Sins of the Fathers by Sally Spencer Read Free Book Online Page B

smashed the statues and stripped away all other signs of Papistry. But the world turns – as it inevitably will – and in the mid-nineteenth century, Catholic cotton money had been used to purchase the church and re-consecrate it into the old faith.
    Monika Paniatowski could have left her bright red MGA right in front of the church – there were parking restrictions in force there, but what did that matter when you were the law? – yet instead she chose to park at the bottom of the hill, even though that meant subjecting herself to a long, steep climb.
    The reasoning behind her decision was simple. Her sporty car was one of the most distinctive vehicles in Whitebridge, so people seeing it parked outside the church might be forgiven for assuming she had gone inside to pray.
    And that was an assumption she really did not want
anyone
to make.
    Ever!
    That was an assumption it was worth climbing the highest and most gruelling
mountain
to avoid.
    As she toiled up the steep gradient, Monika found herself thinking about her past in general, and her mother in particular – and with these thoughts came an involuntary physical reaction which made her feel as though her bowels were slowly turning to water.
    Her mother had been a devout Roman Catholic. It had been Agnieszka Paniatowski’s faith that had sustained her during those long, terrible, years while she and her daughter had criss-crossed war-torn Europe as refugees on the run. Never once – despite all the hardship they had endured, despite all the horrors they had seen – had that faith of Agnieszka’s wavered.
    And neither had her little daughter’s. Even as a small child, Monika had understood that she was both a Pole and Roman Catholic – and that the two things were so intertwined that she could no more separate the one from other than she could separate her mind from her body, or her heart from her soul.
    It was only later, in the supposed safety of this English mill town where they had come to live, that she had finally lost her faith – and even then she had not so much
lost
it as had it
torn from her
by what was said from the other side of the confessional grill.
    Monika is thirteen years old. Her body is beginning to fill out, and the boys at school have started to notice her.
    And not just the boys.
    Not just at school.
    She is sitting in the confessional of St Mary’s Church.
Her
church. On the other side of the grille sits
her
priest.
    â€˜Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,’ she says. ‘It has been a week since my last confession.’
    For a moment, she can say no more, but when she
does
speak again, the words spill out of her and feel like they will never stop. She tells how her stepfather came to her room, late at night and smelling of drink, and put his hand on her shoulder. She describes how that hand – that big, beefy, demanding, hand – burrowed its way under the blankets and found its way to her young breasts. With tears streaming down her face, she recounts what happened next – how he climbed into her bed, how he forced her legs apart, how he … how he …
    â€˜Do you think perhaps you led him on, my child?’ the priest, Father O’Brien, asks.
    She is not even sure she knows what that means.
    â€˜Led him on?’ she repeats.
    â€˜Man is but an imperfect being, prone to temptation,’ the priest intones. ‘Did you tempt him, Monika? Did you cause him to think that his attentions would be welcomed?’
    â€˜No. I didn’t. I swear I didn’t.’
    â€˜But did you, deep within yourself,
want
him to do it to you, my child?’ the priest persists.
    She feels like yelling at the top of her voice that of course she didn’t want him to do all those terrible things to her.
    She wants to scream out that the priest must be a bloody fool for even thinking to ask that.
    But she is in a confessional, talking to a holy man who represents Mother