Page 40 of Miss Devoted
Michael scooped up the bundle—perilously light—and the wailing stopped. “Got you,” he said, gently pushing aside the cloth wrapped about the infant. “Got you, you little blighter, and you are for St. Osmond’s.”
He rearranged his cloak to shield the infant, ignored Ingram’s expression of fascination blended with horror, and set a more sedate pace down an east-west street.
“This is what you meant about the season,” Ingram said, catching up to Michael. “Prostitutes who did a good business in the spring will have their babies now, when everything is cold, miserable, and impossible.”
“Not impossible, desperate. Because the ladies are shrewd, they will leave their infants on the steps of more prosperous churches than the slums afford, and because the congregations gather on Sunday mornings, the babies are abandoned on Saturday nights.”
“This is awful,” Ingram said. “This is… I have no words for what you’re dealing with here, Delancey. Why St. Osmond’s?”
“Because St. Osmond’s has the duty this week. The pastors in these parts consider the babies a seasonal sorrow, but nobody knew what to do about them.”
“Some would say—I do not, but some would—the babies aren’t meant to thrive.”
Michael stopped, the child a slight weight in his arms, aliveweight. “Some of the babies don’t, or we don’t get to them in time, but is a God who decrees that babies should starve and freeze a God worthy of your devotion?”
Ingram resumed walking. “You will not credit this, Delancey, but right now I am fresh out of theology. Not a proverb or a citation to be had. Will the infant live?”
“I don’t know. I will put the child into the keeping of this week’s vicar, and Meg and her friends will find some young woman who hasn’t yet surrendered a baby to the foundling homes. Most of those places will take only a firstborn child, and this infant will be entrusted to the good souls who make caring for abandoned children their business. They have wet nurses and warmth, and those are any abandoned baby’s most pressing needs.”
St. Osmond’s was a good half mile of tramping through the dark. Michael stopped once to rouse another drunk, this one resentful of the courtesy and inclined to argue.
“I daresay that fellow will manage,” Ingram opined. “I’m not sure I will. Why do you do this?”
“Wrong question,” Michael said, taking an uneven walkway around to the side of the church and descending a set of worn stone steps. “The proper question is, why must I? Why haven’t these pastors organized themselves to provide for the least among us? Why must a ruse be enacted for the foundling homes’ benefit?” He rapped hard on the arched oak door at the bottom of the steps.
“Helmsley might have an answer for you,” Ingram said. “I do not, but neither can I say why, precisely, I should object to your efforts.”
The door opened, and a sleepy curate took the baby from Michael.
“Ingram, if you’d like to warm up and catch a nap before morning, now’s the time.”
Ingram peered into the dim interior of the church basement. “A quarter hour to thaw my feet,” he said, “and then I’ll resume tagging along.”
“A quarter hour,” Michael replied, brushing past the curate into the relative warmth of the basement. “No longer than that. And, Natty? Not a word of this to anyone. Not Danner, not Twillinger, and certainly not Helmsley.”
ChapterNine
“I’m told you steal babies.” Psyche tried to make her words a statement rather than an accusation. She’d waited until Thursday night to broach the topic, though she and Michael had shared a plate of sandwiches at the Brewpot earlier in the week.
She’d wanted to be Psyche when she and Michael had this discussion, not Henderson. Besides, Lord Dermot had decided to drop in at the Brewpot, and his exaggeratedly casual presence had been a source of unease.
Michael rearranged the pillow behind his head. “I do not go about London stealing babies.” He was once again on the sofa, though tonight Psyche would begin rendering him in oils—or trying to. “Theft implies ownership. Babies are not chattel to be purloined.”
“They most assuredly are, sir. Children are their father’s chattel, just as a wife is a husband’s chattel. We have outlawed enslavement in England itself—how forward-thinking of us when enslavement was never legal here in the first place—and yet, the majority of England’s population remains legal livestock controlled by the self-serving minority. You rail against the Corn Laws. Allow me my own quaint little heresies.”
Psyche mentally stepped back from political quagmires and focused on her composition. “Shift your foot two inches farther along the carpet, and don’t think to lie to me. Nobody save you, Hazel, and some of Jacob’s closest friends know the nature of my marriage. I deserve honesty from you, Michael.”
He moved his foot at her bidding. “If you know my secrets, then they have the power to reflect upon you. Are you sure you want that?”
“Youareone of my secrets,” Psyche retorted, wondering how on earth she was to capture the highlights in his hair. Madame Gérard’s blended brushwork came to mind, a result that took both confidence and patience. Steady artistic nerves.
“What do you know about my midnight rambles?”
“I know you patrol the churches near the slums looking for abandoned babies and you take the infants to safety. Your family is aware of what you do, and while they worry for you, they know better than to try to stop you.”
He turned his head enough to peer at her. “Will you try to stop me?”
Did he want her to? “What you are doing is dangerous.”
