Chapter 14
Beck wasn’t sure why the hell he was doing this. He had gotten dressed. He had shown them which church. He had left his house. He had led the charge.
He just really wasn’t clear on why.
Ahead of him, Ember and her husband were walking arm in arm, and she turned to regard him, a satisfied twinkle in her eye. “Teddy,” she said. “A Catholic, a Quaker, and a Jewess walk into a nave …”
“Ember,” Beck grumbled, coloring as a narrow, scandalized congregant turned around with a frown and a gasp.
“All are welcome!” the congregant insisted, though she rushed away as if she did not want to stand too close, just in case.
“Did you hear that?” Ember said with a chortle. “We’re all welcome.”
“Do you really know the vicar general?” Hannah asked her, looking angelic in white with a row of blue flowers in her hair. “I suppose we could have just written to him.”
“And miss this?” Ember answered with a scoff. “Never.”
“The vicar general married Mr. and Mrs. Cain,” Joe Cresson put in quietly. “She does know him.”
“Does she?” Reed exclaimed from Beck’s side. “That’s delightful.”
“Shut up, Reed,” Beck suggested as they all found their seats in the pews.
Hannah Lazarus took hers directly next to Beck, scooting so close to him he thought he might need to flee. Her warm thigh brushed his as she reached forward to take the hymnal from the wooden slot in front of them, turning it over in her gloved hands.
“I’ve never been to a Christian service before,” she said softly. “I wonder if it will be a story I know or a new one.”
“Your parents don’t mind you coming down here with the heretics?” Reed inquired, leaning around Beck to flick at her wrist. “Or didn’t you tell them?”
“Oh, Mr. Reed,” she said with a little sigh, like she was tolerating an impertinent sibling. “My parents have a great many opinions on things.”
Beck did find himself chuckling at that, even while he used his shoulder to partition Reed back into his polite portion of the pew.
He himself hadn’t been to a church service in many years. Not since Matthew himself had taken over his father’s vicarage, and even then it had seemed more of a great joke than anything bordering devout.
Matthew Everly had been a childhood friend, the son of his mother’s most reliable patron, and a curious little shit who was more interested in finding out how poor children got up to mischief than he was in enjoying the charmed existence he’d accidentally been born into.
Reed, Beck, and Matthew had been an inseparable coterie of dirt and poor decisions through their adolescence, though they could thank the more privileged boy for their literacy and several small benefits that they would not have otherwise had access to.
And, after his mother had died, Beck had let Matthew help him get Vix into a fancy school.
He’d let him do that.
He sighed, resisting the urge to rub away the headache forming at his temples as the organ struck up its opening chords for the beginning of service and his childhood friend took the stairs to the pulpit.
He looked like he’d just rolled out of bed, of course. His hair was a mop of brown curls, his expression easy, his vestments a bit wrinkled.
The entire front row was women, and they all looked extremely happy to see him as he reached his little podium and grinned down at his congregation, spreading his arms like a damned circusmaster.
“God loves the liars, too,” he began.
Reed immediately began to giggle until Beck elbowed him.
What followed was the most interminably long accounting of the saga of Jacob and Esau that Beck thought possible. He remembered, very vaguely, the outline of this story as Matthew had told it to them when they were children, without all the flourish and canticles.
He had preferred that version, which had gone something like, “have you ever been so hungry, you did the stupidest thing imaginable?” and also something along the lines of, “I’ve seen some hairy men, but greasy goat pelt is the future I aspire to.”
He really had been a little shit.
He glanced at Hannah several times during the proceedings. Alarmingly, he found her glancing back during the bit about the pelt, her eyes very thoughtfully scanning his arms and chest.
Christ, but he wasn’t that hairy, was he?
He sat there in a boil for the next hour, trying not to squirm.
“Well,” she said at the end. “I wish we’d brought Rabbi Hirsch.”
“Why’s that?” Beck asked despite his better judgement, and she had only grinned at him in answer.
They lingered while the palm pressing and exits occurred, waiting to be acknowledged, though Beck knew damn well that Matthew Everly had clocked them the instant he had set foot on that pulpit and was just waiting for his moment.
“What did you think?” Reed was asking Joe Cresson. “I hear your people don’t talk at all during service?”
“We talk some,” Joe replied, and then said nothing else, with a smile that Beck thought might have been some Quaker brand of antagonism.
“We’ll have to go to a high mass next,” Ember said with a sniff. “You English have never seen proper flash, and it shows.”
“Reed!” came a booming voice as the good parson decided to come and play, “and dare I believe it, Tod?! Where’s my Vix? Where are you hiding her?”
“In Reading,” Beck said, bracing as he was tackled with a deeply unseemly embrace, the smaller man folding around him in a tight, squeezing hug. “Good Lord, Matthew.”
“Yes, He is good, isn’t He? Let me look at you, you big oaf. To what do I owe the pleasure? Come to ask for money?” He was grinning when he said it, far too many teeth glinting in the afternoon light. “Who are all your friends? Hello there!”
“Charmed,” Ember said, grinning already like she’d found a kindred soul. “And we’ll take money, if you’re offering.”
The vicar led them into his offices, claiming the fireplace was much more amenable in there versus the winter cold.
Hannah lingered at the rear, reaching out and looping her fingers around Beck’s wrist. She tugged him to her side, her big eyes blinking up at him like touching him this way in public, in a church, was perfectly natural.
“Your friends call you Tod,” she said softly, once he’d stopped and looked down at her, “but Ember calls you Teddy.”
He nodded, watching her face with a kind of awed concern, like he knew he shouldn’t be humoring this.
“Does no one call you Thaddeus?” she whispered. “No one but me?”
He shook his head. “No. No one ever has.”
“That is a shame,” she said with a frown. “It is such a beautiful name.”
“Hannah …” he said, knowing he was making a face, knowing he was being dramatic.
“Who is Vix?” she asked, ignoring all of his ignoble suffering.
He sighed. They had reached the parish offices and lost their opportunity for him to argue her into disinterest.
“My sister,” he said, defeated. “Victoria.”
“And she is in Reading?” Hannah pressed, not at all bothered that they had resumed the earshot of the group as they rounded into an assortment of armchairs and wicker benches.
“Yes, why is she in Reading?” Matthew asked, raising his brows. “I thought we sent her to study in Bath?”
“Oh?” Ember perked up, looking from one man to the other. “We? We sent her?”
Beck wondered if he should just walk into the fireplace.
Matthew smiled gently, like he was some beatific bloody paragon while Reed nodded along with the act. “We all pooled our resources after Mama Beck passed,” Matthew explained. “London is no place for an orphaned girl.”
“She’s a governess now,” Beck grumbled. “Just started, end of summer.”
“A governess?” Matthew repeated, a bemused curve working its way into his lips. “I’d love to see that.”
“Will she visit you soon?” Hannah asked, tilting her head. “Does she write?”
Beck stared at her like she had just flashed a blade and asked him if he preferred the throat or the belly. “We ought to get to business,” he managed to say, his voice gone hoarse.
“Business?” Matthew repeated, sounding disappointed. “I was going to put a kettle on. Does no one want tea?”
“We all want tea,” Reed said immediately, just as Beck said, “No.”
They had tea.
“It isn’t that we don’t still need funding,” Hannah was saying half an hour later, and after many niceties and sugar cubes.
“We do. But what the large network of Anglican parishes could offer us as we crest the new year is the logistical aid of relocation. We cannot leave the recovered in businesses that must resume operations with the return of the High Season.”
“We could also use help finding new vocations for the ones who are forever changed,” put in Ember. “Some injuries will prevent them returning to the type of labor that required able bodies.”
“Vocations will be harder,” Matthew said immediately, frowning. “I wish you had come sooner. We just had a large drive for food in preparation for Christmas.”
“It has been a chaotic time,” Beck said with a shrug. “There has been quite a lot to manage, most of it shouldered by Miss Lazarus alone.”
“And our healer,” said Hannah. “She isn’t here today, but she has been doing most of the direct work. We know it is a large thing to ask, sir, but any help you might offer would be most beneficial to us and very welcome.”
“We do have a few doctors from St. Barts helping now too,” Ember said. “We’ve shamed some of the powerful into motion with the press.”
“Ah, yes,” Matthew said, brightening. “I read that! Brothels and Betters: the Benefactors of London’s Needy. Yes?”
“Indeed,” Hannah said, clasping her hands at her chin in pride. “It was very good, wasn’t it?”
“Are holy men supposed to read gossip?” Beck asked pointedly, winning nothing but a grin in response.
They departed with promises that inquiries would be made and assertions that the meetings were a pleasure all around. When they exited onto the cobbles outside the church, it had begun to snow.
“Oh, look at that,” Ember said with a little sigh. “My hair will be halfway to the moon by the time we get home.”
“Glorious,” her husband murmured, patting her hand. “Good day, everyone.”
Reed walked with them for a few moments before halting suddenly and announcing that he had business in exactly the opposite direction.
“What business?” Beck demanded.
“Business!” Reed clarified, and vanished before Beck could maim him.
“He is such an odd man,” Hannah breathed, like she had said that same thing to herself so many times that it had become a mantra.
“Not the word I would use,” Beck muttered. “Well, it seems I am your escort. Where are you headed, Miss Lazarus? Home, I presume?”
“To the Fox,” she said, blinking at him like this was the expected answer. “Of course.”
He wanted to groan. He wanted to collapse at her feet and beg her to please just have mercy on his poor soul. All he could do was stand there and stare at her, wrapped in white and soft blue, snow settling into that glorious red mane, and sigh.
“Fine,” he said. “I know I can’t talk you out of it.”
“Ah,” she said with a smile, taking his arm and standing entirely too close as they resumed their path. “Then we are finally getting to know one another, after all.”
“We need to talk, anyhow,” he said, pulling his hat lower as the snow increased its speed. “We should have talked a long time ago, now.”
“Yes, I agree,” she said, leaning her head against his arm like some manner of soft assassin. “There are so many things I wish to say to you.”
“Hannah,” he groaned. “There are so many people about. Are you not concerned for your reputation?”
“My what?” she answered, and he could hear the grinning mischief in her voice.
Who had taught her that? Ember? Reed?
He gritted his teeth and took longer steps.
He wasn’t sure why he was in such a damned rush.
As soon as the Flaming Fox came into view, he realized his folly. They would only be more alone inside. It would only be warmer in there. Cozier. More dangerous.
She smiled at him and withdrew a key from her reticule.
“Shall we go in,” she asked, “my Thaddeus?”