The Signature of All Things

frequently dined at White Acre. This was the type of man who could easily write four hundred pages on the natural philosophy of grasshoppers, but who, in this case, had instead decided to write four hundred pages on his sensual adventures. This sense of recognition and familiarity both confused Alma and enticed her. If such a treatise was written by a respectable gentleman, with a respectable voice, did that make it respectable?
    What would Beatrix say? Alma knew immediately. Beatrix would say that this book was illicit and dangerous and abhorrent—a mare’s nest of wrongness. Beatrix would want this book destroyed. What would Prudence have done, if she ever found such a book? Well, Prudence wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole. Or, if Prudence somehow did end up with this book in her hands, she would dutifully present it to Beatrix to be destroyed, and would likely receive a strict punishment in the process for having even touched the thing in the first place. But Alma was not Prudence.
    What, then, would Alma do?
    Alma would destroy the book, she decided, and say nothing of it to anyone. In fact, she would destroy it right now. This very afternoon. Without reading another word of it.
    She opened the book again, to a random page. Again she encountered that familiar, respectable voice, speaking on the most unbelievable topic.
    “I wished to discover,” the author wrote, “at what age a woman loses her ability to receive sensual pleasure. My friend the brothel owner, who had assisted me in the past in so many experiments, told me of a certain courtesan who had enjoyed her occupation actively from the age of fourteen until the age of sixty-four, and who now, at the age of seventy, lived in a city not far from my own. I wrote to the woman in question, and she responded with a letter of charming candor and warmth. In the space of a month, I had come to visit her, where she allowed me to examine her genitalia, which were not easily distinguished from the genitalia of a much younger woman.She demonstrated that she was still most capable of pleasure, indeed. Using her fingers and a light coating of nut oil upon her hood of passion, she stroked herself toward a crisis of rapture—”
    Alma shut the book. This book must not be kept. She would burn it in the kitchen fire. Not this afternoon, when someone would see her, but later tonight.
    She opened it up again, once more at random.
    “I have come to believe,” the calm narrator continued, “that there are some people who benefit both in body and mind by regular beatings to the naked posterior. Many times, I have seen this practice lift the spirits of both men and women, and I suspect it may be the most salubrious treatment we have at our disposal for melancholia and other diseases of the mind. For two years, I kept company with the most delightful maid, a milliner’s girl, whose innocent and even angelic orbs became firm and strong with repeated flagellation, and whose sorrows were routinely erased by the taste of the whip. As I have described earlier in these pages, I once kept in my offices an elaborate couch, made for me by a fine London upholsterer, specially fitted with winches and ropes. This maid liked nothing more than to be tied securely upon that couch, where she would hold my member in her mouth, sucking me as a child enjoys a stick of sugar, whilst a companion—”
    Alma shut the book again. Anyone with a mind even remotely above the vulgar would stop reading this thing immediately. But what about the cankerworm of curiosity that lived within Alma’s belly? What about its desire to feed daily upon the novel, the extraordinary, the true ?
    Alma opened the book again, and read for another hour, overcome by stimulus, doubt, and havoc. Her conscience tugged at her skirt hems, pleading with her to stop, but she could not make herself stop. What she discovered in these pages made her feel vexed, frothy, and breathless. When she thought she might actually faint from the tangled stalks of imagination that were now waving throughout her head, she slammed shut the book at last, and locked it back into the innocuous trunk from which it had come.
    Hurriedly, she left the carriage house, smoothing her apron with her damp hands. Outside it was cool and overcast, as it had been all year, with an unsatisfying mizzle of fog. The air was so thick one nearly could have dissected it with a scalpel. There were important tasks to be completed this day. Alma had promised