Read Online Whispers of the Flesh by Louisa Burton - Free Book Online

the moment. Most women would have looked rather hard with their hair styled so austerely; Lili looked like a Greek goddess.
    It took him some time to pry each button loose from its little loop, a process made all the more arduous by his nervous, fumbling fingers. Gradually the back of the dress parted, revealing a corset of ornately quilted ivory sateen laced with a silken ribbon; the same ribbon connected the front and back with a little bow at the outer edge of each shoulder.
    Affecting as casual a tone as he could muster, he said,“I cannot imagine that Elic would take it well, were he to come by and find me undressing you.”
    After a few seconds of silence, she said, “Are you familiar with the concept of free love, David?”
    “I have read the writings of Percy Shelley on the subject.”
    “What do you think of it?”
    “In truth? Not much, I’m afraid.”
    “Why?”
    “I . . . Perhaps we shouldn’t discuss this. I do not care to insult you.”
    “If you intend no insult, none will be inferred.”
    “I cannot help but believe that indiscriminate coupling reflects poorly upon one’s character.”
    “Ah, but what if one is discriminating?” she asked. He could hear the amusement in her voice.
    “It is still a sign of moral weakness. I was brought up to revere the bodily integrity represented by virginity.”
    “As regards
females
,” she said. “I suspect you are a good deal more lenient as regards the transgressions of your own sex.”
    “Not at all. Continence is as much a virtue for men as for women.”
    “Don’t tell me you’re a virgin, David.” Her tone implied that such a state of affairs was impossible, even ludicrous.
    David paused in his unbuttoning, wishing he’d had the presence of mind to avoid this line of conversation.
    She looked at him over her shoulder, her eyes wide with incredulity. “You
are
.”
    Trying not to let his discomfiture show in his voice, he said, “The union of the sexes is rightly reserved to those joined by the sacrament of marriage.”
    “You are a pious man, then.”
    He considered his response as he pushed another button through its loop. “I am regarded as such.”
    “An intriguingly vague reply. Are you or are you not?”
    Oh, how he wanted to be. The counsel of Father Cullen, David’s confessor at Stonyhurst, was never far from his thoughts. “
Blind conformity to the laws of the Church ought not to be confused with true devotion, David. You’ve confessed to taking an excess of pride in your truthfulness, your perfect observance of your vows and of ecclesiastical law. You’ve done penance for the sin of vainglory, yet it is a sin from which you cannot seem to refrain. A priest should be, first and foremost, a man of faith, not an exemplar of correct behavior—or a slave to it. Sometimes I think you’ve chosen a religious vocation more to minister to yourself than to minister to others. Think long and hard on this before your ordination, my son.”
    “Genuine, unassailable piety,” David told Lili carefully, “is something to which I aspire.”
    “Do you think, if you live your life in a cage of righteousness and rectitude, that you will awaken one morning suddenly aglow with true faith?”
    Jolted by her perception, David didn’t answer her. Instead, he pried the last two buttons through their loops and said, “That should do it.”
    She pulled two pillowy pads from the sleeves and tossed them aside, then raised her arms, saying “Would you be so kind?”
    He divested her of the dress with unpracticed awkwardness, gathering it up as best he could into a great mass while working the sleeves free.
    “You can just lay it on that table.” She set about untying a sort of backward apron of starched white lace ruffles affixed over her voluminous petticoats—a bustle, only the second one David had ever seen.
    The first was a pink one that his sister Blanche’s lady’s maid had been laying out on her mistress’s bed, along with a ball gown and