CHAPTER 3
THE BENEFACTOR
POV: MAE
“Monsignor Albright is dead.”
Mother Clare says it the way she says the Angelus. Flat. Practiced. Eyes on a point above our heads.
Thirty of us stand at the long refectory tables with our hands folded over porridge going cold. Nobody sits until Mother sits. Mother isn’t sitting.
“He was found this morning at Holy Rood,” she goes on. “It appears he slipped in the baptistry. There was…” Her mouth thins. “There was drink involved. We’ll say a rosary for his soul at noon.”
Down the table, someone crosses herself. One of the old sisters starts to cry softly into her napkin.
I don’t move.
My hand is flat on the table. Under my collar, the gold ring sits on its chain against my breastbone, warm from my skin. I moved it back there at five this morning, before Lauds. My finger still feels bare without it.
He slipped.
Last night, a man put his knuckle on my jaw and told me to come to his office.
Last night, another man stood in my room and touched my hair.
This morning, the first man is dead.
I wait to feel horror.
What comes instead is so quiet I almost miss it. Something in my chest unclenching. A long breath going out of me that I’ve been holding since vespers.
Relief.
And under the relief, worse. A small hot thrill, like a match struck in a dark room.
Somebody did that for you.
“Magdalene.”
I jump. Mother Clare is looking at me over her pearl-rimmed glasses. She’s small and sixty-something, with hands that never unfold and a face like a closed door.
“After breakfast. My office.”
“Yes, Mother.”
Across the table, Sister Bernadette doesn’t look at me. She picks up her spoon and eats her porridge like a woman who has watched a great many men slip.
***
Mother Clare’s office smells like lemon polish and radiator heat. A crucifix over the desk. A calendar from a funeral home beside it. She doesn’t invite me to sit.
“The benefactor called,” she says.
My stomach drops. “The benefactor?”
“The anonymous gift. The one you enter every quarter at the bottom of your ledger.” She takes off her glasses and polishes them on her sleeve, which is what she does when she doesn’t want to look at you. “He has concerns about the books.”
“Mother, the books are perfect. I’ve checked them four—”
“He wants to review them in person. This morning.”
“I can mail them. Or scan—”
“He wants them delivered.” She puts the glasses back on. “By you.”
The radiator knocks twice.
“Why me?”
“Because you keep them. And because if he isn’t satisfied, St. Agnes closes in January.” Her voice doesn’t change. “Thirty-one sisters. The soup kitchen. The laundry. All of it.”
“He can’t just—”
“He can.” For a second, only a second, something moves under the closed door of her face. “He can do a great deal, child. A car is coming at ten. Wear your good cardigan.”
I don’t have a good cardigan.
I have one cardigan.
***
The car is black.
I know it before I’m halfway down the front steps. Long, low, windows dark as oil, parked against the snowbank on Adams Street exactly where it has been every night since October.
The same car.
My knees lock on the second step. The canvas tote with both ledgers bangs against my hip.
A man gets out of the driver’s side. Blond. Young. A face like a choirboy on a Christmas card and shoulders that belong on a loading dock. He walks around and opens the rear door and holds it.
“Miss Holloway.”
I don’t move.
“It’s cold,” he says. Not unkindly. “He doesn’t like you cold.”
He.
I get in because my legs do it without me.
The door shuts. The locks thunk.
And the smell hits me.
Cedar. Candle wax, the rich old kind. Leather that’s been out in the snow.
The smell from my sheets.
I press my back into the seat and hold the tote against my chest like it can protect me. I stare at the back of the blond man’s head all the way from Dorchester to the water. I don’t say a word. My heart doesn’t slow down once.
***
The building is an old brick warehouse on the Seaport that someone poured a fortune into. Black steel windows. An elevator with no buttons, only a glass panel the blond man touches with his thumb.
It goes up a long time.
When the doors open, there’s no hallway. Only a room. Wide plank floors, a desk the size of an altar, and a wall of glass over the harbor, where cranes lean above the container yard like giant iron birds.
A man stands at the glass with his back to me.
He’s tall. Taller than anyone I know. Dark suit, dark hair cut close at the neck. His hands are clasped behind him, and they’re gloved in black leather.
Black leather.
One finger at a time.
“Put them on the desk,” he says.
His voice is low and unhurried. The voice you use on a horse you don’t want to spook.
I put the ledgers on the desk.
“You’re late.”
“Your driver was late.”
“My driver was on time. You stood at the front door for four minutes and changed your mind twice.”
My mouth goes dry.
He turns around.
The first thing I see is the scar. A thin pale line that starts at the corner of his upper lip and cuts down across his jaw on the left side, like someone tried to open his face and gave up halfway. The second thing I see is his eyes. Gray. Not blue-gray. The flat, dark gray of a gun barrel.
They go over me once. My shoes. The cardigan. The darn at the right elbow.
They stop at my collar.
“Sit,” he says.
“I’ll stand.”
“Sit, Magdalene.”
Nobody has ever said my name like that. Like the whole thing belongs to him.
I sit.
He comes to the desk but doesn’t take the chair behind it. He opens the top ledger and runs one gloved finger down a column without looking at me.
“Page nine,” he says. “March. You carried a two.”
“I—what?”
“Heating oil. You carried a two where it should have been a one. The column’s off by eleven dollars.”
“It’s eleven dollars.”
“It’s my eleven dollars.”
I stare at him.
“Who are you?”
“Ronan Draven.”
The name lands somewhere in my memory. Newspapers. The Draven wing at Children’s. The docks.
“You’re the benefactor.”
“Among other things.”
“What other things?”
He closes the ledger. He comes around the desk, slowly, and stops close enough that I have to tip my head back to see his face.
“I own the roof over your prayers,” he says. “The bank that holds your mortgage. The company that fixed your boiler. The rail in your choir loft.” A pause. “The lock on your door.”
I’m on my feet before I know I’ve moved.
“It was you.”
“Sit down.”
“You were in my room.”
“You asked me to be.”
The floor tilts. Heat floods my face so fast it stings, collar to hairline.
If it’s you, come closer.
He read it. He read all of it. Every Saturday sin. Every night I left the blind up.
“You had no right,” I whisper.
“I have every right. I paid for the pencil.”
“That’s—” I can’t find the word. “That’s sick.”
“That’s thorough.” He tilts his head. “Sit, Magdalene. I’m not finished.”
I sit, because if I don’t, my knees will do it for me.
“Monsignor Albright is dead,” I say. It comes out small.
“I heard. Tragic. Wet floors.”
“Did you—”
“He asked you to his office on Tuesday night.”
“He was helping my father.”
“Your father sat at a card table on Monday night and offered you to the men who’ve been paying Albright to deliver you.” He says it the way he read the ledger. Flat. Exact. “Albright’s office backs onto an alley. No cameras. Wednesday morning you’d have been on a boat.”
The radiator in the corner ticks. Somewhere below us, a crane horn sounds.
“No,” I say. “Dad wouldn’t.”
“He did.”
“You’re lying.”
“I don’t need to lie to you, Magdalene.” He leans down and sets one gloved hand on each arm of my chair, and suddenly the whole room is him. The cedar. The wax. The heat coming off his body. “Owners don’t lie. They don’t have to.”
“Nobody owns me. I belong to God.”
“You belong to the man who pays for your heat.”
I should hit him. I should scream. I should grab the ledgers and run for the elevator I already know won’t open without his thumb.
My body does none of it.
My body sits very still in his chair, with his arms on either side of it, and throbs.
His eyes drop to my collar again.
“Where’s my ring?”
My hand goes to the chain before I can stop it.
“Show me.”
I pull it out. The little gold rosary swings between us, catching the gray light off the harbor.
“It looked better on your finger,” he says.
My stomach falls away.
Last night. The window. My hand.
“How do you—”
“Put it on.”
I don’t. I close my fist around it, the chain biting my knuckles, and I look up at him, and I hate him, and I can’t breathe.
He takes off one glove.
He does it slowly, one finger at a time, and I watch every one.
Then he puts the glove back on.
It’s the cruelest thing anyone has ever done to me.
He lifts his gloved hand to my face. Leather, cool and soft. His thumb finds my lower lip and presses, just enough to part it.
“You blessed a man who was going to sell you,” he says quietly. “You gave him your amen.”
His thumb moves. A slow drag across my lip. I feel it in my knees. In my stomach. Lower.
“Give me mine.”
I can’t. I won’t.
I’m a postulant of the Sisters of St. Agnes. I have prayed for two years to be good. To be quiet. To be His.
His thumb waits.
The throb between my legs turns into an ache.
“Say amen, Magdalene.”
My lips move against the leather.
“Amen,” I whisper.
He smiles. It’s slow and terrible, and it goes all the way up into those gunmetal eyes.
He smiles like I’ve just signed something in blood.