The Lord I Left

by Scarlett Peckham

  They passed a sign noting her village was two miles away. Oddly, the snowstorm had not reached this far inland. There was no ice on the ground at all.

  “The turn is just up the road on the right,” Alice said quietly.

  “Alice, how much of my journal did you read?” The question was abrupt, but he knew he would never see her again after this ride was over, and he would never know the answer if he did not ask her now. There were certain passages that made him sting with embarrassment, passages that could ruin him. He did not want to know; he had to.

  She looked at him sadly. “Not very much, Henry. But enough.”

  Enough. He nodded, taut with such shame he felt like his bones were made of his father’s most delicate, breakable porcelain.

  “Enough,” she repeated softly, “to know that you are a wonderful person. And I wish you could see it for yourself.”

  The porcelain shattered into one thousand tiny, painful pieces.

  He said nothing. He did not trust himself to speak.

  “When Mistress Brearley first invited you to the whipping house, I was angry,” Alice said quietly. “I told her she put us all at risk, and she insisted that I was wrong about you. She believed you genuinely wanted to do good, to help, and would do the right thing if given the chance.”

  Alice paused, for her voice was shaky. She took a deep breath. “And now that I know you, Henry, I see she was right. I’m sorry that I read your journal. I’m sorry I didn’t give it back when I realized it was yours. But I’m not sorry that I know your thoughts. Because they made me understand why it was I liked you, even when I thought I shouldn’t.”

  Tears had welled up in his eyes and he angrily blinked them away. Why did these words mean so much to him? Why was it that when he should be furious with Alice, his strongest emotion was sadness that this was how their time together would end?

  He wished he hadn’t seen that journal in her bag.

  He made the turn toward her village, breathing slowly in an effort to collect himself before he had to use his voice to say goodbye. When they reached the small square at the center of town she looked over at him. “You can let me out here.”

  He glanced around at the square, which was deserted. “Where is your home?”

  “Oh, no, just stop here in the square. I don’t want to inconvenience you in case the weather turns again. I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

  He looked at her with displeasure. “Why?”

  There was a strange expression on her face. Like she was nervous. She seemed to be trying to think of a response, and it made him angry.

  “Driving you a few more minutes to your door is no extra burden when I’ve spent the better part of a week trying to see you safely home. Please, direct me to your house.”

  She fidgeted with the collar of her cloak. “Just follow this road straight ahead,” she finally said. “You’ll see a church on a hilltop. Our cottage is in the valley just below it.”

  He nodded, wondering why she, who had blithely read about all his fears and fantasies, acted like telling him where she lived was a difficult confession.

  He soon saw the church in the distance. They were only a few minutes away.

  “When we arrive,” Alice said very quietly, “I must ask—that is, I do not consider myself dishonest, though I could see how you would think otherwise—but no one here knows the truth about my life in London.”

  He turned his head sharply. “What?”

  She sighed. “They all believe I’m a housekeeper for a widowed relation of my father’s. I didn’t wish to burden them with worry—”

  He nodded curtly.

  She shrank in her side of the carriage. Clearly, it did not escape either of them that she who espoused the nobility of her work should keep it secret, in the precise manner of someone who was ashamed. He wondered if she had been, all this time, more like him than she was willing to admit. Both of them trying to live by certain convictions. Both wavering in practice.

  Were he feeling more generous toward her, it might make him sad to know she, who believed so passionately in living freely without judgment, had kept this from her dying parent. But he was determined not to continue the bad habit of indulging soft emotions for Alice Hull.

  “I will not say otherwise,” he said tersely. “I don’t wish to make trouble for you.”

  He turned off the road to a small cottage tucked into a valley, with a ramshackle barn and a single field that did not appear to be in active use. The roof was in need of rethatching, and the entire dwelling listed to one side. The house itself was small—it could not be more than four rooms. Despite its disrepair, the home was in a pretty place, with a forest bordering its field, and a view of the large, handsome church above it on the hill.

  The front door of the house opened as they neared, and two girls came running toward them. One of them was a girl about Alice’s height, and the other was a child. At the sight of them, Alice’s face broke into a smile.

  “Liza! Sally!”

  As soon as he stopped the curricle she jumped down and rushed to her sisters. The three of them nearly fell on top of each other, clutching each other’s shoulders so tightly it was like they were one being.

  As angry as he was at Alice, he could not help but be touched by the obvious emotion in this embrace.

  “How tall you’ve grown, Liza,” Alice exclaimed, stepping back to admire the bigger girl. She turned to the younger one. “And you, Sally, are the very image of Papa. Except quite a bit prettier.”

  The younger girl laughed, but the older one was beside herself. “Where have you been, Ally? We were so worried something dreadful happened to you.”

  Alice took her sister by the shoulders and looked into her eye. “Eliza, I will never leave you to fend for yourself alone. I got caught in the blasted snow, but I’ve been racing here for days.”

  “What snow?” the girl protested. “It hasn’t snowed all winter.”

  Henry glanced out at the surrounding countryside. It was cold and damp, but there was not even frost on the trees. He could not make sense of it.

  “How is Mama?” Alice murmured, taking the older girl’s hands.

  Alice’s sisters exchanged a worried look. The older one swallowed. “She’s hanging on, resting. She’ll be so happy that you’ve come home.”

  “Of course I’ve come home,” Alice said, drawing both girls back into her embrace. Her eyes fell on Henry over their heads. There was something haunted in them, but the hoarseness he had heard in her voice when she’d run to them was gone.

  She was being strong for them.

  He wondered when, or if, she ever let herself be weak.

  “Girls,” she said. “This is Mr. Evesham. A friend of my mistress, who was kind enough to drive me here.”

  He bowed to the girls. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, albeit in such somber circumstances.”

  The girls curtsied to him.

  He turned back to Alice. “I shall be going now. I will pray for your mother’s health.”

  “Wait,” she said. Her voice was urgent, almost shrill. He paused.

  She came and touched his hand. “You should come inside and warm up first,” she said softly, looking into his eyes with something like a plea. “Give the horses some hay and water and a bit of rest.”

  Her voice was steady but her eyes were desperate. If she had not wanted him to see her home, now, for some reason, she did not wish for him to leave it.

  “I’ve just made luncheon, Mr. Evesham,” the older sister, Eliza, said. “We’d be pleased if you could join us.”

  He did not wish to linger here, feeling as angry as he did. But Alice had a point about the horses.

  “That’s very kind. If I could just put my team in your barn.”

  Once the mares were seen to, he followed the girls inside the house. The cottage was clean, but small and close. There was a haze about the air, as though the smoke of the coal fire could not escape through the chimney, and instead lingered in th
e house. He was practical with his hands—a necessity of looking after the Meeting House in exchange for his board. He itched to go about offering to repair things, though he bit the impulse back, sensitive that he might embarrass the family if he implied their home was less than shipshape.

  He could see from the spare selection of tattered and beaten furnishings, and the bare shelves that passed for a pantry—a sack of apples, a few onions, a bag of flour that appeared nearly empty—that money must be very scarce.

  He felt a momentary pang that he had shamed Alice for her work, when her family clearly needed every pence that they could get. It must have seemed cruel and arrogant of him, especially when she’d seen his father’s ridiculous wealth.

  Whatever bitterness was between them, she had been right. He must not lose sight of this when he set out to write his recommendations to the Lords.

  “I’m going to go in and look on Mama,” Alice said.

  “No, don’t,” Eliza said quickly. “She’s just fallen asleep and it’s so difficult for her to rest with her breathing. I’ll take you in to see her after lunch, and we’ll give her a bit of broth. She’ll be so happy to see you.”

  Alice looked perturbed by this. “I’ll just go in quietly—”

  Sally came over and took Alice’s hand and led her to a seat at the table. “Mama needs to rest. The physician said it’s very important.”

  “And I made your favorite, Ally,” Eliza said. “Soup.” She winked at Alice, as if this were a joke.

  “How I’ve missed your soup,” Alice groaned. “A rare, exotic delicacy.”

  Sally glanced up at Henry. “Liza can make a soup out of anything,” she whispered, wrinkling her nose. “Carrot tops. Old shoes. Rocks.”

  “Actually,” Eliza pronounced, ruffling Sally’s hair, “we’re dining like kings today. Mr. Hovis slaughtered his cow, and brought us a lovely side of beef.” She passed Henry a bowl of broth studded with chunks of meat.

  Alice looked horrified. “Oh, Eliza, Mr. Evesham does not—”

  But Henry caught her eye and subtly shook his head. “I’m ravenous, Miss Eliza. And this smells delicious. It just so happens that beef stew is my favorite. Second only to old shoe soup, of course,” he added, with a wink at Sally.

  Alice looked at him gratefully and he smiled at her, trying to communicate with his eyes that she need not add him to her considerable list of worries. Whatever tension remained between them, he would not embarrass her family.

  “Tell us of your life in town, Ally,” Sally said around a mouthful of bread.

  “Chew before you speak, m’dear,” Alice corrected.

  Sally giggled and made a show of chewing. After she’d swallowed, she repeated the question, assuming a broad version of an aristocratic accent. “Do tell us of your life in town, Miss Hull.”

  Henry chuckled at her cheek but stopped when he noticed Alice glancing at him nervously, as if she was afraid that he would challenge any fact that she asserted. He leaned over toward her little sister. “Miss Hull is a cherished member of the household in which she’s employed. Mrs. Brearley tells me Alice is the finest housekeeper she has ever had.”

  Her sisters both beamed at her with obvious pride.

  “Mama talks of you to everyone who’ll listen,” Eliza said. “’My daughter, the London miss, sending us fine gifts from town.’ She took your cherry cordials into the market and gave them to everyone with a mouth. Even poor Mr. Dunn, who hasn’t any teeth to chew them with.”

  Alice laughed, but was visibly shrinking under this praise. “I’m sorry I could only send cherries,” she said. “I missed you at Christmas.”

  “Well, we missed you too, but William said you managed to have quite a bit of cheer at the markets in London. He told us all about the lights and the carolers. Said you gave him memories he’ll treasure all his life.”

  The warmth with which Eliza said this made Henry wonder who this William was. Was Alice attached to this man? Mustn’t she be, for him to visit her in London and take her to a Christmas market?

  Did he know about her true employment? Had he received her … favors?

  (Envy. Utter, despicable envy. He’d need to pray for an entire day after this. A month.)

  Alice just smiled wanly and shoved bread into her mouth, refusing to look at Henry.

  “How are you acquainted with Alice’s mistress, Mr. Evesham?” Eliza asked. “We’re mighty curious about her. Mama says she’s a grand lady.”

  Henry was not yet over the disorientation of imagining Alice being courted, or—(stop!)—and fumbled to form words.

  Alice swallowed down her bread in a lump to beat him to it. “Mr. Evesham was a dear friend of Mrs. Brearley’s late husband, the sea captain.”

  He found himself nodding along. “Yes. A fine man. A sea captain.”

  “Are you a sailor?” Sally asked, looking thrilled at this possibility.

  “I’m afraid nothing as exciting as that. I am a minister by training, and run a charity.” He did not mention his work for the Lords, lest it lead to other questions about the precise nature of his work, which might cause the family to worry that Alice was consorting with disreputable people.

  “You’re a minister?” Eliza asked, looking oddly at Alice, who was inspecting her soup.

  “I am.”

  He had finished his soup, and he should be on his way. But he hesitated. He did not know why he wished to prolong his stay here, except he had a kind of ache around his heart, because the words Alice had said to him kept running through his head.

  Enough to know that you’re a wonderful person.

  He had never felt such a jarring mix of affection and yearning and pique for any human being in his entire lifetime as he felt for Alice Hull. Perhaps it was only the difficulty of the weather, the odd direction their journey had taken, the high emotions of their circumstances. But he felt the way he had as a man at university, when his head had been in turmoil as he felt himself moving inexorably toward a reckoning he could feel but not yet understand.

  What that internal miasma had been, in retrospect, was the first stirrings of his salvation. His heart opening to God.

  What was opening in him now?

  “I’d be happy to say a prayer for your mother before I leave, if you would like,” he offered. He should have offered before. He’d been too caught up in his own anger to exercise compassion.

  Eliza twisted her mouth, glancing sideways at Alice. “Oh, we can’t ask that of you.”

  “’Twould be no trouble. It’s the least I could do after this delicious lunch.”

  Eliza frowned. “Well you see, Mr. Evesham, Mama’s not in good graces with the Church. She stopped attending after Alice’s dispute with the vicar.”

  Alice’s eyes went wide. “Mama stopped attending?”

  Eliza nodded. “Never went back after Papa’s funeral.”

  Alice looked like someone had punched her in the stomach.

  “May I ask what happened?” Henry asked.

  “’Twas nothing,” Alice said in a low voice, her face distraught. “Just a disagreement.”

  “The vicar would not let Ally play the organ at our father’s funeral,” Eliza said. “He said that it was a desecration for a woman of her character to play music in church and that our father was a philistine for letting her go around performing. Mother sat through the funeral service for Papa’s sake, God rest his soul, but never entered the place again. Alice didn’t even attend the rites. But I think Mama misses it. She prays on her own.”

  Alice looked down at her lap, blinking away tears.

  He could not swallow back his outrage. Of all the things he’d imagined that might have rent Alice from her faith, a vicar was not a possibility he’d considered.

  “And this man, your vicar, has done nothing to welcome your mother back to the church? Not even in her recent illness?”

  Eliza looked uncomfortable. “No … Ally told him he was a pox-blistered son of Beelzebub. After that I think he decided we w
ere not worthy of his efforts. Besides, he rarely comes to town, and there’s no curate.”

  This made him angrier still. To hold the emotions of a grieving daughter against her was contrary to the spirit of ministry. And to occupy a curacy without fulfilling the religious needs of the community was just as bad—exactly the kind of pestilential behavior that had made him begin to question his desire to assume a higher office in the Church of England during his brief year as a curate.

  “A rotten practice, vicars holding curacies themselves,” he seethed aloud. “If the man had any decency, he would at least attend the sick, whatever his relations in the past. I’m sorry your mother’s been neglected in her faith, particularly in her time of need.”

  Alice, who he knew had valiantly held back tears for days, suddenly let out a wail.

  Chapter 24

  “Oh, Ally!” Eliza cried, jumping up and wrapping her arms around Alice. “Don’t cry over the vicar!”

  But she was not crying over the vicar. She was crying that her mother had never returned to church, which was the social center of their village, and had always been her greatest comfort. That she had persisted in this quiet act of loyalty to a daughter who would not even deign to come home for Christmas.

  And now, her mother lay in the next room, dying, and Alice had not even gone in to hold her hand.

  She had listened to her sisters’ warnings not to because some small, scared part of her hoped that if she delayed actually seeing her mother suffering and ill, this truth she could not truly reckon with—her hale, vibrant, forceful mother, dying—would not be real. But now she could not wait.

  All the emotion she had held back on the journey was escaping her in great wracking sobs.

  She stood up, unable to stop the tears. “Oh, poor Mama. I’m sorry Liza, but I have to see her.”

  Eliza jumped up and moved in front of her, appearing frightened. “No, Alice, not yet. You must wait just a bit longer while she rests. The doctor said—”

  “What does it matter if she’s dying? I need to see her. And Henry can say a prayer with her. I know it would mean a great deal.”