Henry rose. Bowed. Left the room.
He walked to the great hall slowly, feeling drugged.
Alice and Josephine were waiting for him, ready to depart for the priory. He put his hand to his hair to smooth it, ran his tongue over his teeth. Tried to revive his faculties, which were dulled from lack of sleep, and Alice’s nearness, and his father’s severity, and what he’d just agreed to, however disingenuously.
Alice said nothing, keeping her eyes carefully on the floor. He desperately wished he knew what she thought of him.
“You look rather low,” Josephine said to him cheerfully.
“Just came from a meeting with our father.”
Jo winced. “Ah.”
He wondered if his sister knew why he’d been summoned here. Were all of them in on it? Had the baby’s christening simply been a pretext to get him home? Did his mother and sister also want him to marry Miss Bradley-Hough, to save their comfortable life in this grand house?
It was uncharitable to even think it, but he didn’t know who he could trust.
The only person he trusted here was Alice.
He was silent on the walk to the priory. He half-listened to Josephine chatter to Alice about the preparations for her season. Apparently, no expense was being spared. He could not begrudge his sister her excitement over balls and dresses, but he wondered at his father spending such a fortune to present his daughter as a lady on money borrowed from God knew where.
“Ah, so many people out despite the snow!” Josephine said, looking at the crowd assembling in front of the priory. He smiled at the sight of his old friends, touched they had traveled through the snow to worship with him at short notice.
His spirits lifted instantly.
These people—many of them his father’s tenants, who he’d met at a revival when he’d been home from University—were some of the earliest fellow pilgrims in his journey toward a more evangelical faith. They were all older now. Some of them who’d once carried babies now stood with large broods of children. Some who’d come with husbands or wives now stood alone, their hair more gray, their faces lined.
All of them greeted him more happily than his own family had. And among them, he felt better than he had in days.
When everyone had settled onto the pews he walked up to the altar and glanced up at the organ. Alice was seated there, waiting for his signal.
“Ready?” he mouthed to her. She nodded.
He lifted his arms. “My brothers and sisters,” he said, projecting his voice so that he could be heard even at the back of the chapel. “Though ’tis icy out of doors, my heart is warm with your fellowship and the light of God’s love.”
He smiled at the murmurs of “Amen” and opened his hymnal. “Join me in a hymn.”
At his nod to Alice, the room swelled with music. She had not had time to practice, and could not know these songs, as most had been written by himself or his friends, but she played flawlessly. He smiled as the faces around him lit with surprise and joy. One by one, their voices rose and met his in harmony. He let the music lift his spirit up to God.
Among this chorus, he caught a beautiful alto, true and clear.
Alice’s voice.
She improvised a harmony of her own, delighting the better singers in the crowd, who began to add their own flourishes to her tune. There was a soulfulness in the way she sang the hymn that made him certain she had been faithful once. He wondered when she had become estranged from God. And why.
He itched for her to share the peace he could see in his fellow worshiper’s expressions. To remind her of God’s love for her. That it was there, even when one’s family’s was less steadfast.
The parable of the prodigal was on his mind, and he opened the Bible and read the story from the Book of Luke, about the father welcoming home his son.
“As a child, I used to think this story was about reconciliation of the family,” he told his friends. “It was not until I was older that I realized it was about faith. The truth is, one cannot always count on the people we love to welcome us home. But the infinite mercy of God is eternally renewable. No matter how we stray, how far we wander, how much we sin, he is always overjoyed to welcome us back into his grace.”
Several of his friends nodded in the nearest pews, their eyes shining. Perhaps this moment was all he needed from this place. Not the admiration of his family, but a reconnection with that joyous, wondrous feeling that he’d first experienced here, among these people: the boundless, miraculous ecstasy when one felt—truly felt—the radiant love of God.
He closed his Bible and looked out at the dear, familiar faces. “You here know what I know,” he continued. “Salvation cannot be taught. It must be asked for and accepted. It must be trusted, the way one trusts ours legs to hold us up after a fall. That is grace. It is the certainty in one’s body and one soul of the expansive measure of God’s infinite forgiveness.”
The room echoed with “Amens”.
And though, in the emotion that had come over him, he had forgotten to give Alice her cue to play the closing hymn—the room swelled again with music.
Chapter 18
The strangest feeling overtook Alice as she listened to Henry preach. She felt rather moved.
To her, faith had never seemed distinct from church, and church had never seemed much more than a ritual requiring boredom and uncomfortable shoes. It was a list of obligations and an even longer list of things you could not do. Another joyless, restrictive code dictated from male authorities who offered little beyond demands that she must follow or face egregious consequences.
She had not considered that faith might fill you up, instead of limiting you. That God could lift, rather than confine. But as she watched Henry and his friends bow their heads in prayer, she could see the tranquility on their faces.
How moving, to watch Henry Evesham lead them to this state of peace.
She’d misunderstood what he believed—or perhaps just wrongly assumed she knew it, drawing inferences from his writings in Saints & Satyrs. The fiery, holier-than-thou tone of those essays and verses had almost nothing in common with the words he’d spoken here, to this small group. They were also different from the worries of the diarist, who longed to perfect himself and railed at himself for failing.
She wondered how often Henry allowed himself to be this man, who insisted sin could be forgiven, whose eyes filled with tears as he spoke of mercy.
But then, had she not seen glimpses of him? Had he not marveled at a woman playing music in an abandoned chapel? Whispered prayers to her through a wall? Bowed his head in the desire for her affection in a snowy garden, in the middle of the night?
Alice watched him saying farewell to his fellow worshipers. A group of children with their mother were among the final people to approach him. He bent down attentively, speaking to the littlest worshipers with solemnity and good humor. So kind. So gentle.
“He’s good with children,” Josephine remarked, walking up beside her. “He’ll make a lovely father.”
“No doubt,” Alice agreed.
“We hope he’ll marry soon. I don’t suppose you know if he’s courting anyone in London? Perhaps a member of your congregation?”
Josephine asked the question casually, but something about it struck Alice as odd. What could she say? Would he want her to repeat what he’d told her in the carriage? She knew so little about him, and yet so much. She knew his horror at the accidental touching of a woman’s breast, his stirring at Solomon’s poem for his bride. The way he tore the page underlining those telling words, I burned.