“Oh.” She flicked her fingers dismissively. “He wishes he were better than me, but fears he is not. On some days, simple jealousy.”
“Why would he be jealous?”
“Don’t be foolish, Thomas.”
“I gave him no cause.”
“The world gave him cause. He would be jealous of any woman to whom you showed the smallest favour, simply because she could offer you what he cannot.”
Thomas blushed beneath the shadow of his own palm. “There are things I would not wish a woman to offer me.”
“A woman could marry you. Give you a child. Live a life openly by your side. With a woman, you could keep your God, without qualm or question.”
“My God?” repeated Thomas. “Is He not your God also?”
“I very much doubt it.” Her tone was a little wry, but not bitter. “He is a man’s God, after all. I’m honestly rather surprised He still feels like yours.”
“It’s not God who holds my love a sin. But to love, I must live in sin. And what kind of priest would that make me?”
“Priests are just people, aren’t they?” she asked. “Are you saying no priest has ever sinned?”
“It’s not the sin. Everyone struggles with sin.” Thomas sighed. “It’s the persistence of the sin. Are you familiar with Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans. Chapter seven?”
Her lips twitched. “Clearly not.”
“I won’t quote it to you—”
“My thanks.”
That drew from him an unexpected half-smile. “Paul, as is rather typical for him, I will admit, is wrestling with what it means to understand sin, and believe in God’s law, and yet continue to fall short of doing what is right.”
“I see.”
“He concludes,” Thomas went on, giving voice to thoughts that lived inside him like rats, feeding upon him endlessly, “that mistakes are to some degree inevitable because, unlike God, we aren’t perfect. And that as long as we recognise God’s goodness, and hate the ills that we do, we can trust in His grace to save us from the worst of ourselves.”
“And what does that have to do with you?”
He sighed, the taste of dust in his mouth, his tongue as cumbersome as stone. “I could never hate being with Micha. I would be choosing sin, day in, day out, knowing always I was in the wrong and refusing ... unable ... to repent.”
“I thought you said”—Sheba’s voice was gentle, in contrast to the needle-prick precision of her words—“love wasn’t sin in the eyes of the Lord?”
“Love isn’t. Fornication is, and for good reason.”
“It’s not as though you have another choice. If you were to act as married, forsaking all others, until death do you part, et cetera, would it still be fornication?”
“Well,” said Thomas, rather hopelessly, “yes. Not all religious laws are secular laws, nor are all secular laws religious. For that matter, it’s not always the case that what’s morally right is upheld by either religious doctrine or legal precedent.”
Sheba’s look was wry enough to remind him, painfully, of Micha. “This all sounds very convenient, Thomas. Convenient for people who are not us.”
“Even so”—on this, at least, he could be firm—“it is not for me alone to decide what holds weight and what doesn’t. I can only live as best I can, in accordance with what is right under the church, right under the Crown, and right to my own conscience.”
“Your own happiness can’t be right also?”
“Not if I want to stay a priest.”
“And you do?”
“I must.”
