The Poet Prince by Kathleen McGowan Read Free Book Online Page A

Rome and placed in a convent school where her progress could be monitored by those closer to her family and faith. When it was determined that she was indeed seeing authentic apparitions, the confraternity adopted her as their living patron saint. Felicity had become a prophetess in her own right, a visionary who fell to the ground in ecstasy, writhing as she was struck by visions of Jesus Christ and his most Holy Virgin Mother. The fanaticism around Felicity and her visions had grown through the ultraconservative movement over the last two years, and she had begun to develop stigmata as the visions descended. Attendance at the confraternity meetings when Felicity was featured had become standing room only as a result. To watchher as the visions possessed her was eerie, yet powerful. There would be one such meeting tonight at the confraternity meeting hall, and she intended to make her appearance count.
    Father Girolamo de Pazzi had given the girl a plaque as a gift upon her return to Italy, something she could use to bolster her strength while she made the transition to the harsher convent environment that would ultimately prove nurturing for her. The plaque was made of wood, inscribed with a quote from the blessed Saint Augustine regarding the sanctified actions of Saint Felicita. It was a quote that the modern Felicity had not only memorized but taken to heart as her model for faith. She would use it tonight during her appearance.
    Wonderful is the sight set before the eyes of our faith, a mother choosing for her children to finish their earthly lives before her, contrary to all our human instincts. She did not send her sons away, she sent them on to God. She understood that they were beginning life, not ending it. It was not enough that she looked on, but she encouraged them. She bore more fruit with her courage than with her womb. Seeing them be strong, she was strong; and in the victory of each of her children, she was victorious.
    To the de Pazzi family, Santa Felicita was an extraordinary woman of faith, possibly the greatest of all Christian martyrs when the total of her sacrifice was taken into account. This faith in the saint’s righteousness was shared with an unequaled passion by the younger Felicity. In all his eighty-plus years of life devoted to the Church, Girolamo de Pazzi had never met anyone with the religious fervor of the woman who stood before him. She was shaking with it now, unable to control her self-righteous anger over the offending book that had brought her to this confrontation. He pleaded for her understanding.
    “What could I have done to stop it? It was . . . out of my control, Felicity.”
    The book sat between them on the desk, a silent enemy.
The Time Returns,
by Maureen Paschal.
The Legend of the Book of Love
.
    “You could have stopped her while you had her there.”
    Girolamo de Pazzi shook his head. He knew when she said, “You could have stopped her,” she really meant that he should have killed her. There was a time when he would have been prepared to give that order. But he had discovered that he could not take a life in the presence of the Book of Love, and certainly not
that
life. Not after he had seen the book opened and realized definitively what it was. What
she
was.
    What he had witnessed that evening in the crypt of Chartres Cathedral was not something he could readily describe to his grandniece, or to anyone else. He had lured Maureen Paschal into the crypt, sure enough, to bring her into the presence of the Book of Love, the ultimate treasure of anyone who revered the name of Jesus Christ. It was a gospel written in his own hand and yet one which could not be simply read by scholars and theologians, many of whom had tried over the nearly five centuries that it had resided secretly within the Vatican walls. It was written in a polyglot of languages and there were layers to it, encoded teachings that average humans and traditional Christians had long forgotten how to