Three years of this passed, and an ever-intensifying resentment seethed in the darker recesses of my mind, for I felt helpless to change, and I was constantly and crushingly lonely.
I despised being a priest.
But what else could I be?
°
The first of many alterations in my circumstances knocked at the vicarage door late one morning in August of 1885. It arrived in the form of the most disreputable-looking woman I’d ever seen. It pains me to describe her as she was then, but I must, for it was her deformities that initially bound us together.
She was, at most, five-foot-two, obviously a vagabond, hunchbacked, with crooked legs and swarthy sun-browned skin. Her jet-black hair—with streaks of white growing from the temples—was swept back from a deep widow’s peak and fell in waves to her twisted shoulder blades. The dress and jacket she wore might have been fashioned from old potato sacks. However, by far the most remarkable thing about her was that the upper part of her face was concealed behind tight-fitting black-lensed leather-bound goggles.
“Forgive my imposition,” she said, and her voice was sweet and mellifluous, surprising me with its cultivated tone. “I’ve fallen upon hard times, Reverend, and I am starving. If you have anything about the place that needs doing, perhaps you would be kind enough to allow me to work in return for a morsel? I can put my hand to any task you care to name, including labour you would normally assign to a man.”
Her grotesque appearance unnerved me, but I managed to stammer, “Quite, quite,” and blinked at my reflection in the shiny glass of her eyewear. “I have some shirts that require darning. Can you—um—but no, probably that wouldn’t—I’m sorry—”
She smiled and tapped the side of her goggles with a finger. “I’m not blind. I can do needlework. I suffer a condition of the eyes that allows me to see with perfect clarity in darkness but which causes me great pain in daylight or in the presence of gas lamps. I would be entirely incapacitated without these glasses.”
“Ah. Good!” I said, before hastily correcting myself. “Er, that you’re not blind, I mean! Is it—is it a congenital condition?”
“Quite so, Reverend. I was born with it.” She made a gesture that indicated her entire body. “As for the rest, a childhood accident is to blame—a chance occurrence, or perhaps it was the will of God, or maybe I was responsible for some misdeed in a past life and am now suffering a natural retribution. I suppose I must have done something very bad to have been thus punished!”
Startled by this statement, I replied, “You refer to the Buddhist belief in reincarnation, and in reaping what you sow over the course of multiple lifetimes?”
She nodded. “They call it karma. But I was merely being facetious. I don’t really believe in it—I’m a strictly practical sort. Supernatural and theological explanations for the world and our existence in it interest me only in so far as they might give hints of forgotten scientific knowledge. I mean no offence.”
“None taken! I’m not so dyed in the wool that I would deny a person the right to question the veracity or usefulness of the Christian faith—or any other creed, for that matter. I was simply taken aback that you know of Buddhist beliefs, that is all.”
“Because I appear a down-and-out, and you therefore presumed me ill-informed about such matters?”
I hesitated, feeling rather disoriented by the strange conversation that had come out of nowhere to interrupt my morning studies. “Forgive my forthrightness,” I said, “but yes, you do have the air of a beggar about you, and I’ve never heard a man or woman of that unfortunate class speak as you do.”
“Class! It is not a class, sir! It is misfortune and adverse circumstances that cause a person to fall to this state, not inherited qualities of character!”
I shifted from one foot to the other, a vicar made awkward and embarrassed by a vagrant, and stuttered, “Of c-course. Forgive me. It was a bad choice of—of—of words. I meant nothing by it. I appear to have jumped to conclusions about you on sight and now find that all of them are wrong. You are obviously not at all what I took you to be. May I—may I ask your name?”
“I am Clarissa Stark.”
“Would you care to come in, Miss Stark? I’m moved to hear your story, and I have a thick vegetable soup on the stove. It won’t take long to heat