As she waited in the wood-paneled audience chamber, Josepha looked around anxiously at the walls. The carvings of angels and devils battling each other with the weapons of history were cut deeply into the brown-stained wood and accented with black and white. Nowhere in the room, she realized, did the vast, convoluted depiction show a victor. It was a common feature of Jacob Kahl’s prolific works.
She began to struggle with a sudden fear. If her cleric father knew of her involvement with the cadre, he might try to use her to track down the other members of the cell, if they had not all been arrested. To have ignored his summons would have placed her under suspicion.
She took a deep breath and sat still. Maybe this was about something else entirely. After all, she had never been commanded to appear before any authority or to come to this audience chamber for the kin of clerics.
“Welcome, daughter,” a male voice said from behind the screen.
“It was by your order, wasn’t it?” she asked, unable to control her trembling as she gripped the arms of the chair.
“Of course.”
“But why?” she added.
She heard him sigh. “I know you wanted him, daughter, but he betrayed us all. And he would have blocked your way—“
“What has he done?” she demanded in a breaking voice.
“Don’t you know? He sought the overthrow of the state.”
“Ondro? Impossible. I know his family.”
“He was not alone, daughter.”
“Where is he?” she asked, afraid that she would hear that he was dead.
“He has been judged. I don’t know the details. You’re well rid of him.”
“Where is he?” she shouted, realizing that Ondro’s life was over, that all his hopes for his profession would never be realized. No one in the cell had expected sudden arrest by the state, at least not before they were all established in their chosen paths. It had been a kind of game, meeting once a month to discuss the latest revision of the revolutionary council’s program for the future. No one knew who was on the council, or when it would call the cells to action. We were all fools, she thought, talking of revolution but also dreaming of personal power. How many other conspiracies waited in Bely’s vast, decaying bureaucracy? Who was the council, anyway? It might be a cardinal or two, perhaps even a single individual telling the cells what they wished to hear. Maybe there was only one cell. Bely himself might have started the whole thing to trap dissenters as they appeared.
She had come to the cell meeting and found an empty room. The chairs and table were in disarray, and the lock on the door was broken.
She had fled in panic, wary of contact with any of her friends from the group, afraid to find out who had been caught, fearful that some of those who had been arrested might be released to lure others into giving themselves away.
There were rumors of a cardinal being assassinated right here in the papal palace.
Later, she found the summons under her door in the college dormitory. It was the first message she had ever had from the man who claimed to be her father.
Quietly, she got up and came around to his side of the screen. “Tell me!”
The old man sitting there looked tired. “You must not…” he began, swallowing as he looked up at her. His obvious distress gave her confidence.
But as she looked at the pitiable old man who shrank from her gaze, she saw something familiar in the gaunt face, and her pity turned to surprise as she recognized the pontiff himself, by whose order she had escaped arrest—and who by being here now confessed himself as her father.
She stood in silence, unable to speak.
“What will happen to Ondro?” she asked at last, struggling with the pontiff’s revelation, wondering if it might be a lie. “If you are my father, then you must tell me!”
“You cannot understand…”
“Then explain it to me.”
He shook his head and sank deeper into the heavy cushions of his chair. “Go back to your studies. Forget…or risk joining him in punishment. Do you want your life to end here and now? I have other hopes for you.”
“What are you saying?”
“Forget these associations. Remake your life, and we will talk again.”