“Say you will come and live with me.”
“I will come and live with you.”
I roll myself up and down and up again—and he is crying out, filling me with his seed. I come then too.
And for a moment, all that has transpired this morning does not matter.
Because everything on earth is perfect.
Chapter 25
Alfred
Ihave lost my mind.
I know that by the laws of the only world that I have ever known, the common decency of society, I am irrevocably lost.
But as I undress in my new bedchamber, the one that adjoins Annabelle’s, it is hard to ignore the obvious. I prefer insanity.
Because when I was sane, I lived every day in deprivation and want, denying my deepest desires, the ones most natural to me, to please others.
We may confidently assert that no man is entitled to the character of being chaste who by any unnatural means causes expulsion of semen.
Those words used to fill me with awe and terror.
I think of the books that once sat in my desk drawer at the vicarage and which now sit in a trunk at my feet: the Acton and the green book. I used to think of the Acton as my true self—and the green book as my guiltiest pleasure that meant nothing. But now I see that, in fact, they represented two paths in life. For a long time, I traveled along thepath Acton had laid out for me and only visited the other path in secret.
Now I have reversed it. I have taken the path of my little green book.
Now Acton seems a ridiculous definition of morality, of righteousness, even of chastity.
In the pleasure Annabelle and I have together, I have found nothing corrupting.
No, it is not the pleasure that is the problem between us.
After she came to me at the vicarage, I returned to Trescott with her.
I know what the world will say.
I will be humiliated and ridiculed.
But I cannot face the alternative: no Annabelle.
I don’t know if she can feel more for me than fondness, than a desire to bed me. But I can no longer deny how I feel forher.
It is as I told her.
I love her.
I am desperate for her.
I will follow her like a dog until my dying day.
I have surrendered everything in the face of this truth.
And in a way that gives me power.
Because I have nothing to lose.
