Page 41 of Miss Devoted
His smile was devilish. “What you are doing is dangerous.”
“Dangerous to my reputation and my ambitions, perhaps, not to my very life. You will not change the subject, Michael. Why do you put yourself at risk and invite at least raised eyebrows from your superiors?”
He resumed the eyes-closed, relaxed posture Psyche had chosen for his portrait. “My superiors will publicly commend me for my efforts, if they must. Their private reaction will be less pleasant, but only because I’m addressing a problem they should have taken in hand long ago, but have instead chosen to ignore. Reform of any sort is anathema to the Church, and poor relief is an area where our bishops are appallingly complacent.”
“How can the Church ignore babies left on its very steps?”
“One baby is easy to ignore, particularly if the poor mite expires while awaiting rescue. A few prayers, a pious sigh about God’s will, and a pauper’s grave generally suffice. Individual pastors have been quietly appalled, but they weren’tdoinganything to prevent the problem or to ensure the infants didn’t die before dawn.” He sounded not furious, but bewildered—and exhausted.
“You must do something?”
“Somebody must, and if my family realizes I am that somebody, they can thank themselves for providing me examples.”
Psyche started her sketch of contours with the long, muscular sweep of Michael’s extended leg, her pencil scraping lightly against gesso and a background wash of pale amber. The image grew from there, thanks to numerous preparatory sketches.
“What do you mean, your family provides the example?”
“Sir Orion Goddard houses street children and crossing sweepers. Those that don’t bide with him know they can always get a meal at his back door or pass a night safely slumbering in his stable. He and his wife have even taken some on as potboys, apprentices, and underfootmen at the Coventry.
“MacKay has a particular regard for the streetwalkers,” Michael went on. “If a lady decides to quit the capital, he’ll pay her fare back to the village and then some. Powell and Tremont, whom you have not met, took on the cause of former soldiers reduced to begging. Another Dorning connection married a fellow who looks after the poorer half of London’s émigré society. Those men see problems, and theydo something. They don’t offer up a few mumbled prayers in the hope that somebody else will resolve the problem.”
“Your superiors will disapprove, Michael. You aren’t some aging rural vicar whose experience has made him a bit too broad-minded. You are a reproach to feigned piety in the capital itself.”
He scratched his nose. “I reproach no one. On Saturday night, we found a girl child. She had the strength to roll from her tummy to her back, so she’s not a newborn, but she’s too damned small. She wasn’t getting enough to eat, clearly, but now she will. If somebody feels reproached by that baby’s good fortune, then so be it.”
He might have been reporting on a military reconnaissance mission—infant secured, mission accomplished—so dispassionate was his tone.
Psyche finished the central figure of her sketch and stepped back from the canvas. “Let’s eat. I’m at a good stopping point, and you have more to tell me.”
Michael rose, stretched luxuriously, and shrugged into the silk banyan. “I’d rather discuss anything other than what I’m about in the middle of a Saturday night. The subject is not cheering.”
Psyche fumbled with the bow holding her painting smock tied at her nape, and Michael came around her easel to unfasten it for her.
“Not cheering,” she muttered, whipping off the stained apron and tossing it onto the sofa. “Notcheering.You save a child’s life—anotherchild’s life, because this is apparently a weekly occurrence—and you declare the result ‘not cheering.’ I could shake you.”
She marched from the studio, sailed through the bedroom and on into the parlor, hearing Michael’s footsteps behind her.
“You are not cheered,” he said. “You are upset. More upset than usual.”
“Babies left on church steps in the dead of winter,” Psyche said, pacing before the parlor’s blazing hearth. “How desperate their mothers must be, how despairing. Waiting in bitter-cold shadows until the darkest hours, dodging the night-soil men and late-night revelers to literally cast their own children into the darkness… and then you must work your wonders like a thief in the night lest your superiors take umbrage at lives saved. How do you stand it?”
She wiped at her cheek, all manner of sketches filling her head—bleak, snowy church steps by moonlight, a forlorn bundle in the center. Church steps filled with ghostly bundles, while a churchyard of gossips in their Sunday finest ignored tragedy a few yards away.
“Psyche, don’t cry.” Michael stopped her pacing by the simple expedient of stepping in front of her. “Don’t cry, please. I cannot abide that I’ve made you cry.”
She glowered up at him. “You are a fraud, Michael Delancey. You appear so self-contained, all quiet reserve and gentlemanly deportment. A dull creature despite your handsome plumage, but that is a lie.”
His gaze became wary, but he did not step back.
“You are so bloody passionate,” Psyche said, the foul language not half so satisfying as it should have been. “You are so damnably determined, so fiendishly focused, that you refuse to waste your energies on small talk, superficialities, and appearances. You simply cannot afford those exertions. You are not socially reserved. You are morally ferocious.”
“It’s not like that.”
“It’s exactly like that. In your mind, you are out patrolling those slums even as you sit down to your desk at Lambeth Palace. The other clerks engage in schoolboy pranks and lovelorn silliness, while you toil away, counting the hours until you can next risk your life for the sake of some hopeless infant. You makea difference, while all I make are cheap prints.”
“We are not in a virtuous competition, Psyche. I find babies on church steps because that’s what I can do. Your prints are all over London, because that’s what you can do.”
“That’s what Henderson can do.” What Jacob Fremont’s widow could not have accomplished half so easily, if at all.
