Holy Scoundrel (6 page)

“Mama used to sing to me sometimes,” she said, then, quick as a curious kitten, she scrambled from Lacey’s lap and headed for a small trunk beneath a shaft of dust-filled sunlight. “This is mine.” Bridget ran her small hands over the leather top. “My baby clothes are inside. Do you want to see how little I was?”

Lacey thought of the dress she’d sewn in anticipation of her own babe’s birth and bit back the cry in her heart.

Looking at baby things would not be easy, but Lacey went to kneel beside the child whose wide, innocent eyes begged a response that could not be denied.

The trunk’s lid was ceremoniously lifted, and the topmost item, a soft, shell-pink bonnet, made Bridget squeal with delight. “I used to b
e
thi
s
tiny!” She tried it on, but it sat like a cone on her head and she couldn’t make the ribbons meet beneath her chin, so she tossed it in Lacey’s lap. “Wait till you see my favorite. It has yellow roses and—”

“What’s this, lovey, making a mess for me, are you?” Mac bustled Bridget aside to repack the baby things.

“I thought you were looking for Clara’s trunk,” she said. Mac gave Lacey a piercing look, claimed the small trunk, and made for the stairs, taking something without name that Lacey wanted without reason.

CHAPTER FOUR

Mac muttered her way down the attic stairs. Lacey didn’t know why she was disappointed; she hadn’t wanted to look at baby clothes. Dismissing her chagrin as nonsense, she sat forward, and one of Bridget’s baby bonnets fell from her lap. Almost expecting Nanny to snatch it up, Lace slipped it into her pocket.

On bended knee, Bridget stared into Clara’s open trunk as if it held a nest of vipers. Lacey knelt beside her and slipped an arm around her shoulder to pull her close. “Show me your favorite of Mama’s dresses.”

Bridget shook her head, swallowed, and sniffed.

“Oh, darling, don’t cry.”

“What’s this?” came a strange, squeaky voice. “Did I hear someone crying?” A hand puppet peeked around the doorjamb, from nowhere, appearing both clandestine and curious.

Bridget gasped and approached it in awe, stopping a distance away to shake her head. “I’m not crying. The smell inside my Mama’s trunk itches my nose and makes my eyes . . . wet.” She wiped her face with her sleeve. “See? All better. What’
s
you
r
name?”

“I’m Hector the Hungry Hedgehog and I’m lonesome. Will you talk with me?”

Bridget nodded, making Lacey wonder if Ivy could see around corners.

“What’s your name?” Hector asked.

“Bridget. My papa, but not, he calls me Cricket.”

“You have a papa, but not?”

Bridget nodded again. “PapaGabe.”

With a frisson of elated apprehension, Lacey wondered what Gabe woul
d
reall
y
think of the name.

“Ah, I see
.
Tha
t
papa. Well, then, Cricket, do you think perhaps you might be just a little bit sad today?”

“I am not sad.”

“Worried then?”

Bridget pondered the possibility and finally nodded.

“Can you tell me what’s bothering you? Perhaps I can help.”

Bridget sighed, raised her arms and dropped them in defeat. “I want to keep MyLacey and I’m afraid my . . . PapaGabe won’t let me,” she ended on a rush.

“And who is MyLacey? Is she a kitten or a puppy?”

Bridget took Lacey’s hand and dragged her before Hedgehog. “She’s my mama’s cousin and I want her to stay. Can you talk to my . . . to PapaGabe for me?”

Lacey had come home, expecting the freedom to leave at anytime, but now she knew for certain that she could not. Nor would she want it any other way.

“MyLacey is your cousin, then?”

Bridget looked up at her, wide-eyed and expectant. “Are you?”

Lace knelt down, tweaked Bridget’s nose, and nodded
because the lump in her throat made it impossible to speak.

“Sh
e
i
s
my cousin. She is!” The discovery clearly pleased Bridget. However, smiling did not come easily or naturally to the child, a sad truth that Lacey planned to correct.

Hedgehog bowed gallantly. “Hello, Cousin Lacey.”

“Nooo, it’s MyLacey. NannyMac said so.”

“Oops, sorry. Hmm. Well, do you smell that?” Hedgehog’s nose crinkled with enthusiastic sniffs. “I think dinner’s about ready. Mmm. Before I go, Cricket, promise me you’ll tell your PapaGabe how you feel about MyLacey. I’m sure he’ll listen. He cares very much about you, and about MyLacey, too, and he wouldn’t want either of you to worry. All right?”

Bridget’s sigh was audible. “All right.” Her answer, however, was barely and reluctantly given.

“Good. Can I visit you again? I like talking with you.”

“Yes, please.”

“G’bye, Cricket. Bye, MyLacey.”

Bridget stepped into Lacey’s embrace after Hector left, and they stayed that way, until Bridget spoke softly near her ear. “Do w
e
gott
a
go through Mama’s trunk?”

Joy infused Lacey. Bridget clearly knew the difference between her and Clara, and she loved her anyway. “No, Baby, we don’t. Let’s go downstairs. You can brush my hair so I can put it up again.”

“Will you brush mine?”

“I’d love to.”

Gabe was so busy with vicariate work, he came late for Ivy—at one o’clock, not eleven—and MacKenzie poured Gabe’s cold pot of coffee down the drain because the two men never did make it back by teatime.

Lacey toured Rectory Farm, Bridget’s hand in hers, while Bridget talked nonstop, from buttery to bower, dovecote to stable, as if Lacey had never seen any of it before, when, in fact, this was all part of her childhood.

Gabriel, like his father and grandfather before him, had expected to owe his rectory living to her estranged family. Right now, however, her distant cousin, Victor Daventry, held the title: Eleventh Duke of Ashcroft. She didn’t know Victor well as an adult, but what she did know, she didn’t much like. He’d been degrading and insulting after she’d named his younger brother, Nick, as the father of her child. Though Nick had offered himself up for the position, a bold lie, because he’d been bound for America the following week, anyway, which would put him beyond the long arm of her mother’s fury. A dear friend and distant cousin, Nick had practically saved her life and definitely Gabriel’s living. Because if the truth came out, Gabriel could never have been a vicar.

On the other hand, when she told Gabe that Nick fathered her babe, after she told her mother the lie, she expected from Gabe . . . trust, faith, and an unwavering love that denied the possibility of betrayal. She’d wanted to hear, “Nick, by all that’s holy, is not your babe’s father! I am!” Gabriel should have believed as much to the roots of his being. Those word
s
shoul
d
have slipped off his tongue. Later, they could have told her mother that Gabe would save her by marrying her and raising Nick’s babe as his own.

Her mother would have rewarded and adored her hero for turning her from an unwed mother into a respectable vicar’s wife. Gabriel Kendrick would have become a well-paid vicar and a pampered son-in-law.

At the worst, if he believed her lie, she’d still expected him to offer his name in marriage. But he did not offer. He paled, turned, and left Ashcroft Towers.

She had not expected to be exiled, to return a pariah, or to find the vicar at a distinct disadvantage in his livelihood.

Prout held Gabriel’s reigns, and a scarier life she could not imagine. It had always been whispered that Lady Prou
t
got her way or someone would pay.

So long as Bridget was not made to do so.

At an ancient, gnarled beech, Lacey boosted her up. And when they perched together in the lowest, widest fork, Lace took from her pocket a beloved storybook, adapted and hand-printed by Clara’s mother, calle
d
Grimm for Girls
,
in which she’d left out the gruesome parts. Lacey rea
d
Snow Whit
e
—until Gabriel’s “Good God,” made them look down.

Hands on his hips, he stared up at them, close enough for Lacey to— She tapped his shoulder with her slippered foot. “Join us. It’s cozy up here.”

To Bridget’s wide-eyed shock, he did, which made her scoot into Lacey’s lap, which put a broody storm in Gabriel’s eyes.

The tempest cleared quickly enough, however, when Bridget told him that MyLacey planned to rea
d
Rapunze
l
next.

“Proceed,” he said. “I shall remain quiet as a church mouse so, Cricket, you can hear every delectable word.”

She hid her face against Lacey’s breast.

But quiet as mouse bait, he remained for a good hour—except for several speaking glances her way. During that time, Lacey became alive to details: her raspy voice and dry lips, his attention to the tongue with which she moistened those lips. The trembling hand she hid beneath her skirt but had to reveal or lose her single-handed death-grip on the book. She became more acutely aware of Gabriel’s thigh pressed along her own, of his stroking the hair on Cricket’s sleepy head pressed wondrously to her breast. She felt for all the world as if they were a family. Impossible with him grieving for Clara and mistrusting her.

When she read the last page, she hated for the peaceful interlude to end, however much of an anomaly she found it.

At dinner, Ivy regaled them with a story about a brawny farmer with the toothache who’d monopolized Gabriel’s afternoon, the man moaning and groaning about dying and getting it over with.

“He would accept help,” Ivy said, “if Gabriel, himself, would extract the tooth, which could only be done by drowning the sniveling giant in enough spirits to knock him off his clumsy feet.”

“I had no idea that vicars extracted teeth,” Lacey said.

Gabriel regarded her soberly, though his eye twinkle belied his mood. “There is no end to my talent,” he said, sending a charged shiver of anticipation through her.

That night, Lacey experienced the rare joy of giving Bridget a bath. When she brought her downstairs afterward to say goodnight, Bridget in her lawn night-rail, hair brushed to a silken shine, slippers on her feet, Gabriel rose as they entered the parlor. He bit his lip, Lace saw, against a treacherous smile. “Bridget, you look lovely. Lace, you look as if you lost a fight with a flapping duck.”

Lacey grinned, but Bridget just cocked her head. Had she never heard anything so playfully absurd from her PapaGabe before?

To Lacey’s disappointment, Bridget had not addressed him as such, nor asked to speak with him. Not that she cared whether Bridget asked for her to stay, she simply wanted her to talk to Gabriel. Say something. Anything. Why she wanted it, since she herself was secretly hoping to be forced to take Bridget to raise, Lacey wasn’t sure. She guessed she didn’t know what she wanted anymore.

It no longer mattered; Bridget’s needs would come first.

Obviously, the task of putting her down for the night was Gabriel’s, which Bridget accepted. However, after she took his offered hand, she dragged him with her to grab Lacey’s hand and tugged her off the settee and from the room along with them.

Thus, Lacey found herself climbing up an evening-dim stairway with Gabriel, a child between them, as it should have been but for the fact that God had taken their daughter home with Him at her birth. As perfect as the scene seemed, she must remember that she and Gabriel were not meant to be. She only hoped Bridget would not find the lesson a difficult one to understand when the time came for them to part.

She would not go far, but leave this house, she must.

When they entered the child’s room, Gabriel took off his frockcoat and threw it over a chair. Bridget climbed on her bed, knelt and began to unbutton his waistcoat, unhooking his fob and dropping it and his watch into one of his pockets. She unhooked the button studs at his cuffs, put them in another pocket and rolled up his shirtsleeves to his elbows.

He gazed at Lacey over Bridget’s head, giving her a lopsided half-grin that shot straight to her heart. “Cricket likes to do buttons. She’s been doing them since . . . forever.”

Lacey felt like a child out in the snow, nose to the window, gazing on a warm family scene in which she ached to be included.

Bridget undid Gabriel’s top shirt buttons to free his cleric’s collar and tuck it into his breast pocket with his studs—as she must have done when he came in last night.

“Now, MyLacey,” she said.

“What?”

Bridget motioned her forward. “C’mere.”

Lacey got her top three buttons and the bow at her bodice undone, then Bridget placed her head on Lacey’s breast, another skip to her heart, those small arms coming around her waist to squeeze.

Grief, love, sorrow, and joy mingled and welled up in Lacey. She laid her cheek against Bridget’s soft curls and closed her eyes. “Thank you for a splendid day, sweetheart. It was the best I ever had.”