When the butler showed Joseph in, Edward was donning his hat. “You’re not leaving?” Joseph asked.
“Plantations do not work themselves! At least I can be of usethere. What can I possibly say to her?”
“Tell her this doesn’t change how you feel about her,” Joseph suggested, trying very hard to restrain himself. “Tell her this wasn’t her fault!”
“How can youstillbelieve that?” Edward pointed an accusing finger at Joseph. “Your father is only placating her.” He pitched his voice into mockery. “Isn’t it asinto lie, Father?”
Said the man who hadn’t been to Confession in a year and a half.
When Joseph entered her chamber, Tessa was curled up on the far side of the bed, turned away from him. What he saw first was her hair: unbound, coursing across the counterpane and dripping all the way to the floor like a cascade of grief. He thought of myrrh weeping from its African trees: golden “tears” of sap that turned translucent brown before they were gathered to perfume the incense he burned in the cathedral. Since the day he’d met Tessa, a selfish,sensuous part of him had yearned to see these tresses displayed in their full glory. But not like this.
Hannah stood up from the chair at the bedside and came to him. “She said Irishwomen leave their hair down till they’ve been churched,” the black woman told him. “Said she should have done it before. She won’t let me touch her. Said it’s bad luck—she’sbad luck.”
When Joseph crossed around the bed, Tessa kept staring sightlessly out the window; she didn’t acknowledge him. “Tessa? It’s Joseph—Father Lazare.”
She did not move. One hand was fisted against her chest. The other lay limp on the pillow beside her.
Slowly, instinctively, Joseph slipped his fingers between hers. Tessa closed her eyes and grasped his hand. He no longer knew what to say, so he said nothing; he only sat with her till Hélène came to take his place.
Autumn became winter.Stranger’s fever released its grip on the Low Country, and Charleston rose from the ashes. Father O’Neill celebrated the first Mass at Saint Patrick’s, the new church in Radcliffeborough on the Charleston Neck.
Every day, Tessa drank a tea prepared by the midwife at Stratford-on-Ashley. Around Christmas, she conceived again. She followed every Irish superstition. If she experienced the slightest knock, Tessa would touch her hip so the damage would not transfer to her child. She ceased wearing corsets altogether. She left her chamber only to attend Mass, when she wore a great cloak.
None of it made a difference. In March, the terrible, familiar pains seized her womb again.
“The troubles of my heart are multiplied,”Joseph read over the grave of the little boy she called Patrick. “Deliver me from my distress.”
Tessa did not rise from her knees. She clung to Hélène, shivering with grief as spring bloomed all about them. Here in the cemetery, Tessa had planted dogwoods for her children after all. They were beautiful. But she did not see them. “We have a proverb in Ireland,” she told Joseph and his sister. “‘Three who will never see the light of Heaven: the Angel of Pride, an unbaptized child, and a Priest’s concubine.’”
Hélène frowned. “The Angel of Pride is Satan?”
“Yes! Satan, a whore, and a baby—on the same list!”
Doctrinally, the list was perfect. Yet Joseph knew he must give Tessa what comfort he could. He’d asked his old seminary professors to send him every theory they could find about Limbo. “The New Earth that Saint Peter talks about, after the Resurrection of the Dead—there are scholars who think that unbaptized children will inhabit that Earth in their new bodies, forever.”
“They will be happy there?” Tessa pleaded. “It will be beautiful?”
“Like your garden in springtime,” Joseph promised.
“Without any mosquitoes,” his sister added.
Tessa smiled through her tears. “Or like County Clare, without any Englishmen?”
Before the end of summer,Tessa miscarried for the fifth time.
Once again, Edward abandoned his wife. Once again, he and Joseph passed in the hall. This time, the man actually scowled at him before departing.
Joseph felt a twist of guilt in his gut. Was he visiting Tessa too often, too long? Did Edward suspect how Joseph felt about his wife?
Of course not, he assured himself.She is my parishioner. This is a sick call. I have done nothing to be ashamed of.
But he hadthoughta great deal to be ashamed of.
The butler directed Joseph to the upper piazza. Tessa reclined on a green méridienne, staring at her honeysuckle vine, a little book open on her lap. Again her stunning hair was unbound, so long it pooled on the floor of the piazza. It reminded Joseph of Mary Magdalene. But what sins did this young woman have to repent?
Her thoughts seemed to follow his. Without looking at him, she said, “God is punishing me, isn’t He?”
“Of course not.”
