Chapter 7
Matthew had lost his train of thought.
Rather than working on his sermon, which was currently nothing more than a spattering of disjointed notes written sideways and diagonally across a sheet of parchment, he was rolling a silver thimble across the letters, watching as its little holes cast a theater of lights over the letters.
Rahab and Delilah - how different? Both mercenaries.
He chuckled, tracing the question mark with the edge of the thimble. That one would get him tossed right out on the street, and he damn well knew it. But all the same, one had to acknowledge the point.
Leah. Esau. Recovery from mistreatment.
He looked again at that one thoughtfully and tilted his head to the side. Maybe.
King Saul. A poor wish granted poorly.
The Israelites as Faust?
He sighed and shut his eyes. Perhaps a nap was in order.
“Tailor’s here,” came a voice from the door, drawing his head up. “And your … associates.”
“Thank you, Mr. Green,” said Matthew, blinking away the dancing Biblical figures lingering in the whites of his eyes. “I’d say to show them in, but …”
“But we’re already in,” came Roland Reed’s voice as he patted Mr. Green conspiratorially on the shoulder and flashed him his most charming smile.
Mr. Green, bless him, actually blushed, and stepped aside to allow Reed and Tod into the office.
“Stay if you like,” Matthew called to him, guilt bubbling on his skin at the thought of how loyal this man had been throughout the gauntlet of the last couple of weeks. “I’ll buy you a suit.”
“Oh, you’re too kind,” said Mr. Green, looking genuinely surprised. “I wish I could, but I’ve promised my aid at your clinic tonight. I’m to read to the children’s ward. Lady Aster is quite persuasive.”
“That’s one word for it,” said Reed, grinning again as he flung himself into one of Matthew’s assortment of chairs. “Pass along our regards.”
Tod rolled his eyes and stomped in, choosing a sturdier offering for his own seating.
The tailor was last, and left the room twice more to retrieve additional bags of sundry that were apparently necessary for today’s fitting.
Matthew watched him with a wariness he was certain was evident on his face, his middle finger pinning the thimble into place over his notes. “Is this really necessary?” he asked, knowing he was whining already.
Both of his friends turned to him and immediately dropped their focus from his face to the thimble under his finger.
“Oh, hell,” said Reed, frowning.
“No,” said Tod, without any prompting.
“Oh, I’m not using it yet,” Matthew said, blinking innocently and whipping it back up into his grip, admiring how it twinkled in the light. “I just had it out to help me with my thinking. But I will, gents. Fear not. I will.”
“No,” said Tod again, though his voice sounded thinner this time.
It got a real, mischief-fueled grin out of Matthew for perhaps the first time since that statue had made its fateful journey to the earth on the day of the picnic. “Oh, yes,” he corrected. “Yes.”
The other two groaned in tandem, but in very different keys.
The thimble’s origins had been lost to the muddle of their childhood memories, though Matthew was relatively certain it had been Vix who started it. She was the girl, after all. Who else would have had a thimble on their person?
It had become a symbol of daring. Whoever held the thimble got to propose a dare to the others, on pain of losing the thimble to the one who took it, and so on, and so on.
A dare with the thimble had to be honored. A dare without it was merely a suggestion.
Matthew, as it happened, had won this thimble last summer.
He’d won it when Vix dared him to ask Rosalind to dance.
He closed his fist around it, suddenly unwilling to consider giving it away, and tucked it back into his desk.
“It’s been almost a year,” Reed said to Tod. “He’s not going to actually do it.”
Tod replied with a skeptical grunt. “He’s thinking.”
“That’s right, Reed,” Matthew said with a taunting little flash of his teeth. “I’m thinking. Have you ever tried it?”
“Of course not,” Reed answered sweetly. “I am a man of action.”
“Odd,” said Matthew. “I’ve a version of you in my bridal room who never moves at all.”
That got a laugh out of Tod and an unamused wrinkle of the nose from Reed.
Once the tailor returned, Matthew resumed his visage of the well-behaved man of the cloth. Several cloths, as it happened, today.
He stood on the little pedestal and let himself be pinched and measured and twisted about and groped more than a couple of times. He answered quite a lot of questions about colors and textures and fabrics and patterns that were all, at best, improvisation on his end.
He was, after all, a man who had worn a shapeless black sack for most of his life.
The only time the others did anything other than watch him with a faint air of amusement was when he pointed at a yellowish-green fabric with a blue stitching on it.
Reed immediately struck down the option with a sternness that startled every other man in the room, and redirected them all to a deeper shade.
“Just match his eyes,” he said impatiently. “It is obvious.”
“Oh,” said the tailor. “Yes. If you could look at me for a moment, Reverend.”
Matthew might have, on any other day, made a jest out of the thing, but in this case, he resolved to be silently grateful instead.
When the tailor had gone, and he had slumped into a wicker love seat near the window, feeling a bit more violated than he had expected at the beginning of the day, the others did not immediately depart.
Tod cleared his throat, as though he wanted Matthew to sit back up like a proper man. When he didn’t, he gave a beleaguered sigh and launched into his piece anyhow.
“Have you heard back from the bishop?” he said, without preamble. “Anything at all?”
“No,” said Matthew.
There was a beat of silence, during which he could feel his friend’s impatience begin to simmer.
“Should we have Sir Ambrose write to him again?” Tod pressed, a little louder. “Should you?”
“No,” Matthew said again. “Do nothing.”
“Oh, delightful,” said Reed, frowning. “It’s care-not Matthew. Just who we need today.”
He sighed, turning his head to glare at them. “I care,” he said. “I just also know that there is only so much action one can take. We’ve already taken it all. His silence is deliberate. We wait.”
“Wait,” Tod repeated, crossing his arms. “Until you wed? Until after that?”
“Until he decides,” said Matthew. “If I’m losing the parish, there’s nothing more we can do to prevent it now.”
“If you’re losing the parish,” Reed said gently, “you might want to consider what you’re going to do instead. Especially if you’ve a wife to provide for on top of yourself.”
“I’ll come work at the Vixen,” Matthew said flatly. “I’ll serve the drinks.”
“Matthew,” Tod said, concern etched all over his face. “There has to be more we can do.”
“If there is, I am not aware of it,” he answered, sighing and shoving himself back up to sit, since they were so determined to prevent him from rest. “I am, of course, open to suggestions. Have you any?”
They glanced at each other and then back at him, both shaking their heads.
“So we wait,” said Matthew again, giving them a tired little smile. “It is not the worst plan. Apparently, the worst plan was that bolt of chartreuse.”
Reed pulled a face. “Agreed.”
“And it’s not all bad,” he said, quirking his lips. “I am getting the lovely Miss Murphy out of it all.”
Once they had departed and Matthew had closed up the church for the evening, he retrieved the thimble from his office desk and took it with him back to the house. He rolled it between his fingers, running the memory of its acquisition through his mind as he walked.
It had been about a year, he thought. The ball Vix had thrown had been at the very tail end of summer, when the air was still sticky even as it started to cool. It had been an excuse to dress properly, to coif and groom and go out into society as something other than a vicar.
And yet, he’d spent the entire night in corners, completely at a loss of what to do with himself in the absence of collar and cassock. Completely at sea.
Reed had been similarly adrift, and the two of them had huddled together in solidarity, admiring from a distance the women they wanted but couldn’t have, until Vix sauntered up and plopped that thimble down between them.
Had she even known who he was when he’d asked her to dance?
He smiled to himself, pushing open the door to his house and stepping inside.
He imagined she did not. He knew he looked very different out of his vestments, and it wasn’t as though he’d ever made a point of speaking to her directly prior to that night.
Even so, she’d said yes. She had danced with him.
She’d smiled for him and held his hand and let him spin her around that ballroom floor, all the while gleeful and breathless and graceful in her movements, and blissfully unaware that his heart had been in his throat for the whole of it.
He hadn’t earned this. He hadn’t earned her.
But he was being given it anyway.
He put the kettle on and pulled himself up the stairs to find his pajamas. His maid-of-all-work had been by today, judging from the shine on the countertops and the lack of clutter in general.
He wondered if Rosalind would want to keep her on. Would she want more staff? Less?
He really knew very little about her.
It was an observational infatuation. He knew that.
He’d seen these little pockets of utter sweetness, of complete candor and wide-eyed wonder with the world around her in the small moments he’d been granted the pleasure of shared company with her, and each and every time, he’d found himself enchanted.
She was beautiful, of course. He wasn’t going to pretend that wasn’t a factor. She was a vision of ruffles and ribbons and all things feminine. She always had her sandy hair fashioned into perfect, glossy ringlets, always had pretty things pinned in her hair and dangling from her ears and throat.
Beauty was well and fine. There was plenty of it to be had in London. Hell, there was more than enough to be had in just his own parish, with many eligible young ladies of pleasing features and head-turning fashion from Sunday to Sunday.
It was something else with her. Something he couldn’t quite articulate to himself without sounding absurd, even in the confines of his own, solitary judgement.
Sincerity, his mind whispered.
And he shook it off, because plenty of people were sincere.
Vix, in all her acid, was sincere. And she couldn’t be farther from Rosalind.
He pulled himself into soft, well-worn cotton with faded green stripes and trudged back down as the kettle started to whistle, ruffling a hand through his hair. He poured and steeped and sweetened and stirred.
He carried the mug into the sitting room where she had slept and settled on the sofa, lost in thought.
This is where it had happened. Where he’d been caught trying to tend to her pain and been accused of impropriety for it.
And the burn of it, the real sting under it all, was that it was improper. It was carnal. And by no fault at all of poor Rosalind’s.
Matthew had been haunted in sleep and in waking, walking torment by the memory of her skirt being rucked up over those pale, soft thighs. He could have rendered a full, detailed, and utterly correct account of her stockings purely from memory, so thoroughly burned into his mind had they become.
His fingertips had been so close to touching her bare skin, so high up under the protection of skirts and propriety, even in the acceptable guise of proffering innocent aid.
He shook his head. He blinked. He sipped his tea while it was still too hot to sip.
They had been letting him into her bedroom alone all week. Day after day, with her in nothing but a thin muslin nightgown, surrounded by a nest of soft, powder-fresh sheets. Her hair had been loose around her shoulders some days or braided by her own hand in large, uneven loops on others.
This morning, when he had arrived, Mae Casper had been there, holding her elbow and walking her in circles around the bedroom, which meant that Rosalind’s full body in that loose, diaphanous nightgown had been visible opposite the shafts of sunlight coming in through her bedroom window.
Worse, Miss Casper had instructed him to begin taking over these walks immediately to help blood flow to the area of injury in Rosalind’s leg.
She had transferred the lady to his arm immediately and talked him through supporting her just enough to be helpful without preventing her recovery, both of them oblivious to the roiling of his blood as she plastered herself to his side without so much as a set of stays or a bodice to cushion her form under the thin fabric between them.
He resolved to wear thicker clothes tomorrow.
He drank another gulp of scalding tea and tried not to imagine what he might be getting away with, alone in that room, with her family so trusting and oblivious just outside the door.
“She won’t be fully healed for another few weeks yet,” Mae Casper had said. “You’ll need to promise me you’ll avoid putting any weight or pressure on that part of her body. Postpone the wedding night, I’d say, or otherwise you’ll need to be creative.”
He cursed and tipped the rest of the cup upward and into his mouth.
He left the cup, still steaming and empty, on the table next to the couch, and retreated to his bed with thoughts he should not be entertaining snapping at his heels.
He did his best to sleep, but it was difficult when all he could think about was exactly how one might be creative in his particular situation.
Unfortunately, Matthew had always excelled at creativity.