Aurora by Joan Smith

triumph pass over the man’s face. What a sly girl Alice was, to be sure! She had most certainly not recognized Kenelm. She was eighteen years old, would have been seven when he left, and could not therefore have been at all close to him. No, she was just allying herself with him to win him over. Kenelm—or whoever he was—took the girl’s elbow with the most charming smile ever bestowed on maiden.
    “Now why is it I didn’t recognize you at once, Sally?” he asked. “Had I seen you coming down the road on your little cream pony you used to ride, I would have done so, I promise you.”
    “Oh, I outgrew him years ago, Lord Raiker. I am all grown up now.”
    “I noticed, ma’am, and a very good job you have done of it, too,” he returned gallantly. He made his bows to the other ladies present.
    “May I do myself the honour of calling on you tomorrow, Marnie?” he asked.
    “Yes, we must meet and talk, certainly. In the afternoon, if that is convenient for you?”
    “Perfect. I’ll call on stepmama in the morning. Good day.”
    The Dougall party left, and before long the other guests took their lead from Dougall and they too departed, to regroup in smaller bunches at various homes and discuss the exciting turn events had taken. There were two camps set up at once—those who believed the newcomer’s claim, and those who did not. The man bore a strong physical resemblance to the Raikers, of course, and he knew a great deal about the family, the neighbours, but wasn’t there just a little something of that ne’er-do-well of a Horace Rutley in him? The man more closely resembled Horace than Kenelm, some said. Horace, for instance, had always had that swarthy skin, whereas Kenelm had been paler.
    Every family and every neighbourhood has its little scandals, and one of the scandals of this pocket of Kent was that old Lord Raiker occasionally went astray. He was a good man by and large, took care of his property and his people and went to church on Sunday, but he had an eye to a pretty girl. Nel Rutley had been a very pretty girl thirty-odd years ago, the daughter of a fisherman in the village, as near to witless as made no difference, but it didn’t affect her looks. The old Lord Raiker had sired a son on her. She had been sent away to some cousin in Hampshire, and later made a match there, but the son was sent back to her parents, who had adopted him. Before he was out of short coats it was patently obvious who the boy’s father was. Raiker was writ in every haughty line of his face and the aristocratic set of his head. The boy had been schooled and treated in every way better than a mere fisherman’s son could expect to be. Certainly Lord Raiker had taken care of him, but without publicly acknowledging him as a son. It was not too surprising that a child who was neither fish nor fowl, neither an ordinary commoner like his family and friends nor an accepted nobleman or even gentry, should become confused.
    He fell in with a fast set of bucks at around eighteen years, and got into trouble, serious trouble, over a horse-trading deal in which one of the participants had been shot to death. It had not been clearly established that Horace had fired the fatal shot. There were three men involved. One ended up dead and the other two vanished, Horace and Elmer Carson. It was believed that they had emigrated to America before they were caught and transported. All this happened some six months after Kenelm’s abrupt departure from Raiker Hall, but it was dredged up now and discussed again in full detail.
    The fellow calling himself Kenelm strongly resembled Horace Rutley. Horace had been more a man when he left than Kenelm had been—perhaps that accounted for it. It was hard to see young Kennie in this fellow that swaggered into town, full of assurance. A lad of sixteen had been less sure of himself, more readily remembered as running through town with a dog at his heels, and likely as not a sugarplum in his hand. It