I have to admit I fought an urge to creep over to the door, to try to overhear; instead, I focused on my novel, and after a few minutes their conversation faded into the background of my consciousness. I don’t remember when their words tailed off, but they had, for a completely different kind of sound shattered the silence: a gasp of pain. One that was remarkably akin to the last sound that had passed from between the Bishop’s lips. I jumped to my feet, thinking one of them had taken ill—or been grievously wounded, though I didn’t want to consider the latter possibility. Dropping my book, I snatched up the lantern, and tore over to the door and flung it wide.
Ali and Meussin were both naked. Ali lay on her stomach, rigid, legs apart, and moaning. Meussin, who knelt behind her, turned as I entered. One of her hands lay on Ali’s buttock; the other held a piece of glistening wood shaped like a phallus. She waved me out of the room with it.
I was so dumbfounded, that I stood there staring at them stupidly for a few seconds; then, when my wits returned, I withdrew quickly, closing the door. I stumbled over to the chair and dropped into it, heart hammering, and burning with—
—with what? It took me a moment to recognize it as jealousy. Of Meussin mostly. But also of Ali. Of the intimacy they shared. I was young and still naive in the ways of love. Yet, when I recall those moments, those feelings seem truer, and stronger, than any I’ve had since. If I’ve loved anyone, it was those two women.
In the next room, Ali’s moans of pleasure intensified; my consternation deepened in equal measure.
Ali prefers women.
Strangely, this didn’t come as much of a surprise.
But when I brought the image of Meussin to mind, the soft, subtle curves of her pale body against the sinewy duskiness of Ali’s, I felt sickened. Worse, I felt betrayed.
I was furious with Meussin, and blamed her for making something unwholesome and messy all the worse. She is a whore, I thought, who thinks only of her own selfish pleasure. In that moment, I hated her as much as I’ve ever hated anyone. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I hated her with the intensity we can only muster for the few lucky souls whom we love.
“I know you are angry, Thomas. But you will get over it.”
After we’d broken our fast in silence, Ali, as was her wont, had vanished into the tunnels of the Vatican, leaving me alone with Meussin. She sat on the settee with her book, and I took my usual chair, immediately burying my nose in a book of my own.
“If you grip the covers any tighter, you will deform them.”
I placed the novel in my lap, and glowered at her. “How could you?” I said, knowing how trite my words sounded as soon as they left my mouth.
“I did what she wanted,” Meussin answered. “What she needed.”
“It’s a sin!”
“If you believe in God, Thomas, you must also believe he made us this way, to feel this kind of pleasure. How can such pleasure be a sin?”
I’d heard these arguments before, or very similar ones, from Ignatius, to justify his own excesses. “There are Laws. The Bible says—”
“The Bible?” She seemed amused. “It is an ancient text of second-hand stories.”
“So you do not believe in the Word of God?”
“If the Word of God is in the Bible, it is too obscure and contradictory for me to understand.”
“Interpretation is the role of the Church, of the Magisterium.”
“I no more believe in the Magisterium’s ability to interpret that Bible than I do in my father’s infallibility—particularly since both those privileges were granted to the Church by the Church.”
“The Law is the Law—we cannot live without it. If everyone forsook it, there would be only chaos.”
“I cannot speak to that, Thomas,” she said. “Though I doubt it. I rather suspect things would be less chaotic. In any case, I have my own rules. Sometimes they are the same as the Church’s, sometimes not. But my rules are as consistent as I can make them, and so I can give you good reason for anything I might do. Can the Church say the same?”
“Did you have good reason for seducing Ali?”
Meussin blinked, perhaps not expecting the vehemence of my response. “I did not seduce her. It was her idea. I could see no harm coming of it, at least not for her or me. And maybe some good.” She paused, looking grave. “But I can see now that it has hurt you. And for this I am sorry.”
“Do not apologize to me,” I spat back at her. “It is God’s forgiveness you should seek.”
“I have forsaken God,” she said. “It frees me to enjoy this life, instead of worrying about the next.”
My anger got the better of me. I stood and took a step towards her, my hands balled into fists. I am ashamed to admit it, but I wanted to strike her. “You had me believing you loved Kite.” Her face creased with the sadness of a fresh wound.
“I do,” she said, eyes averted, voice suddenly distant.
“Then you betrayed him.”
“He would not have thought so.” She looked at me. “Just as Ali would not believe she betrayed you last night.”
My throat went tight and I couldn’t catch my breath; I began shaking as if palsied. Meussin stood, pulling me into her arms, and I collapsed against her, gasping for air.
“It’s all right, Thomas.”
Tears welled in my eyes and, for a time, I wept.
Meussin was tall for a woman; and she was more than a head taller than me. When I’d regained some control of myself, she cupped my chin in her long, pale fingers and raised my head, then kissed me, full on the lips, as a woman kisses a man.
When we broke, she smiled sadly at me. “We are more alike than you might suppose, Thomas. I think you love me. Perhaps not in the same way you love Ali.” She put a pale hand on my cheek, just as she had done when she’d said goodbye to Kite. “And I suppose I love you well enough, though not in the way I love Kite.” She took my hand, drawing me towards temptation. “Perhaps we can find some comfort in each other.”
I loved, and still love, those two women above all others.
Not once did we speak of our arrangement, and we carried on as if nothing was amiss. Yet it was always there in the room with us. Each evening, after sun-off, I’d read while Ali and Meussin repaired to the bedroom. Sometimes I heard them making love (more quietly now than that first time), and I waited until the sounds subsided before I extinguished the lamp and crept into the room; on other nights, when I heard nothing, I nevertheless waited the interval decency demanded before entering the bedroom. In the mornings, as soon as she finished her breakfast, Ali would always abandon the apartment for the tunnels, leaving Meussin and me alone. When I’d depart the apartment before the Garde brought Meussin her lunch, I’d always find Ali waiting at the dark cross-passages Meussin had shown us that first day. And so it went, the folly of our passions carrying us relentlessly forward.
There was one more aspect to our arrangement that bears mentioning. As Meussin had said, the floor was anything but comfortable. I found it cold, hard, and unforgiving. So that very night I crept into bed on Meussin’s side. I didn’t do it to provoke Ali, or so I like to think. But who knows? Others have proven better at unravelling my motives than me. Meussin, for one. And since she raised no objection, and Ali wouldn’t break her silence to do so, I considered the matter settled. From that day, the three of us slept together in Meussin’s bed in that secret apartment beneath the Vatican.
On judgement day, what would God make of us?
The Pontiff’s Atonement
After Meussin and I became lovers, we shared stories of our childhood.
Until then, I had thought memories cheap and easily acquired, but Meussin taught me that no more valuable gift could be given. I treasure hers—as I hoped she treasured mine—and would not wish to dishonour her by recounting things spoken of in the privacy of her bed. Nevertheless, I believe a few are essential to the truth of this memoir; as painful or embarrassing or banal as they might seem, they trace back the id
iosyncrasies of our adult personalities to their roots in our childhood, and so explain how we became who we are.
I have already told something of my father’s inquisition, and of my time at the orphanage at San Savio, but said little of my life before, for it was largely uneventful. Meussin’s was equally routine until the age of five, when she was first conveyed to Rome. There, Bishop Singleton locked her in a small, windowless cell beneath Saint Peter’s. It contained a mattress and a chamber pot—but no lamp. She supposed they’d been afraid she might set fire to the mattress—or herself.
More confused than afraid, she didn’t cry the first day. When she did on the next, her sobs went unheard.
She saw no one, save the silent Garde who brought her meals—and a stooped Priest who entered her room each day, the light from his lamp waking her. He never spoke to her, only to God. In silence he would gather his cassock and, tucking it beneath his knees, kneel on cold stone flags; then indicate she should do the same. Side by side, they would pray for forgiveness.
For what, she had no idea.
The Priest would then leave her to the darkness.
On her third visit to that squalid cell, when she was eight, she discovered the cell harboured its own secret. Sitting in the far corner as the Garde opened the door to deposit her meal, she felt a draft tickle her legs. It took her two days, and four more meals, for her to locate its source: two small holes that had been bored in a stone near the base of the wall. She’d assumed these holes had been made to anchor chains. But when she put her fingers into them, they didn’t end in rough stone or a stub of iron, but in pieces of wood that gave slightly to the touch. Pressing hard on both at the same time, there was a click. It took her only a few more minutes to learn that if she pulled back with her arms while pushing the slats with her fingers, the stone could be canted forward. That first time she pulled too hard and too quickly to get out of the way, and the stone fell forward onto her arms. After a moment’s panic, she managed to wiggle free. In the excitement of her discovery, she forgot about the painful bruises rising on her forearms; feeling around the opening created, she realized it was the entrance to a crawlway.
The space was cramped, big enough for a small man perhaps, but still too small for her to turn around. If she went forward, it would be difficult to return. Fortunately, it wasn’t far to go; within a few metres the crawlspace gave onto a full sized corridor tall enough for a man and wide enough for two. Thus Meussin found herself at large in the secret passages beneath the Vatican.
She crawled back to her cell and carefully returned the stone to its place.
In the weeks that followed she slowly mapped the secret corridors near her cell by touch. On Good Friday (if her reckoning was right) the Garde, as usual, unlocked her door and set her meal down—but did not retreat. She blinked in the light from his lantern set down in the corridor behind him; it shrouded him in darkness, and it was a moment before Meussin realized he was holding something out.
“Take it,” he said. Though she’d seen him upwards of forty days each year for Lent, and another twenty in their travels to and from Rome, those were the first words she’d ever heard him speak.
She reached out with trembling hands and drew what he proffered from his shadow: a small lamp, filled with oil, and a tinder box.
“I will bring more oil, as I can.”
She stood there, trembling, too surprised—and afraid—to say anything.
“Do not hide it in your cell, and do not light it near here,” he said. “The smell will raise suspicions.”
She clutched his precious gifts to her chest. “Thank you . . .” She stopped, because she didn’t know his name.
“Kite.”
“Thank you, Kite.”
“It’s nothing, Meussin,” he said, before locking the door of her cell.
That several years passed before she understood the stooped man who came to her cell each morning was her father should not be surprising. In her other life she was isolated; she had no contact with anyone save her governesses and Bishop Singleton, both of whom spoke to her only when necessary, and never answered any of her questions. How could she have known? Meussin thought herself content on the estate, where her governess generally let her be, and so reconciled herself to her yearly sojourns to the Vatican as the price to be paid for what happiness she had.
Her fourth year in Rome, growing more confident, she extended her explorations, finally stumbling upon corridors that admitted cracks of light. She discovered hidden galleries with spyholes overlooking dusty chambers; sometimes she would chance on a meeting of Clergy, sitting around tables and speaking in hushed tones. Within a week she found her way into the Vatican’s unacknowledged library—and stole her first book. She found a crypt containing the bones of long-forgotten saints, in which several inscriptions baffled her (for they spoke of canonizing miracles that helped make the world—but how could men have existed before there was a world?). Here she would sit with her back against the cool stone of her favourite sarcophagus—that of Saint Viktor, the blessed architect—and read for hours. As she finished them, she placed the books upon the flat lid of his coffin, and so grew her collection.
Toward the beginning of her fifth Lent, she found herself lying inside a space within the arch of a ceiling, looking down upon a group of aged Cardinals at a large oval table; in this secret cavity, the sounds from below were somehow amplified, so that every word was clear, even the mumbling of the most elderly. They spoke in Latin, and having had no schooling in the language, she did not comprehend what was said. But she did recognize a voice, that of the Priest who attended her each morning—only now he wore the vestments of the Holy Father.
When Kite laid her meal on the floor that evening, she said, “He is the Pope.”
Kite paused, a hand on the door, and nodded affirmation.
“Why does he bring me here?” But she knew the answer before she asked the question; it had been given to her in the books she read, in the sins of the men and women whose lives they considered. Their morning prayers were part of his atonement, Meussin knew, for the iniquity of being her father.
She wept and, for the first time, Kite held her.
The year she reached menses, and grown into the promise of her beauty, Meussin seduced Bishop Singleton on the journey home. From her books and observations, she had learned something of men’s desires and the guilts they engendered. She put this knowledge to work to the desired effect: when Singleton brought her to Rome the next year, it was to new chambers, those in which she would hide us years later. By standing tiptoe on a Bible placed on a chair, she could see out the window and into Giardini del Vaticano and sometimes catch a glimpse of the birds that sang there. Although she now had a bit of natural light and had been given a lamp, as well as other small conveniences that had hitherto been denied her, she was once more captive. On the second day of her stay, Kite brought a key. The next, after having slipped from her chamber to learn her new surroundings, she returned to find, in her bedroom, several neat stacks of all the books she’d ever stolen. In the paltry illumination of the first small lamp Kite had given her, the pile had always seemed trifling; in the natural light of these rooms, she was taken aback by the number she’d read.
Her new quarters were far from her old, and another two years passed before she stumbled across a familiar corridor and found her way back to the library. Nevertheless, her collection grew. For the rest of that Lent, and in the year following, each meal tray Kite brought would hold a new book under the neatly folded napkin. They never spoke of those books. Or of anything else.
When she told me all this, I felt a pang of jealousy, and admitted as much to her. I knew she loved him, but from what she said, I couldn’t be sure he felt the same way. So I asked her directly if she believed he’d loved her.
“Yes.” Naked, she rose from the bed and wandered with effortless grace to her bookshelves. I watched, rapt by her melancholy beauty, as she ran her finger lightly along the spines of the
books.
“He told you so?”
She hooked a finger around the top of a book and angled it out of the shelf. As she handed me the volume, she smiled. “In each book he chose for me.”
Sanctuary
Clinging to the outside wall of the Holy City was the Albergo Roma, an inn catering to the endless procession of pilgrims. In its undercroft, where temperatures were more or less constant, twelve oaken casks rested on stout stands, six on either side of the narrow vaulted cellar. Eleven held various vintages; the twelfth, however, was always empty. Through this barrel, on hands and knees, Ali and I crawled out of the Vatican tunnels and back into the city of Rome.
Meussin’s squat manservant waited for us.
The last day of Lent, the last day of Meussin’s penance, she told us she had arranged for us to be conveyed safely out of Rome—but that she would not accompany us. “I must play out my role here,” she said. My heart sank, even though I knew it would be folly to not make use of her position so near the Pontiff and the College. She told us that, if we should wish it, there were those who would harbour us until we might learn what the Angels wanted of us. And should we not wish it, then we would be left outside the city to make our own way. Given how casually she’d brought up the notion of Kite killing us to preserve their secrecy, I regarded the second option with suspicion. Not that I believed Meussin was capable of such a thing, but I knew there must be others in the service of Angels who were. As always, she sensed my apprehension.
The Book of Thomas - Volume One: Heaven Page 18
