Page 10 of The Priest

The door opens again and this time, my eyes see the one thing they’ve wanted all along. Marie. She is glowing and brilliant in a dress so plain even Irene couldn’t find fault with it. The contrast only makes her beauty that much more apparent.

I begin moving toward her. I don’t even realize I’m moving until I’m halfway across the hall, and when she turns my way, I see her heart in her eyes.

How could I ever have wondered if she was my destiny? She’s the one thing that makes me feel like life is a miracle.

I walk until we stand as close as we dare, which is still far closer than I perhaps should. I’m already thinking of the feel of her in my arms, tucked against me, those soft lips on mine, the sigh she releases when she yields to me. The way she looks at me right now, from beneath her lashes, is enough to make my blood heat, to make my breath come in small doses.

“I need you,” I whisper. It’s not what I meant to say. “It doesn’t have to be...” I hesitate, wanting to say it right and wanting it to also be true. “It doesn’t have to be like last night. But I want to hold you. I want to talk to you without an audience.”

She smiles. “Okay. But Edouard?” she asks, blushing. She bites her lip. “I’d like...I’d like it to be last night too.”

She walks away and I walk straight out into the cold, hoping the bitter air will cool my blood, and perhaps stop sending it all to my cock, which aches in a way I can hardly bear. I say ten Hail Marys as I walk to the church, needing to end the torture, but it fails. The whole time I’m picturing what it would be like to be inside her.

* * *

I spend the afternoon paying sick calls, trying not to think of her, which is mostly impossible.

Meeting tonight will be risky. It’s too cold to go to the barn again, and I don’t dare ask her back to my rooms, which leaves the confessional. It’s wrong. A better man would refuse. But I know—even as I sit here holding a dying woman’s hand—that desperation will drive me there. I could convince myself that we’d remain on opposite sides of the screen, that we’d merely talk, but her parting words are ringing in my head.

I’d like it to be like last night too .

My God. I’m ruined. I will take every single thing she’s willing to give, and I’ll take it even in the most sacred of places. I no longer care.

I finish up my sick visits and hurry back to the church, hoping to catch sight of Marie before she leaves so I can tell her the plan. I open the door to the parish office to let Anne, the part-time secretary, know I’m back, and find her looking worried and pale.

“Edouard,” she says, her voice a whisper. She’s never called me by my Christian name before, at least not without my title. “The church council is waiting in the meeting room for you.”

“For me?” I ask. “But we don’t have a meeting scheduled.”

Her eyes are wide. “They said it’s an emergency and they want you to come in as soon as you’d returned,” she says. “And...they seem upset.”

My stomach sinks. Perhaps they heard that I wrote the bishop asking to be replaced, which wouldn’t be ideal, but I’m worried it could be something far worse. What if my feelings for Marie over these long months and weeks have been far too obvious? Or, worse, what if someone—Henri, even—heard us in the barn last night? I can’t imagine him turning me in, not with the damage it might do his sister’s reputation as well...but if he was desperate to keep me away from his sister, or angry, anything is possible.

I push open the meeting room door and the council’s whispered arguments come to a sudden halt.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” I say, taking the remaining seat. “I wasn’t aware we had a meeting?”

They glance at each other and then Louis Gerbert, an old-timer who still thinks the entire mass should be said in Latin, slams his hand on the table. “Something needs to be done about the Durands,” he says. “The girl has cast you under a spell.”

My heart begins to thud loudly in my chest. Whatever it is they think they know, I can’t let them leave here blaming Marie for it. “Excuse me?” I ask, with a small laugh. “Are you accusing a member of the parish of witchcraft? I rather thought those days were put behind us a century or two ago.”

“The Jews,” he replies. “You cannot trust them, Father. They suckle at pigs’ teats. They do the devil’s work here. That’s why they smell of sulfur.”

A few at the table have the decency to look away as he says it, but not all.

My jaw hangs open. Such lies were encouraged during Martin Luther’s time, but that was five hundred years ago. I never dreamed that even here, in this small town near Paris, among my own parishioners, they’d still be believed. “That is absolutely preposterous.”

I wait for someone to back me up, and none of them do.

“Marie-Therese needs to be stopped,” says Jean-Paul Daucort, who I’d previously believed to be a reasonable man. “She’s poisoning you, infiltrating the church through you. We don’t fault you for it, Father. She’s beautiful, and with her trickery and cunning any of us might have succumbed, but it has to stop.”

“Mademoiselle Durand has done nothing of the sort,” I say, my voice too sharp, my fear too transparent. “She’s as Catholic as any of you here.”

“I told you he wouldn’t listen,” mutters Gerbert. “We should have done it my way.”

My head jerks toward him. “And what way is that?”

He says nothing, rising from his chair and walking out of the room. Michel Quinault, the council’s head, places a hand on my shoulder. “I’ll keep him in check for now, Father. But if you won’t remove the poison from your system, it will have to be removed for you.”