“Helmsley wants to see you when he gets in. Danner’s mother sent him a loaf of currant bread, and you’d better get your slice before our good Christian fellows do their plague of locusts imitation.”
Mrs. Danner—and her cook—occupied a place of near veneration among the correspondence staff. “Did she send butter?”
“And jam, Delancey. Raspberry jam.” Ingram slipped through the doorway and closed the door, taking the only other chair in the room. “How is Danner to learn the joy of self-denial if we don’t lend our aid in the face of Mama Danner’s unrelenting generosity?”
“He learns that very lesson when he denies himself the pleasure of slapping some virtue into a lot of thieving schoolboys. What does Helmsley want to see me about?”
“Really, Delancey. If Danner truly begrudged us the sweets, he would find better hiding places for them. Besides, if he ate everything dear Mama sent along, he’d have the dimensions of a hippopotamus. Gluttony is a terrible sin.”
Natty Ingram, with his red hair, freckles, and bobbing Adam’s apple, would have a schoolboy air even if he became a bishop, but his puerile looks hid a brilliant grasp of ecclesiastical law.
“And covetousness is a virtue?” Michael retorted.
“Come now, don’t be cross just because last evening was spent being dutifully familial. Your sister means well, and she doubtless sets a splendid table.”
Ingram was also kind, if a bit nosy. “Potatoes in bearnaise sauce,” Michael said wistfully. “Beef done to a turn and a mousse so rich and light I wanted to whisk the bowl off the sideboard and leap out the window with it.”
“While licking the contents from your bare fingers. So, of course, you declined a second helping. The next time your sister invites you to dinner, tell her you’re bringing that wonderful Natty Ingram along. Did you know this office would be so cozy when you chose it?”
Well, yes. Warmth and light were the sine qua non of a habitable space, and of the two, warmth counted for more. Any man who’d survived a few Yorkshire winters grasped that truth.
“I knew a glorified closet was too small for more than one person to work in,” Michael said. “You are either dodging about Helmsley’s summons, or you have no idea what he wants of me.”
“I have a pretty good idea. Do you know what happens in spring, Delancey? I think not, because you are too new to Lambeth’s ranks to have discerned the pattern. Spring is when the old guard, having survived yet another winter in drafty vicarages and poky villages, decides to reap their long-overdue rewards. They lay down their Books of Common Prayer, attend one last fellowship feast, and turn their thoughts to daughters and nieces living closer to Town. They think of their grandchildren and the sublime pleasure of sleeping late on an occasional Sunday. In short, they succumb to the siren call of comfy retirement.”
“You should have been a playwright.” Though Ingram’s grandiloquence put Michael in mind of his own father, who’d pastored the same London congregation for decades.
“The stage, alas, doesn’t pay very well, so I’m told. In any case, pulpits will soon be in want of preachers, and you did your bit as a curate in the frozen north for years. You were to the vicarage born, Bible verses flowing through your veins, and you put the rest of us to shame with how much correspondence you get through in a week.”
“Because I have my own little office, where I’m undistracted by the temptation to purloin another man’s currant bread.”
Natty sat back, perusing Michael as if he’d been a portrait by a talented unknown. “It’s not just that. You are blessedly smart, which goes beyond memorizing all the handy quotes, and wealthy old ladies adore you.” Ingram rose and turned his backside to the parlor stove, lifting the tails of his coat to reveal trousers gone a bit shiny in the seat. For men who should have been focused on ecclesiastical law, the staff was universally preoccupied with mundane concerns—food, boots that didn’t leak, Sunday clothing worth the name, and enough blankets to keep the night chill away.
They spoke of women only rarely, and always with a forlorn sense of respect.
“I might,” Michael said, “one day years hence, step into my father’s shoes, and I’d be pleased to have that honor. I don’t particularly seek a congregation of my own at this point.” Rather like Mrs. Fremont, who with every gesture, silence, and wardrobe choice, made plain that she did not seek to remarry.
And who instead pursued her art.
“We all claim we’re happy to do the Lord’s work,” Natty said, “but what we really mean is, as feckless younger sons and preachers’ boys, we’re happy to call ourselves gentlemen while we admit of no personal ambitions and deny ourselves a second helping of mousse.”
That was plain speaking and uncharacteristically grumpy too. “Ingram, you are brilliant with church law. Dean of the Arches material, and you enjoy all that canonical whatnot. I’ve learned scads from you, and I hope to learn much more.”
Ingram let his coattails drop and headed for the door. “Dean of the Arches is a job for settled fellows with aristocratic connections. I’m shabby gentry and always will be. Was the mousse truly excellent?”
“Ambrosial.” And the sight of Mrs. Fremont closing her eyes as she slipped the spoon between her lips had been a pleasure too. More confirmation that the widow was not what she appeared to be.
“If Helmsley offers you a congregation,” Ingram said, back half turned to Michael, “you take it. You take it, and you leave this place, and every Yuletide, you send me a happy little note telling me how many children you have and what lovely people your congregants are.”
“You assume I’ll marry.”
“You make a good point. A man too stupid to enjoy a second helping of dessert might also be dunderheaded enough to deny himself a wife. I am in dire need of a second slice of currant bread, with butter and jam. To blazes with you.”
He blew Michael a kiss and slipped from the room.
“Let me know when Helmsley gets in.”
Ingram shut the door without replying.
“Please not the north again,” Michael muttered. He’d done penance aplenty in Yorkshire, and his return to London had solved all manner of problems. To leave now, to have to rearrange everything, move households…
He had neither the means nor the energy for that undertaking. He would simply have to convince Helmsley that even a future Dean of the Arches ought to spend a few years ministering to an actual flock.
Michael had made some headway with a Bristol parson’s question about offering the sacraments to a new parishioner who’d faked his own death—how could one baptize a fellow who was officially dead? Could such a walking shade legally marry?—when his thoughts wandered again to Mrs. Fremont.
She had means. Her clothing was exquisitely well made and fashionable, though the colors were chosen for camouflage rather than flattery. Mrs. Fremont had also apparently come to terms with her loss. She hadn’t mentioned her husband but once or twice in passing, rather than alluding to him in every other sentence as reminder of the lady’s erstwhile marital consequence and ongoing sorrow.
A financially secure widow could afford her own drawing master and engage in all the amateur painting she pleased to.