Chapter 2
TWO
Zephyrine
My heart has barely settled in my chest when I collapse onto the bench in the garden next to the closest friends I have on this island, Sister Ulrika and Sister Teresa.
When we’re alone, though, I still call them by their given names, Aria and Tamara.
To me, that’s who they are. We’re all here out of necessity rather than some sort of calling, and while I do my best to follow all the convent’s rules, sometimes old habits die hard.
I miss hearing people calling me by my old name instead of Sister Mary Anthony, and we still talk in English when no one else is around.
They’re taking a short break from cleaning up the weeds and pulling in some of the fresh veggies and fruit from the walled plot.
It’s a sort of potager’s garden for the convent’s kitchen, which serves the residents and the relic seekers all the same.
This time of year, we always have a flurry of new guests, and we’re kept extra busy keeping food on the table and fresh sheets on the dorm beds as the tourists make their way through.
The relics are the convent's biggest draw. Thousands of years of saints’ bones, blood, and tears are locked up in beautifully ornate reliquaries that are as stunning as they are grotesque.
We have a series of small museum halls and shrines that wind through the convent’s ancient corridors.
Places where relic seekers spend hours visiting and praying as they learn about the saints’ lives and the miracles they’re purported to have worked in their lifetimes.
Some come just to take in the view, a quick stop on their way to the grand palace across the lake, but others come in the hopes of cures for rare illnesses and the end of personal misfortune by touching a miraculous piece of the past. The abbey serves as a kind of last resort for people desperate for one final chance at a different sort of life.
One better than what they’ve had, and the three of us are no exception to that rule.
“Something wrong?” Aria squints into the sun and shifts the fresh basket of basil leaves in her lap to the side as she studies me.
“He took confession today.” I let out a soft sigh of frustrated embarrassment. I can’t believe I didn’t recognize his voice beyond the divider.
“He?” Tamara’s nose scrunches up in confusion as she stands and brushes the garden dirt from her knees.
“Father Levi.”
“Still struggling with the near occasion of sin?” Aria does her best not to smirk as she asks.
“I just wish he’d go home. He has to be close to finishing his research, right?
” Father Levi reminds me too much of things I can't have.
Ones I'm desperately trying to come to terms with giving up forever.
If I were ever going to settle in here—really make this place my home—I need to let go of the hope right along with the vice.
“He’s too pretty to be a priest.” Tamara gives her thoughts on the matter. We were all in agreement on that at least.
“And too young,” Aria adds. “What happened to them all being old and gnarled? A mess of liver spots and patchy gray hair? I liked it better like that.”
“And I personally can’t trust a man, priest or no, who wears long sleeves all the time. It was 25°C the other day. You can’t tell me he wasn’t melting in that black shirt out in the sun.” Tamara raises a brow.
“Oh yes. That tight black shirt.” Aria raises a brow at me, and I close my eyes, trying not to imagine it. This is what happens when you spend so much time hiding away from the rest of the world. Long-sleeved black shirts suddenly become too sexy for your imagination to handle.
“Now you need to go to confession.” I match her raised brow with my own.
“I’m tired of confession.” She sighs. “It’s not like we can get into real trouble here.
I’m always confessing the same three things.
Jealousy of people who get to leave this place at the end of the week.
Anger at Abbess Frances for always giving us more chores in a few days than I think she’s ever done in her life.
And laziness for not wanting to go to church twice on Sundays. ” Aria pouts a little.
“Well, you can add being tired of confession to the list next week,” Tamara teases her.
“At least it’ll add some variety.” She huffs.
“We’re probably the world’s worst novices.” Tamara reflects on our lack of composure.
“I’m sure there were others. King’s discarded daughters. Mistresses. Revolutionaries. The archives are full of mentions of them.” I feel the need to defend us. There were plenty of interesting women who ended up here just like we did—compelled against our will or for lack of better options.
“Mentions of their punishment too. At least Abbess Frances prefers tours of kitchen duty rather than outright torture,” Aria admits.
We fall into silence for a moment as a bird lands and steals one of the strawberries Tamara dropped on the pathway between the berries and the basil.
I imagine a million downtrodden feet have passed through this walled garden.
Some seeing it as a bastion of safety, others as a cage meant to clip their wings.
They’d be deprived of the ones that let them soar too high and replaced with the weight of chastity and temperance.
“So what did you confess to?” Aria glances up at me again before she returns to picking the stems off the leaves.
“That’s between me and Father Levi.” In more ways than one. I start to blush again, less prominently than when I discovered he was my confessor, but enough that my friends would know it was something shocking.
“Something bad then,” Tamara observes as she looks over me like she might find the answer written somewhere.
“Something I’d prefer Father Mark had heard rather than him.” I run my lower lip between my teeth. I have no idea how I’ll face him again, and given the amount of time he spends in the archives, there will be no avoiding him for more than a few hours.
“Something salacious then?” Aria’s eyes brighten with the possibility.
I press my lips together, and she lets out a low breath.
“Not about him?” she presses, her eyes lighting with amusement.
“It was a dream,” I answer defensively.
“You confessed to a dream?” Tamara looks at me like I’m strange.
“It was a dream I liked.” I’m not about to repeat my confession in the broad light of day. It's bad enough that he knows. I feel dirty. Like I've sinned all over again by telling him. The long lectures from the abbess were getting to me.
But I needed to get it off my chest and somehow be absolved for thinking of a priest that way.
Thinking of another man, one who doesn't have those kinds of vows and responsibilities attached, is bad enough, considering my own circumstances. But the two of us? Together? It’s an impossibility.
Sacrilegious, if I'm being honest with myself. I can only imagine how his opinion of me has altered. The new friend I've been making is now likely lost to awkward avoidance. Or at least I could hope. I’m not sure which I’d hate more, him dodging into a row of the archives to avoid seeing me, or him smiling knowingly when my cheeks heat under his gaze the next time he asks for my help. Either way, I’m in for torture.
“Ah, I see.” Aria tries not to grin, but her eyes betray her all the same.
She struggles with the rules as much as any of us. I’m half certain she’s broken them with visitors. Somewhere, a man is sharing a pint with a friend, bragging about how he’s so good in bed he managed to bag a nun.
“He’s a priest. I’m sure he’s heard worse.” Tamara, ever the pragmatist, offers up a distraction.
“He’s a man. I’m sure he’s done worse,” Aria adds, reveling in her own assessment.
I could see her point. Father Levi is too handsome and clever not to have had a youth that was filled with at least some measure of iniquity, or at least the temptation. Another flash of his wicked smile outside the confessional returns.
I try for a moment to imagine him as a naive young virgin and draw a blank.
In my mind, Father Levi definitely had a past, even if he doesn’t have a present, and for that, at least, he can’t completely judge me.
He knows what it’s like to be human. At the end of the day, whatever orders we take, whatever vows we swear to uphold, we’re human underneath it all.
“Aria,” Tamara hisses, using only her name as a reprimand, snapping me out of my thoughts.
“You know it’s true. All priests probably get it out of their systems before they join the seminary.” Aria shakes her head.
“Father Mark did say he had a girlfriend before,” Tamara admits.
“That’s a hard one to imagine.” I think of the graying old man who’s always discussing the principles of the gospels and reciting the beatitudes to us.
“Did you tell him it was him in your dream?” Aria asks.
“No. But I doubt he thinks I’m having dirty dreams about Father Mark or Father Peter.”
“How dirty was it?” Aria always wants the juicy details when it’s something more interesting than our daily chores.
“Three-rosaries-a-day dirty.”
“Oof.” She grits her teeth and then gives me a sympathetic look. “For how long?”
“Until the dreams stop or for a month. Whichever is longer.”
They’re stunned into silence, and I can feel the creep of embarrassment returning.
“There were other sins too,” I try to explain.
“Are you still working with him in the archives?” Aria twirls a leaf of basil between her thumb and forefinger, no doubt plotting how she might get me out of my situation.
“I don’t know. He might not want my help now.” I bury my face in my hands and groan. “I can’t believe I didn’t realize it was him. I was so focused on doing what was right and getting this guilty feeling off my chest that I just made a bigger mess.”
“Don’t get too in your head. Maybe he found it endearing, and he’ll let you do some extra credit in the archives to get back in good graces,” Aria counters, and both Tamara and I snap our heads in her direction, eyebrows raised.
“Oh wow. Okay. I did not mean it like that, and now I’m seeing why you have dirtier minds than me. ”
“Impossible.” Tamara rolls her eyes. She’s the best of us for sure. I might wear a better mask than Aria does, but I fear that if Tamara knew any of my real thoughts, she’d be dousing me in holy water on the daily.
“M?dln!” Sister Maria Teresa shouts from across the garden. She calls us girls like we aren’t all in our twenties. I suppose compared to her seven decades toiling away on this earth, we still seem like children in comparison. “Wir müssen Abendessen machen! Schnell!”
“And onward to the next chore we go.” Aria moans, gathering the basil and her gardening gloves. I help clean up the small harvest by picking some of the peppers and tomatoes, filling another basket before I follow them inside.
Maybe I can stay in the kitchen all night tonight instead of having to serve tables.
I don't love sweating over the stove, but piping the whipped cream on the cakes and making the schnapps-spiked vanilla sauce that the convent restaurant is famous for wouldn’t be the end of the world.
It would give me a few more hours of reprieve from seeing him in person.
But it still wouldn’t stop the way I’d spend half the night back in my room, doing my best not to think of him, and having him appear unbidden anyway.
Sometimes, I remember him debating the complexities of reliquary records while pushing his glasses up his nose and flashing me a bright grin.
Other times, I imagine a future that doesn’t exist. One where he sweeps me off this island, onto the one across the lake, and we dance the night away in the half-finished palace’s mirror room under the light of a thousand candles.
At least in my head, there’s a world where there’s a happy ending and not the reality I’ve chosen for myself or the one fate dealt me back home.