CHAPTER 31
THE SON
POV: MAE
Saint Brigid’s Island is gray.
Gray rock. Gray grass flattened by wind and snow. Gray water all around it, chopping white at the edges, with Boston far away across the harbor, a line of towers and cranes that look like they belong to a different country.
On the high end of the island, facing the open sea, there’s a ruin.
A monastery, once. Ronan told me in the boat, with his arm around me under a blanket and the doctor’s stitches fresh in his face.
Irish monks, a hundred and fifty years ago.
They built it from the island’s own stone.
A chapel and a row of cells and a bell tower.
Then the monks died or left, and the roofs fell in, and the sea took the rest.
His mother used to come here. She’d take the launch out on summer mornings with a thermos and a book and sit in the ruined chapel for hours. She said it was the only church in Boston where nobody could find her.
Below the ruin, in a hollow out of the wind, there’s a house. Stone and slate. Small. New windows. A chimney smoking. Ronan had it rebuilt after she died.
We slept there. What was left of the night.
He didn’t let go of me once.
***
It’s the morning after Christmas. The feast of Saint Stephen. The first martyr.
I know that the way I know my own name. I sang it every year at St. Agnes.
We walk up to the ruin together in the cold. His arm is in a sling like Theo’s. The left side of his face is stitched from his lip to his jaw, black thread in a neat row along the old white line. The doctor said it would scar worse than before.
He said he didn’t care.
I’m wearing the camel coat. Somebody brought it out on the boat. I don’t know who. The black veil is in my pocket. Two pins left. The third one is at the bottom of berth eleven, or in a hospital in Southie, or wherever Conor Kavanagh’s hand ended up.
I didn’t ask.
The chapel has no roof. Just four stone walls, knee-high on one side and twenty feet on the other, black with a hundred and fifty years of salt, open to the sky.
Snow has blown into the corners. Where the altar used to be, there’s a single slab of granite, and on the slab someone has set a wooden crucifix, very old, bleached almost white by the weather.
Grace, probably. Summers ago.
Conrad Draven is sitting on the stone bench along the low wall.
They’ve tied his wrists in front of him.
He’s still in the camel overcoat he wore to the Chancery.
It’s filthy now. There’s salt on the hem and blood on the cuffs.
His white hair is blown sideways. His face is gray and old.
He’s been out here all night in the open chapel with no roof, no fire, no food.
He looks up when we come in through the gap where the door used to be.
He looks at Ronan’s face. At the stitches.
Something moves in his.
“I did that,” he says.
“Yes,” Ronan says.
“Twice.”
“Yes.”
Conrad closes his eyes.
Theo is here. Two other men, standing back by the broken wall with their hands folded. Nobody speaks.
Ronan walks to the middle of the chapel and stops in front of his father.
I stay by the altar stone. Close. Not too close. Where he can feel me without seeing me.
This is his.
***
“You didn’t feed me,” Conrad says. His voice is hoarse. He’s been cold all night. “You didn’t give me a blanket. Your mother—”
“Don’t.”
It comes out of Ronan exactly the way it came out of me in the Crypt, with my father. The same word. The same sound. It rings off the stone.
Conrad stops.
“You don’t get to say her name,” Ronan says. “Not here.”
Conrad looks at him a long time.
Then he looks past him. At me.
“You,” he says. “You understand.”
I don’t answer.
“You understand men like us.” He leans forward on the bench.
His tied hands hang between his knees. “You poisoned a bishop. You put a pin through a man’s hand.
You stood at a rail and counted while my son drowned someone.
You understand that sometimes you have to do a hard thing for the family.
For the people you love. You understand—”
“I held his hand,” I say.
Conrad blinks.
“The Bishop,” I say. “I held his hand while he died. Until the end. So he wouldn’t be alone.” I look at him. “You took your wife up the stairs by the arm and left your son bleeding at the piano. Don’t tell me what I understand.”
He stares at me.
Then, very slowly, he smiles.
It isn’t the famous smile. It’s something smaller and tireder and more honest. The smile of an old man who’s lost a long game and is surprised to find he doesn’t mind who won.
“Grace would have liked you,” he says again.
“You said.”
“I meant it.” He turns back to his son. “She would have. She’d have taken one look at this girl and put her on the piano bench.”
Ronan doesn’t move.
The wind comes across the open chapel, off the gray sea, and blows snow over the altar stone. The white crucifix creaks on its slab.
“Ronan,” his father says. Quietly now. No performance in it. “I asked you to forgive me.”
“You asked so a man could take my wife out a side door.”
“I know.”
“You asked so she’d be on a boat to Halifax with a knife line down her face.”
“I didn’t know about the knife—”
“You knew about the boat.”
Conrad’s mouth closes.
“You asked,” Ronan says, “because you knew I’d wanted to hear it my whole life. You knew exactly how long I’d stand there with my mouth open.” His voice doesn’t rise. It gets lower. “You used the only thing I ever wanted from you as a distraction.”
Conrad doesn’t deny it.
He looks down at his tied hands.
On the third finger of his right hand, there’s a ring.
Heavy gold. A crest on the face of it, worn almost smooth. I’ve never seen it before. I’ve never looked at his hands.
I look now.
Ronan sees me look.
***
He crouches down in front of his father on the stone floor of the ruined chapel, the way he knelt in front of me in his mother’s chapel. He takes his father’s right hand in his.
Conrad lets him.
Ronan works the ring off his father’s finger. It’s tight. The knuckle’s swollen with cold and age. He twists it, and it catches, and he twists harder, and it comes free.
He holds it up in the gray light.
I look at it. At the crest. At the heavy gold edge.
That’s what opened his face. When he was fourteen. When his mother was laughing.
“This was my grandfather’s,” Ronan says.
“It’s yours now,” Conrad says. “It was always going to be yours.”
Ronan looks at the ring for a long moment.
Then he stands. He walks past me to the low side of the chapel wall, where the stone is only knee-high and beyond it the rock goes down in broken steps to the sea. He draws his good arm back.
He throws it.
It goes up, turning, catching the gray light once, gold against gray. Then it’s gone. Down into the white chop at the bottom of the rocks. Into the sea.
Conrad makes a small sound.
Ronan comes back.
He doesn’t crouch this time. He stands in front of his father. He takes his gun out of his coat with his good hand.
Conrad looks up at it. Then at his son’s face.
He doesn’t beg.
I’ll give him that. At the end, he doesn’t beg.
“She’d hate this,” he says.
“She’s not here,” Ronan says. “You made sure of that.”
I cross the chapel.
I don’t decide to. My feet do it. I come up beside Ronan on his right side, where his arm isn’t in a sling, and I take his other hand. The one hanging at his side. His bad arm. I slide my fingers down under the sling and find his hand there and hold it.
He looks down at me.
I hold his hand the way I held the Bishop’s. Tight. So he knows he’s not alone.
He looks back at his father.
“No,” Ronan says.
That’s all.
He doesn’t say I don’t forgive you. He doesn’t say anything else. He says no to the question his father asked him in the Chancery, twelve hours and a hundred years ago, and then he pulls the trigger.
The sound goes out across the island and over the water and is gone.
Conrad Draven goes back against the chapel wall. Then sideways. Onto the stone bench, and off it, onto the floor, into the snow.
The gulls go up from the rocks, screaming.
Then it’s quiet.
***
Ronan stands very still.
His hand is still in mine. It isn’t shaking. That’s what I notice. His hand in the chapel at Draven House, when I sang, shook so hard the gauze bled. In the fish locker. On the Bishop’s floor. It shook.
It isn’t shaking now.
He lets go of me.
He goes down on his knees on the stone floor of his mother’s ruined chapel. In the snow. In his father’s blood, spreading dark across the gray stone. He kneels in it and doesn’t care. His coat soaks it up.
He takes out of his pocket what’s left of my ring. The little gold rosary, fused black in the Bishop’s fire. The beads melted together. The R gone.
He holds it up to me.
His eyes are wet. It’s the second time.
“You can have another,” he says. His voice is rough. “Gold. Platinum. Anything. With a sensor in it, or without. With my name on it, or without.”
The wind blows snow across us.
“Or nothing,” he says.
I look down at him.
I look at the stitches in his face. At the blood soaking into the knees of his trousers. At the black twisted ring in his palm. At the gray sea beyond the broken wall, and the city across it, and the whole cold world.
“Choose,” he says.
He kneels in his father’s blood and asks me to choose.