“I have no desires,” he’d said briskly. (Liar, he’d dutifully accounted to himself as he’d done so.)
“I was speaking rhetorically,” she’d answered, using a tone that was not so different from the one he’d used on the men whose lives he’d upended during his time at Saints & Satyrs. A tone that said we both know what you are.
“But if that is true, Henry,” she’d gone on thoughtfully, “I do wonder if it’s just. A man tasked with reforming the flesh trade, one would think, has a responsibility to understand the yearnings at the heart of it. Does he not?”
“One can judge a crime without committing it.”
“And one can possess a desire without indulging it,” she’d replied, staring at him entirely too long. “As a man of God, I’d assume you value empathy.”
He’d been silent, unwilling to engage her on this point, for he was here to ask questions, not proffer whatever lesions dotted the purity of his relationship with sin for her inspection.
He’d been relieved when she’d dropped the matter and summoned her girl to give him a tour of the premises.
But he’d been wrong to be relieved. For if Mistress Brearley had sensed the secrets buried in his guts, Alice had brought them roiling to the surface by doing no more than entering the room. Ever since he’d first set eyes on her, with her petite frame and faraway expression and enormous, doleful eyes—
Yes, he knew what yearning was.
Elena cleared her throat, reminding him that she was waiting for an answer. “Of course I recall our conversation. And I appreciate your advice.”
“Then I won’t repeat myself. But I urge you to think of the good that you can do. The suffering you might prevent.”
On this, they agreed. It was a call from God, his mission, and he was grateful for the chance to do work of lasting moral consequence. That he’d found the work to be a trial—that it tested his ethics and compassion, necessitated he walk the tempting pathways of a sinner—made him certain the sacrifice was worthy.
He sighed, and ceased the effort of trying to look official. “I rarely think of anything else, of late. That, I promise you.”
She nodded. She always seemed to believe his good intentions despite the threats he’d made against her in his previous line of work. He admired this about her—her capacity for forgiveness. He was not sure he would be so charitable, were their positions reversed.
“How can I help you today, Henry?” Elena asked.
He tried to look extremely casual, though this was difficult, in her hard-backed wooden chair. “In my haste to leave on my last visit I wonder if I misplaced a book. I must travel to the country to write my report and I hoped to retrieve it before I left, if you’ve come across it.”
“A book?”
“Yes—leather, bound, handwritten. It contained my notes.”
It was his journal, actually, but he could not bring himself to admit to Mistress Brearley that he had left such an intimate personal artifact here, where anyone might read it. He suspected it had fallen from his satchel when he’d gone running out the door the week before.
Mistress Brearley shook her head. “I would have sent it back to you had I discovered it. Our respect for discretion extends to exotic creatures like Methodists, same as it does to flagellants and whores.” She smiled.
He was relieved she hadn’t found it. God alone should be privy to the writings in that book.
He must have dropped it somewhere else after he’d rushed off in his ooze of guilt. Losing it in some anonymous alley or bank-side muck would be infinitely preferable to losing it here. It would diminish his authority for such people to know the nature of his private struggles. And if they knew, they might expose him.
He bowed and took a slip of paper from his pocket. “Please write to me at this address should it turn up. Thank you for your time. I must be on my way.”
He moved toward the door, but before his fingers reached the knob, it flew open with such force that the wood cracked against the plaster wall behind it.
He jumped back just in time to avoid being struck on the chin. The serving girl, Alice, rushed blindly past him toward her mistress’s desk, breathing like she’d taken a bullet to the lungs.
Mistress Brearley stood abruptly. “Alice, what is it?”
Before, the girl had always seemed impassive, betraying no emotion beside an occasional touch of perverse playfulness beneath the solemnity of her appearance. Her beauty was in the intelligence of her eyes, which danced in a way that made you long to know the private thoughts that made them flicker so.
But now, her eyes were wild, and she clutched a piece of paper to her sparrow’s chest so tight that her knuckles glinted blue. Her hands, he noticed, were so small he could fold both of them inside one of his large paws. (But he should not be thinking of fleshly contact with a woman. Not ever, but especially not now, when the girl in question was so upset she could hardly breathe.)
“It’s my mother,” Alice choked out. “She’s suffered an attack. Her heart. My sister writes—” she frantically shook her head, as if unable to speak the dire words aloud, and held the letter out to Mistress Brearley.
“We expect she has but days,” Mistress Brearley read aloud. “Oh, my dear girl.”
“My sympathies,” he murmured, without thinking.
Alice whipped her head around, and he realized, belatedly, she had not noticed he was here.
“Oh—I was not aware you had a—” She edged closer to her mistress without finishing the thought, her expression indicating she would have been more pleased to see a beggar pustuled in contagious pox than Henry.
He no doubt deserved that look, and longed to shrink away, but the minister in him could not help but see the anguish in her shoulders and wish to comfort her.
“Miss Alice, I’m so sorry you’ve had bad news.” He pushed a chair toward her, for she seemed unsteady on her feet. “You should sit down,” he said in a low, soothing voice. “You’ve had a shock. Perhaps you’d like to pray?”
Alice looked up at him in bemusement, then quickly turned back to Elena without answering, as if she could not waste time in making sense of him. “I have to get back—my sisters …”
Elena came and bolstered Alice against her arm, rubbing her back. She stood half a foot taller than the girl, whose head would not meet Henry’s breastbone.
“I’ll need to find a mail coach right away,” Alice said, speaking rapidly. “It’s at least three days home and if I miss it today, I may not get there in time to—”
A sound escaped her that was not speech so much as heartbreak.
“Breathe, my girl,” Elena murmured. “I’ll have the boy run and fetch the timetables to Fleetwend while you pack.”
Fleetwend. The name was familiar to Henry. He’d been there once, on a revival.
“Fleetwend’s in Somerset, no?” he asked. “On the River Wythe?”
Elena looked at him over Alice’s head. “Yes, that’s correct Alice, is it not?”
Alice nodded a tearful assent into her sleeve.
He felt a chill run up his spine. God is great.
Her town was only a few hours’ drive beyond his father’s house. This was no coincidence. He had lost his journal for a reason: so that he might be in this very room, on this very day, when he happened to be on his way to Somerset just as a young woman found herself in desperate need of passage there.