Chapter 6 #2
He’d been trying to get me to do this since I’d met him—to be honest with him.
But I’d learned long ago that no confession was safe.
Yet as I heard his soft breathing, saw the shape of his hands through the screen, the sadness and rage and loneliness I’d done my best to keep locked tight spilled out of me, a dam finally breaking.
“I don’t know what I believe anymore.” The words tumbled into the darkness. “I say the prayers, I attend Mass, but…I fear every day that God has forsaken me. Has forsaken this city.
Heinrich was quiet, letting me continue.
“And yet I still find myself praying. Every night. I pray, hoping he will hear me. I ask…” I pressed my palms against my eyes. I couldn’t say that—not aloud, not to him.
“I am here to listen, Katharina, not to judge.”
It weighed on me like lead—these desires.
The desire to live in the light. To offer my knowledge without constant fear.
The desire to have more than a threadbare dress and flattened shoes.
The desire to have him wrap his arms around me and hold me tight, not as priest and flock, but as man and woman.
To have his lips open to mine, to feel the heat of him against this damned cold that never went away, even in the height of summer.
“Katharina.” He didn’t sound impatient. He never did. “Do you know what Christ did when they brought him the adulteress? He said, ‘Let him without sin cast the first stone.’”
I swallowed hard. “But I am not without sin, Father. That is the problem.”
“None of us are.” His voice was soft, barely above a whisper.
“And yet we torture ourselves for wanting the things that make us human. We flagellate our hearts for daring to desire connection and purpose. The Church teaches that desire is the enemy of holiness, but I wonder sometimes…” He trailed off, and I heard him shift behind the screen.
“Wonder what?”
“If perhaps desire is simply love that hasn’t found its proper home yet. If wanting—truly wanting—is not a sin but a compass pointing us toward what we were made for.”
My heart hammered against my ribs. “And the guilt? What of the guilt that follows every wanting?”
“Guilt is a manacle, Katharina—one the Church has become very skilled at forging.” He exhaled slowly.
“I have heard a thousand confessions in this box. Women who weep because they felt a moment of joy. Men who punish themselves for feeling compassion. Children—children—who believe they are damned because they wished for a full belly or a mother’s embrace.
” His voice roughened. “None of that is God’s design. ”
I’d never heard him speak so freely. “You don’t think desire is a sin?”
“I think sin is watching suffering and doing nothing when you have the power to help.” He paused. “I know God’s love isn’t found in scripture or behind altars, but in the hearts and hands of those who serve others.”
My breath caught. “If anyone heard you say such things—”
“Then I would burn as a heretic. And perhaps I am one. Because I cannot reconcile the God I feel in my heart—the one who made…clever minds and gentle hands—with the one the Bishop claims to serve.”
Through the screen, our eyes met. For the first time since I was young, in the darkness of the confessional, the truth rose to the surface.
“I dream about her, my mother,” I admitted. “Not just the burning. The things she taught me—how the garden and its bounty were a blessing from God himself, and how we served him by understanding its purpose. She said knowledge was its own prayer.” My throat tightened. “But knowledge killed her.”
“No,” Heinrich said firmly. “Fear killed her. Fear of women who didn’t need men to interpret God for them. Your mother died for the same reason Christ did—for showing people they had power the authorities didn’t want them to know about.”
“Sometimes I…I’m so afraid, Heinrich. I don’t want to burn. I think of just being the obedient, invisible creature they want.”
“And?” He was always so patient.
“And then I think of Leibchen.” Fresh tears slipped down my cheeks. “How quickly they disposed of her once she stopped producing. How her years of service meant nothing once her body failed. That’s all women are to them—bodies that produce until they don’t, then fodder for fire.”
“You’re angry.”
“Yes.” The word hissed out. “Is that a sin too?”
“Christ overturned the moneylenders’ tables. Even God’s Son knew righteous anger.” The wooden bench creaked as he shifted, the smile evident in his voice. “Though perhaps don’t overturn any tables just yet.”
Despite everything, I laughed—a watery, broken sound, but real.
I took a shaky breath. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I have desires I cannot rid myself of. No matter what I do, they linger in my heart.”
“These are not sins. But if they were, you would be absolved. God sees your heart, and it is pure.”
“Heinrich—”
“Go in peace,” he said, the formal words of dismissal. “To love and serve the truth of what’s right.”
I left the confessional feeling lighter and heavier at once. Heinrich followed, and in the candlelight I saw recognition on his face, as if he’d finally understood something about me—or perhaps about himself.
“Thank you,” I murmured. “For Leibchen. For…understanding.”
He reached out and took my hand in the dark. “She was lucky to have you. As am I.”
There it was again—that moment when we weren’t priest and parishioner anymore.
The only sound was our breathing, deep and unsteady, and all it would have taken was one small step forward to cross that line.
One small step, and I would be pressed against him, his arms wrapped around me as I surrendered to everything churning inside me.
I stepped back instead.
Our hands parted, and I turned away without looking back. I fled the nave nearly as quickly as I had entered it.
The touch had lasted only a moment, but his warmth lingered on my palm long after. Descending through the cold stone corridors back to my chamber, I realized the hollow grief had shifted into something else.
Heinrich always had that effect on me. He’d said my desires were not a sin, but he didn’t know the depths of what I wanted. How I wanted him. But he was a good man, one of the only ones in Bamberg. I would wrestle with my own damnation, but I would never drag him down with me.
Yet the need inside me clawed until it became an ache I could no longer ignore. I settled beneath my thin wool blanket, the cot hard beneath me as I rolled onto my stomach. My hips pulsed against the tight fabric as I tugged up my chemise, my fingers finding their home quickly.
This had become as familiar to me as my evening prayers—and so much sweeter.
The tension coiled as I pinched and tugged at my clit, but as I remembered the feeling of his hands and his soft voice, I knew it wouldn’t be enough.
I slipped one hand farther back, pressing one finger, then two inside myself, wondering if it was what he would feel like.
No, he would be so much better. His long scholar’s fingers reaching deeper than I ever could, the soft Latin he would whisper in my ear as he worked me slowly, not with the rapid desperation I felt now.
I groaned, my forehead pressing into the rough surface beneath me as the throbbing pressure built. It felt distant tonight, blocked by the guilt that never left me alone, even in the dark.
Dirty. Desperate. Damned.
But tonight the words drilled into me in the convent came in Heinrich’s voice as his hand tightened at the back of my neck. Tonight I didn’t want his kindness, but his admonishment. For him to finally see the sinner that I was and treat me accordingly.
You deserve this. Your body deserves this.
I moaned his name into the night as that flicker of pleasure passed through me, like a candle being snuffed out. It was never more than that. I rolled onto my back, panting until my breath fogged in the cold air.
You deserve this. Your body deserves this.
I curled in on myself as hot tears of frustration streaked down my cheeks, and sleep slowly claimed me. As it did, I dreamed of tiny feet and the buzz of wings, soft mouths drinking my tears away.