But now he was buying her cakes and coddling her health and begging for the privilege of praying for her mother?
Perhaps she was not the odd one in their traveling party.
She put the book aside and closed her eyes. They felt heavy from a day’s effort not to cry. From the bitter cold. From life itself.
Her mother had liked to scold her as a girl that there were always pleasures to be had, if one could find the strength of will to look for them.
She focused on the quiet crackling of the fire, the faint pressure of the quilt above her body, the pit-pit-patter of the rain. How nice it was, she forced herself to notice. How pleasant, despite everything, to be warm and snug in bed when it was cold and wet outside.
Her mother had been right.
She let her comfort carry her away.
And when she awoke it was to darkness and the aching quiet of the countryside and the bleakness of the future. The awful, awful truth that this silence would be her life now.
Empty. Hopeless.
She gasped against the weight of fear that pressed the air out of her chest.
She couldn’t breathe.
Chapter 7
After a light supper, Henry put on his coat and went outside for his evening constitutional. The rain had stopped at last. He walked along the carriage road, using a lamp to light the way. These days, he never slept unless he’d walked at least five miles, careful to observe Reverend Keeper’s prescriptions for building ramparts against sin.
“You’ve lived too long amidst low morals, Henry,” the reverend had pronounced, not unkindly, that awful night six months ago when Henry showed up at his door, shaking and stricken from what he’d very nearly done. “’Tis a noble thing you’re doing, helping rid our city of its sinful ways. But you must buttress your faith against Satan’s temptations, lest they overpower you.”
Reverend Keeper had advised a rigorous course of biblical perfection to ward off the worldliness that had crept into Henry’s thoughts and habits during his years of secular work. A daily regime of exercise, prayer, Bible study, meditation and rigorous abstention from worldly pleasures, all carefully recorded in his journal.
The routine—the same one he’d observed when he’d first joined an evangelical fellowship at University—gave him more strength. But it had done little to relieve his growing doubts about his mission to the House of Lords. With every passing day, the report, and the quandary it posed, seemed a heavier millstone about his neck.
Should he, as Reverend Keeper so fervently believed, use his power to suffocate the flames that fed prostitution, and its attendant vices? Or should he be more conscientious to the argument Alice had made so forcefully in the curricle. Whoredom is not caused by a lack of faith in God. It’s caused by the desire to eat.
He had done enough research to know that, in the practicalities, Alice was not wrong.
But did such practicalities matter, when it came to making laws? Should law protect the body or the soul? Reflect the highest ethics of the nation and of God, or protect its weakest parties, even if that necessitated turning a permissive eye toward sin?
Surely it was closer to the spirit of Christ to be compassionate? But how could he in good conscience remove obstacles to vice? Leaving aside his own morals, his credibility as a reverend would be laughable if he openly advocated for fornication.
And he wanted to be a reverend.
Didn’t he?
(Yes? Should the answer not be clearer? Should it not even merit question? Oh Lord, help me.)
Did he not feel most weightless when he put himself in God’s hands, and most dutiful when he shared His word? Did he not enjoy counseling, worshiping, preaching?
(He did! He did!)
But then, if he was meant to be a man of God, what was it that had flared in him when he’d followed Alice Hull through the hallways of Elena Brearley’s club? Why had he nearly choked for air?
Well, he hadn’t, not at first. The first room she’d shown him had been a kind of dungeon, with stone floors and a wooden rack against a wall fitted with iron bars and shackles.
“A place for torture?” he’d asked, unsettled.
“A place for pleasure,” Alice had contradicted, laughing softly when he’d shuddered.
“Many of our members join the club because they’ve heard rumors of this room. I’ve seen men fall to their knees upon entering, in gratitude, because of how closely it matches what they’ve dreamt of.”
He’d wanted to say that desiring the act did not excuse the sinful nature of it. But she’d turned and unlocked another room across the corridor, a chamber lined in burgundy velvet. It contained a number of poles and hooks, across which were strung an elaborate network of ropes, like the web of a spider.
“Some of our members enjoy suspension. Some enjoy tying others, or being bound.”
He’d hardly been able to look.
Another door, this one a schoolroom. “For when a governess has caught one of our dear members being naughty.”
He wrote senseless notations, trying to keep his expression neutral, so as not to betray his shock.
Another door revealed a bathing room with an elaborate mirrored dressing table. “Some guests enjoy performing acts of service. Playing at being a lady’s maid or a valet. Others like to command—to be pampered and groomed like a king.”
That was when he’d begun to doubt himself. When his squeamishness had begun to feel like something else. For the bathing tub had sparked a memory of the night that had sent him racing to Reverend Keeper’s.
He’d quickly retreated to the hall, not wishing to linger in a place that ushered in unwanted memories of dissipation that would awaken what should not be in his heart.
He’d been relieved when Alice led him to the last room in the corridor. Until she’d opened the door, and the hall had filled with the scent of something spicy and familiar.
Incense.
He’d felt a presentiment of dread, but he’d followed her inside and found himself frozen at the unholy sight of what was in that room. Stained glass panels on the walls. Kneelers. And at the front of the room, an altar.
Of all the things. It was a sacrilege to put an altar in this place. A fake church in a house of sin. What kind of person would—
(He would. He would.)
He could hardly breathe, shocked that the execrable, sinful, sacrilegious stirrings he loathed himself for sometimes feeling might be shared by other men. Enough of them that there was an entire room devoted to it in a whorehouse.
“What happens here?” he’d forced himself to choke out.
“Acts of worship,” Alice had said quietly. “And acts of penance.”
His mind swam with ideas of such rank sinfulness his skin prickled, and he turned his back away from the image.
But the thoughts had come anyway.
Hands on him. Perfumed ablutions. A woman kneeling at—
Hellfire.
Hypocrisy.
Damnation.
That’s when he’d gone lurching for the door.
He was hot, just recalling it. He shrugged off his overcoat, never mind the flurries of ice that had begun to drift down from the sky.
He walked in the icy night and prayed. He walked, and prayed, and walked, and prayed until finally he was cold again, and his mind was clear, and he was so exhausted it was all he could do to climb up the staircase of the inn and remove his boots and collapse into his bed.