“Oh Ellie, she must have been terrified!” Tessa cried. “I amso sorry, Bean!”
Joseph closed his eyes. This was not the first miscarriage he’d attended. A few months ago, he’d arrived in time to speak the cold, conditional words:“If thou art a human being, I baptize thee…”What elsewouldit be? Its mother still loved it desperately, no matter its appearance, no matter that it clung to life only long enough to receive the Sacrament. He’d been glad for the Latin; he’d hoped the mother had not understood.
Joseph made himself stand, clutching his breviary against the chest of his soutane, begging God to give him the right words.
His father strode through the triple-hung window, blocking his path. Above the waist, his father was stripped to his shirt and smeared with blood, yet he frowned atJoseph’sattire. “If you are going to increase that young woman’s misery, turn around right now.”
Joseph did turn around, but only because someone was approaching. Hannah. He returned his attention to his father. “Do you think I am heartless?” Joseph hissed.
“No, but your Church often is.”
“It’s not—”It’s notmyChurch, it’stheChurch, he would have said.
But his father had already moved past him to ask Hannah where he and Hélène might change their clothes.
Cautiously, Joseph entered the bedchamber. Hélène moved from her friend’s side to ask: “Joseph, Edward and his father think that because Tessa hadn’t felt Bean moving yet, she didn’t have a soul yet. Is that true?”
This explained their behavior, though it did not excuse it. Joseph shook his head. “Bean has a soul—as immortal as yours or mine.”
Tessa raised her bloodshot eyes to him, but only for a moment.
Hélène promised to return soon, and the midwife left them too.
Propped on pillows, Tessa was swaddled in a baggy blue dressing gown with her knees drawn up beneath the bedclothes. Onthis support, she cradled in both hands something so small Joseph could not see it even as he came to stand beside her. She sheltered it as one might a baby bird fallen from its nest. As if its stillness were temporary. As if sheer will might infuse it with life again.
“Edward wouldn’t even look at her,” Tessa whispered.
Joseph gathered the courage to share her pain. The sight was more terrible than he had imagined—not because the little body did not resemble a child, but because it did. What Joseph saw first was an impossibly tiny hand, balanced on Tessa’s thumb—utterly perfect yet fragile as glass. Ears, nose, and mouth, already formed. Bean’s skin was translucent, revealing the delicate tracery of arteries. Her eyes were veiled promises beneath the surface, just like a baby bird’s. Tucked into a folded handkerchief, she filled Tessa’s palm, but nothing more. Three inches? Four?
“I baptized her as quickly as I could,” Tessa said. “I know the mother isn’t supposed to do it, but no one else knew how.”
For a moment the image seared through him: Tessa alone but for the slaves and the tiny being in her trembling hand, ignoring her own agony in order to save her child. Of course she was a mother, no matter how brief her daughter’s life. “Bean was born alive, then?”
Tessa closed her eyes and shook her head. “The Baptism wasn’t valid, was it?”
Joseph stared at his breviary. “No. I’m sorry.” Did his father expect him to lie? Tessa had been a catechist; she knew this truth as well as Joseph did. It was right there in the Gospel of John and in Bishop England’s catechism: “Is Baptism necessary to salvation? Yes; without it, we cannot enter the Kingdom of God.”
“My daughter is damned?”
Yes. But he must soften this. “Are you familiar with Limbo?”
“Isn’t thatpartof Hell?”
That was how Albertus Magnus had conceived it; Limbo meant “border.” Saint Augustine believed unbaptized children suffered the pains of Hell, only to a lesser degree than wicked adults. Scripture simply did not address the fate of unbaptized children, and the Church had never explicitly confirmed or denied the existence ofLimbo. In the absence of a clear revelation, theologians could only speculate about where and how such souls would spend eternity. But in Joseph’s experience, people were even more reluctant to accept“I don’t know”from a Priest than they were from a doctor. “We do not believe unbaptized children suffer the pain of fire.”
“Is their banishment temporary, like Purgatory?”
“No.”
“Bean cannoteverenter Heaven?”
“Although she committed no fault of her own, because she wasn’t baptized, the stain of original sin has not been—cannot now be—washed from her soul. So she can never enter the presence of God.”
“Because of my sin?”
“Because of Eve’s sin, and Adam’s.”Transmitted to her through you.
Tessa stroked her daughter’s tiny head. “Bean won’t have to spend eternity like this, will she? She’ll have a better body than I could give her? Her eyes will open, and she’ll be able to run?”
