Page 31 of Mrs. Merritt’s Remorse (Lord Dere’s Dependents #2)

I thank God all is tranquil again, after many fears and alarms.

—Mary Delaney, The autobiography and correspondence of Mary Granville (1755)

Everyone agreed: the marriage of Mr. Geoffrey Cottrill to Miss Felicity Hynde was a scandal.

Not because Miss Hynde was young enough to be Mr. Cottrill’s daughter—that bit was a tale as old as time—but because of who performed the ceremony and the whole way in which it came about.

The old vicar, poor Mr. Spacks (and he was never, after his death, referred to as anything but “poor Mr. Spacks”), died within a fortnight of his stroke of palsy, a stroke for which many blamed his argument with Mr. Cottrill. The wedding was then postponed, but Mr. Cottrill’s stern daughter Miss Cottrill let it be known that it awaited only the appointment to the living of Mr. Cottrill’s nephew Mr. Philip Egerton. Well and good, but Mr. Egerton’s appointment, in turn, awaited his own replacement in his temporary curacy and “the clearing of his name” in the quarter sessions at Epiphany! What sort of vicar required his name to be cleared in court?

That Mr. Cottrill should first kill poor Mr. Spacks and then name as substitute his criminal nephew—?

It was a marvel the bishop would permit it, but rumors flew that Mr. Cottrill was not Mr. Egerton’s only influential friend.

“My cousin the lawyer in Oxford says a baron pulled wires and spoke in his defense,” sniffed one parishioner, only to be hushed when Miss Cottrill’s beady eyes turned toward them.

As if all this were not enough, by the time the scandalous nephew arrived in their village, he brought with him his equally scandalous bride, if “bride” were the appropriate term for a widow who had eloped with her first husband and ended in debtor’s prison.

“But he had to marry somebody, ” hissed another congregant, “for I hear Mr. Cottrill stole Mr. Egerton’s own first choice for a bride.”

“No!”

“Yes.”

“And who could a violent criminal persuade to marry him then, but someone who herself had no reputation to speak of?”

“True, true.”

It was all too, too much, and there were many who said that, though they could not escape the payment of their tithes, they would never set foot in St. Lawrence Church again under the circumstances.

But with time curiosity proved more powerful than outrage, and when the February morning of the new vicar’s reading-in and Mr. Cottrill’s wedding arrived at last, there was not an empty pew in the little church.

Despite being a pardoned criminal, the new vicar was handsome and well-spoken enough, and he bore himself calmly as he joined his nefarious uncle to his own would-be sweetheart in holy matrimony. Nor could any immediate fault be found in Mrs. Egerton, who sat quietly at the end of the first pew, watching her husband with shining eyes.

When the service was ended, moreover, and the wheat thrown at the newlyweds, the new vicar and his wife met every single member of their flock, and the little details they already knew about them showed pains had been taken to learn their names and situations.

“Why,” said one to another as they left the churchyard, “they are the most decorous scandalous people I have ever met.”

“Just you wait,” answered the other. “Everyone can behave himself for one morning, but time will tell, and then there will be plenty of meat for tittle-tattle.”

Sure enough, the first occasion came only a half hour later, when the sexton returned to make things tidy and to lock the vestry. Morton was unobtrusive by nature, “but those two might not have noticed a thunderclap,” he reported later to his wife.

For when he slipped into the back of the church, “there were the vicar and his wife a-standing by the pulpit, and him kissing her within an inch of her life and her giving him a Rowland for his Oliver. Then, when they finally come up for air, he says, ‘Happy?’ and she says, ‘Never happier.’ And he says, ‘Kiss me again, then, my darling Mrs. Egerton,’ and off they go again. Never seen anything like it in all my born days, but I got out of there, quick like.”

Despite this shocking beginning, however, which Mrs. Morton shared throughout the village by sundown, Mr. and Mrs. Philip Egerton soon settled into their new church and new home and surprised everyone by living a life as quiet and unscandalous and blissful as any which had yet been known in all the realm.

The End