Page 62 of Miss Delightful
“I believe I will instead bid you adieu for the nonce, Phoebe dearest. The cold takes a toll on my dignified bones, and for the past three days, my steward’s report has been silently reproaching me from the top of my pile of unread correspondence. Thank you as always for your excellent company. I will give your regards to the prodigy when next he deigns to afflict me with his company at breakfast.”
Zachariah bowed over Phoebe’s hand and withdrew to see himself out, as he’d long been doing in her household. Phoebe dumped her tea into the nearest potted fern and poured herself a fresh cup. As she stirred in a dash of sugar and a dollop of milk, it occurred to her that dear Zachariah would not be around forever.
Well, neither would she, and it was time Isaiah took Dorcas Delancey to wife. Thomas Delancey would support the match, and Miss Delightful would have nothing to say to it.
* * *
“She wants to learn the Gaelic,”Alasdhair said, taking a sip of the finest libation the Aurora Club had to offer, meaning Goddard’s own champagne. “And what Miss Dorcas Delancey sets out to do gets done and done right.” The lady was soon to be Mrs. Dorcas MacKay, and didn’t that just have the prettiest ring to it?
“Does she want to spend her life shivering away in your Highland rock pile?” Dylan Powell asked, propping his feet on a hassock. “Does she want to leave everything familiar and dear to have your brats between bouts of chilblains and lung fever?”
Goddard opened his eyes and shifted in his reading chair. “Even for you, Powell, that’s a bit gloomy. Most women are happy to leave their father’s house and set up their own domiciles.”
Powell spared Goddard a glance. “Your Ann hasn’t followed that path. She’s advanced professionally at a time when most women would be giving up employment altogether.”
“Giving uppayingemployment,” Alasdhair said. Powell was in a taking about something, but then, he was in a taking nigh incessantly. “Have your sisters been nagging you to marry, lad? If it’s the right woman, you’ll gallop joyfully to your fate. Goddard will agree with me.”
“Goddard,” said the man himself, “does agree with you, but he also agrees with Powell. This engagement is precipitous, MacKay, and you know little of Miss Delancey besides what her late cousin told you.”
Alasdhair knew that Dorcas was brave, principled, passionate, and honest. Her integrity shone forth like a city on a hill, or whatever that biblical passage said, and she had decided to gift Alasdhair with her entire future.
“She knows me,” Alasdhair said. “Knows I am ruled by my tummy, knows I will never desert her or the boy. She knows I am honest and loyal and an excellent dancer.”
Goddard guffawed. “That didn’t take long, and her a preacher’s daughter.”
Powell’s scowl had acquired a hint of bewilderment. “You got out the swords and hopped about in your kilt for her?”
Goddard sat up and scrubbed his hands over his eyes. “Would MacKay be ordering a bottle of my best champagne if he’d merely shown the lady his sword dance?”
“But MacKay’s a monk,” Powell said. “He took holy orders or something, and now he’s letting this Puritan reformer lead him up the church aisle. What the hell is going on, MacKay?”
“You’reworriedabout me?”
Powell smacked him on the arm. “There is no stupidity like Scottish stupidity, saving perhaps English stupidity. You were as drunk, swaggering, and lusty as the next officer until something happened at Badajoz. Then you stopped talking, you stopped drinking but for the occasional wee nip, you never again so much as sang your filthy pub songs after that. You began consorting with nuns and orphans, and when you mustered out, you developed the thankless habit of aiding streetwalkers.”
“Now,” Goddard said, taking up the narrative, “you are courting a woman who is the furthest thing from a streetwalker, and she has won your heart—or something—in a matter of a few short weeks. We are not worried, MacKay, we arepanicked.We did not lug extra rations for you all across Spain to see you fall victim to the wiles of a scheming spinster.”
“Dorcas is a schemer,” Alasdhair said, touched at his cousins’ concern, but not about to embarrass them with an expression of thanks. “I adore that about her. She will work tirelessly on behalf of others, flatter, reason, cajole, and plan, but she would never dissemble on her own behalf. She’s an honest woman, and if she says she likes me, then I rejoice to believe her.”
Rejoiced toloveher, in every sense of the word.
Powell and Goddard were both looking at Alasdhair as if he’d just announced plans to wear his father’s coronation robes on his next hack through Hyde Park.
“Cut line, you two.” Alasdhair held his glass of champagne up to the firelight. “I told her about Spain.”
Powell set aside his drink, though he’d finished his serving doubtless to be polite. The Welsh were a contradictory people. Full of manners while they called a man’s sanity into question.
“What exactly was there to tell her about Spain, MacKay?” Powell asked with uncharacteristic gentleness.
Rejoicing faded into a familiar sadness, though regret had lost its bitter edge. “You are right that I had a bad time of it in Badajoz,” Alasdhair said slowly. “Everybody did, and that’s all we need to say about it. Will you two stand up with me when I speak my vows?”
A silent exchange took place between Powell and Goddard, while they apparently decided to permit Alasdhair to change the subject.
“You had best not speak those vows without us on hand,” Goddard said. “Ann will prepare your wedding breakfast, which you will hold at the Coventry, if Miss Delancey is amenable. Consider it a wedding present.”
“I’ll lend you my housekeeper,” Powell said. “She’ll put your house to rights before you can inflict that ordeal on Miss Delancey.”
“What’s wrong with my house?”
