Mercy by Alissa York Read Free Book Online Page A

to want to see his wife more than five minutes a day?”
    She doesn’t answer.
    “I asked you a question, Mathilda.”
    “It’s polishing day,” she says quietly.
    “What?”
    “It’s Wednesday, polishing day. I have a lot to do—”
    “Damn the polishing!” Thomas bellows, Mathilda staring at him as though two black horns were sprouting from his brow.
    “Thomas!” Crossing herself swiftly, she yanks open the door. “Cleaning St. Mary’s is a sacred duty. The Church is the
Body of Christ.”
    His jaw works on its hinges. She leaps over the threshold before he can summon a reply.

6
ADORAMUS TE
(
we adore thee
)
    T ucked up tight against his massive desk, August shuffles his notes for the week’s sermon, reordering them yet again. His mind has been truant all afternoon. The moment he sets it to work, it slips back to the rectory, where a muted drama unfolds.
    The housekeeper’s taken to her bed, the cancer so far advanced even the doctor was shocked—how had she been up and about at all, let alone still attending to her duties? August could have told him. With help, of course, the help of a loving and devoted niece.
    Now Mathilda works alone. Each morning, August awakens to the sound of her arriving early to make him breakfast. Standing at the bathroom sink, he draws the razor slowly down his cheeks, listening to the pipes moan as she fills the kettle for tea. He dawdles while dressing, emerging from his bedroom only after she’s mounted the stairs to relieve the night nurse and see to her aunt.
    She’s up and down those stairs all day. He’s caught glimpses of her through the parlour’s glass door, bearing watered milk or a wash basin, clean syringes or weak beef tea. All that, and she somehow manages the rectory choresbefore noon, prepares a hot lunch, then crosses to the church with her cleaning box in hand. Day after day, August finds his meals steaming in the empty dining room, as though they’ve been laid out for him by some otherworldly force.
    Of course, she can’t stay on long-term. Married or not, she’s too young and—well, people would talk. As soon as her aunt passes, he’ll have to arrange for someone new. He should do it now, really—she’s running herself ragged—but the idea pains him. No, he decides, better to wait awhile. It might seem as though he’s rushing the housekeeper along.
    He walks a hand across the green desk blotter, halting at its cushioned edge. Mathilda’s been here recently, last evening perhaps, while he was out on his rounds. The desktop gives off an underwater gleam, papers layered and frilled, the paperweight an enormous black pearl. He shakes his head hard, grabs a random sheet from the pile, grips it in both hands and stares. His leggy scrawl swims. Hopeless. He needs a walk, that’s all. A little air.
    He catches sight of her on his way out. She’s standing close by the altar, so close she could lean her hip lightly against it. Her hands move over the monstrance, the left cradling, the right rubbing vigorously to bring out a shine.
    The first time Father Felix showed him the monstrance at St. Paul’s, August heard
monstrous
, and so it seemed to a little boy—the spindly leg of its stand, its spiky head, the pale, translucent pupil of its eye. He learned the proper term soon enough, but it wasn’t until seminary, bent over the fat OED, that he discovered the diverse etymologies of the words.
Monstrous
from the Latin
monstrum
, meaning “portent.” Monstrance from
monstrare
, “to show.” Still,the two remained twinned in his mind, and he found he could never quite strain all the horror from his awe. It didn’t help to find out that, while it now exposed only the host, the monstrance had its origins in those reliquary cylinders that displayed the bodies of martyrs—either whole or in gruesome parts.
    Mathilda draws close to the lunula and breathes on the glass, following with a flick of her cloth. August bristles. Surely such intimacy is