CHAPTER 15
THE KNEELER
POV: MAE
Declan Byrne chews gum outside my door all Friday.
I can hear it through the wood. A small wet click every few seconds, steady as a clock. He’s been there since seven this morning, when he knocked and introduced himself and told me he’d be “on my door” until further notice.
“Anything you need, Mrs. Draven,” he said. “Anything at all.”
He’s big and thick-necked and polite. He smells like spearmint and wet wool. He asked me what time I usually say my prayers.
“Whenever I want,” I told him.
“Sure. Sure.” Click, click. “Just so my guys know where you are.”
Now it’s dark, and he’s still there, and Ronan isn’t home.
***
The house is different today.
There are men in the garden. Two at the back gate, two at the front, one at the end of the covered passage outside the chapel door, stamping his feet in the snow.
When Rosa brought my lunch, there was a man in the kitchen eating a sandwich at the counter, and he stood up when I came in and said, “Ma’am,” and didn’t sit down again until I’d gone.
Six more from the Quincy yard. I heard Declan say it.
The cage has more bars.
I should mind.
I sit on the window seat in my room all afternoon with the Augustine from the library open on my knees, and I don’t read a word of it. I watch the snow come down on Louisburg Square. I watch the gas lamps come on at four. I think about a dining room table with blood on it.
She isn’t owed. She’s mine.
Then she’s the price of your war.
Then I’ll pay it in their blood.
I heard every word. I stood in that doorway with my heart slamming against my ribs, and I heard his father offer him thirty years of peace in exchange for me, and I heard him say no.
Twice.
He didn’t even take a breath before the first one.
Nobody has ever chosen me.
My father chose a card table. Every time. Every Friday night. My mother chose—that isn’t fair. My mother didn’t choose the cancer. But she chose not to fight it the last year, chose morphine and the television and sleeping through my fifteenth birthday, and I have never once said that out loud.
The Church chose the man who pays for the heat. Mother Clare told me so to my face, through a door on a chain.
Ronan Draven chose me over his own father. Over his city. Over a man dead in a burnt warehouse and a war that’s going to cost him more than I can count.
I’ve been counting all afternoon.
I can’t make it come out.
***
At eleven-forty, I get up.
I don’t let myself think about it. If I think about it, I’ll sit back down.
I take off the gray dress and the cardigan and fold them on the chair. I open the second drawer and take out the white nightgown. Silk, long, thin straps, plain. I’ve looked at it every night for a week and chosen black.
I put on the white one.
Over it, the camel coat. On my feet, the boots from the slanted shelf. And over my hair, the black lace veil, pinned at the crown the way I wore it to the altar.
I look at myself in the dark window.
A bride, if you didn’t look too closely. A widow, if you did.
I open my door.
Declan pushes off the wall. The gum stops.
“Ma’am?”
“Is my husband home?”
“Came in at eleven. Went straight out back.” He tips his head toward the stairs. “Chapel.”
“Then I’m going to pray.”
“I’ll walk you.”
“You don’t need to.”
“Boss’s rules, ma’am.” He smiles. It’s a nice smile. It doesn’t reach anywhere. “Anywhere you go, somebody goes.”
He walks me down the stairs, through the dark kitchen, to the glass door at the back of the house. He opens it for me. The cold rolls in.
“I’ll be right here,” he says.
“Thank you, Mr. Byrne.”
“Declan, ma’am. Please.”
I go out into the passage without answering.
The chapel windows are lit. Red and blue and gold, glowing on the snow. Saint Agnes and her lamb, burning in the dark.
***
The candles are lit. All of them. The two tall ones on the altar, the three on the Advent wreath. They throw long moving shadows up the stone walls.
He’s kneeling at the altar rail.
Not the prie-dieu. The rail. On the bare stone step, in his shirtsleeves, his coat thrown over the front pew. His head is bowed. His bandaged hands are folded on the rail, and wound through them, the onyx rosary.
He doesn’t turn around.
“Go to bed, Magdalene.”
“No.”
My voice sounds loud in the little stone room. I walk up the aisle. My boots are loud too. I don’t stop at the prie-dieu. I stop at the rail, beside him, and I kneel down on the cold step next to him.
Our shoulders almost touch.
He still doesn’t look at me.
“Declan walked you,” he says.
“He’s very polite.”
“He’s paid to be.”
The candles hiss. The wax on the pink one has started to lean.
“Your father said I’m the price of your war,” I say.
“My father says a lot of things.”
“You told him you’d pay it.”
“I will.”
“Why?”
He turns his head at last and looks at me. In the candlelight his eyes are dark gray, almost black, and there are shadows under them I’ve never seen.
“You know why.”
I do. That’s the problem.
“Nobody has ever—” My throat closes. I make myself say it.
“My father chose a card table. My mother chose to stop fighting. The Church chose whoever pays for the oil. And you—” I look down at his hands on the rail.
At the rosary. At the blood that keeps coming back through the gauze.
“You chose me over your father. In front of me. You didn’t even wait to hear his price. ”
He doesn’t say anything.
“I came to say it,” I tell him.
His hands tighten on the rail. The beads click.
“Then say it.”
“Please.”
“Please what?”
My face goes hot. All of it. My ears. My throat. The bruise.
He waits. He can wait forever. I’ve seen him do it.
“Look at me when you say it,” he says quietly.
I turn on my knees to face him. The veil slides against my cheek. I make myself hold his eyes.
“I want you,” I say. “All of you. I want you inside me. I don’t want you to stop this time. I don’t want you to go back through that door.” My voice shakes. I don’t let it stop me. “I want to be yours all the way, Ronan. Please.”
The candle flames bend, as if something moved through the room.
He stands up.
He doesn’t say anything. He reaches down and takes me under the arms and lifts me off the step like I weigh nothing, and sets me on my feet in front of him.
He unbuttons the camel coat. One button at a time. His bandaged fingers are slow, and I watch them. He pushes the coat off my shoulders and lets it fall onto the stone.
He looks at the white nightgown.
“You wore white,” he says.
“It’s my wedding night,” I say. “The real one.”
Something happens in his face that I’ve never seen. It goes open. Only for a second. Then it closes again, darker.
I reach for his shirt.
My hands are shaking, but I do it. I undo the top button.
The second. He stands still and lets me.
The third. His chest under the white cotton is broad and hard and there’s dark hair across it and a long pale scar on his left side, under the ribs, that I’ve never seen.
I undo the rest. I push the shirt off his shoulders, and he lets it go down his arms, and when he turns to toss it over the pew—
I see his back.
Across his shoulder blades, dark and enormous, a heart.
A sacred heart, the kind in holy pictures, crowned in thorns and wrapped in fire. Black ink and red. The flames climb up toward the back of his neck. A thin line of script runs underneath in Latin, too small to read in the candlelight.
I lift my hand and touch it.
He goes still.
The skin is warm. I trace one flame with my fingertip. Up. Over the thorns. Down to the center of the heart, where the ink is darkest.
“When?” I whisper.
“The day after the funeral.”
I don’t ask which funeral. I don’t have to.
He turns around. He takes my face in his bandaged hands. And he kisses me.
It isn’t the altar kiss. It isn’t the hard claim in front of a priest. It’s slow and deep and it goes on so long that I forget where we are, forget the candles, forget the man chewing gum at the other end of the passage.
His tongue slides against mine. His hands slide down my throat, over my collarbones, and push the thin straps of the nightgown off my shoulders.
The white silk goes down.
I’m standing on the stone in front of his mother’s altar in nothing but his veil and his ring and a pair of boots.
He picks me up.
He sets me on the edge of the altar.
The marble is freezing under my thighs. I gasp. The white linen cloth bunches under my hands. The candles on either side of me throw his shadow up the wall, huge.
“Ronan—”
“You asked,” he says. “In here.”
“I know.”
“On my altar.”
I look up at him. At the scar. At the dark eyes. At the fire tattooed on his back that I can’t see now and can still feel under my fingertips.
“On your altar,” I say.
He puts his mouth on my throat, right on the bite, and his hand between my legs.
I’m wet. I’ve been wet since I put the white nightgown on.
He groans against my neck when he finds it, a low sound I feel in my breastbone, and pushes one finger into me, and then two, the way he did the night of the wedding, stretching me slow while his thumb circles and my heels knock against the front of the altar.
“You’re sure,” he says against my skin.
“Stop asking me.”
“Say it again.”
“Yes. Yes. I’m sure. Please.”
He takes his hand away. I hear his belt. I hear the zip.
I look down.
I’ve felt him through his clothes. I’ve seen the shape of him. It isn’t the same. He’s thick and long and hard, flushed dark at the head, and for one second, panic goes through me like cold water.
He sees it.
He puts one hand flat on my chest, over my heart, and holds it there.
“Look at me.”
I look at him.
“Breathe.”
I breathe.
He lines himself up. The head of him presses against me, hot and blunt, and I feel myself stretch to take it and it’s already too much, already more than his fingers.
He pushes in an inch.
I grip his shoulders.
Another. It burns. My nails dig in.
He stops when he feels it. The place inside me no one has ever been. His eyes don’t leave mine. His hand stays over my heart.
“Mine,” he says.
He pushes through.
The pain is sharp and bright and I cry out, loud, and the sound goes up into the stone and the colored glass. He stops, buried halfway, shaking with holding still. He bends and kisses the tears off my cheek. The corner of my mouth. My eyelid.
“Breathe, dove.”
I breathe. The burn goes out slowly, like a match in water. In its place there’s something heavy and full and strange, him inside me, stretching me, and under it, a pulse. His or mine.
I move first.
A small shift of my hips, testing. The burn flickers. Under it, something else. Something warm and low that catches, like a hook.
“Don’t stop,” I whisper.
He doesn’t.
He moves slowly at first. Long, careful strokes, sliding a little deeper each time, until he’s all the way in and I can feel him everywhere, up under my ribs, in my throat.
The marble is cold under me and he’s hot inside me and the candle flames lean and leap with every thrust. The linen cloth slides. The candlesticks rattle.
“Harder,” I hear myself say. “Ronan. Harder.”
He makes a sound I’ve never heard a man make. Then he gives me what I asked for.
It changes. It stops being careful. His hand leaves my heart and grips my hip, and he drives into me in long, hard strokes that knock the breath out of me, and every one hits something inside that makes my vision go white at the edges.
I wrap my legs around him. I dig my heels into the backs of his thighs and pull him in.
He pulls out.
I cry out at the loss. He lifts me off the altar. My legs are shaking and he holds me up. He turns me around, walks me three steps across the stone, and bends me down over the prie-dieu.
His mother’s kneeler.
My knees sink into the worn red velvet. My elbows go down on the slanted wooden rest where I folded my hands this afternoon and asked to be made sorry.
He kneels behind me. His hand gathers up the veil, all of it, and winds it around his fist.
He pushes back in.
I sob. It’s so deep this way. So full. He holds me by the veil and the hip and takes me on my knees in front of Saint Agnes and her lamb, and I’m not sorry, I’m not sorry, I’m the opposite of sorry.
The wooden rest bangs against the wall. The velvet rubs my knees raw.
His free hand slides around my hip and between my legs and finds my clit, slick and swollen, and circles it in time with every stroke.
“Come for me,” he says, hoarse, against my ear. “In here. Let Him hear it.”
I come.
I come on my knees on the prie-dieu with his hand wound in my veil. It rips through me so hard that I scream, really scream, and the stone throws it back at me, and the colored window rattles in its frame. My whole body clenches around him again and again.
He says my name. Not Magdalene. Mae.
Then he drives into me three more times, deep, and holds, and I feel him come inside me, hot and pulsing. His forehead drops between my shoulder blades, against the veil. He’s breathing like he ran here from the harbor.
For a long moment, neither of us moves.
The candles hiss. Somewhere out in the passage, faintly, a man’s boots stamp in the snow.
***
Later, we’re on the floor.
He’s pulled his coat off the pew and wrapped it around both of us. I’m lying on his chest on the cold stone, with the veil tangled around my shoulders and his heart going slow and heavy under my ear. His bandaged hand moves up and down my back.
I lift my head.
On the altar, on the white linen cloth, there’s a small dark stain. Rust-red. The size of a coin.
He sees me see it.
He doesn’t say anything. He only looks at it, the way he looked at the photograph of me on the steps with one suitcase.
I put my chin on his chest. I look up at him.
“I’m yours,” I say.
It comes out quiet. It isn’t a question.
His hand stops moving on my back. His eyes come down from the altar to me.
“Say amen,” he says.
“Amen.”