Page 39 of Miss Devoted
“I don’t care if Helmsley does know about that part, though he’d probably tell me that the poor will always be with us, and charity that interferes with the just deserts of the slacker and the whore has no place in his theology.”
A stray dog trotted by, stopped, and sniffed at Michael’s boots.
“I don’t care for dogs,” Ingram said. “Especially not skinny mongrels.”
Michael tossed the dog a square of shortbread nicked from Dorcas’s sideboard—or left out on the sideboard for precisely this purpose.
“That cur doesn’t care for starvation,” Michael said, moving on. “O’Malley was a purser on a ship of the line, and he was wrongly accused of theft from the officer’s stores. Some marquess’s brat took to stealing the key to the wine cellar when O’Malley slept, and O’Malley got the worst of it. He’s lucky to be alive, though he’d take issue with my opinion on the matter.”
Ingram had no reply, though when Michael roused the next drunk—a woman he didn’t recognize—Ingram was more helpful.
“Can you get yourself to Meg’s?” Michael asked as the woman stood shivering in the street.
“Aye, ’appen I can.”
“That way,” Michael said, pointing the direction they’d come. “Two streets and turn left at the pump.”
She wrapped her thin cloak more closely about her. “I know t’ pump.”
“Be off with you. The weather will kill you if you don’t seek shelter.”
“We’re all going t’ die. You be Preacher?”
“I be cold, madam, and with a long road to travel before dawn. Away with you, and no more napping on the walkway.”
She gave him a ghost of a smile and shuffled off, her gait uneven.
“I could see her feet through the holes in her boots,” Ingram said. “She sounded as if she hailed from Yorkshire.”
Michael resumed walking, in part to keep warm and in part because they did have more ground to cover.
“Half the countryside has come to London, turned off the enclosed properties, unable to make exhausted ground produce, hoping for better wages than they can earn on the rural estates that are letting staff go left and right.”
“But nobody warns them—nobody warnedme,” Ingram said, “that London is too expensive by half. Yes, you earn more—ifyou can find a post—but there’s nowhere decent to live, and a pair of boots will cost the earth.”
“I dream of new boots,” Michael said. “These people no longer dream, and in the crown jewel of the greatest empire since Rome fell, that offends me.”
Ingram was silent for a time as they made their way to streets where a few of the mandatory porch lights were actually lit, and no more dogs roamed at large.
“What does your papa think of these nocturnal forays into the slums, Delancey?”
“The topic hasn’t come up. If he suspects, he hasn’t chided me for it.” Michael took some comfort from that thought. Perhaps Papa attributed Michael’s midnight walks to a guilty conscience, or youthful zeal, though these journeys had little to do with either.
“This is not quite a slum,” Ingram said, slowing his pace. “My sister would disdain to live in these surrounds, but they look respectable.”
“Precisely, respectable, but on the border of the hinterlands. The church is this way.”
“Church? At this hour? No church in this neighborhood will be unlocked, Delancey, and I am not at the moment disposed toward contemplative prayer. My feet have no sensation, my nose is shortly to follow, and I—”
“Hush.” Michael had spoken harshly, and Ingram fell silent.
“What was that?” Ingram asked a moment later. “Sounded like a fox. Do we have foxes in London?”
“We do,” Michael said, “but that was not a fox.” He took off at a jog, and the steps of St. Cedd’s came into view shortly, barely illuminated by a guttering streetlight.
“There,” Michael said as Ingram trotted beside him. “In the shadows, out of the wind.”
“I’m not going to like this,” Ingram muttered, slowing. “I’m fairly certain I will abhor what you find on those steps.”
