Work Text:
Here, a secret:
To lie is to omit or to obscure the truth. To keep a secret, however, is to make the truth wholly your own.
Katharine fits words around her tongue, plays with them quietly, a silent and constant puzzling. It would not be correct to say that she twists the truth, exactly. (God is truth and wills the truth.) It’s more like a child reluctant to part from her favorite toy. There are so many possibilities wrapped in silence, waiting to be unfolded...if the moment for truth-telling has long passed by the time she is ready to open her mouth, is that wrong?
She has learned this from her family. She has learned so much from her family, none of it spoken aloud. How to talk, when to be silent, how a lady holds herself, with whom it is permissible to associate (the Viscontis are Catholic and here the Catholics keep to their own). Her lesson lies in the way her mother defers to her father, in the way his eyes grow storm-dark. Katharine’s lessons are in the grasping hands of her many younger siblings, how—wordlessly, almost before words—it is expected that she will join her mother at the stove.
She kneads, she stirs, she keeps a catalog in her head. (Where the basil’s stored in the kitchen. How much a pound of tomatoes costs. Which alleyways to avoid. The muscle memory and intuition that comes from making painful mistakes, one wrong cut a lesson better than ten thousand neat and perfect slices.)
Some of what she learns is hers and hers alone, and is that wrong? (What Genevieve said to Marta in the schoolyard when they thought no one would overhear. The money Don Salvatore portions out from the alms box Monday afternoons at the chapel and takes with him to the liquor store. The thick paper bags he carries back furtively, empty bottles tossed in the bin behind the rectory.) She lets the room she shares with two bickering siblings fill with rare and precious silence simply by choosing to keep her mouth shut.
Yes, what’s left unsaid may be the sweetest choice. Is it wrong to make that choice, day after day, to let on to no one that there ever was a decision to be made in the first place?
Time passes in a blur of summers, schoolwork, sauce on the stove, battling at night over who needs to use the phone right now, then pulling the springy cord around a corner for privacy and gossip with friends. She kisses one boy, two, then a flood of them on brief and fun but unsatisfying dates. It’s like...dancing. Enjoyable in the moment. Still, she’s not about to dance her way through every hour. She’s content to return home and fall happily asleep.
Then Katharine is twenty-two years old. It is the year 2000, the Great Jubilee. Her older cousin Alma has just joined an order of women religious in Spain. Meanwhile in her own family, Tolomeo—the second oldest Visconti—has come of age and is enrolled in the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas. It has been a decision nearly a year in the making. Still, Katharine finds herself quietly reeling now that the day has come. For years he was a curly-haired boy tumbling after her, yelling in her ear, a headache and human question mark, her constant trail. Somewhere along the way he has grown dark and handsome and intense. He is still curious (and she suspects that he will forever be) but now he has narrowed the world into a select few questions that he pursues with relentless fervor.
Now he is tall enough that she can hide her face ever so briefly in his scratchy jacket. It’s August and he is leaving for the Angelicum, slipping out of her reach into a world in which she does not exist. (When someone leaves, does a part of you leave, too? What, if anything, can we possibly give to one another that will endure?)
Katharine is not too much older than he is yet she’s somehow felt old for years now. It feels like a natural price to pay, absorbing life first as the firstborn, softening the blow for the others as best she can. Kisses to scraped knees, small lies to make rites of passage easier—it’s all what she’s learned, what she knows bone-deep as the oldest. You cannot make the world safe but you can make it safer.
A secret, then: It is easiest to lie to those we love. With them, we have the most practice. "It will be alright," she has said enough times to have lost count. (Whether she’s believed it herself or been believed is another story.) It is a two-way street, this bending of truth, of reality. She has known Tolomeo all his life. She knows his tells. She lifts her face from his tear-stained jacket and smiles up at him.
He smiles back. “I’ll be home every weekend,” he says. (See? There. He is lying.)
“I’ll hold you to that,” she says, and wishes she could. “You take care, Tolomeo, you hear me? Study hard. Make Maman and Papa proud, yes?"
“Impossible! But I’ll try,” he says. They exchange a wry look. Maman and Papa have never been the sort to let silly things like love and support get in the way of their high standards. "I’ll miss you,” her brother says. “I’ll be home soon."
She sees him off, watches the car as it is lost to sight. She should...call him, write a letter, chase the car down and pull him out, clutching him tight to her, her brother a small boy once more. She should say—
She should tell him—
Time passes in a drip of autumns and meals on the table, morning newspapers, ever-present comments on her marriage prospects and her plans for the future from the well-meaning and nosy elders of the parish. (Tolomeo is doing well. Tolomeo is buried in his studies. Tolomeo rarely calls, and that is alright.) Two years after Katharine’s cousin Alma’s entrance into an Andalusian order—it was never quite clear which order, exactly—Alma comes to visit and brings with her the Most Reverend Bishop Francesco Duretti.
Duretti is smiling and he is kind and he holds a secret behind his eyes. Katharine sees it.
Her cousin is deferential yet filled with a fervor, an excitement that had not been present when she left home months ago. She holds herself taller and she pulls at the collar of her habit to hide a bruise. Katharine sees it.
Duretti speaks politely with her parents, praises her cousin, blesses the children, and eventually—after what feels like a very long time at this dinner table, crowded with proud and yelling siblings—asks after Katharine’s activities, her hobbies and schooling, her vocation. It is calculated, both the question and the delay. She sees it.
She’s not yet discerned a calling and she admits as much, then grabs the youngest as he hurtles by her chair, fixing the tag of his shirt before letting him go again. At the age of twenty-four it feels wrong to admit to restlessness that goes nowhere and only ever circles back into inertia. Surely it is reasonable to stay in her parent’s home where she knows exactly what is expected and knows she is needed. Surely life without a point is not necessarily pointless. Surely…(She thinks of Tolomeo and the joy that drives him into his books, away from her.)
Her cousin watches her but says nothing. Duretti smiles and sips his wine. Under their attention, bishop and novice both, Katharine feels uneasy. She excuses herself and steps outside to light a cigarette; quick flash, the flame, and a slow curl of smoke. A prickling sensation in her lungs. Above her, the broad night sky. It is grounding, reckless and soothing.
Then her cousin appears. Katharine tenses.
“His Excellency wants to speak with you.”
“Duretti? Why?”
Alma's smile is sharp. (Her face is hidden by the night, but her eyes are lit by the glow of Katharine’s cigarette.) “I cannot say for sure, but I believe His Excellency sees in you what he saw in me when I first joined the Order, Katharine. I’ve told him of you, you know.”
“What? That’s absurd. What is there to tell?”
“More than you think, Katharine. You are strong, and smart, and you see what others do not. Oh, don’t look at me like that. You’re not as invisible as you try to be. Anyway, His Excellency agrees with me. He sees in you God’s blessing and great potential.”
Katharine scoffs, flicks ash off the end of her cigarette. Takes another drag—slow this time. “No offense to His Excellency, but I rather doubt his vision.”
“You are free to doubt, Miss Katharine Lucia Visconti di Modrone. Thomas doubted, did he not?”
She startles, drops the cigarette (rather conveniently—she stubs it out with her toe and hopes he hasn’t noticed her smoking).
“Your Excellency. I apologize, I—”
“No need. You are right to ask what I see in you, right to question and to seek answers.”
She does not speak, only looks at him. (There, she sees it—the leap from her doubt to assuming questions when she has not asked any.)
He smiles as if aware of what she’s thinking. “You are, of course, not the only one in your family with questions. I’ve worked closely with your brother on several occasions.”
“You’ve worked with Tolomeo? Forgive me, your Excellency—you are a professor at the Angelicum, then?”
“No, though I have taught there from time to time. I am involved with special research projects that several of the more adept students at the Angelicum have undertaken over the past decade. They are, I believe, on the brink of taking applied theology to realms previously unimaginable to us. Your brother in particular has contributed a great deal to these efforts.”
He lets that sink in, then asks, “He has told you of these research projects, yes?”
“No.”
“Ah, I see. Well, the mission of the order I oversee is not all that dissimilar from the work in which your brother is engaged.” He glances at Alma. “Though where his studies lead him closer to understanding the exact nature of the darkness that hounds humanity, our work involves bringing innocent souls out of that darkness and into the light. In His infinite wisdom, our Lord has provided His Church with many means towards the same end.”
“And this work consists of what exactly, your Excellency?”
“Divine warfare. And yes, I am aware how that may sound...overwrought. I assure you that ours is a mission of grave importance—one which must not be revealed in its entirety to the public, for the simple reason that it is difficult enough to live one’s life without knowledge of—” He cuts himself off, smiles a little wryly and shakes his head. (An artful omission. She sees it, and knows he knows she’s seen it.) “We need not add to their burdens. We need only be God’s holy army on earth.”
“On whose authority?”
“Apart from Pope Urban II and every Holy Father since? Saint Areala of Cordoba.” (The name is unfamiliar to her.) “And—” He grows sober. “An angel of God.”
“An angel?”
He nods. “Adriel. An emissary, and a soldier. He gifted the order under my care with certain relics imbued with the divine forces your brother studies. There are none quite like them in the world. Tell me, do you recall a minor explosion just south of here in the year 1995?”
She does.
“That was a hard-won victory for the order. It did not come about lightly and will not be soon forgotten. In its aftermath, we have relied on young women like your cousin—” He gestures toward Alma, who beams with pleasure at the honor. “—to revive the ranks, to care for their sisters, and to fight back against the forces of darkness.”
It all sounds very grand. She’s sure he means at least some of what he says. Which parts? Hard to tell. She decides, here at the end of the conversation, to take the bait he placed before her at the very beginning.
“You haven’t answered my question,” she says. He smiles graciously, indulges her.
“What question, my dear?”
“Why me? What do you see in me, Your Excellency?”
He opens his mouth as if to speak, then closes it and smiles once more. He extends a hand toward her and instinct propels her through the proper decorum—she kisses his ring.
Then he nods and walks away, Alma trailing behind him.
What moves a life in a particular direction? Are we pushed, are we pulled, or do we move under our own power? Years later Katharine would remember this night while learning how to walk again. Such silly questions. We, of course, decide life for ourselves. It is the millions of decisions made by all around us that render our own hollow, that overwhelm our strength. And yet…
And yet. Hers have brought her here, sweating through the bed sheets with a weight in her back and a constant fever.
Here, with a sword in her hand and a holy secret.
She will always remember that night, the cigarette smoke and the night sky. It will come back to her on feast days when Duretti lights the censer, murmuring prayers. She will remember it when she smells her own flesh burning.
Yes, what we do not say may be the sweetest choice. She would rather let her mouth go bloody rather than admit the exact nature of the halo’s burden, its effect on her. Better stiffness than weakness. Better to move towards a shared end than be left behind.
She may seem callous, she may be cold, but she is a member of the Order of the Cruciform Sword and she chose this.
She is Katharine Lucia Visconti di Modrone and she will tell the truth in her own time.
Now, is that wrong?