“They will resume in a few weeks, when all the fribbles are on hand. I’m enjoying the break, to be truthful, though I’ve run into Lord Dermot several times since the course concluded.”
Psyche began repacking the hamper, passing Michael the last half sandwich. “Run into him where?”
“When I’m on this side of the river, once when I’d paid a call on Mrs. Oldbach. I don’t think he saw which address I’d just quit, but he clearly didn’t expect to find me lurking on the fringes of Mayfair.”
“Are you worried?”
Michael did not like or trust Dermot, but after that little business with the ripped sketch, his lordship had left Henderson alone.
“I suspect,” Michael said, wrapping the sandwich in linen and tucking it into his pocket, “I have grown too adept at worrying. I worry for the babies. I worry for the other clerks. I worry that my father is getting on and doesn’t have a curate. I worry about you.”
Psyche passed him a profiterole and helped herself to one as well. “Hazel says I must decide whether to fight for you or turn you loose, that I am too enamored of you for my own good. I worry that Hazel is correct.”
Michael gave himself a moment to recover from that blow. Apparently, contemplating the end of their dealings was what had her betwixt and between.
“I can offer you nothing, Psyche, but pleasant moments and friendship.”
She pitched her profiterole into the water, provoking a swarm of waterfowl to paddle madly and noisily toward the little treat.
“You offer me encouragement,” she said. “You will deliver a handsome marquess to me, commission in hand. You showed me the London my flower girls dwell in. You showed me exactly why marriage to Jacob was so bewilderingly disappointing. You give and give and give, and I’m supposed to wave a fond farewell to you and flit off to Rome.”
Perhaps this outburst explained the growing sense of unease plaguing Michael, the nagging suspicion that trouble lay just around the corner.
“You give too,” he said. “You listen to me prose on for hours about nothing. You gave me work when the coal bill was my worst nightmare. You trust me with your secrets and your dreams. You remind me that life can be achingly sweet, and you haul me up short when my blasphemies shade into whining. I am so much more, so much happier for knowing you, Psyche Fremont. If you must go to Rome, then go with my best wishes, but I will miss you for the rest of my days.”
“Bloody rubbishing bedamned hell. Must you?”
Even for her, that was rough language. “Sorry, but what’s the point of hoarding the words if they’re true? And they are true.”
The truth—the real, dangerous truth—was that he loved her. Somewhere between arranging his hair with her fingers, asking him about Thad’s and Bea’s favorite stories, and telling him to just take over his father’s congregation and be done with Lambeth, Psyche had become the woman Michael loved. She was also, alas, a woman on her way to shaking the foundation of polite society’s art world.
She could not do that with him and his past tromping on her hems.
“Michael, if you asked me to fight for a future with you, told me that we should fight for that future together, I’d fight for us.”
Bea moved her subject, propping the doll at the base of a towering maple. The artist took up a place in the grass a few feet off and resumed sketching—or pretending to.
“You honor me,” Michael said, then realized he’d come perilously close to the words used to reject a marriage proposal. “You also ambush me.”
Psyche tucked the flasks of lemonade into the hamper, then sat back. “I feel as if I’m struggling with a composition, sketching it this way and that, and still not finding the right arrangement for my subject. I turn the thing upside down—a tried and true test—and still nothing. Then I happen to walk around behind it on a day the sun shines brightly, and all of a sudden, new possibilities begin to appear when I behold the shadow version of my work.”
She wanted to fight for them, in other words to make his risks her risks, but what of her dreams?
“You are ambushed too?” Michael said, smiling slightly.
“I was so busy looking at my art, then along came a model, and now I see him and my art, and the whole undertaking wants more study.”
“You tempt me to join you in an adventure in hope.”
She turned her face to the sun, which had already begun to lose some of its strength. “You excel at adventuring in hope. When you rescue those foundlings, you take great risks for the sake of hope. They won’t all live, much less thrive, but you risk everything on the basis of hope. Might we not use some of our courage to risk a future for ourselves?”
They had tarried through the warmest hour in the park, and the shifting light told Michael that the time had come to leave. The carriage parade was not yet the congested throng it became in the warmer months, but neither would the park remain deserted much longer.
“I want to hope with you,” Michael said. “To think that Bea’s situation will never create trouble for you, much less for me. To think that a priest can be married to a fashionable portraitist, or that I can find a headmaster’s job somewhere. I will not depend on your resources to support me or my children, Psyche.”
She made a face, and Michael heard what she did not say: If he married her, Thad and Bea would no longer be exclusively his children. They would become her children too.
His heart leaped at the notion, though his caution did as well.
“You aren’t telling me to fight,” Psyche said.
“I’m not telling you to lay down your arms either. The idea that we both want a future together is exhilarating and complicated. The matter wants thought.”
“If it’s the money…”
“It’s not the money. I can live on very little, and we both know the lengths I will go to for the sake of honest coin. It’s more…”
“What?”
Michael glanced around at a sunny, green respite in the middle of a hectic, noisy city. “Even here, I feel as if somebody is watching me. Helmsley set the other clerks to spying on me a few weeks back, and though I doubt they are bearing tales, I’ve also felt that somebody-walked-over-my-grave feeling.”
“Because for once in your life, you are happy.” Psyche had used plain language, and yet, her observation bore tangled insights.
“Perhaps I’m afraid somebody will snatch my happiness away, but then, why am I running into Dermot? Why are the other clerks whispering in corners? Why has Helmsley been so suspiciously cheerful toward me lately?”
“Maybe you are being promoted? Maybe your father’s congregation is about to become yours?”
“Maybe.” But the whispering and forced good cheer did not feel like harbingers of glad tidings.
“And maybe not,” Psyche said. “Shall we depart before the sun dips much lower?”
“We haven’t settled anything.”
She rose unassisted and smoothed down her skirts. “Oh, but we have. We want a shared future, and now we must ponder what’s involved in securing it. Maybe we aren’t willing to pay the requisite price, and maybe we are.”
“I want to kiss you.”
“What I want, if pursued in this location, would get us both arrested.”