She led him down one flight of stone steps and through two echoing corridors, one short, one long, until they arrived at a set of heavy double doors, carved wood and iron. She pushed one open and revealed to him…
“Beautiful chapel,” he said.
She didn’t disagree. The chapel was original to the monastery—16th century and still looked it, though it had been through restorations and repairs many times. The walls were stone and the ceiling vaulted with small arched Norman windows. A humble chapel, small and ancient, but made lovely by the candles burning on the altar and at the windows.
“I could have turned it into a fabulous dungeon. I thought about it, even spoke to our architect about it…but I didn’t. I wanted to keep it this way.” She turned and looked at him. “For you.”
He glanced at her, his eyes wide at first, then narrowed in suspicion.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “You know I love you. And you always—”
“Hurt the one you love. Yes, yes, I know this.”
She pulled on the heavy door behind her, but Marcus waved her off and shut it for her. Ah, to be young again. She would kill to be that age again—specifically, she would kill him.
They went to the front pew, nearest the bank of burning candles, and sat side by side. She had made one change to the chapel, adding cushions to the pews. Very lush ones. Her ancient backside needed it.
“I love to come sit in here at night,” she said. “I don’t pray. But it comforts me to think I own my very own Catholic chapel. The Church didn’t want me but when the time came, they wanted my money.”
“I would have thought you’d taken a sledgehammer to it, after what the Church did to you.”
“Ah, I’m above petty revenge.”
“No, you aren’t.”
“True. But I’m too old for hefting sledgehammers. And I wanted you to see it.”
He rose from the pew. She watched him walk around the altar, run his hands over it. She saw his fear but couldn’t say for certain what the source of it was. They were so much alike, she and him, both sadists, both damaged, and yet both had their own strict, strange moral codes they lived by. If she had to guess, take a stab in the dark, she would say he was afraid he would be forced to leave the priesthood because of his son.
Or, since he was a sadist and the son of a sadist, perhaps he was terrified his son would take too much after him in that regard.
“I have to wonder how many masses have been celebrated here over the centuries by how many priests. Who were they? What did they hope for, dream of?” His voice was far away, as if speaking to himself.
“Fear?”
He met her eyes over the altar, over the candles. “Yes.”
“Are you afraid they’ll make you leave the priesthood?”
“No. They might if they find out, but I’m not afraid of that.”
“Are you afraid you’ll never have a relationship with your son?”
“I don’t know if I should, honestly. I haven’t even decided yet if I want to. It feels almost enough to know he exists. He has a mother. He has a father. He doesn’t need me. My part is done.”
She rose and walked to the altar, stood on the opposite side of it, a dozen dripping white candles burning between them. “Then what is it, Bambi? Tell me.”
He lifted his hand and ran it over the flames of the candles, letting the fire lick his palm.
“You knew Eleanor and I would be together,” he said, “years before I met her. And after she left me and I came here, you told me she would come back to me, eventually, and she did.”
He’d always scoffed at her claims she could divine the future from reading palms and tea leaves. How terrified must he be to admit that he might possibly believe, even a little, that she did have the ability to see what was coming?
He ran his palm over the candle flames again, then turned it, held it out, offered it to her. “Can you answer this question—is she going to leave me again?”