CHAPTER 28
THE VESTRY
POV: RONAN
“I was wrong about her,” my father says.
We’re standing by the fireplace in the Chancery’s front parlor, under a painting of a cardinal nobody remembers.
The fire is too hot. The room is too full.
Somebody has put a glass of eggnog in my father’s hand, and he hasn’t drunk it.
He holds it the way he held his cane in the dining room, like a weapon he’s decided not to use yet.
His other hand is on my arm.
“I was wrong about a lot of things,” he says. “Your mother. You. That piano.”
The string quartet has started a carol. Behind us, the room laughs. On the other side of the room, by the tree with its bent angel, a young woman in a black veil is walking toward the back stairs beside a man in red silk.
I don’t turn my head. I watch it in the mirror over the mantel.
“Are you listening to me, son?”
“Yes.”
“I hit you.” His voice drops. His eyes are wet again.
He’s very good at that. “I’ve never said it.
Not once in twenty-one years. I hit you with my father’s ring and I took your mother up those stairs and I never said a word about it.
Not at her bedside. Not at her funeral.” He tightens his fingers on my sleeve. “I’m saying it now.”
In the mirror, the red silk and the black veil reach the foot of the back stairs.
They go up.
In my pocket, my phone is set to buzz twice if her heart goes over one-fifty. Once if it drops under fifty.
It doesn’t buzz.
“I’m asking you to forgive me,” my father says.
I look at him.
I’ve wanted to hear those words since I was fourteen years old, with blood running between my fingers onto the piano keys. I used to lie awake and write the speech for him. I used to write what I’d say back.
He’s saying it now so a man can walk my wife out a side door to a boat.
“Go on,” I say.
He goes on.
He talks about the docks. About his own father, who was worse.
About the Kavanaghs and thirty years of peace, and how a man in his position has to be hard, has to be iron, has to make choices his wife would never understand.
He talks about my mother’s rosary. About how he knows I carry it.
About how he used to watch her pray in that little chapel and not understand it, and how he’s starting to understand it now, at seventy-one, too late.
It’s good. It’s very good.
My hand is in my coat pocket, on the beads.
One. Two. Three.
Eleven minutes.
Twelve.
My phone doesn’t buzz.
At fourteen minutes, it does.
Once.
Not the alarm. A message.
I take it out. My father stops talking. His eyes go to the screen.
It’s from her. Four letters.
Amen.
I put the phone back in my pocket.
“Merry Christmas, Dad,” I say.
He blinks. “Ronan—”
I take his hand off my arm. I do it gently, the way she took the snuffer out of my fingers in the sacristy, the way you take a knife away from a child.
“You asked,” I say. “I heard you. That’s all you get.”
I walk away from him across the room.
I feel him watching me. I feel it on the back of my neck the whole way to the stairs. I don’t look in the mirror.
***
The second floor is quiet. Carpet. Oil paintings. The sound of the party coming up the stairwell like water through a floor.
The study door at the end of the hall is closed but not locked.
I open it.
The fire. Green leather. Books. A statue of the Virgin in the garden outside the window, with snow on her shoulders.
And Crewe.
He’s in the green armchair by the fire with his eyes closed and his hands crossed on his chest over the gold cross. His red skullcap is straight. His robes are smoothed over his knees. He looks like they’ve already laid him out.
Two glasses on the low table. One empty. One full.
And her.
She’s on her knees on the carpet beside his chair, sitting back on her heels, with her hands folded in her lap. The veil falls down her back. The firelight is on her face.
She looks up when I come in.
Her face is calm. Very calm. Her eyes are enormous.
“He couldn’t finish it,” she says.
I close the door behind me.
I cross the room. I go down on one knee in front of her on the Bishop’s carpet. I take her face in my bandaged hands and turn it to the light. No marks. No blood. I take her hands. Cold. Steady.
“Did he touch you?”
“He blessed me.”
“That’s all?”
“And held my hand. Before.” She looks at the dead man in the chair. “I held his. After.”
I look at him too. At the crossed hands. At the skullcap she straightened.
“You laid him out.”
“Somebody should.”
I look back at her. The fire snaps. Downstairs, through the floor, the quartet has moved on to something else, something slow.
“Mae,” I say.
She takes my hand. She stands up. She pulls me up with her.
She doesn’t look at Crewe again. She walks me past his chair to a narrow door in the paneling beside the fireplace, one I hadn’t noticed, and opens it.
A small room. The Bishop’s private oratory. A prie-dieu. A crucifix. A cabinet of polished oak for vestments, long and low, a chest with brass fittings, and folded on top of it, a white stole embroidered with gold.
She pulls me inside and shuts the door.
It’s dark in here. Just a line of firelight under the door and a votive candle burning red in front of the crucifix.
“Sit,” she says.
I look at her.
“Sit, Ronan.”
I sit on the vestment chest.
She stands between my knees. She reaches up and unpins the veil. The black lace comes down off her hair, and she folds it once, and lays it on the chest beside me, on top of the Bishop’s white stole.
Then she reaches behind her and unzips the black dress.
It’s the dress she married me in. She lets it fall. She steps out of it. She’s in nothing but black lace underneath, the set from the third drawer, and her heels.
“Mae,” I say again. My voice isn’t working right.
“You’ve taken me everywhere.” She climbs onto me. Straddles me on the chest, her knees on either side of my hips, the brass fittings cold against my thighs. “In your chapel. In your shower. In my sleep. Under a table, in front of him.”
She tips her head toward the door. Toward the green chair.
“Tonight I take you.”
She reaches down between us. She opens my belt. My zip. She takes me in her hand, and I’m hard, I’ve been hard since the stairs, since the four letters on my phone.
She pushes the black lace aside.
She sinks down onto me.
Slowly. Her eyes on mine the whole time. All the way down, until she’s seated on me, full, and she stops, and holds, and breathes.
“Mine,” she says.
I stop breathing.
She says it again. Lower. Rocking her hips once, deep, deliberate.
“Mine. You hear me? You watched me for two years. You bought my convent. You bought my heat. You bought my father’s paper.
” Another slow roll of her hips, and I hear myself make a sound.
“But you don’t get to own me unless I own you back. ”
“Yes,” I say.
“Say it.”
“Yours.”
She rides me.
She rides me on the Bishop’s vestment chest in the dark with a dead man on the other side of the door, and she does it the way she prays, slow and devout, and then not slow, her hands on my shoulders, her nails in the wound Declan left, her mouth on the scar.
I hold her hips and I let her set the pace.
I’ve never let anyone set the pace in my life.
The votive candle flickers red on her skin.
“Look at me,” she says, and I look, and she comes. On me. Around me. With her forehead against mine and her breath in my mouth and my name coming out of her like the last line of a psalm.
I follow her. I can’t not. I pull her down onto me as deep as she’ll go and hold her there and empty into her, and her arms lock around my neck, and she doesn’t let go.
For a long moment neither of us moves.
Then, below us, through the floor, the music stops.
Not ends. Stops. In the middle of a bar.
I lift my head.
Footsteps on the back stairs.
Heavy. Several men. Not hurrying, the way men don’t hurry when they think they have time.
Mae goes still against me.
“Dress, dove,” I say.
She’s already off me. Already stepping into the black dress.
I stand and fix my clothes and take my gun out from under my arm, and she turns her back to me and I zip her up with my free hand, and she snatches the veil from the chest and drives its three black pins back into her hair. The steps come down the hall.
The study door opens.
I hear it. I hear the pause. I hear somebody see the man in the green chair.
“Jesus—”
“He’s dead. The Bishop’s dead—”
“Where is she?”
“Check the—”
I put Mae behind me.
The oratory door opens.
There are three of them. Wool coats. Southie faces. The first one has a gun already up, and I shoot him through the throat before he sees me, and he goes back into the second one, and they both go down in the doorway in a tangle.
The third one fires.
It goes past my ear and into the crucifix. Plaster sprays. The votive candle goes over.
I fire again. He drops behind the green chair.
Something hits my left shoulder. Hot. Hard. It spins me half around, and my back hits the oak cabinet, and I don’t feel it yet, I only feel the push.
The man behind the chair is still up. He’s firing blind over the arm of it. The dead Bishop jerks in his seat as a round goes into him.
I get my arm up. I aim.
A cane comes out of nowhere.
Silver. A hound’s head. It catches me across the face from the left, right where the ring caught me twenty-one years ago, and I feel the old scar open like a zipper. The world goes white.
I’m on the floor.
I don’t remember going down. I’m on my back on the Bishop’s carpet, and there’s blood in my eyes, and above me, very tall, framed in the oratory doorway against the firelight, is my father.
He’s holding the cane in his left hand and a small pistol in his right. Pointed at me.
“Stay down, son,” he says.
His voice is kind.
“I asked you to forgive me,” he says. “You should have let me finish.”
Hands. Behind him. Two more coming in through the study. They go past him into the oratory. I hear her.
“No—”
I try to get up. My father puts the tip of the cane on my chest and leans on it, gently, and the shoulder screams, and I go back down.
“It’s for your own good,” he says. “One day you’ll understand.”
Through the blood, I see them take her. Two of them. One on each arm. She kicks. She twists. She gets an elbow into one man’s face and he swears and doesn’t let go. She’s shouting my name.
“Her hand,” my father says.
They pull her past him. He catches her left wrist in his hand, the one without the gun, and looks down at the ring.
“I know my son,” he says to her. “He’d have put a leash on you.”
He twists the ring off her finger.
She screams. Not from pain. From something else.
My father holds the little gold rosary up to the firelight in the study. Looks at it. Looks at my initial where the cross should hang.
Then he tosses it into the Bishop’s fire.
They carry her out.
I hear her on the back stairs, still fighting, still shouting. Then a door. Then cold air. Then a car.
My father looks down at me.
“Merry Christmas, Ronan,” he says.
He goes.
***
I roll over.
It takes a long time. The shoulder. The face. The blood in my eyes. I get onto my hands and knees on the carpet beside the dead Bishop’s chair. My phone is on the floor beside me where it fell out of my coat.
The screen is cracked.
Her dot is on it. Green. Here. In this room.
In the fire.
I crawl to the hearth. I look in.
The little gold rosary is lying in the coals among the logs, the beads glowing orange, my initial glowing red.
On my cracked screen, her green dot flickers once.
And goes out.