Chapter 25
By moonlight, the church looked cold, washed away to nothing but greys and shadows.
Of course, Thomas had been here after dark before, at Midnight Mass for many years, but there was candlelight for that, all a-glitter, and voices raised in joyful song, bodies pressed together to warm so much old stone.
Now, though, it was simply a room. One that, as Thomas paced its confines, felt empty.
He wasn’t sure he’d truly slept in days, possibly even weeks.
Mornings, evenings, afternoons, they could have been anywhere, anywhen, and he had stumbled through them, smiling when it was required he smile, nodding when it was required he nod, offering words by rote, like the psalms he had learned as a child, with no reference to their meaning.
The nights, though, the nights were interminable.
In the rectory, the ticking of every clock had become a blade, cutting his life into a thousand scattered pieces of after Micha.
It was mostly a need to escape the noise, and the silence, and to pass the time, the too much time, that had driven Thomas from home.
Once he might have believed that the fact his steps had led him to the church meant he was seeking guidance, or even comfort.
Now he did not know what he sought. If anything.
He paused before the altar but did not ascend the steps. He was not, in this moment, a priest, and he had never felt less of one. When had he learned to find joy here, purpose, a kind of peace? And how had he lost it just as swiftly, just as inexplicably?
Where are you, he wondered.
And could not have clarified who he was asking for.
Thomas had been taught, and fallen naturally into, a brisk, practical English Protestantism.
He’d found little use for what he thought of as papist effusions and discouraged his parishioners from anything even slightly resembling them.
There was, after all, enough in life already to demand your supplication.
No truly loving Father should want that from His children.
Nevertheless, tonight he knelt. The flagstones were ice-cold, but he barely felt them.
He barely felt anything. He couldn’t remember the last time he had.
Slowly, he lowered himself further. To his elbows.
Then full-length, his cheek in the dust of so many footsteps.
Closing his eyes, he waited. Waited for something to change. Then realised nothing was going to.
Because it was still there, the soft tug inside him, that delicate fishhook, embedded in the tenderest sinews of his heart, the deepest places of his soul, drawing him as inexorably to God as life to death. As lover to lover.
Had he known how, he would have ripped it from himself. Left it there on the church floor, like a silver worm in a bloody pool. Walked away and never looked back. Except it had been part of him since before he had known how to recognise it.
It was what made him believe in kindness over cruelty.
What made him find hope for tomorrow. For the day after tomorrow.
It was what made him want to be a better man, even if his power to be so was enacted on the smallest imaginable scale.
It was what helped him accept that this could be enough.
Not only for him, but for any who chose—in the face of an often-indifferent world—even a little goodness.
The salt of his own tears stung his cracked lips.
Thomas had written once, in the journal he had found no reason to continue, that God never subjected you to more than could be endured. He had repeated those words as rote consolation more times than he could remember.
But he understood them now. The truth of them.
Because he could endure this. He could.
“It’s just”—he lifted his head, moonlight spilling down his cheeks, illuminating nothing—“how am I to forgive you?”
And God had no answer. For He did not need to give one.
At some point, Thomas rose and moved to one of the pews, where he waited not quite awake, not quite sleeping, barely thinking, neither wanting nor able to pray, as the hours passed.
The light swept through the church, grey-tinged at first from the fading night, then flame-bright with the sunrise.
It was the colour of meadow primrose by the time Sheba came and sat next to him.
“How did you know I was here?” he asked, his voice raw from tears and unspoken words.
“I didn’t,” she admitted, smiling. “But you scared the life out of Sophie Butterworth when she came with fresh flowers.”
Thomas searched himself for the capacity to interact like a reasonable person. “It’s surely not so unusual for a priest to be found in a church.”
“You’re not generally here so early. She was afraid you might have been here all night.”
“And this made her flee the building?”
“She was worried about you. And she thought you might speak more easily to me—a friend.” She paused. “Was she wrong?”
“Just at present,” Thomas admitted, falling back on honesty in the absence of anything more useful, “I’m not certain I recall how to speak to anyone.”
Sheba’s hand came to rest lightly, affectionately upon his knee. “What happened, Thomas? Between you and Micha?”
For some reason, it felt almost impossible to say, even though it was the simplest of all possible answers. “He left.”
“Why?”
“Because”—Thomas swallowed, his mouth full of ashes—“I couldn’t leave with him. I thought I could. But he was right. I . . . I’m where I’m meant to be.”
She was silent for a long time. “I don’t think I understand?”
“God placed me here.”
“Did not the bishop place you here? To appease your family?”
Thomas made a sound that, at another moment, could have been a laugh. “Earthly machinations may sometimes reflect heavenly intent.”
“That’s rather convenient, don’t you think?”
Thomas dropped his head into his hands. The light was making his eyes ache. “You’re very like him, you know.”
“We have a lot in common,” she agreed, mildly. “More than enough to dislike each other for it, at any rate.”
“I never understood his antipathy.”
“Oh.” She flicked her fingers dismissively. “He wishes he were better than me, but fears he is not. On some days, simple jealousy.”
“Why would he be jealous?”
“Don’t be foolish, Thomas.”
“I gave him no cause.”
“The world gave him cause. He would be jealous of any woman to whom you showed the smallest favour, simply because she could offer you what he cannot.”
Thomas blushed beneath the shadow of his own palm. “There are things I would not wish a woman to offer me.”
“A woman could marry you. Give you a child. Live a life openly by your side. With a woman, you could keep your God, without qualm or question.”
“My God?” repeated Thomas. “Is He not your God also?”
“I very much doubt it.” Her tone was a little wry, but not bitter. “He is a man’s God, after all. I’m honestly rather surprised He still feels like yours.”
“It’s not God who holds my love a sin. But to love, I must live in sin. And what kind of priest would that make me?”
“Priests are just people, aren’t they?” she asked. “Are you saying no priest has ever sinned?”
“It’s not the sin. Everyone struggles with sin.” Thomas sighed. “It’s the persistence of the sin. Are you familiar with Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans. Chapter seven?”
Her lips twitched. “Clearly not.”
“I won’t quote it to you—”
“My thanks.”
That drew from him an unexpected half-smile. “Paul, as is rather typical for him, I will admit, is wrestling with what it means to understand sin, and believe in God’s law, and yet continue to fall short of doing what is right.”
“I see.”
“He concludes,” Thomas went on, giving voice to thoughts that lived inside him like rats, feeding upon him endlessly, “that mistakes are to some degree inevitable because, unlike God, we aren’t perfect.
And that as long as we recognise God’s goodness, and hate the ills that we do, we can trust in His grace to save us from the worst of ourselves. ”
“And what does that have to do with you?”
He sighed, the taste of dust in his mouth, his tongue as cumbersome as stone. “I could never hate being with Micha. I would be choosing sin, day in, day out, knowing always I was in the wrong and refusing . . . unable . . . to repent.”
“I thought you said”—Sheba’s voice was gentle, in contrast to the needle-prick precision of her words—“love wasn’t sin in the eyes of the Lord?”
“Love isn’t. Fornication is, and for good reason.”
“It’s not as though you have another choice. If you were to act as married, forsaking all others, until death do you part, et cetera, would it still be fornication?”
“Well,” said Thomas, rather hopelessly, “yes. Not all religious laws are secular laws, nor are all secular laws religious. For that matter, it’s not always the case that what’s morally right is upheld by either religious doctrine or legal precedent.”
Sheba’s look was wry enough to remind him, painfully, of Micha. “This all sounds very convenient, Thomas. Convenient for people who are not us.”
“Even so”—on this, at least, he could be firm—“it is not for me alone to decide what holds weight and what doesn’t. I can only live as best I can, in accordance with what is right under the church, right under the Crown, and right to my own conscience.”
“Your own happiness can’t be right also?”
“Not if I want to stay a priest.”
“And you do?”
“I must.”
“Forgive me for what is probably a foolish or insensitive question, but why?”
“I know it sounds absurd to feel . . . called, I suppose, to so small a life, and yet I do.” He managed the faintest of smiles, for the wretched absurdity of it all, if nothing else. “I thought it was one father who demanded this of me, but it turned out to be another who truly drew me.”
“How can you be sure?” she asked, her tone more curious than it was sceptical, though it was not devoid of scepticism either.
“I wish I could tell you. Like all love, it’s simply there. And it will be until the day I die.”