The Lord I Left

by Scarlett Peckham

  I am a nuisance to myself. This morning at fellowship, Lydia Byron passed by me as I was making my donation and I … I almost can’t bear to commit the words to paper. I touched her breast. It was not intentional, of course—an accident, which we both pretended did not happen, for it would be too outrageous to address such a thing in the house of the Lord—but I cannot expunge it from my mind. All day I have been gripped with the memory of that accidental burst of flesh—so soft beneath my hand. The memory of it provokes an unwelcome excitement that I am tempted to sinfully relieve, and the evidence of which necessitates the wearing of my coat indoors for decency, though it is hot today, and the heat adds to my affliction. God, grant me please the coolness of mind and strength of will to eradicate this memory from my body, for I am in hourly danger, so tempted to indulge myself in sinful memory.

  Alice bit her lip. Poor diarist.

  She hoped, for his sake, that he had succumbed to temptation and brought himself relief.

  His description of desire, so tortured and reproachful, reminded her of the way she’d felt herself, in the years before she’d met Elena Brearley.

  She’d also felt a sickly kind of guilt when, as a girl, she wanted things she was told she mustn’t. Her mother was always catching her—with her father’s organ student in the woods, or in the barn with the hired boy who kept their livestock, or in the graveyard on the hill behind their cottage with the baker’s son, who always smelled like bread. Unlike when Alice wandered, or said bold things, or laughed at the wrong time, her mother did not chastise her for these lapses. Instead, she hustled her away, a look of fear in her eyes. Nothing below the skirt or you’ll wind up with a baby in your belly.

  It had been wonderful, when she arrived at Elena’s, to match her yearnings to knowledge of the flesh. On Charlotte Street desire was not considered a shortcoming of one’s character. She’d observed what ecstasies were possible, from the commonplace to the exotic. How touch could turn patrician men into writhing boys. How made-up fantasies could transform stone-faced women into purring felines. She’d learned from her mistress exactly how babies were begotten and how she could avoid one, without sacrificing her desire to be touched. Elena did not mind if she brought lovers to her garret room on nights she wasn’t working, so long as they came up the back stairs and did not disturb the members. With these men, she traded favors. Learned how to channel longings into pleasure.

  She hoped her diarist had met some woman and realized he needn’t torture himself with guilt. She immediately set upon skimming the journal to see how he’d progressed. Toward the back, she caught sight of the words “crisis of lust.”

  She raised a brow. “Wicked of you, diarist.”

  I walked ten miles today, stricken by a dream in which I found myself reliving once again the crisis of lust that set me on this course of purification. In the dream, I lingered after worship, working on a hymn. Sarah came in with a rag and bucket, and was pleased to see me—crediting me with finding her the work as maid. She ran up and embraced me as I sat on the pianoforte bench. She was effusive and did not let go, hanging on me, and though I knew that I should move aside, I lingered overlong because, I will confess, it felt so good.

  Her former trade being what it is, and her not long out of it, she is too free with favors, and she kissed me. I became paralyzed with shock, knowing I must get up but unable to move, which she took as enthusiasm. Her hand went to my manhood, which had plumped at her nearness in a way she could perceive. “Let me comfort you,” she said. “I am so grateful for all you’ve done for me.”

  In life, of course, I came to my senses in time, refused, and fled.

  But in the dream, I let her do what I’d imagined on that day—what I’d truly wanted.

  “Would you wash my feet?”

  And in the dream she found her bucket and took down her hair, as in the Gospel of Luke, and most tenderly undressed me. She used her hair to wash me, as the whore did for Christ. Her hands crept higher, higher, toward my shame—

  And then I woke up in the throes of pleasure, unable to prevent what had, in sleep, already progressed past the point of stopping. Now, I am left to face that my excitement was not just from her tender touch, nor her comely face, but from the fact that my desire was based in scripture, that it was intensified because we were in church—that place that should be most separate from sin.

  I cannot tell the reverend about this for he will think me depraved, so instead I write it here, to hold myself to account and ask forgiveness from the Lord.

  This journal was becoming very diverting indeed. Now she understood why she had found it at the whipping house. It must belong to a member with religious fantasies, who had left it behind by mistake. She wondered if she’d answered the door for him, or assisted in one of his sessions. She wondered what he looked like—if he was handsome.

  She decided to imagine he looked like Henry Evesham. A man of compelling proportions—tall and sturdy and inviting. Very much the kind of man she might enjoy watching explore his most forbidden urges. Or, at the very least, entertaining in her room, alone.

  Did Henry know that he was so appealing? She wondered how he would react if she told him she desired him. If she put her hands on his and brought them to her skin.

  She reached beneath her nightdress and closed her eyes and grazed her fingers over her breasts, then lower, to her cunt. She allowed her thoughts to wander over the plains of Henry’s body.

  He would be sweet. A virgin. Eager, but unsure of what to do. Cautious not to hurt her with his size. So gentle she would have to pull him down on top of her and show him exactly how indelicate a small girl could be.

  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.

  This central dilemma was intransigent. No matter how clear the facts and figures, he could not resign himself to using his powers, such as they were, to advocate changes that would reduce the consequence of sin.

  He looked out the window into the swirling snow and prayed to God.

  Oh Lord, what is the more virtuous path? What should I do? Guide me.

  He saw a flash of something in the kitchen yard.

  He squinted.

  Through the haze of falling snow, he could faintly make out the glow of a lamp. He pressed his face to the glass, and vaguely discerned the silhouette of a queenly cape. It was Alice, dashing toward the gate leading to the garden.

  Where was she going?

  Something must be horribly wrong.

  He put his candle in a lamp and rushed downstairs and out the nearest door, not pausing to find a coat.

  Alice was nowhere in sight by the time he made it to the gate. He followed her small footprints through the gardens, past the stables, and onward, toward the old priory.

  Her tracks stopped at the door to the stone building. He stepped inside and raised his lamp.

  “Alice?” he called.

  There was a mighty boom, like the bursting of a pipe. Then a gusty, stentorian moan.

  And then the priory surged with a wave of sound so forceful he felt it vibrate through the stone floors.

  Organ music.

  It was not a song he recognized—it sounded improvised, a ferocious counterpoint of dramatic falls and minor lifts surging into rhapsody, like the calling of a ghost.

  A chill ran down his spine. “Alice?” he called again.

  The organ overpowered his voice as he walked toward the chapel. The ancient stone walls echoed with its howls. He felt like he was walking through a storm of sound.

  He pulled open the chapel door. In the back, above the choir nave, the brass pipes of the organ reflected moonlight shining through a stained-glass window. Alice was bent over the manual of the organ, her tiny body even smaller set against the instrument’s mighty pipes. She moved fluidly as she played, like she and the instrument were merged into a single creature.

  He moved closer, silent, transfixed by her hands moving rapidly over the keys, and the sorcery they were capable of stirring.

  Chapter 14

  Somehow Alice had known she would feel better here. Her body had been drawn to this place, sensing what she needed like she was a wounded animal.

  She closed her eyes and gave herself over to the music, playing from touch and instinct, not caring how it sounded. She poured all of her sadness into the organ’s keys, all of her fear, her outrage at this life and its crushing disappointments. She did not know what she played, only that she must.

  She played for her mother, for her father, for her sisters. She played for Elena, and the hope she’d given her, and the life she wanted s
o badly to return to and knew she never would. She played for Henry Evesham and his rotten brother and cruel father. She played until she was not a small, sad woman but a mighty swell of sound, larger than she could ever hope to be, so powerful she made the stone walls shake.

  “Alice!”

  She froze and opened her eyes.

  Henry Evesham was staring at her like she was possessed.

  “What… ” He looked from her hands on the manual to her eyes and back to her hands, which were still suspended over the keys, not moving.

  She held herself still, braced for the words to come, like a blow. Daring him to say them and knowing that he would and prepared to riot, to scream that he was wrong. Don’t make me stop. I’ll die if you make me stop. I’ll tear my hair and beat my breast.

  “That was …”

  Sinful. Immodest. Immoral.

  “… Astonishing,” he whispered.

  He did not look on her with judgment. He looked on her with wonder.

  His face flickered in the lamplight, as he moved closer, and she saw his expression was soft with uncomplicated pleasure. She felt his presence like a touch.

  She was grateful she was seated, or she might swoon.

  “You are a remarkable player,” he murmured. “One of the best I’ve ever heard. A natural.”

  She was not a natural. She’d been taught, drilled at scales since before her earliest memory, tutored for hours a day most of her life. She could not recall a time she could not play.

  She forced herself to speak. “Oh, I’m not. I’ve played since I was very small.”

  He shook his head, his eyes gleaming. “You have a true gift, Alice.”

  She stared at him, wordless, unable to fully believe his face held admiration rather than outrage. She was so relieved he was not rebuking her she began to shiver.

  She’d not known how much she missed this. Playing the organ felt, to her, the way that Henry described prayer. To be alone with your thoughts and God.