Page 49 of Miss Delightful
“If your evening is taken up composing meeting minutes,” he said, “your reformist ideas are less likely to see the light of day. Then too, if Thomas Delancey were forced to take his own meeting notes, he might be less preoccupied with the blandishments of a bishopric and more interested in his own congregation.”
“Papa is very interested in his congregation.” He was also prone to spending hours in his study working on sermons while Dorcas called on his parishioners. She had not considered those calls to be a disservice to her father’s happiness.
Alasdhair stood and extended a hand. “I’m sure he’s utterly devoted to his congregation.”
“I could smack you.” Dorcas took his hand and rose. “You have a way of piquing my ire, then dancing away. Of firing conversational mortars over my parapets and then looking about with an innocent expression. Your parents doubtless despaired of you regularly.”
“That’s where having younger siblings came in handy.” He draped her cloak around her shoulders and did up the frogs. “My brother Finn won highest honors for parental despair. He’s a good man, brave and loyal, but in his youth, he was much given to impulse. Dashing and bold. You know the sort.”
Michael had been prone to impulsive foolishness. “Always getting into scrapes and expecting other people to either forgive the misstep or smooth it all over. Is he married, your brother?”
“Finn’s a widower. Not as prone to recklessness anymore, and damned if we don’t miss the old Finn. He made the rest of us look steady by comparison.”
Alasdhair settled Dorcas’s bonnet on her head and did up the ribbons. “I wish we were married now, Dorcas,” he went on. “We’d toddle back to the house and, if the mood struck us, toddle right on up to the bedroom for a wee marital interlude. Then you would write your fiery tracts, I would answer all three of my father’s letters about the business. In the afternoon, I’d sally forth to peddle Papa’s whisky, and you would meet with your reforming ladies. We might have another marital interlude before supper, and we would definitely spend some time with our wee John.”
The life he sketched was breathtakingly intimate, also happy and full of meaning. Not grim, lonely, and frustrating.
“You are flirting with me, in your usual outrageous fashion.”
He paid the bill and escorted her onto the walkway. “I am dreaming with you and of you. You are a prudent woman, and you are entitled to make up your own mind about my suit on your own excruciatingly deliberate schedule. I mean to call on your father next week, Dorcas. That is not a warning, that is another promise.”
Dorcas was mostly reassured by that promise. Alasdhair MacKay would never willingly break his word.
“Are you prepared for me to refuse your proposal?” She was asking for form’s sake and also to fortify herself against his version of charm.
“If you break my heart, I will bow politely, apologize for having misconstrued the situation, and stay drunk for a week. I will confide my sorrow to John and Charlie, and my cousins will drop around from time to time to nettle me about my blue devils, because they love me, of course. Why would you refuse me, Dorcas?”
Alasdhair asked the question quietly as they ambled along the walkway.
“I don’t know, but that is my prerogative. Did you mean what you said about anticipating the vows?”
“Aye. With my whole heart and a few other parts of my anatomy.”
Dorcas had the most extraordinary conversations with him. They argued, they challenged one another, they teased each other. They debated everything from the Acts of Union, which had obliterated Scotland’s national sovereignty, to expansion of the right to vote, to the poor laws.
And when Dorcas made a telling point, Alasdhair did not regard her as if she’d stumbled onto a lucky shot, like some village lad tossing balls to win the prize at a Bartholomew Fair booth.
Helistenedto her, and he rebutted her arguments without giving quarter or descending into insults about a woman’s limited understanding or lack of worldly experience. Did he but know it, those moments when he cocked his head, raised his eyebrows, and marshalled his counterarguments were as gratifying to Dorcas as all the spicy cups of hot chocolate in London.
He bowed his farewell to her at the vicarage door, to all appearances the soul of gentlemanly manners—which he also was.
“I know what you’re about.” Dorcas also knew the porch’s overhang shielded them from all but the most determined prying eyes. “You haven’t kissed me today because you think to make me long for you. You need not bother. I already do long for you.”
“And that perplexes you? I’m not hideous to look upon, Dorcas, and I will exert myself to the utmost to see to your—”
She bussed his cheek, not entirely to silence him. “We have matters to discuss, Mr. MacKay, matters to which I must devote some thought before I raise them with you. Your inherent honesty compels me to deal with you truthfully, and though I doubt I can match your brother Finn for recklessness, I, too, have disregarded prudence in my youth.”
She could have tipped her chin down, such that her bonnet brim would have obscured her features from Alasdhair’s view, but she aspired to be as brave and honest as he was.Begin as you intend to go on, Mama used to say.
And Dorcas did very much want to go on with Alasdhair MacKay.
“You had a beau, and you permitted him liberties. Did you give him your heart, Dorcas?”
That was not even close to the truth, but it was as close as Dorcas had planned to come. “Never. I was the typical preacher’s daughter, headstrong, easily affronted by parental rules, and convinced of my own sophistication. I was a lackwitted young fool who might well have ended up in Melanie’s situation.”
Alasdhair paced to the edge of the porch, and for a harrowing moment, Dorcas thought he was leaving, just walking away, never to return. He took relations between men and women seriously, for all his references to marital interludes. A younger Dorcas had tried very hard to convince herself those same relations were of no moment. Sauce for the goose, and so forth and so on.
Except that a lady’s virtue was not a roast fowl, to be dispatched between vegetable courses after a perfunctory grace.
