Page 3 of Salt in the Wound
But surely he wanted what I also wanted; he’d never said otherwise. He’d allowed me to spend as much time as I wanted at the dojo, he’d never contradicted me when I spoke of my plans for the future. He’d never seemed jealous that I’d idolized my maternal uncle, a cardinal in the Catholic Church, more than I had him, Geoffrey Laurence, king of bankers.
“Thank you,” I answered politely.
My father took a bite of goose, chewed, cut off another bite. “And you are still committed to Columbia?” He didn’t look at me as he spoke.
“Yes,” I said, “but—”
I didn’t have a chance to raise the issue of my major, because just then a tall man strode into the room, the scarlet-trimmed hem of his simar fluttering around gleaming shoes. His cheeks above his neatly shorn beard were freckled, ruddy, dotted with pockmarks, and when he smiled at me, the smile revealed a gap between his front teeth. Flurries dusted the black cape hanging over his shoulders.
He held out his arms in welcome, and getting up to answer the invitation for a hug was as natural as breathing. My uncle Mortimer was as warm as my father was cold, and the only adult in my life who truly understood what I wanted after school.
“I didn’t know you were coming,” I said into Mortimer’s chest. The chain of his gold pectoral cross pressed into my cheek before I pulled away to beam at him. “I thought you’d be in Rome.”
“I had business in London tonight,” he said, giving my shoulder a fond pat. The Irish in his voice had been sanded down by years of living at the Holy See, but the lilt was still there. It reminded me of my mother’s voice. “But it’s concluded now. So I thought I’d come check on my favorite niece.”
“Your only niece,” I reminded him as I went back to my place at the table. Mortimer sat without an invitation from my father and gave the both of us another wide smile, the gap in his teeth flashing.
“I hope I’m not intruding,” he said.
“Of course you aren’t intruding—”
“Isolde,” my father interrupted sharply. “Go to your room.”
I froze, my fingers stalled in the act of reaching for my fork. “I’m sorry?”
Geoffrey Laurence turned his dark eyes on me. His already thin mouth was pressed even thinner, the lines bracketing his mouth severe. “I need to speak to your uncle. Please leave us.”
I looked over to my uncle, whose wide smile was still on his face. “Don’t worry, Isolde. It won’t take but a minute.”
I nodded and stood, leaving my napkin on the chair and walking out of the dining room and up the stairs to my own room. Where I promptly slipped off my shoes and then crept back to the stairs, careful to descend along the sturdy, quiet edges, rolling my bare foot from ball to toes with each silent step until I was at the bottom and within earshot of the dining room.
“It’s as good as done,” my father was saying. His English voice was as crisp and cool as money, a banker’s voice. “And it serves us both, as you well know.”
“Perhaps.”
I knew Mortimer’s cryptic response would infuriate my father, because it would be coupled with Mortimer’s famous arched eyebrow, that gap-toothed smile. My unclehandledthings for the Vatican, and there were many reasons why he was indispensable to the Vatican, but one very important reason was his inscrutability. He gave nothing away that he didn’t want to.
“I know what you’re thinking,” my father said, and I’d been right, I could hear the defensiveness in his words.
My uncle’s voice was a raspy one, a voice that always had a sense of wheezing to it, and so when he pitched his voice low and quiet, like he did just then, I couldn’t make him out from my position on the stairs. That voice was part of what made him so good at Vatican diplomacy, he’d once told me. He could be extremely difficult to eavesdrop on when he wanted to be.
But I could make out the last bit of what he said.
“…would be a waste, Geoffrey.”
“For you, maybe,” replied my father.
Once again, my uncle was difficult to make out. But I thought I heard the wordweapon, which couldn’t be right.
“I don’t want to be at odds with you on this, so I hope you’ll reconsider,” my father answered tightly. China clinked and a chair scraped—someone was standing abruptly. Perhaps readying to leave the room.
With a light movement, I leapt back up the stairs, just as quietly as I’d come down. I was fast, and a few minutes later, when my uncle knocked on my door, I was at my desk reading in a settled position, not a hair out of place.
“Come in,” I called, and he let himself in, a pillar of clerical black in my spare, cream-colored room.
“Very good,” he said as he sat down in a small armchair near my bookshelves. “I didn’t hear you at all.”
I dipped my chin in acknowledgment. It had been him who’d taught me how to creep, eavesdrop, how to listen unperceived. As a child, he would send me around parties and events, and I’d be his ears for him. His ears on a quiet little girl no one thought to curb their words around.
