Page 2 of Miss Delightful
“It’s half day,” Alasdhair went on, “which is why you find me answering my own front door and without help in the kitchen.”
“You will need a wet nurse,” Miss Delancey said, taking a place in the middle of Alasdhair’s favorite napping sofa. “I’ll have Mrs. Sidmouth send along the baby’s dresses and whatnot, and those will tide you over for a time. He’s taking some cereal, but he wasn’t yet weaned.”
Alasdhair remained on his feet, pacing the length of the carpet. “Miss Delancey, I care not which society for the oppression of beggars you represent, but I must observe that your hearing appears deficient. I cannot take in that baby. I am a bachelor. I have no staff to care for a child. I have no wish to care for a child.”
Not quite accurate. Alasdhair would save them all if he could, and their mothers, but he had noabilityto care for a child.
“Has anybody seen to Melanie’s final arrangements?” He could not bear the thought of her lying in a pauper’s grave, nobody to mourn her, nobody to leave a single flower.
“Please do sit, Mr. MacKay. You have had a shock.”
Why were women such as Miss Delancey always telling others what to do? “How did she die?”
Miss Delancey adjusted the blanket swaddling the baby. “She surrendered herself to the embrace of Father Thames. No inquest has been held because we have no body. A woman fitting Melanie’s description made her way to the Strand Bridge last night, and Melanie’s best bonnet and slippers washed up on the morning tide.”
The proper name for that newly opened bridge was Waterloo Bridge, an irony when many of the women who chose to die there were war widows. Alasdhair perched a hip against the battered desk. He’d have a word with the river police and see what the mud larks had to say.
First, he had to get this woman,and that baby, out of his house. She would see to the lad, come fire, flood, famine, or frost fair.
“Send the boy to his mother’s family,” he said. “They can pretend, as all the best families do, that he’s the offspring of a widowed cousin in Scotland with too many mouths to feed. Make him into a badge of virtue for the very Christians who all but threw him to the lions.”
One do-gooder spinster relation had taken pity on the child. Melanie had never mentioned her by name, but the pittance that auntie or cousin had regularly sent along had been enough that Melanie had been able to cease selling her favors. Alasdhair had made sure of that.
“With you named as legal guardian, Major, Melanie’s family would have no authority to raise the child.”
“I will cheerfully give my permission for them to do just that.”
“Are you ever truly cheerful, Mr. MacKay?”
Miss Delancey tucked the child against the corner of the sofa, banking pillows around him. Swaddled in his blanket, the baby could hardly crawl off across the cushions, but still, the lady took precautions.
Did the lad even know how to crawl?
“I will be very cheerful,” Alasdhair said, “when I contemplate this boy growing up in the bosom of his nearest and dearest. I am a stranger to him. No relation at all. I have no children and don’t expect I will ever be so blessed. Take him away, Miss Delancey, and I wish you best of luck with him.”
The words hurt, like telling a wounded man he was bound for the surgeon’s tent. A boy barely shaving was to lose a limb, if not his life, and all Alasdhair had been able to do was stop by to offer a nip from his flask and prayer that the soldier would survive the day.
“Melanie chose you to raise him, Mr. MacKay. You had best reconcile yourself to that honor.” The woman rose, and though she was not tall, she carried herself with dignity. She undid the frogs of her cloak and draped it over the sofa.
Her figure was a trifle on the lush side, somewhat at variance with that ruthlessly reserved expression.
To be a plain creature of mature years in a society that valued beauty, youth, and malice equally was a tribulation, a battlefield of sorts. She’d chosen aloof dignity and virtuous meddling as her weapons. An interesting combination.
She inspected the framed copy of the dispatch mentioning thenotable gallantryof Major Alasdhair MacKay and Major Dylan Powell. From there, she moved to a landscape of the River Tweed, and Alasdhair realized he was being lectured with silence.
“I am no relation to that child, Miss Delancey, but I suspect you are.”
She smiled, a sweet, astonishingly impish curve of her lips. “I am indeed an exponent of that tribe of pious hypocrites who turned their backs on Melanie. She and I were cousins. We grew up together, and when she ran off with her handsome soldier, I knew exactly what her fate would be. We lost touch for a few years, and then she wrote to me. I thanked God for that.”
“Why not take in the boy now?”
The lady folded her arms. Perhaps in deference to her cousin’s passing, she was attired in a blue so dark as to qualify as mourning, or nearly so.
“What do you think his fate would be, with my father angling for a bishopric and my great-uncle already in possession of one? Do you suppose John would be permitted to dine with us at table? Would he be made to say the grace and quote all the nasty proverbs and passages about ungrateful children, Jezebels, and Magdalens? I can assure you that would be the least of the miseries to befall him, and heaven help the boy if he’s given to running in the house, yelling, or talking back. He would be bread-and-watered at public school to within an inch of his sanity—for his own good, of course.”
“Nobody consigns babies to bread and water.”
Miss Delancey regarded Alasdhair steadily, and his insides went squirmy.
