Chapter 4

four

Ilaughed. I actually laughed.

Because it was laughable. Because it was absurd.

Because it was the exact opposite of everything I wanted.

But my father didn’t laugh. He didn’t even smile. Instead, he poured himself another glass of wine and drank from it slowly, his eyes somewhere in the middle distance.

I stopped laughing. “You aren’t serious.”

“I suggest you accustom yourself to the idea,” he said tightly. “Because I am very serious.”

He was, I could see it all over him. As serious as he’d been about my grades, about me going to university. And an unpleasant feeling bloomed deep in the pit of my stomach. “Is this why you wouldn’t listen when I told you I wanted to take vows? Because you wanted me to marry some…some sex club owner? Why?”

“You are not taking any kind of vows, and I’m sick to death of hearing about it,” my father bit out. “I could kill Mortimer for filling your head with that nonsense. You are my only heir, the sole container in which all of my work and my father’s work and his father’s work before him will pour into, and it was never a question that you would carry on the bank in my stead once I retire. You can hardly do that with a vow of poverty, Isolde. You can hardly do anything interesting with your life if you choose to spend it mumbling prayers and scurrying about doing your uncle’s pointless little errands for a pointless, dying institution.”

Small trembles had accumulated under my skin. I knew my father didn’t want me to become a nun; I knew that as well as I knew his middle name or his birthday. But he’d never openly mocked me, never made my dreams sound stupid or gullible or small.

“It’s what I want to do,” I said, my nose stinging. I hated that I was so close to crying right now. I wanted to face my father with all my dignity armored around me, with logic and collectedness on my side. “It’s what I am called to do.”

“You are called to be my daughter!” my father roared suddenly, slamming his fist onto the table and making all the dishes jump. “You are called to obey me; you are called to heed me. And now I am telling you that you will marry Mark Trevena, and you will obey!”

“I will not,” I said and got to my feet. My voice was quivering, but I would not falter, I would not give in. Like Catherine of Siena, I knew my own destiny. “I’m eighteen. You can’t make me do anything I don’t want to do. You can cut me off from all your money, and I will thank you for making my vow of poverty even easier to take. You can kick me out, but I’ve already inherited Cashel House in Ireland, and I’ll go live there instead until I can find a monastery that will take me. There’s nothing you hold over me that can make me do this.”

I turned and left the room, my flats making a steady, even noise on the parquet wood of the penthouse floor.

I would not hurry or run. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

* * *

It wasnear midnight when I heard the knock at my door. It was a reluctant kind of sound—a tap instead of a rap—and it was only that small concession that made me say, “Come in.”

My father stepped in, his tie unknotted, his jacket off. His hair, normally aggressively smoothed, was sticking up at the top, as if he’d been running his fingers through it. The whites of his eyes were bloodshot. I suspected he’d been drinking this entire time.

He dropped himself in the chair by my desk. Though our penthouse was generous in its living space—by Manhattan standards, anyway—my room wasn’t spacious by any means. My father was close enough for me to smell his wine and sweat from where I sat against my headboard.

Father’s gaze found the picture on the edge of my desk—him, me, and Mum, smiling together at Disney World. We were all slightly sunburned and giddy with sugar, and behind us were balloons and castle spires and an unrelenting subtropical sky. I remembered knowing I was too old to do something like fall asleep on my mother’s shoulder during the Hall of Presidents show and doing it anyway, right in the middle of President Penley Luther’s speech. I remembered how it had felt to walk between them, all of us linking hands. I remembered thinking I had the best family in the world.

Three weeks after that, my mother had died in a car crash.

Father touched the edge of the picture frame lightly, hesitantly, and then pulled his hand back.

“She wouldn’t want me to do this either, you know,” I said. My voice had lost its quaver—it was cold and clear.

But my father surprised me. “I know,” he said, and then he sighed. “I know that better than anyone. But her death changed more than her not being here, Isolde, and I think it’s time you knew how much.”

“Changed what? Us? The bank?”

“We have to think about the future differently. We have to think about this family differently, ensure our survival in more creative ways. Did Ms. Flores-King tell you what Mark Trevena used to do?”

“You mean before the sex club?” My voice had a bite to it that I rarely allowed, but my father seemed to expect it.

“Trevena was CIA. Special operations.” My father paused, seemed to decide on a different way to start. “His club, Lyonesse, is different from its competitors in many ways, but the chief difference is this: he doesn’t accept payment in money, only in information. His patrons are politicians, diplomats, celebrities, royalty. All of them have to pay in knowledge exclusive to their positions.”

I absorbed this.

“So in a way, Mark has never left the field of intelligence,” my father continued. “And intelligence is a generous word for what he used to do, anyway—he was the devil they sent in to scourge the other devils. And he was the best in the world at it.”

I knew immediately what the appeal was for my father without being told. “So he knows things. Things you think could help the bank.”

“He knows things. He knows people.”

I looked down at my hands. “And that knowledge is worth me. My future.”

“Your future is Laurence Bank, Isolde, and united with Mark Trevena’s hoard of information…there is nothing the bank couldn’t do. No place we couldn’t reach, no person we couldn’t sway. We would be unstoppable.”

I didn’t respond.

“This request isn’t arbitrary,” my father said as he came to his feet. “It’s not meant to be cruel or to torment you or whatever else your teenage mind is telling you right now. It is the best step toward your future and the bank’s that I can take.”

I hated him just then. I hated that he was taking my reaction and making it seem as if I were the unreasonable one, the foolish one for having a plan for my life that didn’t include him abruptly announcing that I was going to marry a stranger.

“I’m not doing it,” I told him. My voice was shaking again, and it made me even more upset. “And you can’t make me. You certainly can’t convince me that this is the best thing for my future when I’ve already pledged it to God.”

He didn’t bother arguing with me; he must have known he’d get nowhere.

“Good night, Isolde.”

* * *

I avoidedhim for the next week. Which wasn’t that difficult; though he made a point to eat dinner with me whenever he was in the same city as I was, he traveled enough that those dinners were very infrequent. After that, it was only a matter of spending as much time at the dojo as possible—hardly a sacrifice when I loved being there anyway.

I was running through my forms when the bell above the door rang. I turned, expecting to see another student or a delivery person, and then felt a boost of happiness when I saw my uncle standing there instead, grinning his gap-toothed grin, his pectoral cross and the gold ring on his finger winking in the cheap, flickering lights. He wore his black simar as always, red skullcap tucked tightly against his head.

“Mortimer!” I said and jogged over to give him a hug.

He patted my back fondly. “I had the feeling my favorite niece needed me. So here I am.”

I pulled back and studied his face, which was pointless, since Mortimer’s face never revealed anything he didn’t want it to.

“Did Father tell you? About what he wants me to do?”

“Yes,” Mortimer allowed with a sigh. He looked around the dojo and then back to the door. “Let’s take a walk, you and I. Let me hear how you’re feeling.”

There were only two cities in the world where Mortimer could walk in his simar and skullcap and no one would bat an eye: New York City and Rome. And so we were completely ignored as we walked to the High Line and climbed its stairs, me in my gi and Mortimer in his cardinal vestments, our heads bent together as I told him everything that had happened.

“And then,” I finished as we reached the path and started walking, “I told him that he couldn’t make me do it. I’m eighteen, I don’t need his money. My future was already in consecrated poverty, anyway.”

The sun was bright and hot up here, and the lush greenery lining the path only added to the cloying humidity. Below us, I could see the creep and crawl of traffic, not so bad today, but still constant, incessant. Like blood through the city’s veins.

Mortimer hadn’t spoken yet, so I turned to look at him. I expected indignation on his face, maybe even disgust at my father’s archaic thinking.

But instead, he looked pensive.

“What?” I asked, suddenly wary.

Mortimer’s hands were laced behind his back, as they often were, and he had to turn his shoulders to look at me.

“I think you should do it,” he said.

Something gaped and yawned inside my chest, an empty space absent of air or blood or anything. He could have slapped me across the face and I would have been less surprised.

“You think I should do it,” I echoed. I stopped walking, feeling my pulse in my neck and my wrists, a pulse that still came even while breathing barely felt possible. “You think I should marry a stranger. For a bank.”

My uncle stopped too, the simar swishing around his ankles as he took a step closer to me. It was a weekday and scorching to boot, and so the High Line was empty in both directions. It was just us and the plants bobbing in the concrete-scented breeze.

He stared at me, and I knew he was waiting for me to have an outburst, to plead my case, and I hated that I couldn’t stop myself from speaking, from exploding. It was the exact lack of control that he had tried to tutor me against, but how could I stop myself? When he didn’t seem to understand the situation at all?

“I want to be a nun,” I said, my jaw tight to keep my voice from wavering. “I want to take vows. I can’t do that if I marry this man. This man whom, I cannot stress enough, I don’t know and whom I don’t want to marry. I’m not a stock to be traded, I’m not an asset to be invested, and I’m not giving up my future to further my father’s earthly glory.” I was proud that I hadn’t started crying yet, but I didn’t know how much longer I could last. I was gutted. Worse than gutted, because it felt like he’d ripped my soul out along with my viscera and flung it all over the railing to the street below.

And that was before I realized something even worse.

“You knew,” I choked out. “At Christmastime, this is what Father was talking to you about. You knew this was coming, and you let me believe…”

I will never steer you away from what God needs you to do.

Why hadn’t I paid attention to how vague his assurances had been then? Why hadn’t I dug deeper, insisted on more?

Mortimer arched an eyebrow at me in sympathy. “My child, I hear you, and I see the betrayal in your face. Will you let me explain? Let me make my case?”

“What case is there to make?” My voice was quiet now, almost more exhalation than speech. “I want to be a nun. I’ve wanted it since I was twelve. I want to serve you and the Church and God, and I cannot do any of that if I am married.”

“I sometimes forget,” Mortimer replied softly, “how very young you are. You have the faith and commitment of someone much older, but you still think so categorically, so broadly. In unqualified absolutes.”

I bristled and he patted the air in a quelling gesture.

“I don’t mean that in deprecatory way, Isolde, it’s only the truth. You are eighteen, and there are things that you will view with an eighteen-year-old’s eyes. I’ve sharpened you into a blade, but being sharp is only half a blade’s job. The other half is knowing when and where to cut. I will teach you that too, I promise.”

I stared at him. “If I married Mark, which I won’t, you couldn’t promise me any such thing. I won’t be able to take vows. I won’t be able to work for you or the Church.”

Mortimer’s mouth tilted up in a fond smile. “Come,” he said, wandering over to the railing and leaning against it. The simar blew a little in the breeze as I joined him, and I thought about the habit I wouldn’t be able to wear if I listened to him and my father.

I braced my forearms on the railing and made a point not to look at him. Childish maybe, but he and the sisters were the ones who had taught me to fight with every weapon I had.

“Now, the issue of your vocation. I am disappointed you did not see the solution to this on your own, Isolde, but I suppose I’ve failed you in teaching you to think outside convention. You, of course, can take your vows and don your habit after your marriage to Mark Trevena is concluded.”

I gave a sharp laugh. “How am I supposed to conclude a marriage when divorce is forbidden?”

“An annulment,” my uncle said smoothly. “Once the marriage is annulled, you will be free to pursue any vocation you like. Any future you like.”

“Annulments are only for unconsummated marriages.” It was so strange to be talking about this with my uncle of all people, but he clearly wasn’t understanding the stakes. “Do you think the owner of a sex club will allow for an unconsummated marriage?”

“Do you think the Church will not allow for whatever I arrange for you? I’d be able to claim that you were not fully consenting; I can claim Pauline privilege if Mark’s baptism records are conveniently lost—but more importantly, I have made myself indispensable to the Holy Father. If my niece needs a marriage to conclude, I will see it done, no matter if you shared his bed or not. The truth is a fuzzy thing when we need it to be.”

I did turn to look at him then, my fingers gripping the railing. I felt like the ground was tilting under my feet, but so slightly that only I could feel it. “That would be lying,” I said faintly. “Non loqueris falsum testimonium. You shall not bear false witness.”

“Is it false witness, Isolde? Truly? The fact of what might happen between your body and Mark Trevena’s is not the same as the holy truth; your sacrifice will make inviolable the reality of your spiritual chastity.”

“My sacrifice.”

“Yes,” my uncle said earnestly. “Because I have not explained to you yet—of course you wouldn’t see yet—how powerful this alliance could be.”

“I already know—”

“No, my child, you don’t. You know what your father has told you, that he wants access to Mark’s hoard of information to help his ridiculous bank. I don’t care about your father making more money he doesn’t need. But the information you could find for me and Rome—to help keep the faithful safe—Isolde, the work that you could do in a moment, that I couldn’t do in a lifetime…”

But it wouldn’t be the work of a moment, why couldn’t he understand this? It would be days and weeks and years and maybe the rest of my life, and those days and weeks would feel like eternities with Mark Trevena. I thought of his cold, searching gaze at the rooftop party, of his relentless mastery in the dojo that day, when he had taken me down to the mats over and over again. It would be torture. And that was even subtracting the effort of trying to get whatever information my father and Mortimer wanted so dearly.

“All that to say,” Mortimer continued, “the Church will not hold this powerful victory against you. You will be rewarded, handsomely. Your heart’s desire for this temporary sacrifice.”

“This word again,” I murmured. “Sacrifice. This is not a sacrifice. This is a violation of God’s will.”

“You say this with a confidence you cannot have.” My uncle shook his head, smiling at me. “Who better to know God’s will than me? This is not a waste, like Jephthah with his daughter, but rather a gift from God. You will be serving me and the Church even more thoroughly than you and I had planned. You will be proximate to all the information, and all the people, I would ever send you to find, and instead of you having to sift for gold, it would be poured into your waiting hands.”

He lifted a hand to my shoulder, the same steady, reassuring hand that had guided me all my life. The hand that had kept me steady through my mother’s funeral, steady when I couldn’t stop crying, steady when my father was so sick of my hysterics that he didn’t even want me at the service. My uncle had insisted, had folded me under his arm, his black cape covering me.

Her tears are holy, he’d said to my father. To hide her tears is to hide God’s love for Inis today. He’d comforted me, prayed with me. Told me that God was inside my pain because God had also lost someone he loved, his one begotten son, and only God was big enough, gentle and patient enough, to receive all the pain and emptiness I’d felt and to fold it inside of his mighty heart.

My uncle had enrolled me in karate, had given me Ignatius of Loyola and Thomas Aquinas to read, stacked alongside The Prince and Leviathan and The Book of Five Rings. He’d given me The Art of War and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations in leather-bound editions small enough to fit in my schoolbags; he’d listened to me attentively when I’d told him what I’d thought of them.

The hand that he lifted to my shoulder now was a hand more responsible for who I was today than my father’s own hand—or even my mother’s.

His cardinal’s ring was a glittering gold beacon in the sunlight.

“We talk often of lifting our pain and suffering up to God,” he said. “What greater pain than this? What greater suffering than this? You would be offering up so much more than a wish, Isolde, but a calling. You would be offering to Heaven a jewel so rare that few can even imagine it. Not just an act or a desire, but an entire life. Like Christ, you are laying down your very future.”

I wavered.

Looking into his eyes, blue at the edges, green in the center, the two of them slightly different in their mottling, I couldn’t see anyone but the man who’d raised me. The man who’d given me a person to be when everything seemed dead and buried along with Inis Laurence.

ThatIsolde trusted him implicitly. That Isolde wanted nothing more than to help him build the kingdom of God here on Earth.

And here he was saying that I needed to do it another way than the way we’d planned.

“But I can’t,” I said. Faintly. “I can’t marry someone I don’t know…”

“For God,” my uncle said, “you can do anything. All things are possible through him.”

“But what if…” I couldn’t finish the question. Not to my uncle. But what if I had to have sex with Mark? Visit his sex club? A marriage ceremony was one thing, but what did being the wife of Mark Trevena actually entail?

Was any information worth that price?

Mortimer gave me a sad smile. “Are you afraid you aren’t strong enough?”

Strong enough? I ran and sparred and punched bags until my shoulders gave out; each night before bed, I spent ten minutes kicking a wooden post covered with old tires to strengthen my shins. I had straight As and an immaculate school career despite my heart already belonging to my future vocation; I had managed to survive six years without Inis Laurence.

“I know I’m strong enough,” I said with a sharp lift of my chin, and it was only as Mortimer’s eyes flickered with triumph that I realized I’d taken his bait.

“Then this is only a test,” he said. “A test you shall pass with flying colors.”

I looked away, my entire body at war with itself. There were so many saints who’d asked for tests, who’d begged for them. Begged for any kind of suffering they could bear on behalf of the world. That was what you did if you were holy. You suffered and then offered that pain up to God to help sanctify souls in purgatory, for the salvation of souls here on Earth.

To suffer was to be holy.

“I will be here to guide you,” my uncle said, squeezing my shoulder now. “To keep you safe. And the moment you need the marriage over, I will see it done.”

“I might be afraid,” I finally admitted. “Of Mark. Of never finding my way out of this marriage.”

“Even Christ was afraid in Gethsemane. But the Father guided the Son to his purpose, and so shall I with you. In fact…”

He dropped his hand from my shoulder as I looked back at him. Hopelessness was a weight on my chest, but perhaps that was my selfishness talking, my fear. I should be offering that hopelessness up to God.

He seemed to be considering something, and then nodded to himself, that eternal eyebrow arched. “Yes,” he said after a long moment. “You’re ready. You’re ready to visit Rome and begin working for me properly soon. Then I think you’ll see what a benediction God has brought us in the shape of Mark Trevena.”