going her own way. I dislike the thought of her alone and lonely for all those years.”

  Ivy pointed them to the mention of the vicarage in Yorkshire. “It seems to me that if the daughter of a duke were to fall in love with a clergyman—perhaps one who wasn’t from a particularly prosperous family—that would be something her noble parents would make every attempt to nip in the bud.”

  “Only they were too late to stop an elopement,” Maitland said quietly. “But if they were away long enough to consummate the thing, why in God’s name didn’t grandfather allow them to marry? If I were Celeste and this vicar fellow, I’d have calculated that being away for an entire night together would seal the deal, so to speak. Instead grandfather had the vicar sent away and forced Celeste to give up her child?”

  “We knew he was a cold, unfeeling man,” Quill said with a shake of his head. “You only have to look at the fact that of their six children, not one visited unless he or she was summoned. And not even then in the case of your father, Maitland and Serena. My own mama would only ever say that they were not very kind people, and leave it at that. I suppose we were lucky that they both died before we were of an age to interest them.”

  “But what happened to the child?” Sophia reminded them. “What did Celeste’s parents do with it?”

  Ivy scanned the pages before her. “It doesn’t look as if she knows,” she said after a few moments of reading. “She asked, ‘begged’ was her word, to have the baby returned to her, but her parents refused.”

  “Poor Celeste,” Serena said, closing her eyes in distress. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive my grandparents.”

  Sophia interrupted. “We must find this vicar. What if he blamed Lady Celeste for his banishment and decided to kill her for it?”

  “But why do so over twenty years later?” Gemma asked, puzzled. “It’s hardly what one would expect from a vicar in any case.”

  “Which is why we need to learn who he was and find his location,” Ivy said with a nod. “What if he only found out where she was recently?”

  “I think I know someone who might be able to tell us,” Serena said suddenly, her eyes bright with excitement. “Because I think Ivy is correct that he only found Aunt Celeste a short while ago.”

  “What do you mean?” Daphne asked, frowning.

  “Our local vicar has only been in the village for a little over a year,” Serena said. “He’s around the same age as Aunt Celeste, and more importantly, his Christian name is Ian.”

  * * *

  “I do wish you’d let us come too,” Serena protested as Quill lifted Ivy into his curricle. He was momentarily diverted from his cousin’s words by the feel of Ivy’s curves against him. Soon, he told himself. Soon we’ll be able to hide away from the rest of the world and not worry about murder and such. Ivy’s sharp intake of breath and the darkening of her green eyes told him she was thinking along similar lines.

  She, however, seemed better at holding a conversation at the moment.

  “It would look odd for all seven of us to appear on his doorstep,” Ivy said as she settled herself onto the carriage seat. “And we don’t wish to frighten him away if he is indeed the man we’re seeking.”

  “God knows there are plenty of vicars named Ian,” Maitland said wryly. “We are likely jumping to conclusions over this odd coincidence.”

  “We’ll learn something soon enough,” Quill said, taking his seat beside Ivy and grasping the reins in one hand. “Finish looking through the journals for some further mention of the child. It’s possible that the father sought her out at some point and perhaps can shed some light on who would wish to kill Celeste.”

  With a wave, he set the horses into motion and they were off.

  “The girl would be thirty-two years old by now,” Ivy said over the sound of the horses’ hooves on the road. “Lady Celeste must have found it impossible not to mark her birth date every year. I wonder if she ever saw her.”

  “We don’t know that my grandfather even let her know where the child was placed,” Quill said, unable to imagine the pain his aunt must have suffered over this whole affair. “Knowing how he wished to punish her, I cannot imagine he would.”

  “But once she was on her own,” Ivy said, her voice echoing his own sorrow, “surely she tried to find her. Or at least had someone search for her.”

  “I don’t know,” Quill said. “The others read those later diaries, but no one made mention of any kind of search. Nothing beyond her quest to find the four of you.”

  He felt a little ashamed for so misconstruing his aunt’s motives when he’d first learned of her decision to leave Beauchamp House to the bluestockings. Like the rest of the family, he realized, he’d not really taken his aunt seriously as a scholar. But the insight into her character he’d gained from the journals reminded him that she was, once upon a time, a young woman with hopes and dreams and that even into her later years she wanted to make her mark on the world.

  The fact that one of her choices had turned out to be Ivy, well, that was more than serendipity. There was no way Celeste could have known that he would find one of her beneficiaries irresistible, of course, but he liked to think that she would have found their mutual attraction pleasing.

  “A penny for them,” Ivy said into the silence. “Though I can guess you’re thinking, as I am, about Celeste and her heartache.”

  “Indeed,” Quill responded. “I can’t help but imagine what I’d have done in Ian’s position. I simply cannot fathom letting the father of the woman I loved keep her from me. It’s impossible for me to think that if your father told me to leave you be, that I’d listen. Nothing would keep me from your side, Ivy.”

  Ivy slipped her hand into his free one. “I feel the same,” she said. “But you must consider that Ian was likely a younger son who relied upon the patronage of men like your grandfather for his living. Perhaps we shouldn’t judge him too harshly. You are a marquess with wealth and property. Would you be able to stand it if your decision to defy my father meant living in reduced circumstances in a hovel, with no prospect of any means for keeping your wife and child fed and sheltered? You’ve always known you would inherit the marquisate, have you not? You don’t know what it is to live from one week to the next not knowing where your next meal would come from.”

  He knew she was speaking from experience, and felt a pang of dismay at the thought of her in such circumstances. “Your father was cut off from his family for marrying your mother, was he not?”

  “Yes,” she said with a nod. “And when I was small I do remember there were days when Mama wept over our lack of funds. But soon after, Papa was able to secure a position as outside tutor to several tradesmen’s sons who needed the help to gain entry into university. And one job begat another and he was able to earn a decent living. But for a time there, when he was unable to secure work at the University, and had no way of doing so, we were in difficulties. It is no easy thing to defy your family. Especially when one’s father makes sure that none of your erstwhile mentors will give you a reference. When you’re cut off from the world you once knew. And anyone who says it is easy hasn’t really had to face the consequences up close.”

  “Perhaps I spoke too soon,” Quill agreed, trying to see
Ian’s defection in a different light. “But I still do not understand how he could have left his child. At least he could see that Celeste would be cared for by her family. But once the child was given away, there’s no telling what happened to her. What sort of family took her in.”

  “But who is to say your grandfather even let him know there was a child?” Ivy argued. “Celeste certainly was unable to speak to him after their ill-fated elopement. I daresay young Ian was trundled off to Yorkshire within hours of their being found on the road and never saw or heard from Celeste again.”

  “Until recently,” Quill said thoughtfully. “If this Ian is indeed the same one from Celeste’s letters.”

  They’d reached the drive leading to the little church where Quill remembered many a Sunday service in the front pew with Aunt Celeste. He tried to imagine what sort of man was the pastor now. If he was indeed Celeste’s Ian, what a shock it must have been on that first Sunday when she arrived at the door. Had he remembered her at once? Had she remembered him? It was impossible to imagine being able to simply greet the love of one’s life as if nothing had ever passed between them.

  “Oh look,” Ivy said as they neared the vicarage. “There is Mrs. Vance. I suppose she’s come to visit the vicar, too.”

  And sure enough as he pulled the curricle to a stop, Quill saw that there was a gig with a piebald horse tied up to a nearby tree just to the side of the house. Mrs. Vance, her face composed, stood in the doorway of the vicarage.

  “I’m afraid if you’ve come to see Reverend Devereaux,” she said with a brief smile, “he’s away at the moment. He just left to go to a deathbed. My husband sent me to fetch him.”

  Ivy’s disappointment was evident in her voice as she said, “Oh how sad. We were hoping to speak with him. I suppose you don’t know when he’ll be back?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Mrs. Vance said with a shake of her head. “I don’t know how much experience you have with sickbeds, but sometimes these things take days. I don’t anticipate that the vicar will stay there for that long, of course, but it could be tomorrow before he’s able to see you. I presume you’re here to request the banns to be read?”