Page 7 of Miss Delightful
“Would you do it again?” Miss Delancey asked as they approached the next street. “Would you serve again, knowing what you know now?”
“I served with two cousins,” Alasdhair said. “The best of men, and they both came home safe and sound. There were some good memories.” Dylan Powell and Orion Goddard were more than cousins and fellow officers, more than Alasdhair’s brothers, even. Goddard had recently acquired a wife, though, a curious development.
“You dodge my question,” Miss Delancey said. “You have not decided if the sacrifices our soldiers made was worth the gain.”
“What gain, Miss Delancey? Hundreds of thousands of casualties on both sides, hungry women and children, and ruined land, and all so France has the same family on the throne they started with twenty years ago. For whom or what is that a victory?”
He expected her to have a handy retort. Women like Dorcas Delancey always had handy retorts. They spouted platitudes about God’s will, the rights of Englishmen, and other drivel straight from the choruses ofRule Britannia.
“One cannot simply set aside regrets and wrong turns, can one?” Miss Delancey asked as the sparrow hawk winged away to some more promising alley. “What’s done is done, and all the apologies and recriminations in the world cannot undo the harm we’ve caused or suffered.”
What could Miss Delancey have to regret so bitterly that she spoke as one well acquainted with wrong turns?
“We arrive to our destination,” Alasdhair said, nodding at the house across from the alley’s entrance. “Mrs. Sidmouth’s establishment.”
Miss Delancey glanced behind them, down the alley. “That really is a shortcut, isn’t it?”
“I would not lead you astray, miss.”
She gave him the sort of skeptical perusal she’d turned on the alley, but said nothing.
As Alasdhair escorted her across the street, he realized that the problem with Miss Delancey was that she was both above his touch—Englishwoman, clearly from means, proper family, et cetera—and a woman who piqued his concern. She was too quiet, too noticing, and too stoic for a preacher’s pampered daughter.
She was a problem, in other words.
Another problem.
* * *
“Shouldn’t you have a companion?”Mr. MacKay asked as he rapped on Mrs. Sidmouth’s door. “A few footmen trailing respectfully in your wake?”
“I am too old to have a companion. Papa took the coach today, and thus I am also free of coachies, grooms, footmen, and other bothers.”
“You can’t be seen on my arm, but you’re permitted to jaunt about Town on your own? Not the done thing, Miss Delancey.”
Well, no. It wasn’t, for most young women, though Dorcas was fast parting from even a fiction of youth. “I am careful. I am also nine-and-twenty years old, the lady of my father’s house, and firmly on the shelf. When I go shopping, when I pay calls, when I attend services, I observe the proprieties. When I am about my charitable endeavors, I am usually in the company of my fellow committeewomen. If they cannot accompany me, then the shield of righteous virtue is my escort.”
He rapped on the door. “You sneak out of camp.”
“I do not sneak, sir.”
“You sneak,” he retorted, “and because you have perfected the demeanor of a meddling do-gooder, your deviousness goes undetected.”
“Iama meddling do-gooder.”
He looked her over, his inspection dispassionate. “Which causes claim the honor of your allegiance?”
“Fallen women.”
“I knew it.” He rapped again on the door, hard enough to rouse the watch. “You bundle them into Magdalen houses, where they are worked to death under circumstances that would horrify most graduates of Newgate. Once a week, your victims are permitted to sing in church, but only behind a screen, lest the very sight of them contaminate the souls of their betters. Bleating hypocrites, the lot of you.”
“I am not a hypocrite.” Not in the sense he meant. “I do not advocate condemning such women to Magdalen houses.”
“You give them a ticket to Dublin instead? I hear that’s where the anti-begging societies are shipping our poor lately.”
“Of course I don’t give them—”
The door opened, revealing a pockmarked young maid with flushed cheeks and a dingy mobcap.
