the older lady replied immediately. “What time would you expect us?”
Florence seemed finally to remember her obligations as hostess. “Would four o’clock suit you?”
“Four o’clock would be perfect.” Miss Yates touched her young companion on the elbow. “We must be going.” She bowed to the three of them. “Until this afternoon.”
Damien watched them continue down the church steps and across the lawn toward a fine-looking carriage, his mind in a daze. A liveried servant sprang down and opened the carriage door for them, confirming his supposition that they were members of the upper class. When the servant slammed the door shut, Damien noted that it was decorated with a blue-and-gold crest.
“Reverend Hathaway.” The peremptory tones of another female parishioner yanked his attention back to the receiving line.
“Yes, Mrs. Cooper, how lovely to see you this morning….”
Lindsay sat in their coach as it carried them down St. George’s Row along the northern edge of Hyde Park. Reverend Hathaway’s sermon still echoed in her ears.
His words had seemed directed at her, exhorting her in a quiet, earnest way to become a true disciple of Christ. Church sermons had never been like this before. Sermons were usually dry, delivered in the elevated tones of a minister who seemed more concerned with his elocution than the text.
Never had she heard the scriptures in such a personal way, a way that demanded something of her even though she’d always lived according to the church’s laws.
“What did you think of the Hathaways, my dear?” Beatrice asked.
Lindsay turned to the older lady, a distant cousin on her mother’s side who had recently come to live with her father to oversee Lindsay’s coming out. “Oh, most genial,” she agreed wholeheartedly, although thinking about it now, she had to admit she’d hardly noticed the reverend’s sister or her betrothed in her admiration for the reverend.
“Mr. Quinn certainly seemed genial, not at all what I expected.”
Lindsay remembered the large, dark-haired man’s friendly manner. “Oh?”
“I meant from all I’d heard about him.”
“What do you mean?”
Beatrice’s eyes widened. “Don’t you know? He’s a former convict.”
Lindsay turned on the seat and stared at her cousin. “A convict?”
“Haven’t you read the papers? He was awaiting his execution at Newgate when he was rescued by a gang of ruffians. For months he escaped the eyes of the law.” Beatrice shook her head with a chuckle. “It turns out all along he’d been hiding away in a parsonage right here. The magistrates were in an uproar.”
“You can’t mean he was here…at St. George’s?”
Her cousin nodded. “The very same.”
Lindsay looked away from her cousin, her thoughts in a whirl, unable to reconcile the godly man who had delivered such a quietly convicting sermon with a man who would harbor a criminal.
“He could not have stayed hidden for so long if the reverend and his sister hadn’t helped him,” Beatrice confirmed for her. “And to think, in the course of aiding and abetting him, Miss Hathaway fell in love with him. It is to her he owes the royal pardon he received.”
“Oh, my,” she breathed, hardly able to grasp it.
“It was in all the tabloids,” Beatrice continued. “Of course, I’m forgetting you’ve been away at school and have missed the goings-on here in London.”
“Tell me all the particulars. It sounds wonderfully romantic!”
By the time Beatrice had finished a story that sounded more incredible than anything in her novels, they’d arrived at Lindsay’s home on Grosvenor Square in the heart of Mayfair.
Despite the happy ending to the tale, Lindsay found it almost impossible to imagine breaking the law and hiding out from the authorities. “You know, I believe it’s no coincidence Mr. Quinn gave himself up to the authorities. If I had been residing under the Reverend Hathaway’s roof all that time, I, too, would have been convicted of any wrongdoing and made a clean breast of things.”
“Yes, I imagine the Hathaways must have influenced Mr. Quinn greatly. Reverend Hathaway appears to have a true shepherd’s heart.”
After the last parishioner left, Damien, his sister and Jonah used the footpath behind the church to cut across the cemetery and apple orchard to the parsonage.
Damien glanced at his sister, wondering if she would say anything about Jonah’s unexpected invitation for this afternoon.
But Florence remained silent during the short walk home. He would just have to wait for her to speak. He took a deep breath, inhaling the sweet-scented air, trying to reconcile himself to the coming afternoon.
When they entered the kitchen, Mrs. Nichols, their cook and housekeeper, turned from the roast she was basting on a spit over the fire. “What a crowd this morning. I haven’t seen the like since I heard Wesley preach just beyond on Harper’s Field nigh on five-and-twenty years ago.”
“I don’t believe it was to hear my preaching that so many turned out,” Damien said with a chuckle, approaching the range. “My, but that roast smells succulent.”
“Oh, they might come to eye Jonah, but they stay to hear your words, my boy.” Jacob Nichols, their man-of-all-work at the parsonage who’d known Damien since he was a lad, clapped him on the back.
Jonah shut the door behind them with a bang. “I don’t want to claim any credit, but people do seem a curious lot. I don’t think I’ve had so many pairs of eyes on me since I stood on the gallows.”
Florence shuddered. “Don’t even joke about that awful day.”
He draped his arm around her slim shoulders and pulled her to him. “Easy there, lass. If it hadn’t been for that day, I’d never have met you.”
She looked up at him a second, her hand cupping his cheek. Damien marveled afresh at the love that had blossomed in so unlikely a pair—a rough laborer and a godly woman who had long since accepted her spinsterhood. A rush of something like envy shot through him. He rapidly dismissed the unworthy feeling.
Florence began untying the ribbons of her bonnet. “Enough of that. Let me help Elizabeth or we’ll never get dinner on the table—and we have company coming this afternoon.” She bit her lip, frowning up at her fiancé. “Whatever were you thinking to invite those two ladies to the parsonage?”
Jonah raised his eyebrows, a puzzled look in his green eyes. “What do you mean? I was being hospitable. Now that I’m a free man, it seems you’re always inviting someone from the parish over on Sunday.”
“Yes, I know, but these ladies are complete strangers. They don’t even belong to our parish.”
“What’s that to the point? Are we supposed to only hold out the hand of friendship to those within
