Page 60 of Miss Devoted
Michael’s posture did not shift, but something in his manner should have had Arbuckle taking his damned polished boot off the porch step and bustling on his pious way.
“At Lambeth Palace,” Michael said, verbally caressing the name of his workplace, “we debate points of law. Church law, secular law… We’re keen to ferret out paradoxes and contradictions before they inconvenience our superiors or the laity. One law we’ve found to be fairly straightforward, if entirely lacking in compassionate effect, is the provision for poor relief. Unless the supplicant is destitute, no application for relief can stand. Did you direct me to take a child of means and standing to the poorhouse, Arbuckle? A child with a prosperous guardian? Did you attempt to commit a fraud on the crown?”
Arbuckle stared at his gloved hands, folded so neatly atop his handsome walking stick.
“Why, no,” he said after a moment. “No, I did not. No child was presented to the authorities for inclusion on their charitable rolls. Therefore, I could not have given you the direction you refer to, Delancey.”
He’d just admitted that very thing in Psyche’s hearing.
“So how, then,” Michael asked, “did I disobey your direction, sir?”
The question was put with a sense of calm puzzlement, though Michael had doubtless lost sleep reasoning himself through this cross-examination. Could the way forward be as simple as calling Arbuckle’s bluff?
“You were to take the child to a wet nurse, of course. You likely even did so, for clearly, my ward is thriving all these years later. You told me the infant had died and tore the child from a life of ease and spiritual security for reasons I cannot fathom. Selfishness of such magnitude beggars the label of mere sin, to say nothing of the hubris involved in snatching a child away from her rightful place in the world. Did you truly hate me so much, Delancey? Did you resent your duties to that degree? I have prayed for you. Truly, I have.”
A boot to the cods—did snakes have cods?—wasn’t nearly punishment enough for this facile, mendacious posturing.
“I see I have shocked Mrs. Fremont,” Arbuckle went on with what was doubtless supposed to be a convincing semblance of regret. “A pity, madam, but you did insist I air my business posthaste. Mr. Delancey is a liar, a kidnapper, and a betrayer of his calling. One pities him, but one must care first and foremost for the child. Mrs. Arbuckle is prepared to accept the girl into our home, and we will do our best with her. The girl cannot be blamed for the sins of the false father, of course.”
Psyche expected Michael to protest, to toss out more legal sophistry, to issue a challenge—something.
“Bea has a brother, Thaddeus,” Michael said. “Assuming your little tale has some basis in fact—and I concede nothing of the sort—you’d tear her from all she’s known, from her only sibling, from the people who love her, for the sake of…? Vengeance? Pride? What exactly is the motivation here, because she’s thriving where she is, which confirms that her best interests clearly carry no weight with you.”
Arbuckle drew himself up and ceased pretending to be a fashionable gentleman at his leisure. “One does the right thing, Delancey, because itisthe right thing. You arrived in Yorkshire in disgrace, a foolish young man, and I prayed that I’d made something worthy of you.”
He propped a gloved fist on his hip in the most hackneyed histrionic tradition. “Then you tell me you are off to visit family in London on the occasion of your sister’s marriage, and I—more fool me—generously agree to indulge your request. Then next thing I hear, you have abandoned your duties in York to take up some post lounging about Lambeth. You lie, you break your word, you shirk your responsibilities, and now I learn that the suspicions I’ve had about you all along are accurate. I don’t know whether you belong in Newgate or Bedlam, but you do not belong in the Church, and you are nobody’s father.”
Michael glanced up at the darkening sky. “Is that a threat? Or are you offering me a choice—criminal charges or commitment to an asylum?”
Whatever Arbuckle had expected, it wasn’t this cool self-possession. He tried glowering, he tried slapping the head of the walking stick against his gloved palm, he tried huffing out a sigh worthy of God upon realizing that the serpent had been busy in the garden.
Michael looked politely bored.
“I am offering you three days to come to your senses,” Arbuckle snapped. “Explain the situation to the girl—I have no interest in any so-called brothers or where you came by them—but turn her over to me, and I will consider merely having you defrocked.”
“And if I cannot bring myself to entrust an innocent girl into your keeping?” Michael asked in the same tone as he might have inquired about some late parishioner who’d been a keen hand at whist.
“You have behaved with criminal disregard for authority, Mr. Delancey, and if you seek to be publicly labeled as a common felon, I will do my duty and oblige your wish.”
Arbuckle stalked off, and Psyche began quietly cursing fit to make a seasoned drover blush.
ChapterThirteen
“Where is that celestial bolt of lightning when true evil walks the streets of London?” Psyche mused after exhausting her supply of profanity. “Shall you and the children come to Rome with me?”
Michael’s gaze traveled upward to the soft glow of a lamp in the window on the higher floor. “You will never become an artist of renown if you elope with an accused felon, Psyche.”
“Right now, I am more concerned for Miss Feathers’s good opinion of me than I am for London Society’s commissions.”
“Come,” Michael said. “I will walk you home.”
“So you can bow your polite farewell to me and let that… that disgrace to the clergy rip up your family?” She hated to see the composure Michael donned like vestments, the reserve, thedistance.
“Psyche, I don’t know what to do.” He began walking, and she fell in step beside him. “I’ve rehearsed a confrontation with Arbuckle more often than I’ve said the Lord’s Prayer, and I thought I had the legal advantage of him. I reasoned that if he’s building the case against me based on his standing as Bea’s guardian, then trying to fob her off on the poorhouse was an attempted fraud on his part. It took him five seconds to concoct the lies that stand my defense on its head, and whatever documentation he produces will support his version of events.”
“As will his wife, God help the woman. Maybe what you need is your own documentation.”
“A forged will?”
