David Lord of Honor (The Lonely Lords) (31 page)

***

A wise old bishop, over several tots of sherry, had once delicately pointed out to the newly reverend Daniel Banks that his relationship with his own father would likely be the most fertile ground he encountered for learning the true meanings of the scriptures. Daniel, only beginning his theological journey, had been railing against his father’s judgmental, harsh, and intolerant approach to his calling.

The bishop had smiled and settled his considerable fundament into a comfortable chair by a cozy fire. “But young Daniel, do you not now sound as judgmental, harsh, and intolerant?”

And thus, thoroughly chagrined by the bishop’s gentle reproof, Daniel’s real education in his chosen profession had begun.

That education had gone on, day by day, week by week, with insight and wisdom coming from odd places. Daniel gained particular comfort from time spent with the elderly and the ill, for they often demonstrated a courage and peace, even an optimism, that humbled him. His spiritual education was more about his own shortcomings and humanity than about verses of scripture or brilliant sermons.

He had learned that very day, for example, that he was capable of adultery. The realization was disquieting, but not as devastating as it should have been. Oh, he hadn’t
committed
adultery, but the actual committing of the sin was a technicality compared to the willingness to commit it.

Olivia had been called away to her mother’s bedside. A bout of influenza the winter past had weakened his mama-in-law’s lungs, and she had been failing since.

So Daniel had handed Olivia up into the northbound stagecoach, knowing it would be several weeks until her return, and he’d turned his steps back toward the vicarage with a curious, surprisingly
unguilty
lightness. The best weeks of summer had stretched before him and Danny, free of strict mealtimes, free of strict bedtimes, free… of so many needless parental rules and consequences. Danny was a bright, well-mannered child, one any father would be proud of.

Olivia, by contrast, was becoming more like Daniel’s father and less like a woman who was grateful she had a child to love and care for in the first place.

Just that afternoon, Danny had gone off to play with the local squire’s sons, and Daniel had used the free time to take Beelzebub for a gallop, one that had them cantering up the track to the widow Ellen FitzEngle’s property. She’d greeted him graciously as always, and strolled her fairy tale flower gardens on his arm with the same friendliness she invariably showed him.

Then, in the shade of her porch, the warm summer air redolent of honeysuckle and petunias, Daniel had kissed her.

And what a soul-gratifying, joyous, heartrendingly lovely thing it had been, to kiss a woman once again with passion. Ellen had responded generously, allowing him every liberty a kiss could encompass, when she should have slapped his face and gone haring off to the bishop.

When Daniel had found the resolve to lift his mouth from hers, she’d remained in his arms for a long moment. He’d held her, his emotions rioting from shock at his own impropriety, to relief that he still could feel passion for a woman, to an absurd urge to laugh and kiss her again.

Ellen had smiled up at him. “So Olivia has gone to Mama’s, and you want to know if you can be naughty with your friend the widow?”

Put like that, Daniel’s urge to laugh, to kiss her again, faded. Ellen must have seen the change in his eyes, for she tucked her face against his chest, sighed, and then turned to take his arm and continue their stroll.

“You don’t want to
be
naughty,” she concluded as if to herself. “You want to know if you
could
be. As if you’d found the decanter your papa hid on the top shelf of the pantry, and you want to know you could tipple, though you don’t actually take a sip.”

“I never found a hidden decanter,” Daniel said—inanely. Nor had he hidden one himself.

Ellen’s smile broadened. “The decanter was hidden somewhere, Daniel. Maybe it was an inordinate interest in butterflies, or a taste for gothic novels, but your papa had his guilty pleasures. We all do, and you are entitled to yours.”

She was so calm. That kiss had rocked him physically, emotionally,
theologically
. Until ten minutes ago, he’d been a virtuous husband, whatever that meant. Now he knew the freckles dusting Ellen’s cheeks were the same cinnamon hue as her hair, and she tasted of peppermint tea.

He found a bench under a huge willow and sat beside her. A stream burbled by a few feet from the willow, and the scent of roses sweetened the air.

“I must apologize, of course. I am not entitled to guilty pleasures at the expense of a lady’s virtue, and you have never led me to believe I would be. I simply…”

She took his hand, the contact reassuring rather than flirtatious.

“One becomes lonely,” she said, “and when the loneliness goes on and on and becomes part of one, it grows roots and can begin to destroy one’s very foundation, like this tree whose shade we enjoy now. You are a lovely, lovely man, Daniel, and I would have to be blind not to see that Olivia neglects you terribly. That you have an occasional lapse of sainthood does not make you wicked.” She laced her fingers through his and squeezed his hand. “It makes you human.”

“You are more than understanding.” Perhaps he’d known she would be.

“Understanding,” she snorted. “Is that the word for it, when you’ve slept alone for five years, and yet you can recall your husband’s intimate affections each and every night as you dream? At least I do sleep alone. I cannot imagine what a torment it must be to share a bed with a spouse who isn’t… receptive to conjugal relations.”

Daniel resigned himself to having a very personal discussion with someone against whom he’d intimately sinned.

“Olivia would humor me, were I to impose on her.” She’d humored him every time he
had
imposed, beginning with their very wedding night. He’d considered it a mercy the urge to impose had stopped plaguing him years ago—mostly stopped plaguing him.

“Straying would be the easier option, Daniel, and Olivia would be relieved if you did.”

Many men extolled the companionship of widows, and Daniel began to see why. “You are undoubtedly right. She wants me to stray.” And what did it say about the state of a man’s marriage—a vicar’s marriage—that his wife hoped he’d sin?

Ellen leaned forward to pinch off a blue pansy gone droopy in a crockery pot beside their bench. “Mean women enjoy knowing every option before a man is a painful compromise. When you are faithful, she can feel virtuously martyred, because the animal passions are beneath her. If you cheat, to use a vulgar term, then she is righteous, and you are guilty. A better bargain for her.”

Something had changed in the pretty, reserved Widow FitzEngle’s world, or in her view of the world, and Daniel suspected it had to do with making the acquaintance of a certain Mr. Windham who’d come nosing about the shire ostensibly in search of property several weeks past.

“I love my wife. I do.”

“Keep telling yourself that, and you will likely end up even lonelier.”

“Whatever do you mean?” He gazed at her in surprise, not because her words made no sense—they made too much sense—but because of the acerbic tone in which she’d uttered them. Ellen was not an acerbic woman.

While Olivia, in all her quiet and piety, was.

“I do not know the woman you call your wife, Daniel, whom you believe worthy of your love, but Olivia Banks is a narrow-minded, hypocritical, mean-spirited, petty little twit, and I cannot like her or name one person in Little Weldon who does.”

“She is pious,” Daniel reported, bewildered, “and sober, but not without charity or affection or friendly associations.”

“She lords her piety over every other lady of her acquaintance, and her charity is dispensed with such condescension that most people would rather refuse it, though that would hurt your feelings, so they don’t.” Ellen pulled her hand from his and swiped at stray locks that had escaped from her braid. “Her Lady’s Charitable Guild is a pit of vipers, all of the members currying favor with the vicar’s wife, and at one another’s expense.”

Ellen was confident of her words, and her tone left no doubt whatsoever regarding her sentiments.

“I cannot absorb what you are telling me. Olivia is my helpmeet. She visits the sick and those lying in. She has taken the burden of the parish books entirely from my shoulders, and has done so for years without complaining. She tends the household accounts so I might have more time for my parishioners.”

Bad enough for Daniel to harbor regrets about his marriage, but for the entire parish to regret it…?

“You are a good, godly man, Daniel, and I am sorry to offend, but your wife is the cruelest bitch. I would give anything to make that not so.”

“Bitch.” He repeated the word softly, wishing it didn’t resonate with some honest, miserable, long-silent part of him. “Bitch,” he muttered again, more softly. He hadn’t used the word about a human female since going up to university, and before then only when not in his father’s hearing.

While the bees buzzed over the glory of Ellen’s garden in spring, she recited to him a litany of meanness: Olivia belittled her husband, criticizing him for spending his “pittance” of a salary to feed his fancy horse, for his inability to condemn the myriad sinners and slackers about Little Weldon (and the one true, habitual drunk, for that matter), for not providing young Danny with sufficiently firm guidance.

“You are a good man, and Olivia would have her coven believe she married a selfish, spineless, puerile cipher, whose only chance of maintaining the appearance of competence at his calling rests with her selfless devotion.”

Daniel suspected Ellen was being diplomatic. She presented him a picture of a woman who was not merely petty, venal, and frustrated, but
hateful
.

“I believe you,” he said at length. “I believe, at any rate, that Olivia comports herself when out of my company in a manner that forces you to draw this conclusion about her.”

Bitch
. He knew full well the implications of the word, and it struck him with the force of unacknowledged intuition as an accurate epithet for Olivia. She criticized him, subtly, particularly when Letty came to visit, and Olivia had to constantly imply that he was not a competent provider, while insisting that managing the finances was no burden for her. She criticized Danny for not mastering skills that he was too young to even attempt. She criticized the parishioners for their parsimony, their sloth.

But she was a clever bitch, for her criticisms were carefully couched.

“Now, Danny, you mustn’t feel bad if you are slow at these simple sums. That would be arrogant, to assume that because other boys can master them, you can as well…”

“Living at the vicarage,” she’d said to Letty in Daniel’s hearing, “gives one endless opportunities to practice economies and the virtue of self-denial.”

“Isn’t it a shame,” she’d observed the day before her departure, “that George Dalton’s wife must bear him yet another child when he’s too intemperate to provide for the ones she’s presented him already? The poor woman…”

To Daniel, the Daltons were happy enough, and the
poor
woman
seemed quite proud of and contented with her smiling George. But Olivia was full of “Isn’t it a shame…?” and “We must remember to pray that Lorna Hamilton finds some self-discipline…” and “How blessed we are, that unlike Cheevers Miller…”

Beside him, Ellen played with the end of her thick, coppery braid. “Are you very upset?”

“I am disappointed in myself, but reassured, too, for having been… naughty with you, as you put it. And as for Olivia… I have known her lack of warmth was a disappointment to my flock for some time. I didn’t want to admit how much of a disappointment. That, I find, is the more disconcerting lapse.”

Ellen went after more fading pansies. “And you still don’t want to admit what a disappointment she is to you.”

Daniel watched her hands, saw competence in them, and the dirt worked into the creases. Again, he had the thought that this was a different Ellen FitzEngle. One who had always been here; he’d only had to offer her a naughty kiss to waken her.

The idea amused him, which wasn’t polite—or pious—at all.

“Perhaps I can barely begin to comprehend what a disappointment she is to me—and to Danny.” What a difficult pill that was to swallow—little Danny did not choose to be born, and he did not choose his circumstances on this earth.

“You will pray about this,” Ellen observed with some amusement. “Do me one favor.”

“Anything,” Daniel replied, meaning it. The woman could see him defrocked, and instead, she was defending him to his own conscience.

“Do not pray for absolution because you asked a friend for one kiss, a kiss that you could ask for from no other. It was just a kiss, Daniel, a lovely, sweet kiss. I thank you for it, in fact. You meant me no dishonor, probably just the opposite.”

“Not probably. I esteem you greatly.”

“And yourself not enough,” she retorted. “Come.” She rose. “As it appears I will be unable to further corrupt you with my florid charms, let us repair to the cider jug and what comforts simple friendship might avail us. We wouldn’t want Olivia to have any pretext for additional righteousness, and we are, after all, merely lonely.”

Ellen was unconcerned about the kiss itself, and perhaps she was right. Walking along beside her, Daniel realized that while Ellen was dear, lovely, and undoubtedly a woman, she was also convenient and discreet enough that he’d likely kissed her more out of desperation than true sexual attraction.