Chapter 21
Rosalind felt a little bit ambushed when she arrived home that evening, though no one had actually arrived yet.
“And Mr. Green too?” she said, blinking at her husband, who was already looking rather ragged about the whole thing, pacing around the bedroom, his black waistcoat buttoned wrong.
“It’ll be the same number of people as our wedding breakfast,” he reasoned as she crossed the room to see to his buttons, slumping in relief as she sorted out the mismatched affair with a few deft flicks of her fingers. “And little Heather will probably nod off after the first course.”
Rosalind scoffed at that. “Maybe if you hide the dessert. Is the food being delivered, or do we need to go retrieve it?”
“Mr. Green is going to bring it,” he said, halting her hands as they flipped the final button into its eyelet and holding them in his. “I should have put them off for another day or two, shouldn’t I?”
“No, no, let it bide,” she said with a tut. “But why is Mr. Green coming?”
“Oh,” said Matthew, a smile attempting to tug its way through his worry. “I think he’s obsessed with your mother. He’s bringing a book she wrote. Something about moons.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake,” she said with a frown. “Jupiter again. All right, well, that will keep her placated, at least. How did my father seem?”
“He had a very impressive beard,” Matthew said, scratching at his own very clean chin. “Ought I to grow a beard?”
“No,” she said, slapping his wrist away from his face. “Matthew!”
He grinned at her. “He said he missed his girl.”
Rosalind softened at that, a little warm egg cracking open in her chest and spilling its yolk down her bones. “Oh,” she said with a wobbly smile. “That’s lovely.”
And then the doorbell sounded.
Their dinner table only seated four, so, much like the day of the wedding, the feast was spread out between the kitchen and the sitting room, with people sitting on various pieces of furniture. If nothing else, Matthew did always have an abundance of seating.
Conversation erupted almost immediately, with Rosalind being embraced tightly by her father and then examined closely by her mother.
“You don’t look injured,” she said, as though the plinth had hit Rosalind’s face rather than her leg. “You look hale, in fact.”
“I’m much better now,” Rosalind said, rather than correcting any assumptions, and then directed her mother to the scalloped potatoes, which she knew would prove an effective distraction.
“Oh, London always has the most divine cheeses,” Abigail Murphy said to no one in particular.
“Is the cheese different in Scotland?” Ezra Barnett replied, sounding truly invested in the answer, and as a result, he stole away Mrs. Murphy’s attention from the devastated Mr. Green for some time as the topics of Cheddar and Stilton were discussed at length on the corner of the sofa.
“Are your own parents not near enough to join us tonight, Mr. Everly?” Angus Murphy asked Matthew. “I’m sure you’ve enough chairs for two more.”
Matthew chuckled, coloring a little on his cheeks. “My mother’s moved in with her sister off in Croydon so that they may live out their widowhoods together, growing flowers and gossiping about the locals,” he said. “She seems extremely happy in every letter she sends.”
“Oh, how sad,” said Abigail, her head coming up mid-debate about the merits of Gruyère. “Your father has left us?”
Matthew nodded. “Yes, almost six years ago now. He took a slip on some ice coming back from a routine errand and hit his head. Death comes at us very suddenly like that sometimes."
“Gracious, but that’s terrible,” Abigail gasped. “He died on the spot?”
“Mam,” said Abe, frowning.
“No, it is all right,” Matthew said, tilting his head. “He didn’t. He came home and ate dinner and went to bed, in fact. It never even bled. But he didn’t wake up the next morning.”
Everyone was quiet for a moment, considering this, until Rosalind reached across the space between their two chairs and took her husband’s hand, giving it a little squeeze. “Will you tell us a story about him, Matthew?”
He seemed to startle a little, his head clicking over to look at her with a surprised little blink. “Oh, I could. Yes, certainly. He was a wonderful man. Mr. Green, what story shall I tell?”
Mr. Green looked up from the spear of asparagus on his fork and considered the question, looking thoughtful. “He saved you from getting rejected from the seminary after that business about subversive interpretation.”
Matthew balked. “I meant a tender story, not an embarrassing one!”
Mr. Green only gave him a polite smile. “I thought embarrassing stories were the foundation of these familial meetings.”
“There now, Matthew,” Abe Murphy said, grinning. “He’s right. Tell us about your subversions.”
Matthew sighed. “I might have misunderstood the assignment.”
Mr. Green shook his head, chuckling, a sound that seemed to genuinely startle Matthew enough that he immediately straightened and glared at the curate.
“You understood it, you just have a sharper mind than the monsignor. There is a portion of the educational process of becoming ordained where we are asked to present a kind of thesis on Biblical writ that is not assumed or cliché,” he explained to the gathered guests.
“It is customary. Mine own was speculation on envy and burden in the life of Aaron, brother of Moses.”
“Oh, a dissertation,” said Abigail, perking up. “Angus, it is like they are seeking a philosophical merit.”
“Just so,” said Mr. Green. “Matthew chose to approach the book of Revelation. Always risky.”
“We really don’t have to talk about this,” Matthew said, frowning.
“Ah, Revelation,” said Angus, nodding. “I rather upset someone once when I described the Angel at the Gates as sounding very much like ambitious taxidermy rather than a beautiful woman with wings.”
Mr. Green laughed again, which made Matthew squirm all the more.
Rosalind stared at him in fascination. She had never seen him so unsettled.
“I only said,” Matthew managed to get out, his color rising, “that Ahab was more the villain than Jezebel, and that her actions were those of a politician backed into a corner rather than an evil murderess or an ambitious slattern. I also pointed out that it is odd that we refer to her in frames of … erm … depravity, when by all accounts she was faithful to her husband throughout her life.”
There was another pause, with everyone except for Heather staring now.
Heather, of course, was happy to play with her doll. All would have thought her oblivious to the conversation if she hadn’t whispered “slattern” at her doll like it was the doll’s new name.
Millie coughed delicately but made no move to remove her daughter from the room.
“Well, now, that is quite a vantage,” said Angus, leaning onto his knees. “Jezebel ordered the killing, didn’t she?”
“Yes,” said Matthew, though it sounded like it pained him.
“Because the king of the nation was having a strop and refusing to get out of bed for weeks while all civic administration had ground to a devastating halt in a time of political unrest and supply shortages.
He was whining under his blankets because Naboth refused to give him the specific toy he wanted, and the longer this went on, the worse the situation became for every single person in the kingdom.
So Jezebel, a foreign queen with no real power, attempted to fix it.
“She offered to buy Naboth out. She offered to relocate him to a better plot of land. She even invited him over and explained the dilemma to him in detail, and he would not budge. What was she supposed to do?”
“Probably not murder him,” Mr. Green said jovially.
“All right, fine, probably not,” Matthew snapped.
“But the woman was pushed into a very difficult position and she had no real power to fix the situation for as long as her idiot husband was refusing to come out of his tantrum. Every day that passed made the crisis worse, and Naboth was just as stubborn as Ahab. What would you have done?”
“Exile?” suggested Abe, scratching his chin. “I guess she’d still have needed to frame him for that.”
“Could’ve kidnapped and dropped him somewhere far-flung with enough gold to start a new life,” Angus returned, thinking about it. “Though I suppose he could’ve just used the gold to come back and try to reclaim the land.”
“Kings have been unseated before for being too tender in the skull to lead,” Abigail pointed out. “We ourselves are ruled by a regent at present.”
“Yes, but look at what it took to get there,” said Mr. Barnett, tapping his fork on his plate. “Several wars, many deaths, and it wasn’t until someone royal died that anyone did anything about it.”
“That’s true,” said Rosalind. “If Princess Amelia hadn’t died, we likely would still have a mad king.”
“We’ve had mad kings,” Angus told her. “We had one who went through half a dozen wives and many more bloodied advisors and no one stopped him. Hell, France had one who literally thought he was made of glass. Apparently that was fine.”
“They let Rodrigo Borgia be Pope,” Mr. Green added, sipping at his wine. “They voted him in!”
Matthew held his hands out as though everything being said was only proving the point.
“And,” said Millie thoughtfully, dropping her chin into her hand, “once Naboth was out of the way, it did solve the problem. Ahab came out of his melancholy. The king went to frolic in his new vineyard and the kingdom went back to functioning again, didn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Matthew, his eyes looking a bit wild.
“Yes. It was a sick, difficult, impossible choice she had to make, but it is what leaders have had to do for thousands of years, and it was a situation she never should have been put into. Naboth was attached to the land because he inherited it, but is that really more important than the survival and wellness of every other person in your entire kingdom? This is my problem with Rahab and Lot too! What kind of a righteous hero betrays everyone they’ve lived alongside for the whole of their life, no matter what it is in the name of?
! Love Thy Neighbor. It isn’t ambiguous! ”
“Mr. Everly!” Mr. Green gasped, though he still looked thrilled.
Matthew cleared his throat and sat back, blinking rapidly. “Anyway, I suggested that maybe she didn’t deserve to be shoved out a window and stomped to a pulp and eaten by dogs and then remembered as the face of promiscuity for all eternity and it … it didn’t go over well.”
“It didn’t,” agreed the curate. “At all.”
Rosalind could scarcely breathe. She thought she must have been just as flushed as Matthew, her face as hot as the steaming food on the table in front of them.
Something about seeing him so passionate and inflamed and correct, especially in defense of a fallen woman, had … it had been rather stimulating.
She took a steadying little breath, though her ribs shook a little as she drew it in.
“Well,” said Abigail Murphy, her head tilted to the side. “I think I agree with you.”
Ezra Barnett was staring. “We don’t have that story,” he said thinly. “In our book. We have Lot, I mean, but not Jezebel. I’ve heard people called that, of course, but I genuinely thought she was a … a …”—he glanced down at little Heather and winced—“a working girl.”
“No,” said Matthew through his teeth. “She was a queen.”
“Though I believe she did like a bit of kohl and rouge,” Abe put in. “If I remember correctly.”
“Be quiet, Abe,” Rosalind suggested softly, making him smirk at her.
“You know I use rouge too, dearest?” Millie said to her husband, as sweetly as a woman can speak to a man. “I thought you enjoyed it.”
“Oh, I do,” Abe assured her. “But I’m a heretic.”
“Abe,” said their father. “Shut up.”
Abe grinned but did not speak further, popping a bit of roast beef in his mouth, evidently satisfied with his contribution.
“Anyway,” said Matthew, softer and sighing, “my father said that perhaps I ought to take a lesson from my interpretation of Jezebel and her management of Ahab, and realize that those with power are not always reasonable or wise but must be appeased anyhow if we expect to make strides toward progress. He was right.”
“He spoke to the monsignor first,” said Mr. Green, “and found a way to reframe Matthew’s thesis statement in a more digestible way, and Matthew, proving he had understood the lesson, went along with it, but at the end …”
Matthew chuckled. “At the end, he took me to a vineyard for a few days to celebrate, and we had a private toast to Queen Jezebel and the wisdom of her lessons. That story must never leave this room.”
“That is a shame,” said Mr. Barnett, blinking his wide gray eyes. “It is a wonderful story.”
Rosalind turned toward him with a lift of her brows. “Speaking of lessons that have been learned,” she said to him pointedly, making him blush.
“Don’t worry,” he assured her. “I won’t.”
“It’s a shame Maggie didn’t join us for this trip,” Angus Murphy said with a sigh. “She’d have liked that, eh, Rosalind?”
Rosalind gave her father a look. “She would not have.”
“Your sister?” Matthew asked, and received a nod. “How is she?”
“Expecting her second bairn,” Angus said proudly. “You’re falling behind, Ros.”
“Oh,” she said, blushing. “I suppose I am.”
“Doubly behind,” Millie put in with a little smile, drawing a finger over her own stomach.
This created a little explosion of reaction, with the room turning toward her in excitement and congratulations.
Poor Mr. Green never did get to talk about Jupiter, in the end.