He looked at her in disbelief.
“Henry, I have two sisters, a dying mother, and no money to speak of. We’ll lose our cottage without my mother’s widow’s portion. Liza could work in service, perhaps, but Sally isn’t yet nine years old. What do you think happens to girls like us, if no man rushes in to marry them? Where’s God’s morality in that?”
“If you need help, Alice—”
“I’m not asking for your bloody charity,” she spat. “I’m just asking you to remember there are lives at stake. Mine. Elena’s. All those girls you interview when you make your sober rounds and scribble down your notes, looking like you might be ill.”
He glanced sadly at her eyes. “I am concerned about them, Alice. Gravely concerned. I take my work seriously. I promise you.”
She relaxed slightly, for he did look earnest.
“But have you no concern for your mortal soul?” he asked softly.
She wanted to lift her arms and scream in frustration.
Charlotte Street was more sacred to her than any church, and for reasons Henry Evesham would never understand. And unlike the church, Charlotte Street had never betrayed her.
“My soul is not your concern,” she muttered. “I told you that yesterday, and I meant it.”
He nodded. For a minute, he was blessedly silent.
“It’s just that I,” he murmured, his voice faraway, as if lost in private thought, “I couldn’t bear it.”
“Bear what?” she snapped, not at all delighted he had resumed this conversation.
“Living in estrangement from the Lord. Surrounded by so much sin.”
He looked at her raggedly, as though the very idea upset him. He seemed sincere.
As if he feared for her.
As if he could not imagine what it was to live imperfectly.
As though he had never felt desire.
But she had worked on Charlotte Street long enough to know that everyone desired something.
Including, she was certain, Lord Lieutenant Henry Evesham. She had seen the look in his eyes as she’d shown him the chapel room in Elena Brearley’s cellar and if she was not mistaken, they had flashed with something she recognized before he’d run off in his fit of horror: yearning.
Read them, Elena always counseled artisans in training. Look into their soul and see what they long for. Answer their hunger.
She decided to put her training to work. “You said you’re looking to marry.”
He nodded. “Yes. Soon, I hope.”
“I see,” she drawled. “Then I expect, as a bachelor, you’re a virgin? Pure as the dawn?” She smirked, waiting for him to admit his hypocrisy.
His mouth fell open. He flushed a deeper red.
“I don’t see what relevance—” he finally sputtered.
Oh.
She had not expected that. Most of the clergy that came to Charlotte Street kept their belief in the purity of the flesh strictly theoretical. But she could tell by his stammering he wasn’t lying. He was a virgin.
What would that feel like? To be a man his age, to walk daily among bagnios and bawdy houses, and shudder in revulsion at the idea of making love?
“Me,” she said softly, looking in his eyes, “I couldn’t bear it.”
“Bear what?” he asked.
“Oh, Henry,” she murmured. “Don’t you ever want touch? Pleasure?”
Something dark flashed in his eyes. He tore them away from her face, looking pained, though whether it was anger at her prying or the pull of unmet need, she couldn’t say.
“No,” he said crisply. “I’m perfectly content. There is ample pleasure to be found in living virtuously. And if you please, Miss Hull, I beg you not to discuss this any further. I beg you.”
His voice shook. She glanced at him and realized he was shaky and upset. She instantly regretted she’d let herself get carried away. Her emotions were everywhere—bouncing between despair and anger and provocation. She felt like a witch, like a demon, like a spirit untethered form the world. She could not feel her fingers, much less her sense of decency.
“I’m sorry,” she said finally. “You’re right. I’m not myself. I did not mean to upset you.”
A drop of snow fell into her eye, like Henry Evesham’s God was rebuking her for lying.
“No,” she corrected herself. “I did mean to upset you. Because I am upset and I wanted you to understand why.”
His shoulders fell. He nodded. “It’s only natural to feel aggrieved. I appreciate your honesty. I won’t forget it when I’m writing my report.”
They drove on in uneasy silence, an unpleasant tension sitting between them. It only grew as the snow began to fall in earnest. By noon, snow had accumulated on the roads, causing the wheels to skitter.
It was rather beautiful, the way it shrouded the trees in pretty veils of white and danced lazily about the air. But she could not pretend she did not know what bad weather meant. She glanced at the horses, worried for the ice packing in their hooves.
She was certain, from his silence, from the tension in the way he held the reins, that Henry worried too. But they both stared ahead, as if by not acknowledging what was becoming more obvious by the quarter hour, they might prevent it from becoming true.
She began to hum about her pin-box, to keep herself from spinning out the possibilities into dreadful visions. She hummed low, improvising on the tune to keep her mind occupied.
Beside her, she heard a rumble. Henry was humming too.
She glanced at him, and he gave her a weary, close-lipped smile. His voice—a tenor, by the sound of it—met hers, and formed a harmony. When she went up an octave, and improvised a measure, he found the counterpoint as easily as if they’d sung the song a hundred times.
She began to laugh, both in joy at the companionable pleasure of the harmony, and at the outrageous notion that the pious Lord Lieutenant was unwittingly crooning the melody to a song about the cunny of an unrepentant whore.
He smiled. “Is my voice so amusing?”
“No, Henry,” she answered honestly. “Your voice is lovely.”
Below them, the carriage creaked, the wheels straining.
Henry’s face tightened, then collapsed into something like despondency.
Finally he sighed, and looked over at her with a posture of defeat.
“Alice, I’m not going to be able to get you to Fleetwend in this weather.”
Chapter 9
Henry had developed a theory about the humming: Alice hummed the way he prayed.
To ease her worries. To be alone inside her thoughts—or perhaps to be released from them. To turn them outward, so that inside, she had peace.
And so he hummed too, because prayer eluded him just now. He felt defeated.
All day, he’d studied Alice like she was a verse of scripture he was trying to illuminate. Her broken sobs the night before. Her seeming inability to acknowledge her vulnerability and grief in the light of morning. Her joy in simple, earthly pleasures—raindrops, hot buttered rolls. Her fierce convictions about her work, and his, and her impish delight in rattling him. The way she was sometimes so intense it felt like her gaze might scorch him—and sometimes so dreamy that had he not been acutely aware of her body’s nearness, he would have thought she’d floated away when he wasn’t looking.