Page 55 of It Takes Two to Tumble
He nearly choked on the plum. “Pardon?” he asked when he had regained his breath.
She turned her circle of dough neatly into the dish, a small bit of kitchen magic he never tired of watching. “You could preach about David and Jonathan.”
He stared at her for a solid half minute as she poured the sugared fruit into the dish and covered it with another circle of pastry. Was it possible that she knew what she was suggesting? By the faint hint of pink on her weathered cheeks, he thought she might.
“Maybe it runs in the family.”
“Pardon?” he asked faintly.
“Wildness. We all know what your father is, bless him. And you, breaking an engagement, whoever would have thought. Quite wild, the lot of you. It must be in the blood. Although,” she added, turning her attention to crimping the pastry, “you were always a fine clergyman.”
He still wasn’t certain how much she knew, or whether she even disapproved.
“David and Jonathan,” she repeated as she slid the pie into the oven. “That would be quite the thing.” She nodded, wiped her hands on her apron, and nodded with the satisfaction of a job well done. “Now let’s go to the church. I daresay your father’s already waiting.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Ben brought his few meager boxes of belongings to Barton Hall, but Phillip noticed that he hadn’t unpacked them. Instead, the boxes stood against one wall of the room that was nominally his own. In practice, he had slept in Phillip’s bed both nights since Jamie’s misadventure, only stopping in his own room for fresh clothes and to give his bed sheets a plausible rumple.
When they made love, Phillip felt like Ben was trying to disappear inside his body. He delved inside Phillip with greedy, possessive fingers and sucked him until Phillip thought he’d be devoured. Even after Phillip was sated and oversensitive, Ben kept touching, as if there were a limited supply of touches in the world and he had to get his fill while he could.
Waking up beside Ben was achingly perfect, but it tore at Phillip’s heart to think that it might not be enough. Their gentle touches and murmured words of love were everything to Phillip, but surely Ben deserved something finer and truer than a lifetime of creeping through hallways and keeping secrets from the world.
Then he remembered what Ned had told him. Perhaps these were the whisperings of his melancholy, and not truth.
“Ben,” he murmured as they lay awake, waiting for those first fatal stripes of light to appear in the sky. “Will you be happy with me? Is this enough?”
Ben rolled to face him. “So much more than enough. It’s just a different kind of enough than I had ever thought of, and it’s taking my mind a little time to settle in.”
Phillip understood that. He pulled Ben close, his fair head resting on Phillip’s shoulder, and kissed the top of his head. His hair had bleached to the color of the palest wheat over the last weeks, and the bridge of his nose was covered in a welter of freckles. He also had a tenseness around his eyes that Phillip thought hadn’t been there before.
“Will you come to church today?” Ben asked later as they were getting dressed.
“If you want me to, of course.”
“It’ll be the last time I do this. So, yes. I’d like it.”
At the breakfast table, Phillip listened with some interest as Ben explained to the children that he would no longer be the vicar. “There are some aspects of church doctrine I don’t agree with, and I don’t think I can carry on as vicar.”
“Blasphemy.” Peggy’s eyes sparkled with evident delight.
“Not quite that,” Ben said, amused.
“The doctrine of the trinity?” Ned asked, more concerned than his sister.
“Not even as dramatic as that.”
“Are you going to preach in a chapel and wear one of those odd caps the Methodists do?” Jamie asked, his mouth full of plum pie that Mrs. Winston had sent down from Fellside Grange. Evidently pie was now a breakfast food at Barton Hall.
“Certainly not.”
That seemed to settle things as far as the children cared. They didn’t ask what he did plan to do, apparently secure in the knowledge that he would stay indefinitely at the hall. Phillip wished he was as certain.
After breakfast, they all dressed in their finest, filled their pockets with boiled sweets to occupy their mouths, and set out for St. Aelred’s.
The tiny church, which had been dismally empty the last time Phillip had entered it, was now hot and crowded. He gathered that whatever ill Ben had done his reputation by jilting Miss Crawford was undone by having sent Easterbrook packing, and Phillip was feeling quite satisfied with himself for having generated that particular tale himself. Mrs. Morris, his chief co-conspirator in spreading that piece of gossip, glanced over at him from her pew, nodding her head and tapping the side of her nose in acknowledgment.
The Crawfords were all together in their family pew along with a dark-haired man Phillip was startled to recognize as Walsh. He hadn’t thought Walsh went in for churchgoing any more than Phillip did himself.
