37

The chapel of Maris Stella was empty, the pungent odour of incense still hanging in the air after the last service had been intoned and the faithful departed.

The altar boys had taken off their gowns and left, no doubt after trying the lock of the cupboard where the holy wine was kept and finding it, as usual, made fast.

Father Callan did not begrudge them the exploration. Boys will be boys, and when holy robes are removed, animal nature often reasserts itself.

The young are entitled to their wild ways, the heavy duties of adulthood come soon enough.

The bishop, of course, might have quite another view. He clove to a most severe authority, but then it was rumoured he had once whispered in Pope Pius’s ear not long before His Holiness departed this mortal coil.

Or was it that Pope Pius had whispered in the bishop’s ear?

Whatever. They were in whispering distance and the little priest had never got closer to the Universal Father than a large portrait of Pius on the wall in the bishop’s study, when he delivered to his superior a monthly report on the comings and goings of the Leith congregation.

It was said the recently ascended pontiff, Leo XIII, was a forward thinker. Hard to tell from his portrait which had been stuck up opposite Pius, but Father Callan hoped so. God knows the Church needed such.

There were many of the cloth who would not agree, but then he had always regarded himself as a secret radical.

He had arrived a young man from Ulster at the height of the Great Famine to find the congregation, a large part composed of recently emigrated Irish Catholics, driven hard in on themselves by a hostile society and clinging to the skirts of Mother Mary for spiritual consolation.

Callan was supposed to be a small cog in the holy machine of this fine new building who would make way for bigger wheels, but somehow he had got stuck in the works and now, thirty years later, he was still on hand.

He lived amongst the poor. He blessed them, visited the sick, comforted and buried them. As best he could.

His superiors wafted past, rings glittering in the candlelight, and looked down from a great distance at this worker ant who, when he gave service, wore his robes like a blacksmith wears his apron.

He was regarded with benign condescension, but they left him alone and that was all he asked.

To be left alone. To labour. To do God’s will.

That was not always an easy task.

His eye fell upon the Stations of the Cross, which ranged around the inside of the chapel, high on the walls. He knew their particular depiction now as well as he knew his congregation and indeed, at times, intrigued himself by superimposing the faces of the poor on the actors in the drama. Not upon Jesus Christ of course. That would have been blasphemous; but Saint Veronica for instance.

Many women who knelt before him to worship could have wiped the sweat of death from the Saviour’s countenance.

‘Adoramus te, Christe, et benedicimus tibi.

‘Quia per sanctum Crucem tuam redemisti mundum.’

He murmured his own priestly words and their response as he walked slowly down the side of the church.

He had worked hard to build some bridges between the Protestant and Catholic poor of his parish, with some success, but now the Home Rule movement had reawakened tensions between them.

Many of the Catholic clergy were in favour and spoke accordingly at meetings for the repeal of the Act of Union and a parliament in Dublin, but Callan steered a middle course. Church and the State. A bad mix. He was no great prophet but he could sense the most hellish upheaval.

The Liberal party was apparently sympathetic, but so was the serpent when it offered Eve the apple.

Ireland would be a battleground. Lives would be lost. The Irish were good at killing each other. Like dogs in a pit they’d been set so many times past, face against face, to snarl and draw blood. They had a taste for it now.

His footsteps echoed in the silent chapel and then stopped. His mind shifted.

He had gone to that meeting in West Calder out of a mild curiosity. But when he heard Gladstone speak on the platform it sent a shiver down his spine.

Something in the voice, the harsh, sonorous tone, awakened memories, drifting memories that were brought back into focus. But it was all so long ago, and who was to say that his mind wasn’t playing tricks?

Then amongst all the faces of the crowd, he saw the one staring back. His gaze had met McLevy’s and he had left abruptly, much disquieted at the coincidence of these events being drawn back together.

Thirty years ago. The same implacable gaze. A young constable, asking questions that Callan would not, could not answer. The constable must have sensed something because he kept pressing hard and it had taken all of Callan’s training in the art of priestly blankness to keep him from betraying what he had witnessed.

During his years at the chapel of Maris Stella, he had heard many confessions, many souls had poured out their pain, some small and even tawdry, some fierce in agony.

But, the one. That night. It had never left him. He looked back towards the confession box and it was as if a floodgate suddenly opened and the images seared through his mind.

He had been sitting alone and enclosed, the hour late, to commune with his Maker, but heard footsteps echo in the empty chapel and then a thud shook the other part of the box as if a wild animal had blundered inside.

He tried to invoke the formal beginnings of the confessional exchange but the man had paid no heed. Either he did not know the responses or did not care.

The voice was low and rumbling as if being wrenched out of the man’s very soul; the words ugly, disjointed.

From where Callan looked down through the grille, all he could see was the top of the head, the hair thick, a few stray shafts of light running across like spiders.

‘Blood. Blood is the cure. Stinking wombs, they chain my soul. To Satan.’

The priest took a deep breath.

‘You must calm yourself, the way to forgiveness is not to be found in violence of word or action. The humble penitent is beloved of our Lord Jesus.’

A harsh cough of laughter was the response as if the very devil himself was squatting on the bench.

‘I will cut them down. Out of their body I will cut my salvation. Out of their stinking wombs!’

Then, astonishingly, the voice changed to that of an educated tone, as if the mind was split. The tone was deep and powerful.

‘For what says Proverbs?’ asked the man. ‘Do not hearken to a wicked woman; for though the lips of a harlot are like drops from a honeycomb which for a while are smooth in thy throat, yet afterwards you will find them more bitter than gall, and sharper than a two-edged sword!’

Then the man scrabbled up the side of the partition and put his mouth against the small opening of the grille.

All that the horrified priest could see was the orifice, mouth opening and closing, the red tongue flickering, teeth bared like a beast and flecks of spittle covering the metal grille and dripping down slowly like some sort of obscene Satanic fluid.

‘For her past sins, St Thais was walled up in a convent cell in which there was but one small opening through which she received a little bread and water. Her cell filled with her own excrement until, at the end of three years, she was finally cleansed. Of her sins!’

The mouth laughed then dropped out of sight and the man once more squatted like a beast below.

Father Callan tried to still the trembling in his voice. He felt as if surrounded by a miasma, an unholy exhalation which seeped into his very pores. To breathe was to be infected.

‘What is it you have done?’ he managed to whisper.

‘I cleansed her,’ came the chilling response. ‘And I rescued her. Out of the stinking womb.’

‘How? How did you do this?’ the priest asked.

For the very first time, the man fell silent. Father Callan could finally bear it no longer.

‘If you do not say, I cannot help you. What have you done?’

A howl of pain, as if from a wounded tortured soul, and then there was a gleam as a sharp steel blade swung up against the grille, denting the metal.

The blade stuck for a moment and the horrified priest could see the smears of blood on the edge.

The blade whipped out of sight and a pair of eyes glared into his, burning with hate.

Then the man was gone. Footsteps. Crash of the outside door. Silence, once more.

If it had not been for the patch of blood where the man had leant against the partition wall, blood that the priest had carefully cleansed away from it and the lattice-work of the grille that very night, Father Callan might have wondered if he had not suffered a demonic visitation, a rupture in the fabric of reality.

But all that was dispelled when he heard the terrible tidings next morning. And then, some days later, looked into the eyes of Constable James McLevy and denied all knowledge of murder, the faint smell of paint and linseed oil mixing with the incense inside the bright new building.

He had no option. He did not know whether the man was Catholic or no, or what perverse demons had driven him into the chapel, but the sanctity of confession must be protected no matter how crude and incomplete the process.

He would carry the burden for the rest of his life. It was a matter of faith.

Father Callan shivered as he came out of these thoughts. For a second he thought someone was behind him and startled, but it was his own shadow on the chapel wall.

All these years ago, he had made his own confession to his bishop and been told to dismiss the matter from his mind. The Catholic Church did not welcome such scandal.

That should have been the end of the matter but now he felt strangely unshriven, as if a feeling of guilt he had carried all these years had been stirred into a raw hunger to confess his suspicions. But that would be wrong. Against his creed.

And if he did, what could he tell? A memory, shifting like sand, compromised by time. Nothing more. What use would that be to McLevy and his like?

Father Callan found himself looking up at the last and fourteenth station.

Jesus is laid in the tomb.