Chapter Four : What God Established

The Church of Sant'Angelo had been standing at the top of Via Sacra for four hundred years.

It was not the largest church in the province, not the most ornate, but it had the particular quality of very old places of worship,  cool and dim inside regardless of the weather, smelling of candle wax and incense and centuries of accumulated prayer, its silence a different kind of silence from the silence outside. The kind that pressed against the ears. The kind that reminded a person, whether they wanted reminding or not, that they were standing in a place that had witnessed considerably more than they had.

Father Lucien had loved it from the first morning he walked through its doors four years ago.

He was at his desk in the small counselling room at the end of the corridor when Brother Matteo found him,  seated, unhurried, his breviary closed at his elbow, his notes for the session open before him. He had heard about the De Luca girl. Everyone in Terranova had heard about the De Luca girl by now. The feast day, the inn, the farmer. The details had moved through the parish the way scandalous details always moved, quietly, thoroughly, arriving everywhere at once.

He was curious about her, he admitted to himself. Simply curious, the way a shepherd is curious about the one sheep that refuses to come in from the rain, wondering what it is in a creature that makes it so determined to stay out in the cold. He had dealt with difficult parishioners before. He expected to deal with one again this morning.

He was entirely prepared.

Matteo slipped through the door without knocking, which always meant he was agitated.

"She is turning onto Via Sacra," Matteo said, slightly breathless.

"Good." Lucien did not look up. "We begin at nine as planned."

"Father." Matteo closed the door behind him and lowered his voice. "I feel I should prepare you."

Lucien set his pen down and looked at him.

"She is not like the other De Luca daughters," Matteo said, with the gravity of a man delivering intelligence before a battle. "Maria is a devoted parishioner. Lucia never misses feast day Mass. But Seraphina De Luca is…" He paused, searching carefully for the right word. "...she is the kind of woman who does not respect boundaries, Father. Any boundaries." His eyes moved briefly around the room in a way that encompassed the corridor, the church, the entire concept of holy ground. "There are stories about the men she has…about the way she …what I mean to say is that pious men have sat across from that woman and not come away entirely…"

"Brother Matteo."

Matteo stopped.

"How long have I served this parish?"

A blink. "Four years, Father."

"and in four years," Lucien said, with the patient, faintly warm tone he used when Matteo was spiralling into unnecessary anxiety, "has any woman, difficult, wayward, scandalous or otherwise , walked through that door and caused me to forget who I am?"

Matteo opened his mouth. "No, Father, but…"

"She is a young woman in need of guidance." Lucien picked up his pen. "Like anyone else who sits in that chair." He glanced up one final time, and his eyes were steady and certain ,  the eyes of a man who has built something over four long years and has absolute faith in what he has built. "There is no woman on this earth capable of shaking what God has established in me, Matteo. You have my word on that."

Matteo nodded, unconvinced but obedient, and slipped back out.

Lucien returned to his notes.

He was still writing ten minutes later when something made him glance toward the narrow window that looked sideways onto the Via Sacra entrance path , a movement in his peripheral vision, nothing more, the way a candle flame moves when a door opens somewhere distant.

He looked.

She was coming up the path.

He did not know it was her. Not immediately. He saw only a woman walking alone, unhurried, her dark hair loose around her shoulders, a green dress beneath her shawl, moving through the grey morning light with the particular ease of someone completely at home inside their own body.

Then she turned her face slightly toward the church wall, and the angle of her jaw caught the light, and the pen in Lucien's hand stopped moving.

The room went very quiet.

Not the quiet of the church around him,  the other kind. The kind that had nothing to do with stone walls and everything to do with the specific, catastrophic recognition of something you have spent four years telling yourself you had made peace with.

She had not seen him. She was looking down now, adjusting her shawl, and Matteo was already moving to open the side door for her, and she would be inside the corridor in less than a minute and in that chair in less than two and there would be nowhere to go and nothing to say and four years of careful, deliberate, painstaking construction would be sitting across a small wooden desk from the one thing that had ever threatened to bring it down.

Lucien was out of his chair before he had consciously decided to move.

He found Giovanni in the sacristy replacing the altar candles. Giovanni turned when the door opened and took one look at Lucien's face and set the candle down.

"Take the session," Lucien said.

Giovanni stared at him. "What?!"

"Room four. The De Luca girl." His voice was even. Carefully, precisely even, in the way that things are even when everything underneath them is not. "Take it."

"Lucien, I have the altar to prepare and Matteo need…"

"Giovanni." Just his name. Quietly. But it stopped every other sentence in the room.

Giovanni looked at him for a long moment. At his face. At his hands. At the breviary he was still carrying, the pages bent where he had been gripping it without noticing.

"Why?" Giovanni asked.

The sacristy was very still.

Outside, somewhere down the corridor, a door opened. Light footsteps. Unhurried. The sound of a woman who had never been nervous about anything in her life, walking toward a room where a chair was waiting and a priest was supposed to be sitting in it.

Lucien said nothing.

Giovanni took a slow step toward him.

"Lucien." His voice was careful now, the way you are careful with something you are not sure is stable. "Who is this girl?"