Page 11 of Salt in the Wound
“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 alongsideThe PrinceandLeviathanandThe Book of Five Rings. He’d given meThe Art of Warand Marcus Aurelius’sMeditationsin 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 acalling. 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.ThatIsolde 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 marriageceremonywas 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…”
