Page 20 of Miss Delightful
“What am I thinking?” Dorcas asked, shaking a rattle in the shape of a jester’s pole. A coral teether protruded from one end—coral was traditionally thought to ward off illness and enchantment—and the rattle and its bells were silver, a metal that brought the moon’s protection in darkness. The whistle fashioned into the silver doubtless worked, for the rattle appeared to be new.
“You are thinking that I’d best watch myself with Mr. MacKay,” Timmens said. “He’d never trespass, but a man like that…”
Like that?A man who bought a new rattle and three stuffed bears for a boy he intended to hand over to the care of strangers? A man who knew how to tuck up a scarf so a lady was finally warm? A man who urged that lady to choose the more exotic spice for her hot chocolate?
“What about a man like that?”
“He can have all he likes from the females, because he don’t go about waving his sword. That’s irresistible. He’s not a pizzle with some arrogance and good tailoring attached. To gain his bed, you’d have to gain his trust. I like that. Mr. MacKay is a gentleman. He don’t clean up as good as some, but he don’t presume, and he sings to a cranky baby.”
“A hungry baby, apparently.”
“The second breast always takes longer. The milk makes him drowsy. Would you like to burp him?”
How Dorcas yearned simply to hold the child. “I wouldn’t want to introduce another element of novelty to his routine.”
Timmens rearranged her shawl and slanted Dorcas a look. “And once he burps, we know what happens next, don’t we? I do not envy the laundresses all the work this boy makes for them. Child makes a stink to revive the departed, he does. Always happens when they start on the porridge.”
“I’ll leave you to John’s many talents, but if you need anything, Timmens, for yourself or the boy, please send word to me at St. Mildred’s vicarage on Holderness Street.”
“Won’t be needin’ nothing, miss, except a good night’s sleep.”
Dorcas let herself out of the nursery, moved two doors up the corridor, and entered without knocking.
Chapter Five
One moment, Alasdhair’s mind had been filled with the lyrics of a ballad about a jolly border reiver, the next he was reaching for his sword and grabbing only empty air.
“At ease, Mr. MacKay.” Dorcas Delancey stood beside his bed, looking all too pleased to have found him resting his eyes. “You did, indeed, fall asleep.”
“I got my boots and stockings off and fell onto the mattress,” he said, peering at his bare feet. “What happened next defeats my powers of recollection. If you will excuse me, I will make myself presentable, and we can guzzle tea and lament the dismal weather.”
Alasdhair knew he should be mortified to find her in his bedroom, to know she’d seen his bare feet and hairy calves. He should be leaping from the mattress to cover his exposed flesh and apologizing to her in midair, except that, first, she had invaded his sanctum sanctorum, the place where a man had every right to display his naked flesh.
Second, Miss Delancey did not seem mortified, quite the contrary. She seemed happy to inspect his bedroomandhis person.
Third, he hadneverbeen exhausted like this.
“The next time we want to defeat the French,” he said, “we should first make sure they all have large families. They will be too tired to put up a decent fight, and we’ll take Paris in a fortnight.”
Miss Delancey’s eyes danced at that profundity, though her humor was a subtle thing. “War doesn’t toughen a man sufficiently for the rigors of the nursery?”
Pride alone had Alasdhair shoving up to recline against his pillows. The only time a fellow was permitted to lie about like a spent salmon was after he’d pleased a willing partner.
“War is mostly marching and learning to endure boredom. You tromp along in the middle of a train of men and wagons that stretches for five miles. You spot a copse of aspens leafing out and tell yourself, ‘I will march that far.’ When you get to the aspens, you see a farmhouse a quarter mile up the road, and you think, ‘I will march that far.’ Your mind drifts, your body gets into a rhythm. Your mates troop along beside you, somebody starts up a song. The time passes.”
Miss Delancey gathered up his boots and set them beside his wardrobe, then began collecting articles of discarded clothing. She retrieved his jacket from the back of his reading chair, his wrinkled cravat from the privacy screen where three others hung, starched and ready for wearing.
“You paint a very different picture of war from the stirring dispatches and fashionable paintings of battle scenes.”
“I am gaining a very different picture of child-rearing. I knew babies were a lot of work, but that one wee lad… My mind cannot drift when I’m walking the floor with a colicky infant. I attend him. Has his crying changed? Is he trying to convey a pain in his belly, or did he dislike the brandy Timmens rubbed on his gums? Then he dozes off, I doze off, and fifteen seconds later—I vow to you, it’s seconds, not minutes—he’s whimpering again. My body is ramfeelzed, my mind is flogged to flinders.”
Miss Delancey’s next objective was to tidy up his vanity, which was already tidy enough. Alasdhair was by nature organized, and that his bedroom had gone a bit the other direction was a temporary aberration. Such was Miss Delancey’s innate decorum that seeing her in his bedroom evoked no prurient imaginings. She was that proper, that far above the melee.
Rather like Wellington on the battlefields.
And yet, Alasdhair liked watching her handle his brush and hand mirror, liked seeing her sniff at his scent bottle. A woman’s hands were fascinating, capable of creativity, competence, and—surely Alasdhair’s mind had turned to porridge—tenderness.
“Nonetheless,” Miss Delancey said, aligning his slippers side by side on the hearth, “if Timmens burst in here, calling for you to come to the nursery on the instant, you’d take off at a run.”
