“You sought to rebel against your impending clerical fate,” Psyche said, tearing off more bread. “I was bent on rebellion, too, but insurrection is a chancy business. Running off with my drawing master did not advance the cause of my artistic victory half so much as it hastened my vows with Jacob.”
Another unlooked-for confidence, and she passed it along with no more ceremony than she would have offered Michael the butter dish.
“I take it Hazel knows?” Michael said, setting aside his empty soup bowl. “Knows and subtly alludes to your lack of sense and your impetuousness and reckless nature?”
“Is that how your pastor cowed you in York? Shaming that never ended over a few predictable gambling markers?”
Michael thought back to his earliest months in Arbuckle’s vicarage. “More or less, but he also sowed resentments with that tactic. I’d confided in him in good faith. I wanted to get off on an honest foot with my superior, and that was a mistake.”
Psyche offered him the plate of sandwiches—beef and brie this week. “Better to know who and what you’re dealing with, and you probably sorted him out fairly easily.”
Michael put two sandwiches on his plate. “I learned to lie to him, if that’s what you mean. To keep a parishioner’s confidence to myself, to report that I’d been walking the Dales in contemplative prayer when I’d been offering last rites to somebody’s drunken uncle. I became a very good liar in Yorkshire and a very bad priest.”
Psyche chose a sandwich. “Living a lie is hard. Jacob and I rubbed along as cordially as we could, but the marriage wasn’t what I’d hoped it could be, and Jacob knew that. He had begun to keep a distance, and I let him.”
“Maybe he kept a distance because his health was failing, and he didn’t want you to see that.”
Psyche poured them both more cider. “That came later. For a time, I hoped we could be a normal couple, though my husband’s frolics would be of a particularly unorthodox variety. I would pretend ignorance of them, and he would pretend fidelity to me, as many couples do. That’s not what happened.”
This conversation was unprecedented in Michael’s experience for the degree of honesty on offer. Honesty and trust. He should resist both lures, and yet, they were as appealing to him as a Christmas feast would be to a beggar child.
To simply say the truth, to be accepted for that honesty… He was muddled by the very notion, and so tempted.
“Jacob pretended fidelity,” Michael suggested, “but you could not manage true ignorance of his other lovers.”
She shook her head. “I am not so sophisticated after all, it turns out. I knew most of them. I learned to know by scent with whom he’d passed a night. This one liked Turkish cigars. That one favored rosewater cologne. That you saw through my Henderson disguise based on my scent was only fitting.”
“There was a bit more to it than that.”
She peered over at him. “Tell me. I don’t want anybody else seeing Henderson as a woman.”
What to say? “I did not see that Henderson was female so much as I gained a tactile appreciation for the possibility. You are… well formed, and I gather you eschew a corset when you are larking about as Henderson.”
Her smile was full of merriment and mischief. “You noticed that I had breasts. You might be the first fellow to do so after my randy drawing instructor. I got as far as Peterborough with him—we were on our way to Gretna Green supposedly—and even I knew by then that I was well rid of him. I do not want to be rid of you, Michael Delancey, and that worries me.”
She had seen him with his clothes off and apparently wouldn’t settle for anything less than his heart bare as well. How he wished he could oblige her.
“Don’t fret,” he said. “I won’t make a nuisance of myself. You have your art, I have my babies,”—who were, in fact, other people’s babies—“and we both know better than to expect the impossible from each other.”
“You fear I could become a nuisance to you?” she asked, dusting her hands over her plate.
“You could never be a nuisance.” Though around her late husband, she’d clearly felt like one. “You have no reason to remarry, and I am not looking for a wife, but we can be friends, Psyche. We can be very good friends.”
Her brows drew down. Not quite symmetric. The right slightly higher than the left, which gave her frown a quizzical air.
“Can we be more than friends? I am horrified to think I might be the female equivalent of the artist who presumes to take liberties with his models. You must put me in my place if that’s the case, Michael. Firmly put me in my place.”
He understood what she offered: an affectionate, intimate, temporary liaison, and he understood as well how much courage it took for her to make that overture. The idea that fornication was a sin in the eyes of some bore no more weight than a temperance pamphlet fluttering on the winter wind.
Those same moralizing hypocrites believed in beating unruly children and upholding the divine right of kings to starve the citizenry.
Michael regarded the woman sitting so demurely at his elbow while she spoke of sharing intimacies that could go nowhere. Subterfuge had permeated her life, from a nearly white marriage, to a shadowed classroom, to a household steeped in “discretion.”
“Before we take another step in the direction of anticipated pleasures,” he said, “I want to tell you a story, though you must understand that it’s merely a story.”
She set aside her table napkin. “A fairy tale?”
“More of a parable, about a young man who became a curate and traveled far, far from his home to the cold and beautiful land in the north.”
He could not tell her everything, but he could tell her more, and then she could decide their course based on a grasp of the realities. He owed her that, though this parable might be the last thing he gave her.
“Let’s get comfortable,” she said, rising before Michael could hold her chair. “The chaise will do. Repose yourself upon it, and get this tale organized in your mind. I gather you haven’t told it to anybody else?”
“I have not.” Michael settled on the chaise, though it felt awkward when Psyche would have only chairs to choose from. “I shall not repeat this parable. The story is not entirely mine to tell, though it’s merely a story.”
“Of course.” Psyche dumped half a scoop of coal on the fire and replaced the fire screen. “A tale told by an idiot or to an idiot. A work of fiction.”
She did not take a chair, but rather, draped herself over Michael, arranged her skirts, and took a shawl from the back of the chaise. When she was thoroughly comfortable plastered to his chest, he settled his arms around her.
“You expect me to be coherent when we’re in such a posture?” he muttered, gathering her closer.
“I expect you to be enthralling. You start with ‘once upon a time,’ and I will close my eyes and see pictures to go with your words.”
Michael closed his eyes and reveled in the pleasures and torment of Psyche’s warmth and weight pressed intimately against him. Sexual longing came wandering out of long hibernation, but only to gild the sense of wonder filling Michael’s heart.
Psyche was so generous and so brave, and so lovely to hold.