Chapter 2

two

The first time I sensed things weren’t entirely as they seemed was three months after I met the stranger in the dojo. It was my senior year of high school, and my father—who split his time between London and New York—had brought me to our Kensington terrace for my winter break. Professionally designed Christmas decorations filled the corners and twined up stair railings. The tall Georgian rooms were filled with fresh evergreens and bowls of baubles and twinkling candles lit by staff. Piles of presents, neatly wrapped, beckoned from under the tree. My father hadn’t bought any of them for me. I doubted he even knew what they were. Something as unimportant as presents was undoubtedly delegated to the same person who sent me birthday cards when he was out of town, and who arranged for the driver to pick me up from school.

We ate a late Christmas Eve dinner in the too-grand dining room, candlelight glinting off the hand-painted china. It was just the two of us; my mother was long dead by then. There’d only been two of us at Christmas dinner for the past five years, and yet that empty spot at the table was still so full of my mother’s absence that it ached like a tooth.

“Your school report was quite good,” my father said. Despite being uninterested in the minutiae of parenting a teenager, Geoffrey Laurence took a keen interest in me. He expected the best from me, which I was grateful for. Even if sometimes I wasn’t exactly sure what he wanted beyond good grades and impeccable manners.

But surely he wanted what I also wanted; he’d never said otherwise. He’d allowed me to spend as much time as I wanted at the dojo, he’d never contradicted me when I spoke of my plans for the future. He’d never seemed jealous that I’d idolized my maternal uncle, a cardinal in the Catholic Church, more than I had him, Geoffrey Laurence, king of bankers.

“Thank you,” I answered politely.

My father took a bite of goose, chewed, cut off another bite. “And you are still committed to Columbia?” He didn’t look at me as he spoke.

“Yes,” I said, “but—”

I didn’t have a chance to raise the issue of my major, because just then a tall man strode into the room, the scarlet-trimmed hem of his simar fluttering around gleaming shoes. His cheeks above his neatly shorn beard were freckled, ruddy, dotted with pockmarks, and when he smiled at me, the smile revealed a gap between his front teeth. Flurries dusted the black cape hanging over his shoulders.

He held out his arms in welcome, and getting up to answer the invitation for a hug was as natural as breathing. My uncle Mortimer was as warm as my father was cold, and the only adult in my life who truly understood what I wanted after school.

“I didn’t know you were coming,” I said into Mortimer’s chest. The chain of his gold pectoral cross pressed into my cheek before I pulled away to beam at him. “I thought you’d be in Rome.”

“I had business in London tonight,” he said, giving my shoulder a fond pat. The Irish in his voice had been sanded down by years of living at the Holy See, but the lilt was still there. It reminded me of my mother’s voice. “But it’s concluded now. So I thought I’d come check on my favorite niece.”

“Your only niece,” I reminded him as I went back to my place at the table. Mortimer sat without an invitation from my father and gave the both of us another wide smile, the gap in his teeth flashing.

“I hope I’m not intruding,” he said.

“Of course you aren’t intruding—”

“Isolde,” my father interrupted sharply. “Go to your room.”

I froze, my fingers stalled in the act of reaching for my fork. “I’m sorry?”

Geoffrey Laurence turned his dark eyes on me. His already thin mouth was pressed even thinner, the lines bracketing his mouth severe. “I need to speak to your uncle. Please leave us.”

I looked over to my uncle, whose wide smile was still on his face. “Don’t worry, Isolde. It won’t take but a minute.”

I nodded and stood, leaving my napkin on the chair and walking out of the dining room and up the stairs to my own room. Where I promptly slipped off my shoes and then crept back to the stairs, careful to descend along the sturdy, quiet edges, rolling my bare foot from ball to toes with each silent step until I was at the bottom and within earshot of the dining room.

“It’s as good as done,” my father was saying. His English voice was as crisp and cool as money, a banker’s voice. “And it serves us both, as you well know.”

“Perhaps.”

I knew Mortimer’s cryptic response would infuriate my father, because it would be coupled with Mortimer’s famous arched eyebrow, that gap-toothed smile. My uncle handled things for the Vatican, and there were many reasons why he was indispensable to the Vatican, but one very important reason was his inscrutability. He gave nothing away that he didn’t want to.

“I know what you’re thinking,” my father said, and I’d been right, I could hear the defensiveness in his words.

My uncle’s voice was a raspy one, a voice that always had a sense of wheezing to it, and so when he pitched his voice low and quiet, like he did just then, I couldn’t make him out from my position on the stairs. That voice was part of what made him so good at Vatican diplomacy, he’d once told me. He could be extremely difficult to eavesdrop on when he wanted to be.

But I could make out the last bit of what he said.

“…would be a waste, Geoffrey.”

“For you, maybe,” replied my father.

Once again, my uncle was difficult to make out. But I thought I heard the word weapon, which couldn’t be right.

“I don’t want to be at odds with you on this, so I hope you’ll reconsider,” my father answered tightly. China clinked and a chair scraped—someone was standing abruptly. Perhaps readying to leave the room.

With a light movement, I leapt back up the stairs, just as quietly as I’d come down. I was fast, and a few minutes later, when my uncle knocked on my door, I was at my desk reading in a settled position, not a hair out of place.

“Come in,” I called, and he let himself in, a pillar of clerical black in my spare, cream-colored room.

“Very good,” he said as he sat down in a small armchair near my bookshelves. “I didn’t hear you at all.”

I dipped my chin in acknowledgment. It had been him who’d taught me how to creep, eavesdrop, how to listen unperceived. As a child, he would send me around parties and events, and I’d be his ears for him. His ears on a quiet little girl no one thought to curb their words around.

Have any crumbs for me, little mouse?he used to ask, and I would give him any crumbs he wished for, my smiling uncle who carried me on his shoulders and taught me how to pray so that God would listen. As I got older, the crumbs became larger, gathering them more dangerous. And so he’d schooled me over the years, and it had become second nature to gather the information he wanted, to sneak into places I wasn’t meant to be, and to hide in plain sight in the places I was supposed to be.

“What were you talking about?” Mortimer was the one person other than Bryn and my confessor that I was entirely candid with, and he’d encouraged my curiosity from the moment I could talk. When other adults ignored my questions or batted them away with canned answers, Mortimer listened to them, took them seriously. And whenever I asked something that he wouldn’t—or couldn’t—answer, he apologized sincerely.

In a perfect world, we know all things, Isolde. Alas that this isn’t a perfect world—yet.

From the way he smiled at my question, I knew I wasn’t getting an answer tonight.

“I wish I could tell you, but your father has asked me not to.”

Alarm, cold and tight, pulled at my stomach for a moment. I ignored it. “So it’s about me.”

Mortimer nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

“Is it about my future? About my vocation?”

Mortimer didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

I looked down at the book in my hands, St. Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises. “I’m not changing my plans. I want to take vows. I want to work for God. I want to work for the Church.”

“My child, so you shall,” my uncle said kindly. “You were marked for God from the moment you were born, and marked for increasing His glory here on Earth. You have exactly the gifts the Church needs.”

“Father doesn’t understand that,” I said. I closed the book, smoothing the battered cover and setting it on my desk. “He wants me for the glory of the Laurence family.”

It had been an ongoing argument since I’d told him the day after my mother’s funeral that I wanted to become a nun. He wanted me to join the ranks of Laurence Bank, the financial empire his great-great-grandfather had founded in 1901, and the idea that his only child would throw her future away on intentional poverty had infuriated him. I’d informed him he could always have more children.

The conversation hadn’t much improved from there.

“I imagine the compromise you’ve struck still holds,” Mortimer assured me. “You’ll go to university before you do anything else, and so you have time. We have time.”

If only my father didn’t also want me to major in something I didn’t care about in the meantime. He was hoping an education in finance would help me see the value in Laurence Bank.

“I know what I’m meant to do,” I said. “I’m meant to be God’s hands.”

“And so you shall be,” Mortimer said. “I will never steer you away from what God needs you to do.”

I hadn’t raised the next subject for the last few months, but Mortimer’s assurances made me hopeful. And, I supposed, it would be a nice Christmas present, if an unusual one.

“Have you…” I forced the words out, even though speaking one of my deepest spiritual needs aloud was like spreading my ribs apart and allowing someone to look at the bloody machinery underneath. I hated vulnerability, even with the one adult I trusted above all others.

Mortimer took pity on me. “I know what you’re asking, Isolde, and yes, I have given it more thought. And my answer hasn’t changed. Corporal penance is something that’s rarely permissible in the eyes of the Church.”

I wanted to push my ribs back together, I wanted to sew myself back up and pretend I hadn’t bled in front of this man I idolized so much, but I couldn’t help myself. “I wouldn’t be irresponsible with it, I promise. I would do it under the direction of my confessor. I would only use it as needed—”

“The gift God is giving you now,” my uncle suggested softly, “is one of deprivation. You must offer up that lack, that yearning, to him. You must live without this thing you crave to better serve him. There is no more valuable suffering or penance than that.”

I swallowed. “But—”

“Isolde, you wish to be God’s hands here on Earth. That requires sacrifice. You cannot creep through rooms with a cinched thigh, you cannot listen for me unnoticed at your father’s galas and parties if everyone is noticing the flagellation marks on your shoulders. If you are to be God’s creature as I have molded you to be, your body must be whole and strong and unmarked. You must not fast from nourishment, because it will make you weaker. You must not keep yourself awake, because it will make you slower.” He reached for my hand and squeezed it. “I would not score a blade or throw it carelessly into a fire. Neither will I allow you to damage yourself when you are already consecrated to the cause.”