The Last Hellion

by Loretta Chase

  Whose name and image persisted in her memory? Vere wondered.

  No biddable young lady should have a clue how to escape a vigilant household, Grenville had said.

  Anne Ballister had been closely guarded and sheltered.

  How had she and John Grenville—a third-rate actor—ever crossed paths? How had he managed to get to her, seduce her into eloping with him to Scotland? Her father was a “pious hypocrite,” according to Dain. Acting troupes were not invited to Athcourt in Dain’s father’s time. Anne’s father wouldn’t have invited them to his home, either.

  Vere had recognized, in hindsight, all the clues Grenville had carefully dropped into The Rose of Thebes. Carried away by the adventures, the readers had overlooked them. Only when Orlando’s perfidy was finally revealed did one discern the seeds, so cleverly sown throughout the preceding chapters.

  He looked for clues in the little diary, but if they were there—as he was sure they must be—they were too cleverly concealed.

  He returned the book to its place on the night table and went into his dressing room.

  According to Beelzebub, the legal firm of Carton, Brays, and Carton were “a lot of driveling incompetents.” This was why Dain had dispensed with their services as soon as he inherited.

  Beelz must have bestowed a stare more petrifying than usual in the process, because nothing seemed to have moved in the intervening nine years, including, most especially, the dust.

  Mr. Carton the elder wasn’t in, “on account he’s barmy,” the law clerk informed Vere. Mr. Carton the younger was in Chancery, embarked on the process of going “barmy” himself. Mr. Brays was not engaged at the moment, but he was most certainly drunk, “as is his usual habit,” the clerk explained. “It’s a sorry state of affairs, is what it is, Your Grace, but it’s a place, and the only one I got at the moment, and I make the best of it.”

  The clerk, by the name of Miggs, was little more than a boy—a tall, lanky one to be sure—with a very little fuzz aspiring to a mustache and a great many spots.

  “If you do what I ask without your superiors’ approval, you’ll probably lose your place,” said Vere.

  “Not likely,” Miggs said. “They can’t do anything without me. Can’t find anything, and when I find it for ’em, they don’t know what it means and I have to explain it. If I was to go, they’d lose every client they got, and that isn’t many, and most of them I got for them.”

  Vere told him what he was looking for.

  “I’ll see,” the boy said.

  He went into a room and did not come out again for half an hour. “I can’t find a record,” he said when he came out. “But that doesn’t mean much. The old fellow kept everything in his head. Which explains why he went barmy. I’ll have to go into the catacombs, sir. It might take a few days.”

  Vere decided to go with him. Which turned out to be very wise, for the “catacombs” was Carton, Brays, and Carton’s equivalent of a lumber room: heaps of boxes, filled with documents. They were simply stacked, one atop the next, according to no logical system whatsoever.

  They worked through the entire day, only stopping at midday and late afternoon for ale and pies. Vere heaved the boxes, and the clerk quickly sifted through the contents, again and again, hour after hour, in a dank basement, while various insects and rodents scurried about, darting in and out of the crevices between boxes.

  Shortly before seven o’clock that night, Vere trudged wearily up the cellar steps, out the door, and into the street. His neckcloth, now grey, hung limply from his neck. Cobwebs clung to his coat, along with miscellaneous dirt and debris. Sweat trailed through the grime caked on his face. His hands were black.

  But in those grimy hands he carried a box, which was all that mattered, and as he set out for home, he was whistling.

  To pacify the overly anxious group Ainswood had sternly ordered to look after her, Lydia had said she would take a nap before dinner.

  This didn’t mean she intended to nap. She’d taken a book with her to the master bedchamber—and fallen asleep reading it.

  A noise from the window woke her, and she caught her husband in the act of climbing through it.

  She did not ask him why he couldn’t come in the door like a normal person. One glance told her why he’d eschewed the more public route.

  This morning he’d told her he was going to meet with Mr. Herriard regarding the marriage settlements, and would probably be at it for hours. These negotiations had been delayed while His Grace searched for his wards. Dain had reminded his friend of the matter yesterday, before he left.

  “I collect one of the settlement terms was your sweeping Mr. Herriard’s chimney,” she said as her glance swept over six and a quarter feet of human wreckage.

  Ainswood looked down at the small box in his hands.

  “Um, not exactly,” he said.

  “You fell into a sewer excavation,” she said.

  “No. Um…” He frowned. “I ought to get cleaned up first.”

  “I’ll ring for Jaynes.”

  He shook his head.

  Lydia left the bed.

  “Vere?” Her voice was gentle. “Did someone knock you on the head?”

  “No. Let me just wash my face and hands. I can have a bath later.” He hurried into his dressing room, still holding the box.

  She supposed the box contained the marriage settlements and there was something in them he didn’t think she’d like. She beat down her curiosity and waited, pacing.

  He emerged from the dressing room a few minutes later, wearing a dressing gown and nothing else, and carrying the box. He drew up a chair near the fire and invited her to occupy it. She sat.

  He settled onto the hearthrug at her feet and opened the box. He withdrew an oval object and laid it in her lap.

  It was a miniature, of a young man, fair-haired and blue-eyed. He wore a faint smile.

  It was almost like looking into a mirror. “He looks…like my brother,” she said. Her voice sounded thready to her ears. Her heart was thudding.

  “His name was Edward Grey,” Ainswood said quietly. “He was a promising actor and playwright. His mother was a highly regarded actress, Serafina Grey. His father was Richard Ballister, your mother’s great-uncle. Edward Grey was the devil Richard Ballister produced, in his wild youth, on the wrong side of the blanket. Richard’s father was past sixty when Richard was born, of a second marriage.”

  He took from the box a yellowed piece of paper. It bore a fragment of the Ballister family tree—Anne Ballister’s branch—and the names and dates were written in her tiny, precise hand. The second marriage, late in life, explained why Anne Ballister’s Great-Uncle Richard was only three years older than her father.

  But Lydia’s gaze had already shifted lower, to where her name was written, below and between her mother’s—and Edward Grey’s.

  She looked at the miniature. Then at the family tree her mother had so neatly drawn. Then at the miniature.

  “This is my father,” she said softly, wonderingly.

  “Yes.”

  “Not John Grenville.”

  “There’s no doubt of it,” he said. “Your mother made sure. Like a true Ballister, she had it all documented. My guess is that she intended the lot to be given to you when you reached adulthood. Something went wrong. John Grenville ended up with it and sold it to the third Marquess of Dain—via his solicitors. The receipt for the transaction is dated August 1813.”

  “That explains where he got the money to go to America,” Lydia said. She met her husband’s gaze. “This explains a great deal.” It was Edward her mother had eloped with to Scotland, not the man Lydia had called Papa.

  “The box contains love letters he wrote to her,” Vere said. “Two dozen at least. I hadn’t time to truly study and sort everything out.” His green gaze was soft and he wore his boy’s smile, half abashed. “Even the little I read told me he adored your mother. He was born on the wrong side of the blanket, but they were deeply in love, and conceiv
ed a child in love.”

  “I love you,” she said, past the lump in her throat. “I don’t know how you did this, how it occurred to you, what drove you to look for and find something no one else guessed existed. But I know you did it in love for me—and really, Ainswood, I am so vexed with you. I have never done so much blubbering as I have since I met you.” Her eyes were filling. She didn’t try to say more, only slipped down from the chair and into his arms.

  Though he was illegitimate, Edward Grey had been fairly close to his father, who provided for his keep and his education. He was one of the numerous dependents who attended family gatherings. That was how he and Anne had met. She had been told he was “a distant cousin.” They fell in love.

  She had been visiting when he quarreled with his father, who vehemently disapproved of the acting career Edward was set upon. Edward was ejected. Permanently. When Anne found out what had happened, she insisted on going with him. He wanted her to wait until he was sure he could support her. She refused to wait. She understood now that her father would never consent to their marriage. She’d be forced to wed the man her father chose. That was out of the question.

  And so she fled with Edward to Scotland.

  They were wed over the anvil. No minister, no church, no banns, no parental permission required. Their marriage was legal, but not by their relatives’ standards. The Ballisters had no more regard for the savage Scottish race’s quaint laws and traditions than they did for the bizarre rituals of Hindus or Hottentots. In their eyes, Anne was a whore, the mistress of a bastard. The box contained letters from the lawyers notifying her she’d been disowned, had no legal claims upon the family, and was forbidden, on pain of prosecution, to attempt any claims, financial or otherwise, or any other form of communication.

  But Anne and Edward had known this when they set out. They understood their kin. They knew those doors were permanently closed.

  They couldn’t know that, in three short months, a piece of scenery would fall on Edward during a rehearsal and kill him. He hadn’t had time to make provision for his wife, or the child she was carrying.

  A month later, John Grenville married Anne. As the diary had indicated, he convinced her he truly loved her. She was seventeen, pregnant, with no one else to turn to. She thought he was generous to accept another man’s child as his own. Only when he tried and failed to use her baby as a way into the Ballisters’ hearts and pocket-books did Anne see her error.

  Still, she hadn’t much choice but to stay with him, at least in the beginning. It was either John Grenville or the streets, since she had no other way of earning a living. She had been ill for a very long time following Sarah’s birth and never fully regained her strength thereafter. If she had been strong, she would have left John Grenville eventually, Lydia was certain.

  Anne had definitely tried to leave him little with which to exploit her death or Lydia’s true identity. The diary constituted a very small scandal, compared to the high drama the box held. Every publisher in London would have fought for those documents. Small wonder Carton, Brays, and Carton had paid handsomely for the materials. And very small wonder they’d promptly buried them.

  Evidently, the box was overlooked when the current Marquess of Dain changed solicitors. The diary, along with other records, must have gone to the new firm, where everything was properly sorted out and materials deemed of interest to the new master sent to Athcourt. Since Dain had resided in Paris rather than Devonshire until last spring, it was hardly astonishing that the diary had ended up tucked away in a drawer or file or shelf with other archival materials. The amazing thing was that Lady Dain had found it.

  That, though, wasn’t half so amazing as Ainswood’s piece of “finding.”

  And he, as usual, would not admit to having done anything out of the ordinary.

  On the following afternoon, while the younger contingent was out watching a parade in honor of the Queen of Portugal, Lydia and Ainswood enlightened Dain and Jessica.

  Knowing the Ballisters, Dain wouldn’t have had any trouble believing the story, even if he hadn’t the documents spread out before him on the great table in the library.

  What he couldn’t believe was that the Duke of Ainswood was the one who’d got to the bottom of it.

  “How the devil did you perceive what no one else even imagined was there?” he demanded of his friend. “And what guardian angel pushed you to Carton, Brays, and Carton, of all places?”

  “You’re the one who told me the Ballister nature isn’t confiding,” Vere said. “You’re the one who nattered on about mimics and weaknesses for the theater. You were the one who pointed out how extraordinary it was that the family birthmark—the holy badge of the Ballisters—had appeared upon a woman. Yet Anne never ‘confided’ that miraculous matter in her private diary. It was natural to be suspicious. All I did was put two and two together. And since she eloped in your father’s time, I started in the logical place, with your father’s solicitors. I certainly didn’t expect to find the answers there. I was merely hoping to be set on the right trail.”

  He threw an exasperated glance over the group. “Now that we have Lydia’s identity sorted out, and she doesn’t have to worry about John Grenville’s bad blood, don’t you think a celebration is in order? I don’t know about the rest of you, but I could use a drink.”

  Monday morning found Bertie Trent and his bride-to-be in the morning room of Ainswood House, and it wasn’t in order to do what young couples do when they snatch a moment’s privacy.

  They were trying to figure out how to stop a war.

  Everyone else was in the library, arguing about their future. They’d been at it since breakfast: Dain and Ainswood and their wives, with enthusiastic help from Elizabeth, Emily, and even Dominick.

  They could not agree on where the wedding should be held: Longlands, Athcourt, London—in church, or at whose townhouse. They could not agree on who had the right to provide Tamsin’s dowry, or a place for the newlyweds to live, or the finances necessary for maintaining the abode.

  Because it was Dain and Ainswood doing most of the arguing, compromise was out of the question. Left to themselves, the ladies might have negotiated an acceptable arrangement, but the men wouldn’t leave it to them, because that meant compromise.

  Tamsin was very upset. She didn’t want a dowry. Yet she didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Bertie was upset for her sake as well as his own. He couldn’t say a word about his own future because it would look like he was taking sides.

  “At the rate they’re going,” he said, “they won’t get it settled before Judgment Day. And meanwhile, m’grandmother and Abonville’ll get back from France, and they’ll be wantin’ us to live there.”

  “I know it sounds ungrateful,” Tamsin said, “but an elopement to Scotland is beginning to exert a strong appeal.”

  “We don’t need to do that.” Bertie lowered his voice. “You can’t walk ten minutes in London without trippin’ over a church. And where there’s a church, there’s a parson.”

  Her enormous brown gaze lifted to his. “We did tell them we were going for a walk,” she said.

  Bertie patted his breast. “I got the license.” He’d been carrying it about with him ever since Dain had given it to him a few days ago. Considering the way important documents tended to go astray—for decades—in certain families, Bertie thought it best to keep this one upon his person at all times.

  “I’ll fetch my bonnet,” she said.

  It took her only a moment. A moment later, they set out for St. James’s Church, Piccadilly. They had only to walk a short way across St. James’s Square and step into York Street, at the end of which the church stood.

  They were about to turn into York Street at the same time a well-dressed, bespectacled, middle-aged fellow was turning out of it into the square.

  He stopped short, and Tamsin did, too.

  “Papa!” she cried.

  “Tam!” The fellow opened his arms.

  She let go
of Bertie and ran into them.

  “I say!” Bertie exclaimed. “By Jupiter.”

  As soon as the first transports were over, Bertie hustled them into York Street, so they wouldn’t attract attention from Ainswood House.

  “We was tryin’ to get shackled quick-like,” he explained to Mr. Prideaux. “Before we was missed. I weren’t runnin’ away with her or nothin’.” He produced the license as evidence.

  As Mr. Prideaux perused the document, Bertie added, “You ain’t goin’ to raise a fuss, I hope. It’s all settled, like I wrote you, and she’s safe and well, and I can take care of her. We don’t need nothin’—only your blessin’ would be a good thing, if you can manage it, but we’ll do without if we have to.”

  By this time Tamsin had disengaged herself from her father and was clinging to Bertie’s arm. “You won’t change his mind, Papa, or mine. I won’t go back to Mama.”

  Her parent returned the license to Bertie. “Neither will I,” he said. “Your mother didn’t send me word when you ran away. I found out only a week ago. I was in Plymouth getting ready to set out for America to look for you when Sir Bertram’s letter finally reached me. She had waited for a sign from the Almighty before deciding to send it to my secretary.” He took off his spectacles, cleaned them with his handkerchief, then put them back on. “Well, I have looked after you very ill, very ill, indeed, Tam. I daresay this young fellow will do much better, eh?”

  “Oh, never mind heaping coals on my head, Papa,” Tamsin said. “I can’t blame you for running away from Mama when I did the same thing. If I’d had work to get me away from her, I’d have worked day and night.” She put out her hand. “Come with us, there’s a dear, and give the bride away.”

  She tucked one hand into her father’s arm and the other into Bertie’s, and they set off toward the church.

  It was a very short walk, but Bertie managed to do plenty of thinking in the course of it. When they reached the church, he said, “You know, it seems to me like no one’s goin’ to argue with the bride’s pa if he says this church is fine with him and this sort of wedding, and never mind the fancy trappings. What if we asked ’em all—meanin’ them at Ainswood House—to come along? You’d like to have the Duchess of A at the weddin’, I know you would, Tamsin, and only think how Lizzie and Em didn’t get to see Ainswood get shackled.” He grimaced. “It bothers me to disappoint ’em.”