Miss Delightful Read online

  Miss Delightful

  Mischief in Mayfair book 2

  Grace Burrowes

  Grace Burrowes Publishing

  Copyright © 2021 by Grace Burrowes

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  If you uploaded this book two, or downloaded it from a free file sharing, torrent, or other pirate site, you did so in violation of the law and against the author’s wishes. Please don’t be a pirate.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter One

  “That is a baby.” Alasdhair MacKay stood back lest the infant or the woman holding it touch him as she sailed over the threshold into his foyer.

  “How astute you are, Colonel MacKay.”

  “Mister Mackay will do.” Formerly of His Majesty’s army. Alasdhair closed the door because the day was chilly and babies were fragile. Also because this situation needed no witnesses among the nosy neighbors. “And who might you be?”

  He turned his signature commanding office glower on the woman, and allowed his burr to deepen to the consistency of a growl. He did not so much as glance at the bundle in her arms, one glimpse of a cherubic pink face being more than enough.

  “Miss Dorcas Delancey.” She dipped a curtsey, baby and all. “This good fellow appears to be your son, so I will leave him with you—”

  “He is not my son.”

  She turned earnest gray-green eyes from Alasdhair to the baby and back again. “Perhaps not your legitimate son, but there is a certain—”

  “Newborns of native British stock all have blue eyes. That child is not my son, and you and I have not been introduced Miss Delancey.” He would recall an introduction to a such a woman. She exuded propriety and decorum, could doubtless deliver whole sermons on divine plans and mankind’s fallenness.

  So could Alasdhair, did she but know it. So could any soldier fortunate enough to return from the wars.

  “He’s not a newborn,” she said. “The child is a good six months or thereabouts. He’s beginning to teeth, you see, and that is a good thing. The landlady heard him yelling and realized his mama was not with him. He was having rather a bad time of it.”

  A coldness assailed Alasdhair, the same coldness that had come over him in battle. His body would function with heightened efficiency, his mind would leap along paths of strategy and intuition, while his heart froze into granite.

  But there was no battle here. No enemy. Only this well dressed female with her drawing room English and earnest gaze, and that… that bundle of trouble.

  “I am sorry for the lad’s misfortune, but he is not my son.”

  “He is still your responsibility.” She unfurled the word responsibility like a pristine banner of righteous certainty. “Melanie Fairchild named you as his guardian, and as she is on longer extant, and her will is quite clear, that makes you—”

  “What?”

  The coldness had never made Alasdhair light-headed before. “I saw her just last week. She was in great good health.” Melanie, like so many of the women offering themselves on London’s streets, had been a good girl once, the kind to suffer terribly when deemed no longer worthy of that appellation. She’d been quiet when last Alasdhair had called on her, perhaps tired. Only that. “She cannot be dead.”

  “I am sorry,” Miss Delancey said. “You cared for her.”

  “Of course I cared for her.” Alasdhair cared for them all, fool that he was. “She had come so far, against such odds. She had a cousin or auntie who was helping her, though the rest of her family was a worthless pack of pious hypocrites. She doted on that baby, went on and on about him.”

  What a smart lad he was, how merry, what a good sleeper. Mellie had rhapsodized about one tiny infant. He had been her reason for living.

  “I apologize for being the bearer of sad tidings, but you will have young John here to console you.”

  “No, I will not.”

  The baby gurgled, a happy sound accompanied by a tiny fist flailing in the direction of Miss Delancey’s not-quite-dainty nose.

  “Might we continue this discussion somewhere warmer, Colonel MacKay.”

  “Plain MacKay will do.” The dictates of gentlemanly deportment required that Alasdhair take the lady’s burden from her, but he could not. “This way.”

  He led her through a townhouse that was more of a roofed campsite than a dwelling. London was not his home, God be thanked, but he bided here from time to time and had cousins here. No siblings, and certainly not a son.

  “My study,” Alasdhair said, opening the door reluctantly. “My guest parlor is unheated.” Equally important, the guest parlor had windows visible from the street, and the draperies on those windows were tied back, the better to display Alasdhair’s social life to any passerby.

  Fortunately, he had no social life.

  Based on the lady’s merino wool cloak, matching blue gloves, and nacre buttons, she was one of those women who thrived on going from friend to friend collecting gossip. She would expect a tea tray. Where were her chaperone, lady’s maid, and footman for that matter?

  “It’s half-day,” Alasdhair went on, “which is why you find me answering my own front door and without help in the kitchen.”

  “You will need a wetnurse,” Miss Delancey said, taking a place in the middle of Alasdhair’s favorite napping sofa. “I’ll have Mrs. Jacobs send along Melanie’s effects, and I’m sure the baby’s dresses and whatnot will tide you over for a time. He’s taking some cereal, but he wasn’t yet weaned.”

  Alasdhair remained on his feet, pacing the length of the carpet. “Miss Delancey, I care not which society for the oppression of beggars you represent. I have no need to know which variety of meddling fool you are, but I must observe that your hearing appears deficient. I cannot take in that baby. I am a bachelor. I have no staff to care for a child. I have no wish to care for a child.”

  Not quite accurate. He had no ability to care for a child.

  “Has anybody seen to Mellie’s final arrangements?” Alasdhair could not bear the thought of her lying in a pauper’s grave, nobody to mourn her, nobody to leave a single flower.

  “Please do sit, Mr. MacKay. You have had a shock.”

  Why were women such as Miss Delancey always telling others what to do? “How did she die?”

  Miss Delancey adjusted the blanket swaddling the baby. “She surrendered herself to the embrace of Father Thames. No inquest has been held because we have no body. A woman fitting Melanie’s description made her way to the Strand Bridge last night, and Melanie’s favorite bonnet and slippers washed up on the morning tide.”

  The proper name for that newly opened bridge was Waterloo Bridge, an irony when many of the women who chose to die there were war widows. Alasdhair perched a hip against the battered desk. He’d have a word with the river police, and see what the mud larks had to say.

  First, he had to get this woman, and that baby out of his house.

  “Send the lad to his mother’s family,” he said. “They can pretend, as all the best families do, that h
e’s the offspring of a widowed cousin in Scotland with too many mouths to feed. Make him into a badge of virtue for the very Christians who all but threw him to the lions.”

  One do-gooder spinster relation had taken pity on the child. Mellie had never mentioned her by name, but the pittance that auntie or cousin had regularly sent along had been enough. Mellie—and Alasdhair—had made sure of that.

  “With you named as legal guardian, Miss Fairchild’s family would have no authority to raise the child.”

  “I will cheerfully give my permission for them to do just that.”

  “Are you ever truly cheerful, Mr. MacKay?”

  She tucked the child against the corner of the sofa, banking pillows around him. Swaddled in his blanket, he could hardly go crawling off across the cushions, but still, the lady took precautions.

  Did he even know how to crawl yet?

  “I will be very cheerful when I contemplate this boy growing up in the bosom of his nearest and dearest. I am a stranger to him. No relation at all. I have no children and don’t expect I will be so blessed. Take him away, Miss Delancey, and I wish you best of luck with him.”

  The words hurt, like telling a wounded man he was bound for the surgeon’s tent. A boy barely shaving was to lose a limb, if not his life, and all Alasdhair had been able to do was stop by to offer a nip from his flask if the soldier survived the day.

  “Melanie chose you to raise him, Mr. MacKay. You had best reconcile yourself to that honor.” The woman rose, and though she was not tall, she carried herself with dignity. She undid the frogs of her cloak and draped it over the sofa.

  Her figure was a trifle on the lush side, though her face was plain. Regular features, nothing to rhapsodize about. Every aspect of her physiognomy was one degree off laudable. Her nose a bit too strong, her hair not quite red enough to qualify as titian. Her chin was a shade stubborn, and her mouth wider than was strictly refined. Her eyes were gray-green, not the brilliant green of emeralds or the moss green of the fairies.

  Green like hills of the Scottish borders on a brooding autumn day, perhaps. Nothing more remarkable than that.

  To be a plain creature in a society that valued beauty and malice equally was a tribulation, a battlefield of sorts. Nobody, apparently, had informed Miss Delancey of the challenges inherent in her circumstances. She inspected the framed copy of the dispatch mentioning the notable gallantry of Lieutenant Colonel Alasdhair MacKay, Colonel Sir Orion Goddard, and Major Dylan Powell.

  From there she moved to a landscape of the River Tweed, and Alasdhair realized he was being lectured with silence.

  “I am no relation to that child, Miss Delancey, but I suspect you are.”

  She smiled, a sweet, surprisingly impish curve of her lips. “I am indeed an exponent of that tribe of pious hypocrites who turned their backs on Melanie. She and I were cousins. We grew up together, and when she ran off with her handsome soldier, I knew exactly what her fate would be. We lost touch for a few years, but then she wrote to me, and I thanked God for that.”

  “So why not take in the boy now?”

  The lady folded her arms. Perhaps in deference to her cousin’s passing, she was attired in a blue so dark as to qualify as mourning attire, or nearly so.

  “What do you think his fate will be, with my father angling for a bishopric, and my great-uncle already in possession of one? Do suppose John will be permitted to dine with us at table? Will he be made to say the grace and quote all the nasty proverbs and passages about ungrateful children, Jezebels, and Magdalens? I can assure you that will be the least of the tender regard to befall him, and heaven help the boy if he’s given to running in the house, yelling, or talking back. He birched, lectured, and bread-and-watered within an inch of his life—for his own good, of course.”

  One of the reasons Wellington was so highly regarded by the enlisted men was his insistence on reducing the barbarity of military discipline. A missing button was no longer a pretext for flogging a soldier to death, thanks to Old Hookey. But then, Wellington had been unable to conscript replacements for the casualties, so perhaps his stance had been pragmatic rather than honorable.

  “Nobody flogs babies.”

  Miss Delancey regarded Alasdhair steadily, and his insides went squirmy.

  “Babies cry, Mr. Mackay, a lot. They make messes and drool and refuse to sleep when it’s dark outside. Babies cannot tell us what hurts or frightens them. They can only squall and whimper or go off their feed. Don’t delude yourself that I would be free to intercede much on his behalf.”

  Miss Delancey stalked over to Alasdhair, her bootheels rapping against the carpet. “I am permitted my charitable works,” she said, “and that umbrella permits me the occasional deviation from propriety, such as this call upon you. If you cannot take in this child, then arrange for him to be fostered somewhere safe. Not one of those dreadful baby farms, not the foundling homes. Take responsibility for him, or you are wishing upon the boy a fate no child should endure. Melanie asked this of you, and I demand it.”

  Alasdhair’s paternal great-uncle had been an old-style Lowland Methodist. Three-hour sermons had been nothing in his congregation, and grace could go on for half an hour when the old man was in good form.

  The squirmy feeling acquired the dimensions of resignation. Defeat was imminent, retreat a certainty.

  “You may leave him with me for now,” Alasdhair said, “but use your charitable connections to find a proper place for him. Your father’s household might not be appropriate for an illegitimate child, but a soldier’s bachelor quarters aren’t much better.”

  Her smile returned, a benevolence so palpable and good-hearted that basking and wallowing came to mind.

  “I knew Melanie’s faith in you was justified. I will return tomorrow morning, Mr. MacKay, with a wetnurse if I can find one. He can make do with warm, thin porridge until morning, though you will also need a supply of clean clouts.”

  Alasdhair eyed the bundle waving chubby fists at nothing in particular. “While will I need a supply of clouts? He’s only one boy.”

  Miss Delancey’s smile acquired a hint of mischievous. “Use your nose, sir. It’s a very fine nose, and I’m sure you will deduce the situation soon enough. Until tomorrow.”

  She shook out her cloak and swept it around her shoulders with a graceful flourish, then marched for the door. She had a good, sturdy figure, probably the robust health of the inveterate crusader.

  Those thoughts hummed along at the periphery of Alasdhair’s mind, while the reality of the child’s presence occupied the center of his mental stage. The front door closed, and the ticking clock on the mantel exactly matched the cadence of Alasdhair’s thumping heart.

  “You and me, lad,” he muttered, “for the nonce. Only for the nonce.” His brisk tone of voice apparently did not fool the child, who regarded him with owlish caution. “The lady has gone, and we’re to make do on short rations until she comes back. I’m MacKay.”

  How was the boy to learn to speak if nobody talked to him? Alasdhair came to within two feet of the sofa and bent to take up the child.

  He straightened, assailed by a spectacularly foul miasma. “That woman. That woman ambushed me. That infernal woman ambushed me.”

  The baby flailed his fists, and tried to kick against his blankets. His little face squinched up, and Alasdhair had no choice but to lift him off the sofa.

  “I will court martial her,” Alasdhair muttered, trying to cradle the child closely, but not too closely. “I will have her drummed out of the regiment. I will strip her of rank and see her reduced to private. Put me on latrine duty, will she?”

  He kept up a similar patter—the boy seemed to enjoy it—until they reached the laundry. Alasdhair set the baby among a basket of folded towels, and took a knife to the first clean length of linen he found.

  “Is this a table napkin?” Dorcas asked, peering at the cloth tied about John’s little waist. The linen was edged with whitework embroidery on one side, though the make-
shift nappy drooped around John’s belly.

  “You see before you the remains of a table cloth,” Mr. MacKay said. “I seldom entertain, and needs must. The boy enjoys healthy digestion.”

  The boy had reached the indignant phase of hunger. “Timmens, you will please take Master John to the kitchen. He has missed you.”

  Timmens pressed a kiss to the baby’s crown. “I’ve missed him too. Come along, poppet. Time for your breakfast.”

  Mr. MacKay watched the wetnurse depart, though his expression gave away nothing. Not relief, not worry, not gratitude for a problem solved. Melanie had spoken highly of him, but then, Melanie’s judgment when it came to the male of the species was suspect.

  “That is John’s regular wetnurse?” he asked.

  “She is. Her baby was a chrisom-child. Melanie tended to John herself for the first few months, but she claimed her supply was inadequate. Timmens was stopping by first thing in the day and at bedtime, and Melanie was making do with porridge during the day and if John woke up a night.”

  The landlady had provided those details, and packed up the pathetic box of belongings Melanie had left behind.

  “You’ll want proper nappies for John,” Dorcas went on, perching on the edge of the lumpy sofa in Mr. MacKay’s study. “Up to a dozen or so per day. He’ll need a cradle too, as I gather he was sharing Melanie’s cot, and that cannot have been a sound notion.”

  “You’d begrudge the lad his mother’s warmth to cuddle up to?”

  “An exhausted mother can inadvertently smother her child when they share a narrow bed, Mr. MacKay. I’ve known it to happen. The child can fall out of the bed onto the cold hard, floor. Then too, an exhausted mother needs her sleep.” This knowledge was theoretical, of course, as most of Dorcas’s knowledge of children was.