Chapter 48 #2
Joseph entered the hall to find his father attacking the newel post at the bottom of the stairs. He slammed his palm against the wood again and again till it must have hurt. “Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn!”
Joseph’s mother stood beside his father. She glanced at Joseph, then touched his father’s shoulder and offered: ‘At a time like this, we must remember our blessings.’
‘What blessings?’
She hesitated. ‘God spared our home during the fire…’
‘What is a pile of wood and brick beside our daughter’s life, Anne?
’ He glared at the portrait of Christ on the wall.
‘Take the house!’ He stopped signing and started shouting.
“Do you hear me, you bastard? Take the damn house! Just leave me my girl…” He sank to his knees on the floor.
Joseph had never seen his father sob before.
His mother tried to comfort him, but she told Joseph: ‘He’s given up hope.’
Hélène had too. Joseph climbed the stairs to hear her pleading with her husband. She spoke no longer of Shakespeare or fairy godmothers, only reality. “Don’t you see? That’s why God didn’t give us children—so you could start again.”
“I can’t,” Liam insisted, his breaths as labored as hers.
“But I am saying I want you to!” Hélène’s tears belied her words. “Heaven will be a little awkward, yes; I cannot pretend I won’t be a tiny bit jealous. But the last thing I want is for you to spend the rest of your life mourning me!”
Liam saw Joseph on the threshold. “Tell her, Joseph,” he begged. “Tell her you only love once. That everything else is meaningless.”
Joseph opened his mouth to argue. He’d been taught these answers so long ago. He’d taught them so often himself: This is why you must never love a created thing more than the Creator. Only God is deathless. Only He will never fail you.
Yet his sister’s own childish words invaded his thoughts:
“I do love Our Lord—but I can’t hug Him!”
“The grave’s a fine and private place…”
Joseph could only cover his face and turn away. In that moment, he didn’t care about God’s will or even His love. It was weak and it was wicked; but he wanted his sister to stay.
When their father dragged himself back up the stairs, Hélène smiled at him. “I know you did everything you could, Papa.”
His face crumpled again.
“You did the best thing you could have done: you let me marry Liam.”
Their father wiped angrily at his tears and glanced at Joseph before he answered: “My child asked me for bread. I was not about to give her a stone.”
One more time, Hélène pressed the key to Tessa’s garden into Joseph’s palm. His sister’s eyes blazed like blue flames. “You have fasted for so long, Joseph…”
To soothe her, he accepted the little box. But at the first opportunity, Joseph slipped across the hall to Hélène’s dressing room, where he tucked the key into a drawer in her wardrobe.
He must direct her thoughts away from sin. This was his last chance. “Dearest sister…” Joseph prayed before she left them, words that might have been written for this moment alone and had never been more painful to pronounce:
“Freed from the fetters of this body, mayest thou return to thy Maker, Who formed thee from the slime of the Earth. … May Christ place thee in the ever-verdant gardens of His Paradise… Lord, be not mindful of her former transgressions and excesses which passion and desire did engender. … Blessed Joseph, patron of the dying, I commend to thee the soul of this handmaid Hélène, suffering the throes of her last agony…”
The agony passed. The end came as gently as sunset. Such a simple change: a final breath, a stilling of that vibrant heart. But Hélène’s sun would never rise again. Not on this side of the grave.
Joseph celebrated the long Rite of Burial like some kind of automaton, as if he were one of the mechanical figures on his grandfather’s clocks.
When it was over and he had unvested, he returned to his father’s house.
He climbed to the third floor and stared into his sister’s bedchamber as if all of it might have been a mistake.
But of course the bed was empty. His parents were downstairs accepting condolences. Liam had announced his intention to drink himself unconscious, and Joseph did not doubt it.
Perhaps Tessa had seen him go upstairs. Somehow, she appeared at his side and took his hand. That was when the tears began. Within a few moments, he could barely see her.
“I’m here,” she said simply.
In his blindness, Joseph let her lead him away from Hélène’s chamber, down the stairs and into his old room.
Tessa pushed the door closed and pulled him into her arms. Even this was not enough.
His legs shuddered beneath the weight of his grief, and Tessa swayed with him.
As powerless as wheat before a scythe, they fell onto his old bed.
He clutched her so tightly he could feel not only the softness of her throat but also the stiffness of her corset and petticoats through his own garments.
Her skirts were a hindrance; but as much as they let him, without thought of propriety or violation, even his legs clung to hers, like a vine climbing desperately towards the light.
She didn’t resist him. When he felt wetness on his forehead, he knew she was weeping too.
But Tessa held him more than he held her.
In time, the storm calmed, as all storms must. He found he could breathe again, albeit with difficulty. He loosened his grip on her, though he did not let her go. He pulled back just enough to see her beautiful face taking shape in the dimness. Only gauzy white curtains covered the windows.
Her fingers sunk into his hair, Tessa’s thumb stroked his forehead as if he were a child. The comfort suffused him like sunlight. With every caress, her own tearful eyes communicated her thoughts: I know. I understand.
Joseph didn’t. Why should the loss of Hélène wound him more deeply than Sophie’s passing? The only answer he could find was regret. He’d chastised his sister because he loved her, because he didn’t want to spend eternity without her—had she understood that?
“If my Ordination granted me one miracle,” he whispered hoarsely, “if I could raise one person from the dead as Christ raised Lazarus…”
Tessa tried to smile.
For a moment, Joseph closed his eyes to chastise himself. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t say that. You’ve lost so much.”
“I still have you.”
He avoided her eyes now, looking past her to the windows.
Tessa’s thumb stilled on his forehead. “Your father said you were planning to leave Charleston?”
The morning after Epiphany, and so many times since, he’d “firmly resolved to avoid the proximate occasions of sin”…
“Might you reconsider?”
“It is the wisest course.” He withdrew from her and sat up. She followed him, her petticoats rustling. His arms and legs ached to enfold her again. His hands actually twitched. He fisted them in determination. “I suppose Hélène explained why she gave you the blue lamp.”
“Yes.” Tessa’s smile was brighter now. “Did she give you the garden key?”
“She tried. I left it in her wardrobe.” Gazing at Tessa was dangerous, so he stared at his fists instead.
“I wish I could come to you. I wish there were a better place…”
Where? At the Bishop’s residence, in the shadow of the cathedral? Here, where his mother might see? Joseph shuddered at the thought of Tessa flitting unprotected through the dark streets.
“We needn’t do anything more than this, Joseph.” She took one of his hands, uncurled his fingers, and laced hers between them. “Edward stays at the plantation for two or three days at a time; I could put out the blue lamp during the day, and you could visit in the morning or afternoon…”
Was that really what he wanted: afternoon teas with her, half an hour in the parlor or garden—when one of her slaves might interrupt them at any moment?
He wanted this: a time and place where they might be truly alone, where they might belong only to each other, when they might speak without censure and embrace without fear of discovery.
But such a refuge would always be tenuous.
Even if they never unfastened a single button, anyone who caught them together would assume they were committing adultery.
Joseph would be committing it, in his heart. “I need…”
“I need you, even if you don’t need me.”
“I need time.” It was not entirely a lie. Tomorrow was Ash Wednesday. He kept staring at their joined hands. Whatever this might become, Joseph knew one thing for certain: he could not begin it during Lent. “Give me until Easter?”
He felt Tessa’s hand tremble in his—whether from disappointment or anticipation, he couldn’t say. “If ’tis safe before then, I’ll still light our blue lamp, so you’ll know what to look for. ’Tis a double-burner Argand lamp. It will be on the second floor, in the right-most window.”
Behind the house, from the direction of the slave quarters, a baby began to cry. When Tessa drew in a sharp breath and turned toward the sound, he realized it must be her daughter.
“Clare is another reason I cannot come to you.” Tessa smiled an apology. “So the decision must be yours.” She squeezed his hand and left him.
He curled up on the bed again, basking in her warmth as long as he could.