She smiled and, for a moment, he caught again that flash of something very familiar in her face as she read his thoughts.
‘I knew them both, my lord. Your mother and I shared a bed from the time we were small girls. I’m your aunt, Margaret, but the family calls me Peggy,’ the woman replied to his unspoken question.
So he had not been mistaken about the family resemblance. Something lost within him had told him that this woman was related to him. Isabel had told him that his mother had left behind a large family.
How did one greet long-lost aunts? Kiss them, hug them, shake their hands? He settled for a foolish grin.
‘I’ve been expecting you!’ his aunt chided. ‘Ever since we heard they’d found you, we’ve been waiting for this day. After all ’twas mother and I who told Mr. Bragge about you and set them off on the search.’ She held out her hand to him. ‘Come and meet your gran. Marjory was always her favourite.’
‘It’s too early... I’m not dressed.’
Sebastian groped for excuses. Accidental encounters with long-lost aunts was one thing, grandmothers quite another.
Peggy took his hand. ‘She’d not care if you came in rags,’ she said. ‘She’s been waiting more than thirty years for this day.’
Sebastian followed his aunt out of the church to the gate of a small cottage only yards away from the church. She paused and turned to look at him.
‘My father—your grandfather, that is—died ten years ago, and the old lord granted us a grace and favour cottage. It’s not much, I know, but it does us well enough.’
The wicket gate opened with a protesting squeak and he followed her up the gravel path to the front door. Peggy opened the door and turned back to him.
‘You wait here,’ she said, and then, as if remembering who she addressed, she added with an embarrassed smile, ‘if you don’t mind, my lord. I need a moment or two to make sure Ma is ready.’
While Sebastian waited, he could hear Peggy’s low voice in the parlour. He went over in his mind what he should say to this long-lost grandparent, and it seemed an age before his aunt appeared, standing back to admit him to the little room. Once again, Sebastian ducked his head to avoid the low beams and wondered if the entire village had been constructed by midgets.
An elderly woman sat in a chair beside the fire, looking just as he had imagined a grandmother should look. Fluffs of white hair escaped from her neat lace cap and milky blue eyes looked up at him from a face that looked as fragile as tissue.
‘Lord Somerton, Ma,’ Peggy announced, unnecessarily.
‘You’ll have to come closer, boy,’ the old woman said. ‘My eyes aren’t that good.’
‘She’s all but blind and quite a bit deaf, so you’ll need to talk clear,’ Peggy whispered in his ear.
Sebastian went down on one knee at the woman’s feet and took her hand. He kissed it, the delicate skin like paper beneathhis lips. When he looked up, she had tears in her eyes. Her hand went to his hair, caressing him as if he were a small child.
‘I never thought I’d see the day when Marjory’s boy would come to me,’ she said as her gnarled fingers moved to his face, lightly touching his eyes, his nose and his mouth as if the touch would in some way produce a picture in her mind. ‘You’ve a good strong face,’ she said and smiled, cuffing him lightly on the cheek. ‘And you have come out without shaving. That will never do!’
‘He’s as like his father as he could be,’ Peggy said.
‘Oh, he was a good boy, James,’ his grandmother said, ‘but headstrong like our girl.’
As he straightened, Sebastian found himself completely bereft of the well-rehearsed words. He coughed to disguise the unfamiliar prickling sensation at the back of his throat.
‘I ... I... have a brother and a sister. Your grandchildren, too.’
The old lady looked in the general direction of her daughter.
‘Oh, Peggy. All these years and we never knew.’ She turned back to Sebastian, her fingers found his and she squeezed them tightly as if afraid to let go. ‘Your grandfather, the Reverend, was undone by her eloping with the lord’s son. He forbade letters from Marjory. If she ever sent them, he threw them unopened into the fire.’ Her voice shook with emotion as she said, ‘We only heard she was dead by sheer chance. That good man, the Reverend Alder, passed a message by word of mouth to a friend, and he whispered it to me when he came to visit.’ She shook her head as if trying to vanquish the memory.
Sebastian lowered his head. If it hadn’t been for the kindness of the Reverend Alder, both he and his mother would have ended up in the workhouse—or dead. Such unspeakable cruelty by her own father beggared belief.
As if answering his unspoken words, his grandmother continued. ‘You mustn’t judge your grandfather, lad. Marjory was promised to marry a young clergyman from over Grantham way. He’s a bishop now. Her running off like that, jilting her intended,and with the lord’s son doing the same to his young lady, and him with not a penny to his name after his father cut him out.’ She shook her head and lowered her eyes. ‘It brought terrible shame to this house.’
So that was how it had happened. His parents had both been betrothed to other people, facing two loveless marriages or the fleeting chance of happiness together, even with the approbation of family and society. Whatever happiness they had enjoyed had been short lived. He wondered if his mother had appealed to her father after James had died. If she had, it sounded like her cry for help fell on stony ground. So much for Christian charity.
He glanced out of the window at the solid respectability of the church building and shook his head. These were matters that belonged in the past. His mother’s second marriage to the Reverend Alder had been a happy one and she had died greatly loved and greatly mourned.
His grandmother echoed his thoughts. ‘Those are sad memories we must leave in the past. You are here now, where you rightly belong, and I know your mother and father would be proud of you. A hero of Waterloo, Peggy tells me.’
