He bowed in return and came up grinning. “Away with you. I have prints to make.”
Psyche remembered to moderate her pace as she returned to the coach, but really, why should a woman mince about in cold weather, while the men were free to nearly jog down the street?
She was tempted to ask Mac to take the coach across the river and past Lambeth Palace, but that would be the behavior of a besotted schoolgirl. She was not besotted, though she was happier than she’d been in ages and wishing every week had seven Thursday nights.
But she was most assuredly not besotted.
Chapter Eleven
“If you put that scoop of coal on the fire, I will thrash you, Danner.” Natty Ingram halfway meant the threat. “Delancey is right when he claims excessive heat makes us mentally sluggish. Sit down and do some work.”
Danner was blond, solid about the middle, not quite as solid about the morals, and underendowed with ambition. He understood the request for what it was, though, dumped the coal back in the safe, and resumed his seat.
“Inadequate heat makes you peevish,” he said, fiddling with his quill pen. “I’m to be banished to Nottinghamshire, home of legendary bandits and my own dear uncles. They serve in adjoining parishes and trade sermons. Each fellow has to do half the work that way. The uncles are great ones for doing half the work, and being their curate will mean I’m doing half their work in two parishes as well as the curate’s jobs—they’ll share me, like I’m some subaltern on military campaign—and I won’t have a feather to fly with.”
“Worse yet,” Ingram said, giving up on his own letter for the moment, “you won’t have Mama’s baked goods to see you through each week. You won’t have the blandishments of the Old Smoke to comfort you.”
Danner parked his chin on his palm. “Barbara will kill me if I leave Town. She thinks it’s wonderfully naughty, keeping company with a priest.”
The fair Barbara was ten years Danner’s senior and had formerly been on the stage. She would spare him one fond sigh, perhaps a fare-thee-well, and then welcome some other lonely fellow into her boudoir on Sunday afternoons.
“Being a curate is a step up,” Ingram said. “A step forward. You aren’t likely to gain your own pulpit without a few years’ drudging in some rural nest of sin.”
“No sinning for me if I’m biding with my uncles. Not so much as a curse if the cart horse tromps on my toes, or Mama will hear of it. Ingram, I tell you, I’m considering a job in the City.”
For cheerful, good-natured Danner, that was a cri du coeur. “You’d last two weeks in the City, and the pay for clerks without articles isn’t half what you make here.”
Danner rose and went to the window, which let in little enough light this time of year. “When will I be my own man, Natty? At least those clerks can put down their pens and walk away from the job once they have their articles. At least they have a say in whether they’re banished to godforsaken Nottingham.”
Which was beautiful and well-to-do, as rural shires went. “You are your own man now,” Ingram said, though that was a generous assessment of the situation. Danner was his mama’s boy, Barbara’s naughty caller, and an all-around decent fellow, but he lacked… some definition of self that Michael Delancey had in quantity. “Besides, some of those clerks don’t get a half day.”
“Neither did we until Delancey got us organized and shamed old Helmsley into it. Did Helmsley expect us to sit about stitching samplers when we’d no mail to answer?”
Ingram rose and perched a hip on the corner of Danner’s desk. “If you don’t want to go to Nottingham, perhaps a post in York appeals.”
“York is a nice town,” Danner said, brightening marginally. “All the modern amenities, though it also has Yorkshire winters and an archbishop lurking at the gates. Has Helmsley given you a pulpit there? I could be your curate.”
One shuddered to think of the baker’s bills. “The post Delancey held in Yorkshire is already vacant again. From what I hear, the curate’s position in Hannibal Arbuckle’s parish was frequently vacant until Delancey stayed the course for something like five years.”
Danner peered up at him. “Delancey doesn’t say much about those years, but then, he doesn’t say much about anything. No wonder his sister is having trouble marrying him off. Good looks are fine across a supper table, but the ladies need some charm and humor in a husband.”
And Danner would know that exactly how? “Delancey’s a good sort, for all he’s so quiet. You might ask for the Yorkshire post and thwart your mama’s plans for you, but I’d talk to Delancey first.”
“Will he be honest with me? I mean, if he’d like to move up in seniority here, I was at Lambeth before he was, and my absence will mean advancement for him.”
Ingram thought back to the longest, coldest, most interesting—and terrifying—Saturday night of his life. “Delancey does not need or want our version of advancement, Danner, which would earn either his scorn or his amusement. Talk to him about the situation in York and consider asking for that post.”
Ingram sidled back to his desk and stared at the letter he’d begun drafting. A vicar’s wife was begging for help with a husband who used too heavy a hand on his spouse and children while preaching the livelong liturgical year about turning the other cheek and doing good to those who persecute you.
No template for this topic, though Delancey might have a few good ideas.
“What if Delancey says York was hellish?” Danner muttered, twirling his quill pen between his palms. “He don’t mince words, and he’s the sort who could withstand a hellish post far better than I could. I’m delicate, according to my mama, and you will not disabuse her of that notion on pain of excommunication from the favored company of the weekly treat. I could ask my uncles about this Arbuckle fellow.”
Danner was about as physically delicate as a rhinoceros. “You can look over Arbuckle himself,” Ingram said, rising and swiping the abused wife’s letter from his blotter. “Arbuckle is apparently coming south to see family, though for some reason, we are not to tell Delancey about his former vicar’s travels. Helmsley was clear with Twillinger and me that this is to be some sort of surprise reunion for Delancey.”
“That don’t smell right,” Danner said, frowning. “Delancey hasn’t been down from the moors for a full year yet, and I haven’t seen any correspondence for him from this Arbuckle person.”
“It doesn’t smell right because it smacks of Helmsley up to his usual tricks. If he can curry favor with a provincial cleric, he will, and Arbuckle has apparently been moldering away in the shires for decades. In any case, we’re not to alert Delancey, though I doubt he’d care much one way or the other.”
“Does he care about anything? I’ve never met a fellow who’s so parsimonious with opinions, laughter, quips… It’s as if he’s on leave from some battlefield assignment and dreads going back to war, but longs to get free of his mother’s fretting over the charms of the camp followers.”
“His mother passed away some time ago.” And yet, Danner’s comparison had an odd ring of accuracy. Delancey was like a soldier in some regards, sitting down to a proper Mayfair tea, with one ear cocked for the rumble of distant guns. “I’m off to discuss a letter with Twillinger. The village of Shepherd’s Rest has a brute in the pulpit, and his wife is ready to leave him.”