She imagined how his face would change as she brought them both closer to release. How he would look at her with wondrous desperation. She came quickly, in moments, with a quiet gasp. And then, exhausted and spent and finally calm, she slept.
Just as suddenly, she woke.
She did not know the time—it was still dark.
Her heart was in her throat.
Mama. Mama.
Oh God, what would she do?
She tried to breathe, but she could not, for she was choked with black, stifling fear. Why would the world be so cruel as to take her mother, when it had already taken her father? And why now, when she needed more time?
What would she do?
The room was too small. She couldn’t breathe. She was suffocating.
She threw off her blankets and stood, bare feet pressing against the freezing floor. Out the window, the night was dark, endless, swirling with the snow.
Outside.
She must go outside, to breathe.
She fumbled in the dark to dress and tiptoed from the room, holding her boots so as not to wake the house. A lamp burned on a table in the corridor and she took it, creeping through the vast interior until she found the downstairs cloakroom. She crept into her ermine, put on her boots, and stepped outside the cloakroom door into the night.
She was in an empty kitchen yard. She panted, inhaling the freezing, humid winter air like sips of icy water.
In the distance, she saw the outline of the old priory in the moonlight, blanketed by snow.
She knew what it was she needed.
She ran.
Chapter 13
Henry awoke, as he did every morning, at four, to the shame of an unchaste state.
His manhood was stout and aloft. There was a telltale dampness between his stomach and his nightshirt, a sign that his sinful desires had leaked out in his sleep.
He’d lay awake for hours, tossing and turning as his body vibrated from his near-embrace with Alice. When he finally slept, he’d dreamt of her. Of her pulling open heavy doors in a dark house, describing an endless list of ways to sin. Of her oiled hands caressing him. Of a dove-eyed woman kneeling in a room that smelled like church. Of a girl in a blue dress sticking out her hip, waggling her finger, vowing she knew better than to marry him.
Is that where the strange notion had come from, which had struck him on the staircase? The preposterous idea that he wanted to marry a woman like Alice Hull?
Marriage was on his mind, of course. The plan Reverend Keeper had proposed to him—carving out a circuit of ministry in their connexion that would enable him to continue his charity work in London, while also expanding it to other cities, like Manchester and Birmingham—came with a condition. Henry was to find a woman who shared his faith to join him as a helpmeet. It was not appropriate for a bachelor to minister to whores and fallen women, the minister had said; it would be too rife with temptation. Besides, Henry’s sinful urges would abate if he had a proper, healthy outlet for his lust. The scripture was clear on this: it was better to marry than to burn.
But this did not explain why Henry’s skin had prickled at the perverse, impossible, utterly strange notion of marrying a girl who was unsuitable in every single way.
(Because she is intelligent and brave and sometimes oddly sweet? Because you desire her? Because the heart and loins don’t deal in what is possible?)
He rose from his bed and into the coldness of the bedroom and used the basin of water to clean himself, taking pains not to linger on his swollen manhood, where he might be tempted to enjoy his own ablutions.
He might be weak in mind, but he would not lower himself to being weak in body.
Bodily desire was given by God to be enjoyed by man and wife. To indulge it in any other circumstances was to invite a flood of other indulgences that rent a man from his devotions.
When he’d first begun to visit dens of fornication, he’d tried to greet the evidence of the trade—the nudity, the profane words, the sights and smells of sex—with objectivity and distance, like a naturalist who must visit the cave of a bear to understand its habits.
But objectivity was more difficult to muster when one was sleeping.
And women did not have the same effect on him as bears.
He’d taken to sleeping without a quilt or fire and his windows open, hoping his body would be too cold to manifest fleshly preoccupations in his slumber. But ever since the week before, when Alice had led him through the whipping house murmuring all sorts of wild things, no amount of frigid morning air was enough to slake the visions that haunted his sleep. The dreams left him as ashamed as they did sinfully, depravedly tumescent.
He dropped to the floor and began his morning exercise, which always served to calm his mind. He pushed his own weight up on his biceps over and over and over, until his muscles quivered. He rolled onto his back and lifted his abdomen up into his knees one hundred times. He went through his routine, torturing his muscles until he’d exhausted his arms and legs and belly.
The searing in his muscles exorcised his bodily temptations.
If it did not make him pure, it at least made him sore.
He examined his proportions in the looking glass as he dressed. He did not keep a mirror in his rooms in London, for it fostered vanity, but here he could not resist inspecting his reflection.
It was shocking to see exactly how broad he’d become.
His shoulders were wide and his arms were thick, with veins that stood out from his exertions. He was lean—his fasting kept him from carrying excess flesh atop his muscle—but he looked every inch the names his father and brother always sneered at him.
Lummox. Beast.
His size gave proof to their condemnations, however his conscious mind objected that the insults had no basis in reality, that this body had been given to him by God.
He watched his large hands tying his cravat around his neck and wished fervently that there were less of him to dress. It was foolish to entertain thoughts of Alice when a woman of her petite size would no doubt look at him in horror, worrying of being smothered.
It was too cold for a walk—he’d work instead. He spread his notes out on his desk. He’d already compiled all the findings from his interviews into orderly files, arranged by topic. He had evidence on the preponderance of prostitution, areas of the city most afflicted with it, data on pimps, culls, procurers, brothels, molly houses. He had suggestions from doctors on the prevalence and treatment of venereal disease, accounts from magistrates on the frequency of unlawful brothel-keeping and public solicitation. And mostly he had stories—so many stories—from those who plied the trade.
He’d expected, when he’d begun this work, that stricter laws and harsher punishments were what was needed to clean up London’s streets. But the more he’d probed into the flesh trade, the less convinced he was that harsh punishments would meaningfully change the situation. More likely to help the most unpleasant aspects of it—sick and injured women, public fornication, the spate of illegitimacy heaping costs upon the councils—would be requiring licenses of brothels, issued in such a way as to reduce violence and procurement. The fees raised could be used to provide things like condoms and maternity hospitals that would keep prostitutes healthier, at less burden to the city and its charities.
But this would provoke outrage, and he could not say he didn’t share it.
If he still wrote Saints & Satyrs, he’d have thundered against such measures himself.