Chapter 4 #2
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I was uncharitable in my thoughts toward Mother Agnes. I neglected my evening prayers twice this week. I felt envy when I saw the baker’s wife with her new dress.”
Small sins. Safe sins. The kind any novice might confess to fill the silence. I’d heard a thousand such confessions, and I knew the shape of a soul holding back.
She spoke to me through a veil thicker than the wooden screen between us.
Each word was carefully chosen, stripped of anything that might reveal who she truly was.
I would offer her penance—three Hail Marys, an Our Father—and she would thank me and leave, and I’d sit alone in the darkness of the confessional, wondering what storms raged behind those calm, recited words.
What had made her so careful? What had taught her that even the sacrament of confession was not safe? I was still new to this city then, didn’t know that caution was survival for a woman who lived outside the prescribed path of wife and mother.
I found myself wanting to reach through the screen, to take her hands in mine and say, Tell me. Tell me what burdens you. I will not betray you. I swear before God, I will not betray you.
But I did not. I could not. The screen existed for a reason, and so did her silence.
Still, I began to look for other ways. Small kindnesses. A warmer greeting when we passed in the cloister, questions about her garden that invited longer answers. I told myself I was ministering to a wounded soul, coaxing a frightened lamb back to the shepherd’s arms.
I did not yet admit that I simply wanted her to look at me.
After weeks of nothing, I knew I needed more. I found her after Sunday Mass, sitting near the back, eyes downcast, trying to become invisible in the shadows of the pillars. But I saw her—I would always see her now. When the congregation dispersed, I approached slowly, cautiously.
“Katharina,” I murmured. “I was wondering if I might ask you something?”
She looked up then, and her eyes—blue with flecks of green, like the herbs in her garden—held such wariness it broke my heart. “Yes, Father?”
“I understand you help with the convent’s work. The sisters speak well of your dedication.”
A lie, one I would atone for later. The sisters didn’t speak of her at all, except perhaps Sister Margareta. But I saw how her shoulders relaxed slightly at the kindness.
I was not a holy man. I knew that then. If I had been, I would have kept my distance. I would have heeded the rot and corruption growing in my heart at the soft glow of her cheeks and the sharpness in her eyes.
Instead, I said, “I wonder if you might assist me with organizing the church’s texts. I could teach you to read the scriptures properly in return.”
The hunger that flashed across her face, the pure yearning for knowledge, made my decision for me.
This was no creature of the Devil. This was a mind in need of guidance.
I had intended to teach her to read but was shocked to find she was already quite skilled in German.
Perhaps that should have cautioned me—a literate woman, even amongst the nobility, was rare—but it became apparent quickly that she was brighter than many of the men I’d studied amongst, and what had begun as simple Bible study transformed into lessons in Latin and theology.
Every morning I rose looking forward to our discussions, to watching her finally bloom into life, no longer hiding in the shadows.
She became my light in those dark months.
I’d arrived in Bamberg hollowed out by loss—my family burned with their farm, my home reduced to a Swedish trophy.
I had nearly succumbed to my own darkness then, praying nightly on why such cruelty and injustice existed in our world.
Bamberg’s blood-soaked stones and constant smoke had threatened to drown what little faith remained in me.
But Katharina…she approached each lesson with such fierce joy, such determination to understand not just the words but their meaning, their purpose.
When she struggled, her brow would furrow in concentration that, while absolutely beautiful, had me wishing to smooth it with a gentle brush of my thumb.
When she succeeded, her smile could have lit every candle in the cathedral.
Her mind. God forgive me, it was her mind I fell in love with first. In the way she treated knowledge with the reverence it deserved while never accepting it without question. How she was constantly pushing back against what so many refused to question.
Dangerous.
The word often rang in my mind. In a world that begged all to conform—especially beautiful women like her—she was pushing past what was safe.
But that only drew me to her. I found myself craving it: the gentle struggle, the debate, and beneath that, watching the way her eyes lit as I met each of her arguments with one of my own.
In teaching her, I found my own faith renewed—not in the institution that burned innocents, but in the divine spark that could create a mind like hers, a spirit that remained compassionate despite having every reason to turn bitter.
Because she was compassionate and brave in a way that made my chest ache. In a city where fear had become the only currency, she moved through the shadows with steady hands, healing where I could only pray.
She risked her life every time she opened her door to a desperate woman, and she did it without hesitation, without the comfort of believing God would protect her.
Because God hadn’t protected her mother.
I’d lied to her today. I had read the trial records of Anna Müller, but I’d read them a dozen times, searching for understanding.
The woman had been tortured for three days before confessing to impossible things.
That she had flown through the night, coupled with demons, and cursed livestock.
But between the forced confessions were fragments of truth: she’d known more of herbs and their uses than a woman was allowed to know.
She had been guilty of knowledge, of refusing to let women die when she could save them.
Just like her daughter.
“Is this a test?” I asked the silent Christ. “Did you place her in my path to try my faith?”
But I knew better. Katharina wasn’t a temptation sent from Hell.
She was grace itself, moving through a graceless world.
When she tended the sick, I saw Christ’s compassion in her hands.
When she risked everything to help others, I saw the kind of love scripture spoke of—the kind that laid down its life for those who could not save themselves. I loved her for it.
I loved her with a fervor that should have been reserved for God alone.
My fingers found my rosary, but instead of prayers, I imagined how it would feel to wind those beads around her wrists, to watch her surrender to something other than fear. The thought was blasphemous, combining the sacred and profane in ways that should have horrified me.
Instead, it set my blood on fire.
“I am weak,” I confessed to the altar. “I am failing you. I cannot protect these people from the Bishop’s madness. I cannot stop the trials. And I cannot stop wanting her.”
The chapel door creaked, and for one wild moment, I thought it might be her. But it was only Brother Thomas, come to light the evening candles.
“You missed Vespers,” he said, his tone accusatory.
“I was at the cathedral,” I replied, rising from the bench. My knee screamed in protest.
“Oh, I thought perhaps you were with that woman again.” He didn’t bother to hide his disdain. “You spend much time teaching her Latin. One wonders what use such education serves.”
I turned to face him fully, letting him see something of the darkness that had been growing in me since I’d arrived in this cursed city.
“One might also wonder why you concern yourself so deeply with my activities, Brother Thomas. Perhaps you should examine your own soul before casting stones at others.”
He paled and scurried away, leaving me alone with my guilt…and desire.
Tomorrow, she would come again for her lesson. I would find excuses to touch her hand, to lean near enough to smell the herbs that clung to her hair. We would dance around the truth that burned between us, both of us pretending that what we felt was proper—anything other than what it was.
I was a priest who had sworn himself to God.
She was a woman who refused to kneel in a city that craved to watch her burn.
We were impossible.
It wasn’t my life I worried for, but hers.
It wasn’t her sin that she was temptation made flesh, that I dreamed of her soft laugh and the smiles only I could draw from her.
But that is not how the Bishop would see it.
Not how anyone in Bamberg would see it—not as the pure expression of God’s love that it was, but as the greatest sin of all.
So I would stay away. No matter what it took, I wouldn’t act on these desires that held my heart like the Devil’s own hand.
And yet, like Thomas doubting Christ’s wounds until he could touch them, I found myself needing to press my fingers to this impossible thing, to prove to myself it was real. That in all this darkness, something this luminous could exist.
“Forgive me,” I whispered again, but this time I wasn’t sure who I was asking—God, or Katharina, or perhaps my own soul for what I was about to do to it.
Because I would see her tomorrow, and the day after, and every day until the flames finally came for us both. I knew, somewhere in my deeply human heart, that I would eventually break.
And God help me, I would burn for her before I let them take her.
That was my true sacrilege—not the desire, but the certainty that, given the choice between my vows and her life, I would choose her.