Shadow of Night (All Souls Trilogy, #2)(56)

The air in the church was oppressive, as if my words had removed all the oxygen from the place. There wasn’t a sound except for the cooing of the birds in the belfry.

“Today is Lucas’s birthday,” Matthew said at last.

His words hit me with the force of a blow. I sank to my knees behind him, cranberry skirts pooling around me. Philippe was right. I didn’t know Matthew as well as I should.

His hand rose and pointed to a spot on the floor between him and Joseph. “He’s buried there, with his mother.”

No inscription on the stone marked what rested underneath. Instead there were smooth hollows, the kind made by the steady passage of feet on stair treads. Matthew’s fingers reached out, fit into the grooves perfectly, stilled, withdrew.

“Part of me died when Lucas did. It was the same for Blanca. Her body followed a few days later, but her eyes were empty and her soul already flown. Philippe chose his name. It’s Greek for ‘Bright One.’ On the night he was born, Lucas was so white and pale. When the midwife held him up in the darkness, his skin caught the light from the fire the way the moon catches her light from the sun. Strange how after so many years my memory of that night is still clear.” Matthew paused in his ramblings, wiped at his eye. His fingers came away red.

“When did you and Blanca meet?”

“I threw snowballs at her during her first winter in the village. I’d do anything to get her attention. She was delicate and remote, and many of us sought her company. By the time spring came, Blanca would let me walk her home from the market. She liked berries. Every summer the hedge outside the church was full of them.” He examined the red streaks on his hand. “Whenever Philippe saw the stains from their juice on my fingers, he’d laugh and predict a wedding come autumn.”

“I take it he was right.”

“We wed in October, after the harvest. Blanca was already more than two months pregnant.” Matthew could wait to consummate our marriage but hadn’t been able to resist Blanca’s charms. It was far more than I had wanted to know about their relationship.

“We made love for the first time during the heat of August,” he continued. “Blanca was always concerned with pleasing others. When I look back, I wonder if she was abused when she was a child. Not punished—we were all punished, and in ways no modern parent would dream of—but something more. It broke her spirit. My wife had learned to give in to what someone older, stronger, and meaner wanted. I was all of those things, and I wanted her to say yes that summer night, so she did.”

“Ysabeau told me the two of you were deeply in love, Matthew. You didn’t force her to do anything against her will.” I wanted to offer him what comfort I could, in spite of the sting his memories inflicted.

“Blanca didn’t possess a will. Not until Lucas. Even then she only exercised it when he was in danger or when I was angry with him. All her life she wanted someone weaker and smaller to protect. Instead Blanca had a succession of what she saw as failures. Lucas wasn’t our first child, and with every miscarriage she grew softer and sweeter, more tractable. Less likely to say no.”

Except in its general outlines, this was not the tale Ysabeau had told of her son’s early life. Hers had been a story of deep love and shared grief. Matthew’s version was one of unmitigated sorrow and loss.

I cleared my throat. “And then there was Lucas.”

“Yes. After years of filling her with death, I gave her Lucas.” He fell silent.

“There was nothing you could do, Matthew. It was the sixth century, and there was an epidemic. You couldn’t save either of them.”

“I could have stopped myself from having her. Then there would have been no one to lose!” Matthew exclaimed. “She wouldn’t say no, but her eyes always held some reluctance when we made love. Each time I promised her that this time the babe would survive. I would have given anything—”

It hurt to know that Matthew was still so deeply attached to his dead wife and son. Their spirits haunted this place, and him, too. But at least now I had an explanation for why he shied away from me: this deep sense of guilt and grief that he’d been carrying for so many centuries. In time, perhaps, I could help loosen Blanca’s hold on Matthew. I stood and went to him. He flinched when my fingers came to rest on his shoulder. “There’s more.”

I froze.

“I tried to give my own life, too. But God didn’t want it.” Matthew’s head rose. He stared at the worn, grooved stone before him, then at the roof above.

“Oh, Matthew.”

“I’d been thinking about joining Lucas and Blanca for weeks, but I was worried that they would be in heaven and God would keep me in hell because of my sins,” Matthew said, matter-of-fact. “I asked one of the women in the village for advice. She thought I was being haunted—that Blanca and Lucas were tied to this place because of me. Up on the scaffolding, I looked down and thought their spirits might be trapped under the stone. If I fell on it, God might have no choice but to release them. That or let me join them—wherever they were.”

This was the flawed logic of a man in despair, not the lucid scientist I knew.

“I was so tired,” he said wearily. “But God wouldn’t let me sleep. Not after what I’d done. For my sins He gave me to a creature who transformed me into someone who cannot live, or die, or even find fleeting peace in dreams. All I can do is remember.”