Tolliver was peering up at him with wide, brilliant eyes. Mark knew that look—that gaze of utter delight. Tolliver looked as if he’d just received a pony for Christmas and couldn’t wait for his first ride.
And by the way he was staring, Mark was the pony. Before Mark could say anything, his hand was captured in an impassioned grip.
“Forty-seven, sir!” Tolliver squeaked.
Mark stared at the earnest young man in front of him in confusion. The boy had barked out those words as if they had some special significance. “Forty-seven what?”
Forty-seven people who might accost him on the street? Forty-seven more months before society forgot who he was?
The boy’s face fell. “Forty-seven days,” he said, sheepishly.
Mark shook his head in confusion. “Forty-seven days is a little long for a flood, and a bit short for Michaelmas term.”
“It’s been forty-seven days of chastity. Sir.” He frowned in puzzlement. “Didn’t I do it right? Isn’t that how members of the MCB greet one another? I’m the one who started the local division, and I want to make sure our details are correct.”
So the cockade was real, then. Mark stifled a groan. It had been foolish to hope that the MCB had restricted itself to London. It was embarrassing enough there, with those cockades and their weekly meetings. Not to mention the secret hand signals—somebody was always trying to teach him the secret hand signals.
Why was it that men had to take every good principle and turn it into some sort of a club? Why could nobody do the right thing on his own? And how had Mark gotten himself embroiled as the putative head of this one?
“I’m not a member of the Male Chastity Brigade,” Mark said, trying not to make his words sound like a rebuke. “I just wrote the book.”
For a moment, Tolliver simply stared at him in disbelief. Then he smiled. “Oh, that’s all right,” he said. “After all, Jesus wasn’t Church of England, either.”
Beside him, the rector nodded at this piece of utter insanity. Mark wasn’t sure whether he should laugh or weep.
Instead, he gently removed his hand from Tolliver’s grip. “One thing to consider,” he said. “Comparing me to Christ is…” Ridiculous, for one, but he didn’t want to humiliate the poor boy. A logical fallacy, for another. But this young man, however exuberant, meant well. And he was trying. It was hard to be angry about a youth throwing his heart and soul into chastity, when so many others his age were off pursuing prizefights and fathering bastards instead.
But without any chastisement on his part at all, the boy turned white. “Blasphemous,” he said. “It was blasphemous. I was just blasphemous in front of Sir Mark Turner. Oh, God.”
Mark decided not to mention he’d blasphemed again. “People are allowed to make mistakes in front of me.”
Tolliver lifted adoring eyes. “Yes. Of course. I should have known you’d have the goodness to forgive me.”
“I’m not a saint. I’m not a holy man. I just wrote a book.”
“Your humility, sir—your good nature. Truly, you are an example to us all,” Tolliver insisted.
“I make mistakes, too.”
“Really, sir? Might I inquire—how long has it been for you? How many days?”
The question was invasive and impolite, and Mark raised an eyebrow.
Tolliver cringed back a step in response. Perhaps he’d recognized the impertinence.
“I—I’m sure it’s in all the papers,” he said, “but we only get a handful of them, when someone visits London. I…I surely should know. P-please forgive my ignorance.”
Perhaps he hadn’t. And what did it matter if he asked Mark? Mark had written the book on chastity. Literally. He sighed and performed a rough calculation. “Ten thousand,” he replied. “Give or take.”
The boy gave an impressed whistle.
Mark was less impressed. If there was a local MCB here, all that remained to cut up his peace was—
“Your worshippers are not restricted to the men, of course,” Lewis said. “On Sunday, after service, I hope to introduce you to my daughter, Dinah.”
—that. The constant efforts to thrust suitable women in Mark’s way. In all truth, Mark wouldn’t have minded meeting a woman who actually suited him. But beside him, Tolliver frowned, rubbing his chin, and glanced at Mark in consternation, as if the man had set himself up as a sudden rival. If this Dinah was someone that interested the youthful Tolliver, it meant that this exchange was following the usual pattern. After all, the only women that others deemed suitable for a gentleman of his supposed righteousness were—
“She’s a sweet girl,” Lewis was saying, “obedient and chaste and comely. She’s biddable—a confident, strong man such as yourself would make her an extraordinary husband. And she’s not quite sixteen, so you could form her precisely as you wished.”
Of course. Mark shut his eyes in despair. Write a book on chastity, and somehow the whole world got the notion that your preferred bride would be a malleable child.
“I’m twenty-eight,” Mark said dryly.
“Not yet twice her age, then!” the rector said, with a smile that contained not a hint of awareness. He leaned forward and whispered confidentially, “I should hate to see her saddled to an old man. Or—” he cast a pointed look at Tolliver “—a young pup, who scarcely knows his own mind. Now. I know you’re keeping a bachelor household. I can start drawing up a rotation immediately. If we have you scheduled for tea and supper on a daily basis, why, within six weeks, all of the best families—”
“No.” There was nothing for it. Mark was going to have to be rude. “Absolutely not. I came here for peace and solitude—not daily engagements. Certainly not twice daily engagements.”
The man’s face fell. Tolliver flinched, and Mark felt as if he had just kicked a puppy. Why, oh, why, could his book not have disappeared into a sea of anonymity, as most books did?
“Weekly,” Mark conceded. “No more.”
The rector gave a long-suffering sigh. “I suppose. Perhaps if we had larger events. A church picnic? Yes. That should answer. Followed by—oh, dear.” Lewis glanced across the square and his voice hardened. “Well. At least this way, we can keep you from the unsavory elements.”
Mark followed his gaze. A few rays of sun shone through the clouds, brightening the produce in the market shambles across the square. The patrons at the marketplace had arrayed themselves so that they all had a view of him. But the rector was staring at a woman who had entered the square.
For an instant, all Mark could see was her hair—an ebony spill of ink, braided and pinned up in intricate loops that just kissed her shoulders, covered with the barest excuse for a lace bonnet. He’d always thought of black as a colorless hue, but her hair seemed so black it was every color at once, the rays of the sun spangling it. And there was a great mass of it on her head. Freed from the pins and
