Page 82 of Miss Delightful
“I am a proper vicar now,” Michael replied, sounding anything but pleased with his own announcement. “I have no adventures. I pull no pranks. I am frightfully dull and likely to grow yet more boring with the passage of time. You, however, have taken up some interesting causes, sister mine.”
“Papa has been complaining?” They’d reached the foot of the garden, and Dorcas did not want to turn back toward the house. “Let’s avail ourselves of the churchyard.”
“As long as you protect me from dear Mrs. Oldbach,” Michael said. “I fear she has a goddaughter all picked out for me.”
Dorcas was sick of protecting her menfolk. “Mrs. Oldbach has only the best goddaughters. You could do worse. Papa would delight to see you marry one of them.”
“Mrs. Oldbach approves of your reforming adventures,” Michael said as they passed through the gate into the alley. “Said Mama was of the same mind. Britain is hell-bent on conquering half the known world, but cannot bother to look after its own burgeoning poor. Charity begins at home and all that.”
That Ophelia Oldbach approved of anything—other than her patent remedies and godchildren—was something of a surprise.
“I needed somethingrealto do, Michael. Something that mattered more than whether St. Mildred’s vestment committee sewed a new altar cloth for Yuletide.”
“You are bored?” Michael asked that question as if he and boredom had grown intimately acquainted.
“Bored, yes. Very bad of me.”And I am lonely.So lonely, and Alasdhair MacKay had made the loneliness go away. “You and Papa were given the option of examining your consciences and deciding whether you had a calling. I was simply born into a family of churchmen, without regard to where my talents might truly lie. I’m doing the best I can.”
And making a complete hash of it. They crossed the street and turned down the walkway toward the church.
“Are you happy, Dorcas?”
Utterly miserable.“I have made what peace I can with a life many would envy.”
“Couldn’t have said it better myself.” Michael stood beside her as they waited for traffic to pause. He’d been a handsome youth, and he was a striking man. Tall, dark, and serious. Too handsome to be so holy, to quote Mrs. Prebish.
The younger Michael hadn’t been a sober fellow. Now, he was given to carefully modulated speech characterized by tiny pauses before he replied to a question. His polite smiles came with predictable frequency, and his manners had gone from friendly to faultless.
Was that the sum of adulthood’s accomplishments? The ability to appear composed and appropriate at all times? Unbidden, the memory of a fallen Alasdhair MacKay came to mind. The sight of him curled on the carpet, overcome with hunger and exhaustion, muttering inanities…
So dear and unexpected, and so lost to her.
“St. Mildred’s prospers in your care,” Michael said as they reached the gate to the churchyard. St. Mildred’s had two gates—one on the street side traditionally used for weddings and christenings and one on the alley side, the lych-gate proper, for funerals.
Michael ushered Dorcas into the churchyard through the wedding gate, though realizing that Dorcas’s own wedding might soon take place made that little courtesy discomfiting.
“Papa loves this place,” she said while Michael closed the gate behind them. “In fine weather, he comes out here to read by Mama’s headstone. I wish he’d remarry.”
“As do I, but he’s likely waiting to see us settled before he takes that step. Let’s pay our regards to Mama.”
Michael led Dorcas down a walkway of crushed shells. In warmer months, the churchyard was peaceful and green, with trellised roses along the walls and borders of lavender edging the paths. On a chilly winter day, with the sun disappearing behind slow-moving clouds, the same space was dreary and forlorn.
“I miss her,” Dorcas said when they’d reached the modest headstone marking Mama’s resting place. A bench in her memory faced the plot where she lay, and Dorcas took a seat there. “And yet, I’m also sometimes glad she’s gone. She has not had to see Papa grow old, hasn’t had to watch his hopes dim as one colleague after another either retires in comfort or finds advancement.”
“Good heavens, that’s honest.” Michael came down beside her. “But I suppose if you can write about the stench of an overcrowded jail, you can admit to some mixed feelings regarding a departed parent.”
Dorcas could not tell if Michael was approving of her writings, disapproving, or simply passing the time. He was her brother, and somewhere along the way, between regular letters and infrequent visits, she’d lost sight of him.
“The financial allotments to the jails for food, blankets, chamber pots, and other necessities aren’t increased just because that jail is overcrowded, Michael, and they are allalwaysovercrowded. If we took note of that little discrepancy, our jails might not be such cesspits of disease and despair.”
“This is where we could have a rousing debate about the necessity for sin to be punished before repentance is possible.”
The bench was cold, lichens were encroaching on the pediment of Mama’s headstone, and Dorcas was tired of being the perfect sister.
“Shall I quote you Scripture, Michael, about compassion being preferable to making ostentatious displays of piety in the temple? Is it not punishment enough that those women are taken from their children and families, violated by the guards, subject to violence among themselves, starved, and ill? How much more punishment would you inflict on them before you magnanimously forgive them for being so poor, desperate, and determined to survive that they will steal a spoon?”
“I’d let them all go,” he said, “save for the truly violent. I’d give them passage to the New World, or the Antipodes if they’d rather, with some means, a packed trunk, and a few good books.”
“Many of them cannot read.”
