Page 3 of Miss Devoted
Polite dinners were also a bother, but necessary if one wanted to be perceived as a genteel and unassuming widow. Psyche took care to dress plainly, to style her hair unremarkably, and to speak softly on such occasions. Invariably before the soup was removed, her fingers were itching to hold a paintbrush, a stick of charcoal, even a pencil.
A youngish butler admitted them, and Psyche was introduced to Mrs. Dorcas MacKay, a dark-haired lady with a brisk air entirely belied by the smiles she and Mr. MacKay shared across the parlor. Mr. MacKay—Major MacKay, to be more accurate—was dark-haired, tallish, and spoke with a burr. He was not in the least dour, and he clearly chaired the committee devoted to admiration of his wife.
Aunt’s apparent partner for the evening was one Colonel Sir Orion Goddard, a cousin to Major MacKay. Goddard’s features were slightly weathered, and a subtle pattern of scars radiated from one eye. His looks suggested an interesting history, and when he switched to speaking French, Aunt replied in the same language with a rhapsody over chocolate drops.
No megrim tonight, alas.
“Here’s our final guest,” Mrs. MacKay said, striding to the dimmer recesses near the parlor door and kissing the cheek of a sable-haired man who turned out to be her brother. Mr. Michael Delancey had brought with him an air of quiet reserve, a calm that suggested he would never rhapsodize about anything. But then, a vicar’s son might have had all the rhapsodies preached and prayed out of him.
Psyche crossed the parlor to make her curtsey to the fellow who’d be her partner for the evening, and as he bowed over her hand, a shiver skittered over her nape. His manner was so bland, so lifeless, that for a moment Psyche doubted the evidence of her own eyes.
“Mr. Delancey, a pleasure.”
“Mrs. Fremont, likewise, I’m sure. A chilly evening, though one hopes for an early spring.” He ran a hand through his hair while exchanging polite nods with Goddard and MacKay, and that slight disarrangement confirmed Psyche’s suspicions.
This staid, proper, churchly cipher regularly lolled about in the altogether for hours at a time in front of a whole class of aspiring artists. And in Mr. Delancey’s case, the Almighty had apparently been as parsimonious with personality as He had been generous with masculine pulchritude.
Psyche came to that conclusion—a disappointment, though a relief too—when the entire meal passed, and Mr. Delancey gave not one hint that he recognized the woman upon whose breast he’d had his hand barely three hours earlier.
“Your Dorcas gets high marks for tenacity as a matchmaker,” Rye Goddard said, accepting a glass of exquisite cognac from his host. “But Delancey gets higher marks for indifference to his sister’s efforts.Santé.”
Alasdhair MacKay nosed his whisky—honey, apples, pears, a hint of vanilla—and lifted the glass a few inches. “Slàinte mhath. Does your Ann have an opinion on the matter of Delancey’s never-ending bachelorhood?” MacKay had an opinion, one not fit for polite company.
Goddard eased into a wing chair as if the cold weather might be bothering his hip.
“Ann says as long as Delancey is in good appetite, we are not to worry about him. She also says a crooked pot needs a crooked lid.”
Ann was Goddard’s wife, also the chef in residence at the fancy gaming-hell-cum-supper-club he managed and now partly owned. She’d prevailed on Dorcas to get her husband away from the club for a night, and the colonel, ever dutiful, had heeded Dorcas’s summons.
“What do we hear from our cousin in Wales?” Goddard asked, propping a boot on a hassock.
“Raptures, odes, panegyrics.” MacKay settled into the second wing chair. “Marital wonderment in all its lovely forms, though subtly stated. Dylan and Lydia will manage.” A relief, that. Of the three male cousins, Dylan Powell had been the most determined to avoid parson’s mousetrap. “About Delancey.”
“He’s an adult,” Goddard said, holding his cognac up to the firelight. “An intelligent, well-educated, healthy, inordinately attractive man who has earned the notice of the archbishop. Dear Michael is making himself indispensable at Lambeth Palace, the saintly heart of the Church of England. Churchmen are supposed to be reserved, and Delancey has all the makings of a very successful churchman.”
Potential which impressed MacKay not at all. “Before he was a churchman, he was Dorcas’s only sibling. She feels as if Michael took up his first post in Yorkshire and five years later sent a ghost of himself south to resume life in London. Michael used to be a mischievous, high-spirted boy, and now he’s sober to the point of unrecognizability. A handsome, mannerly automaton.”
Goddard sipped his drink, looking exactly like what he was—a former soldier who’d survived many a battle and who’d had the courage to marry for love. He worked hard, he loved profoundly, and he was at long last happy.
“Meddling and matchmaking are but two faces of the same coin,” Goddard said. “We were all once high-spirited boys, and war knocked those spirits down to earth. Life—and the ladies—have revived us. Maybe Yorkshire was some sort of battlefield for Delancey.”
That metaphor fit MacKay’s own observations. “I’ve sent a few letters north.”
“Reconnaissance?”
“Keeping in touch with our former fellow officers. We know Delancey got deeply in debt before he took holy orders, and we know he’s resolved those debts.”
“High spirits have consequences.”
“Not always fair, but usually true.” As a youth new to the blandishments of Town, Delancey had been manipulated into amassing gambling debts, all of which had been cheerfully bought up by the same scoundrel who’d led him astray. An old and lucrative rig. The scoundrel figured in Dorcas’s past as well, and he’d been sent packing far, far away, though after Michael Delancey had paid every penny owed, plus considerable interest.
“Mrs. Fremont is lovely,” MacKay said, trying to put his finger on what exactly had been so off about the evening thus far. “Dorcas has paraded all manner of women before her brother. The sweet, the churchy, the bold, the funny, even a few beauties.”
“I can’t see Delancey caring much about a woman’s appearance. His good looks have taught him at least that lesson.”
“As my great good looks have instructed me on the same point,” MacKay said.
Goddard threw a pillow at MacKay’s knee.
