his wife’s death? Rupert was a badly behaved child—and is now a dissolute adult—because he felt unloved, and perhaps even guilty. His misbehaviour was a cry for help.”
“Tosh and piffle!” Miss Stark exclaimed. “The same misfortune was visited upon your family, yet your father doted on you, and you are kind and generous. Why different results from an almost identical circumstance?”
“The source must be farther back,” I responded. “Sir Philip’s reaction was shaped, perhaps, by some ill that was done to him by his own parents.”
My companion snorted dismissively and said, “Back and back and back until, no doubt, you arrive at Cain! But why stop there? Cain’s murder of Abel was prompted by a jealous rage, and that a response to God’s cruel preference for a blood sacrifice over a gift of fruit and grain. Must we then consider God as the source of evil?”
“God is the epitome of good!” I objected.
“So your argument falls down. Cause and effect are an insufficient explanation.”
“Do you have an alternative?”
She shrugged. “Maybe there’s no origin, and no point to evil at all. Perhaps it’s simply a component of some personalities, in the same way that gregariousness is, or shyness, or boldness, or timidity, or any other characteristic.”
°
In 1887, two years after Clarissa Stark joined me in Theaston Vale, the Tanner family arrived in the town, having moved from Southampton, and in them I saw demonstrated a wickedness that appeared to support my sexton’s assertion, for there was neither rhyme nor reason to it. The Tanners were simply bad.
They were a large clan, headed by a brute of a man named Oliver who came to set up shop as the town’s new blacksmith. On their first Sunday in the parish, they attended my morning service, descending upon the church in an unseemly manner, with much shouting and boisterousness. Despite it being an early hour of Our Lord’s day, the head of the family was obviously drunk and slurred his words as he introduced his pinch-faced wife, his three burly and sneering sons, and his two daughters, the youngest of whom was a mousy, runny-nosed girl of about ten years.
The other was Alice.
Alice—who promised Heaven and sent me to Hell.
She was curly-haired, tall, and shapely, with dark direct eyes that glittered and flashed like those of an angry cat. Her beauty was mesmeric—and she used it with ruthless efficiency. When she stepped forward that morning, I, who had no defence, was conquered in an instant. I stammered like a fool and turned red as a beetroot. She giggled, fluttered her lashes, smiled coquettishly, and entered the church. Her father slapped my shoulder and emitted a bellow of laughter before following her in.
The service that day was the worst of my life. Again and again, my gaze found its way to where Alice sat watching me with her lips curved into a slight smile, and each time I lost my train of thought and stumbled dreadfully in my speech. Meanwhile, the three Tanner boys disregarded me and talked to one another loudly throughout my liturgy, while their father sprawled with his head back and snored with the volume of a passing locomotive.
The crudeness of her family notwithstanding, over the course of the next few weeks, I found myself thinking obsessively about the girl and the way she’d looked at me—with a challenge and an invitation—and when I discovered that her father had purchased a small allotment on the outskirts of town, and that she worked there each afternoon, I began to take daily postprandial strolls so I might walk by it and stop to exchange a few words with her. She was always polite but distant, regarding me with pursed lips and hooded eyes, as if she knew something about me of which I was not myself aware. Our conversations were short and restricted to meaningless observations about the weather or the progress of her vegetables. What few attempts I made at greater depth were met with a giggle and a dismissive wave of the hand. It was obvious she was sorely lacking in education, but like an idiot, and contrary to all the signs, I interpreted this as a sort of purity, seeing in her a wholesome naturalness through which the divine spirit might be expressed in an unadulterated manner.
In my regular evening debates with Clarissa Stark, I again and again tried to legitimise my infatuation by dwelling on theories of female beauty, oblivious to the fact that this may have been a painful