Phillip had no idea what Hartley Sedgwick, wills, or letters had to do with it, but he had met Hartley, and he could make an educated guess. “About that,” Phillip mused. “I think there might be a way to keep you above water. Would you be open to letting Lindley Priory?”
“I’d be open to burning it to the ground, to be frank. But I sold most of the furniture and I don’t know what kind of price I could get for an unfurnished house miles away from any civilization.”
“Well, I’d be your tenant. My steward would take over the running of your land,” he added, thinking aloud. That would mean he and Smythe would no longer have to undo the damage done by Easterbrook’s bloodthirsty steward. “But you would still get the rents.”
“I could leave,” Easterbrook said, looking as Jamie did when faced with an entire jar of greengage jam. “I could go live someplace cheap on the Continent,” he mused. In his distraction he forgot to keep the dog at bay, and was currently being accosted with kisses.
“I don’t think this part of the world has many happy memories for you,” Phillip said, feeling a kinship with this young man who had caused so much trouble.
Easterbrook’s expression shuttered. “You’re wrong there, Dacre. But no matter. I’ll take you up on your offer.”
“Write to—who’s the solicitor in the village—Crawford. Ask him to come up now to draft an agreement.”
Three hours later, Phillip—or rather an entity called The Sedgwick School for Wayward Children—was the tenant of Lindley Priory, and Easterbrook was riding south.
“This ought to cover your wages through Michaelmas,” Ben said the next morning, pushing coins across the vicarage kitchen table where Mrs. Winston sliced damsons for a pie.
The housekeeper only spared the coins the briefest glance before turning back to her plums. “I don’t need wages through Michaelmas but I’m getting married in about two hours, so I’ll accept it as a wedding present.” She deftly ran the knife through another plum and tossed the pit aside. “I heard Sir Martin is letting the Priory and going abroad. I had the news from Lottie Bannister whose young man is the gardener at the Priory. She said he left in the dead of night, giving orders for his solicitor to manage the lease without him. Apparently you made him leave.”
“I did nothing of the sort! Captain Dacre arranged it.”
“That’s not what I’ve heard. Everybody thinks you’re some kind of Robin Hood. You’re in danger of having ballads written about you.”
“I’m a man of the cloth,” he protested.
“A daft one.” She sprinkled sugar over the fruit. “Being as Sir Martin is running off to France or wherever, I doubt he’ll find time to appoint a new vicar. There’ll be nobody to give a sermon tomorrow.”
Ben nodded. “I’ll write to the bishop and see what’s to be done.”
“He won’t get your letter in time,” Mrs. Winston said. She was now thwacking and slapping a ball of pastry dough in a way that Ben found positively menacing. “You resigned, you weren’t defrocked.”
He shook his head. “I can’t.” The truth was that he didn’t want to stand before his congregation. He had always been their affable, amiable, utterly conventional vicar. The last two weeks had exposed him—not only to the good people of Kirkby Barton but also to himself—as something more complicated than that. He didn’t know yet how to live as that person, let alone how to be that person in the pulpit. Worse, he had begun to think Hartley had the right of it, and he couldn’t stand in front of a congregation and align himself with people who thought he committed a crime every time he went to bed with the person he loved.
She made a frustrated sound. “It’s not like you’re going to steal from the poor box. You’re an ordained clergyman and you ought to do what God requires of you.”
“I have some doubts about precisely what God requires of me and how it lines up with what the Church of England requires,” he said carefully, keeping his eyes on the dough rather than on Mrs. Winston’s face.
She paused, her hands still on her rolling pin. “It’s like that, is it? You’ve gone the way of your heathen father?”
“No,” he said quickly, not pausing to wonder what kind of lively debates would take place in his father’s household after this morning’s marriage. “More like . . . Unitarianism.”
She waved a floury hand and got back to rolling out her dough. The intricacies of the church didn’t interest her. “I daresay you could do it once. Preach your heart out on whatever you want. Go out in a blaze of glory.”
He stole a slice of plum. “That would cause quite a bit more of a stir than you’re envisioning.”
“Brotherly love.”
He nearly choked on the plum. “Pardon?” he asked when he had regained his breath.
She turned her circle of dough neatly into the dish, a small bit of kitchen magic he never tired of watching. “You could preach about David and Jonathan.”
He stared at her for a solid half minute as she poured the sugared fruit into the dish and covered it with another circle of pastry. Was it possible that she knew what she was suggesting? By the faint hint of pink on her weathered cheeks, he thought she might.
“Maybe it runs in the family.”
“Pardon?” he asked faintly.
“Wildness. We all know what your father is, bless him. And you, breaking an engagement, whoever would have thought. Quite wild, the lot of you. It must be in the blood. Although,” she added, turning her attention to crimping the pastry, “you were always a fine clergyman.”
He still wasn’t certain how much she knew, or whether she even disapproved.
“David and Jonathan,” she repeated as she slid the pie into the oven. “That would be quite the thing.” She nodded, wiped her hands on her apron, and nodded with the satisfaction of a job well done. “Now let’s go to the church. I daresay your father’s already waiting.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Ben brought his few meager boxes of belongings to Barton Hall, but Phillip noticed that he hadn’t unpacked them. Instead, the boxes stood against one wall of the room that was nominally his own. In practice, he had slept in Phillip’s bed both nights since Jamie’s misadventure, only stopping in his own room for fresh clothes and to give his bed sheets a plausible rumple.
When they made love, Phillip felt like Ben was trying to disappear inside his body. He delved inside Phillip with greedy, possessive fingers and sucked him until Phillip thought he’d be devoured. Even after Phillip was sated and oversensitive, Ben kept touching, as if there were a limited supply of touches in the world and he had to get his fill while he could.
Waking up beside Ben was achingly perfect, but it tore at Phillip’s heart to think that it might not be enough. Their gentle touches and murmured words of love were everything to Phillip, but surely Ben deserved something finer and truer than a lifetime of creeping through hallways and keeping secrets from the world.
Then he remembered what Ned had told him. Perhaps these were the whisperings of his melancholy, and not truth.
“Ben,” he murmured as they lay awake, waiting for those first fatal stripes of light to appear in the sky. “Will you be happy with me? Is this enough?”
Ben rolled to face him. “So much more than enough. It’s just a different kind of enough than I had ever thought of, and it’s taking my mind a little time to settle in.”
Phillip understood that. He pulled Ben close, his fair head resting on Phillip’s shoulder, and kissed the top of his head. His hair had bleached to the color of the palest wheat over the last weeks, and the bridge of his nose was covered in a welter of freckles. He also had a tenseness around his eyes that Phillip thought hadn’t been there before.
“Will you come to church today?” Ben asked later as they were getting dressed.
“If you want me to, of course.”
“It’ll be the last time I do this. So, yes. I’d like it.”
At the breakfast table, Phillip listened with some interest as Ben explained to t
he children that he would no longer be the vicar. “There are some aspects of church doctrine I don’t agree with, and I don’t think I can carry on as vicar.”
“Blasphemy.” Peggy’s eyes sparkled with evident delight.
“Not quite that,” Ben said, amused.
“The doctrine of the trinity?” Ned asked, more concerned than his sister.
“Not even as dramatic as that.”
“Are you going to preach in a chapel and wear one of those odd caps the Methodists do?” Jamie asked, his mouth full of plum pie that Mrs. Winston had sent down from Fellside Grange. Evidently pie was now a breakfast food at Barton Hall.
“Certainly not.”
That seemed to settle things as far as the children cared. They didn’t ask what he did plan to do, apparently secure in the knowledge that he would stay indefinitely at the hall. Phillip wished he was as certain.
After breakfast, they all dressed in their finest, filled their pockets with boiled sweets to occupy their mouths, and set out for St. Aelred’s.
The tiny church, which had been dismally empty the last time Phillip had entered it, was now hot and crowded. He gathered that whatever ill Ben had done his reputation by jilting Miss Crawford was undone by having sent Easterbrook packing, and Phillip was feeling quite satisfied with himself for having generated that particular tale himself. Mrs. Morris, his chief co-conspirator in spreading that piece of gossip, glanced over at him from her pew, nodding her head and tapping the side of her nose in acknowledgment.
The Crawfords were all together in their family pew along with a dark-haired man Phillip was startled to recognize as Walsh. He hadn’t thought Walsh went in for churchgoing any more than Phillip did himself.
And yet Phillip was sitting in a hard-backed church pew anyway, because Ben needed him, and he would go wherever Ben required him. Perhaps Walsh had a similar motive; the very feminine pink parasol he held in his lap, the way Miss Crawford leaned towards him to whisper in his ear, and the expression of smug satisfaction on Mrs. Crawford’s face all indicated that an offer might be in the making.
Yesterday, when Phillip told his friend that he wouldn’t be returning to the Patroclus, Walsh hadn’t evinced any surprise. “The admiralty won’t be best pleased,” he had said. “I’m afraid we’ll both be in their black books.” Phillip had been too caught up in his own thoughts to ask what Walsh had meant, but now he wondered if Walsh meant to marry Miss Crawford and resign his own post on the Patroclus as well. Very interesting indeed. He turned his attention back to the pulpit.
Ben made a very striking appearance in his cassock and surplice. He looked grave and a bit sad.
“This will be the last sermon I give at St. Aelred’s,” Ben said. “Probably the last sermon I give anywhere.” A murmur went through the congregation. “It’s fitting for me to use this, my last sermon, to talk about charity. Love. People more learned than I could explain the finer points of translation, but all of us here today know that we are commanded to love one another.” He paused. “That’s not what I’m going to talk about.”
Phillip was not certain whether what followed was a good sermon, but the congregation followed with rapt attention and wide eyes as Ben spoke meanderingly of how the marriage of a friend was a fitting time for God to work a miracle. “Water into wine,” he said musingly. “It would seem a petty use of God’s power if it weren’t a wedding present.” Here his eyes strayed to Miss Crawford and Walsh. “And then there are the vows. There is that old, quaint promise to worship with one’s body, another mingling of love and prayer.” Phillip wasn’t certain he knew what that meant, or if anyone else did, but what he did know was that Ben meant what he said.
Ben fell silent for long enough that the people in the pew behind Phillip started to rustle. Peggy turned around to glare, causing Ned to elbow her firmly in the side.
“And then there are David and Jonathan.” Phillip had always been a lax student and couldn’t immediately place the reference. “We’re told that their souls were knit together. Jonathan gave David his robe and his sword, his bow and his belt. They loved one another and had a covenant. Not water to wine, but a different kind of miracle.
“Friendship and love,” Ben went on. “Vows and covenants. It’s the only kind of miracle most of us will experience, whatever shape it comes in.”
Perhaps some of the other churchgoers were confused or disturbed, but Phillip would never know because he couldn’t take his eyes off Ben. He knew Ben was saying this to him, and that it was important, and he didn’t want to miss a word.
Ben spent longer than usual in the vestry, hanging up his surplice and cassock with more care than necessary, partly because it was the last time and partly because he didn’t know what awaited him outside. He doubted most, if any, of his parishioners would have read between the lines to see his sermon as anything other than a meditation on the holiness of friendship and love. But Phillip had been there, and Phillip might have recognized it for what it was.
Ben had meant it as an offering, albeit a one-sided sort of one. He was trying to tell Phillip, in the only way he knew how, that he believed that the love between them was as good as any marriage that could be sanctified in a sacrament. He had officiated at too many weddings, believed too earnestly in the vows he witnessed, not to believe that those words had importance. Or, at least, they did to him. And he wanted, somehow, to tell that to Phillip. He told himself that he didn’t need Phillip to reciprocate; Phillip loved him, and Phillip wanted a life with him, and that was all that Ben needed from Phillip.
He fussed over the cuffs of his street clothes, laced himself slowly into his boots, all while listening for the quiet that would signal that the church was empty and the churchyard had resumed its usual sleepy air. Leaving through a side door to avoid any straggling parishioners, the first thing he saw was Phillip leaning against the lych-gate.
“I sent the children home ahead of us,” Phillip said, his expression too blank for Ben to guess his thoughts. “Go the long way with me?” he asked.
Ben nodded. The long way would circumvent the village. Probably the cleverest thing would be to let Phillip bring up the topic of the sermon, but Ben hardly made it twenty paces down the lane before he spoke.
“I meant every word of it,” he said quietly.
“I know you did. You always do. It was the most reckless damned thing I’ve ever seen you do.”
“It wasn’t that obvious.”
“Of course it wasn’t. But it would have been if I had climbed over the pews and thrown myself into your arms, which I might very well have done.”
Ben felt his pulse quicken and his heart pound madly against the walls of his chest. “Is that so?” he managed.
“It’s damned well so.” Phillip’s voice was gruff. Ben didn’t dare so much as glance at him. “But we can’t talk about it now.”
“Quite.” Ben tipped his hat at a couple walking in the opposite direction.
“Because otherwise I’m going to shove you against the nearest wall and get us both sent to prison.”
Once they were a safe distance into the wood, Phillip looked over his shoulder, then rounded on him and grabbed his arms. He made good on his promise by pressing him against the trunk of a thick oak tree and kissing him hard.
“Tell me again,” Phillip growled.
“I love you.”
“More. The rest of it. That night we first were together, you mentioned the marriage vows. I didn’t understand then, but I do now. It means something to you. So tell me.”
“I don’t have any worldly goods to endow you with,” Ben whispered.
“I’m not rich but I have enough for both of us to be comfortable. And you’ll accept it? Will you, Ben? Not just as an investor in your school, but because what’s mine is yours. You’ll understand that it’s nothing to do with freeloading or whatever it is your father did?”
Ben swallowed. “Yes. I understand.”
“Now keep going. I want to hear the good part.�
�
Ben laughed despite the tears in his eyes, and looked away.
“No, look at me when you say it.”
“With my body, I thee worship.”
“And I do too. Benedict, Benedict. The words may not mean the same to me as they do to you, but I’d swear it on anything you liked. I love you and never ever want you to doubt that. You’re mine and I’m yours and . . .” He squeezed Ben’s hands. “This is all new to me. I’m in a new world without a map or a chart, but you’re my compass, Ben, and I know we’ll find a way.”
They kissed slowly in the shade of the oak tree, as if they had all the time in the world, because maybe they did. But the knowledge that there was a place where all of them belonged, a place where they could be safe and welcomed and together, made him feel like this was even more his rightful home than it ever had been.
“A month ago,” Phillip whispered, “I was dreading going home, and now, well, I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life here. With you.”
Phillip brushed a kiss across his lips, and Ben could tell he was smiling. “Take me home, Phillip. Please.”
Acknowledgments
This book owes even more than usual to the insight and feedback of my editor, Elle Keck, and the help of everyone at Avon. My critique partner, Margrethe Martin, managed to make sense of an early draft despite my having changed the characters’ names several times, sometimes mid-chapter. Many thanks to Laura Tatum, for sharing her experience with dyslexia. Deidre Knight, my agent, is endlessly supportive, and for that I’m truly grateful.
Unmasked by the Marquess
Keep reading for a sneak peek at Cat Sebastian’s debut traditional regency romance,
UNMASKED BY THE MARQUESS
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