Chapter 59
Annabelle
Iwalk without direction.
I weave my way through St. James’s and up towards Piccadilly.
I have no goal in going there. I only want to get away from Alfred and the horrible feeling rioting inside of me.
In the end, is he just another man who has used and discarded me?
I haven’t let any man get truly close to me since my first terrible lovers back in Trescott. Was I right to be so guarded? Was I a fool now for letting him in?
When we first met I thought I was using him, that I was turning him to my purposes.
Perhaps he was just turning me to his.
The worst part is that I love him. I know that now. After I have made myself despicable to him. He cannot love me now, if he ever did. Not after I revealed what I initially planned for him. That the life that stirs within me was conceived through deception.
The street blurs before me at the thought.
I thought I was the seducer.
But it seems I was wrong.
He seduced me.
He made me love him.
Despite all of the time that has passed, and everything that I have achieved, I am still the same heedless, reckless, foolish, openhearted girl that I was at sixteen.
I shake my head, trying to put my regular armor back in place.
Annabelle de Lacey does not love people. And she is certainly not loved. The child in my belly will surely rue being born to me.
My eyes fill with tears at that thought. At the stupidity of my hope for a new future with Alfred.
I am on Piccadilly now. And I am weeping. I hate the idea of anyone seeing me in this state. I can imagine the broadsheet that they would create over such a scene. I must take cover in a shop.
I cast around me and see a bookshop.
Willoughby’s.
It is the one to which I sent Alfred for his erotic books.
I have always liked the place, and it warms me to know that he has been there.
Hating my weakness, I lurch into the shop.
The sheer number of books on the wall are a calming sight.
I duck into an aisle at random, bringing my handkerchief to my face to wipe away my tears.
I need to compose myself. I do not want the disillusion of my marriage, my humiliation, to feed the broadsheets.
As I put my handkerchief back into my reticule, a name flashes from a shelf. A familiar name.
William Acton.
Without thinking, I reach for the spine.
It has gold lettering and a brown leather cover.
The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs.
This manual must be the one that Alfred told me about. The one he was forced to read as a boy and which put so many absurd restrictions upon him.
I open the book at random and my eyes fall upon a passage:
We may confidently assert that no man is entitled to the character of being chaste who by any unnatural means causes expulsion of semen.
Chastity must be entire. This definition, of course, excludes the masturbator from the category of chaste men, even though he may never have had connection with a female.
The words, so cruel in their certainty, in the provision they lay down, take my breath away.
They make me remember Alfred as I first knew him. So uncomfortable and bothered by his longing. How hard his cock was and how he did not allow himself relief.
I flip through and keep reading at random.
Many a man has, until his marriage, lived a most continent life; so has his wife.
As soon as they are wedded, intercourse is indulged in night after night; neither party having any idea that these repeated sexual acts are excesses, which the system of neither can with impunity bear, and which to the delicate man, at least, is occasionally absolute ruin.
What absolute bollocks!
I keep reading, each passage a new horror.
Soon, I am not sure how much time I have lost to this book.
It is not a short time, I am certain, but I am unable to keep my eyes from the page.
Page after page of well-meaning cruelty pours over me.
Nonsense about the enervating effects of orgasm on men, on the excesses of sexual congress to be avoided even in marriage—and completely abstained from outside of it.
I cannot believe that Alfred was taught that these edicts were the truth.
But reading the words of this devil, this William Acton, shakes something loose in me.
I think of my husband seated on that desk. The way his body was unsure, tentative, his eyes wide and his lips parted.
Had he truly not been aroused? Or was he only being careful? Perhaps I was right, and he did not approach me in the last three weeks because he wanted to respect my state. That such abstaining would not strike him as odd or unusual, given what he was taught.
Certainly, he had excellent training in ignoring his desires.
Perhaps he needed a moment to adjust to my abrupt switch.
The knot in my chest loosens just a little at the notion.
“For Christ’s sake, there you are, Annabelle.”
I whirl around, still holding the book.
There Alfred stands, his brow wet and his face flushed, as if he has been running.
He seizes me, grabbing my elbow a bit roughly.
“You must promise to never run from me again, do you understand? I thought I would have an apoplexy.”
And then he pulls me into his arms.
I don’t resist. I don’t want to.
Then he pulls back again.
“What is wrong? Why did you dash out of the house in such a fashion? What did I do?”
His eyes are urgent but steady. They search mine for answers. The bookstore is perhaps not the best place to have such a discussion. But I don’t care.
Let anyone hear. Let them write a thousand broadsheets about it.
“I told you,” I say, not meeting his eye, as I cling to him. “I am done. I dismiss you. I have tricked and deceived you and used you and it is only right that you have now tired of me. It is only what I deserve.”
“Damn it, woman,” he says. “I have not tired of you.”
“When I kissed you, on the desk,” I say, licking my dry lips. “You didn’t enjoy it.”
“Fuck, Annabelle. You know that isn’t how I feel. I want you all day, every day, without stopping.”
“It did not seem that way,” I whisper.
“Christ, this is the source of your upset? Annabelle, you’ve been ill.
You’re carrying our child. I was not sure what you wanted.
Of course, if you want me to, I will bed you from dawn till dusk.
I want you, always. I wake at night, Annabelle, hard and aching only for you.
But I can control myself. I only want you to feel happy with me. I only want you to feel safe.”
I cannot breathe. Every word is perfect—every word a rebuke to my own thoughts.
“It kills me,” he continues, “that other men treated you so wretchedly. I could tear them all limb from limb. If your father wasn’t already dead, I would kill him.
I still have not decided whether to let Frank Holster live.
Or Terrence French. The only thing that stops me from riding back to Trescott and annihilating both men is that I don’t want to be separated from you. ”
I lean into him again. I can’t keep myself back. I kiss him madly, wanting him to understand how I feel.
He kisses me back and, to my great delight, this time he groans into my mouth. I can feel him stirring against my belly.
But he wrenches me away from him.
“You must talk to me, Annabelle. No kissing until you can tell me what is going on. Is it true what you said? About your plan when you first bedded me?”
“Yes,” I cry, tears leaking out of my eyes. “Now you know everything, What a monster I am.”
He laughs. “Annabelle, I am not angry.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Perhaps I should be,” he says. “But our meeting was so unconventional. And we have both changed so much. Let us not linger on the past.”
“You cannot truly be so forgiving. I planned to get with your child and then dismiss you. You, who always wanted to be a father.”
“And did you?” he asks. “Did you execute this plan?”
“I bedded you.”
“You did,” he says. “But did you dismiss me?”
“No,” I whisper. “I couldn’t.”
“Then I will not punish you for what you planned to do before you knew me. I could have been anyone or anything when you made your plan. With what you’ve known of men, I can hardly blame you for thinking that I’d be worth dismissing.”
I swallow. I realize that this sin that I have built up in my mind as the one Alfred wouldn’t be able to forgive is anything but.
He looks down. “Why are you holding that infernal book?”
“I found it here. I was so upset. I thought you didn’t want me.” I am crying again. It is embarrassing. But I can’t care enough to stop. “And then I found myself here. And this book. And I was reading it—and, oh Alfred, what is in this book is so dreadful.”
He smiles. “I know, my love. But do you see what is right next to it?”
I look and gasp. I pull the green volume off the shelf.
It is Alfred’s green book—or not his, but another copy of the same one.
“You did this?”
“Yes. I found it as a desperate young man on a bookstore shelf—and I thank the person who left it there for me. So I hope someone else will find it. And may it help them know their desires and find peace.”
“And what better revenge on William Acton,” I say. “To put him in such company.”
He takes the brown volume from my hand and puts it back on the shelf.
“Indeed. I’d burn all the copies of that book if I could. Just like I burned those broadsheets.”
“What do you mean?”
He sighs.
“That broadsheet in my pocket. I found it on a newsstand with about fifty others. I bought them all and burned them in the street.”
“They must have been sold elsewhere,” I say, laughing through my tears. “It was silly to burn them.”
“Undoubtedly. But I wanted to destroy them all the same, so I did. They made me so angry. They denigrate you, Annabelle, because they can’t control you. They hate you for being what they can’t stand. Beautiful and powerful and not controlled by any man.”
“Not even you?”
He laughs.
“Certainly not by me. Don’t you remember? I am at your mercy. Always.”
“But I am at yours,” I say. “I need you. It’s true. I don’t want to be without you.”
“You will never have to be,” he says, kissing me once more, tenderly.
But I have one more question.
“Then why did you keep one broadsheet?”
“It was foolish. I did it to remind myself that I once believed such dross. Before I met you. I imagined you as something like those caricatures. And then when I met you—” He breaks off. “I shouldn’t have kept it. Not when I knew you could have found it.”
“I thought it meant that you had grown disgusted with me. That you believed it.”
“It could never be, my love.”
He kisses me again, and I let him.
How could I not love this man? He came after me. He wants to protect me, to keep me safe, to give me freedom and a safe haven as no man ever has. All while not restricting me in the least. All while celebrating what makes me myself.
Tears leak from my eyes. I was cruel to deny him the truth for so long. In my heart, I have known for a long time how I feel for him. But I was too scared to admit it.
Now I look into his eyes, that crisp green, and know the time has come to tell the truth.
“I love you, Alfred.”
He smiles down at me and brushes his fingers against my cheek. He looks, even to my eye, utterly happy and utterly serene.
And then he says the words that I hoped he would.
That I need to hear above all others.
“I know, Annabelle.”
I kiss him then because I love him, and I want him to never forget it.
I put all the proof that he doesn’t need into that kiss.