Unable to greet this Meggie naturally, he stiffly indicated a chair. “Please sit down.”

“Thank you,” she said, equally stilted.

It was only when she was seated and he could gaze down upon her whole person that he noticed how visibly swollen her feet and ankles were.

“Meggie! Have you flown all the way through from Australia without breaking your journey? What’s the matter?”

“Yes, I did fly straight through,” she said. “For the past twenty-nine hours I’ve been sitting in planes between Gilly and Rome, with nothing to do except stare out the window at the clouds, and think.” Her voice was harsh, cold.

“What’s the matter?” he repeated impatiently, anxious and fearful.

She lifted her gaze from her feet and looked at him steadily.

There was something awful in her eyes; something so dark and chilling that the skin on the back of his neck crawled and automatically he put his hand up to stroke it.

“Dane is dead,” said Meggie.

His hand slipped, flopped like a rag doll’s into his scarlet lap as he sank into a chair. “Dead?” he asked slowly. “Dane dead?”

“Yes. He was drowned six days ago in Crete, rescuing some women from the sea.”

He leaned forward, put his hands over his face. “Dead?” she heard him say indistinctly. “Dane dead? My beautiful boy! He can’t be dead! Dane—he was the perfect priest—all that I couldn’t be. What I lacked he had.” His voice broke. “He always had it—that was what we all recognized—all of us who aren’t perfect priests. Dead? Oh, dear Lord!”

“Don’t bother about your dear Lord, Ralph,” said the stranger sitting opposite him. “You have more important things to do. I came to ask for your help—not to witness your grief. I’ve had all those hours in the air to go over the way I’d tell you this, all those hours just staring out the window at the clouds knowing Dane is dead. After that, your grief has no power to move me.”

Yet when he lifted his face from his hands her dead cold heart bounded, twisted, leaped. It was Dane’s face, with a suffering written upon it that Dane would never live to feel. Oh, thank God! Thank God he’s dead, can never now go through what this man has, what I have. Better he’s dead than to suffer something like this.

“How can I help, Meggie?” he asked quietly, suppressing his own emotions to don the soul-deep guise of her spiritual counselor.

“Greece is in chaos. They’ve buried Dane somewhere on Crete, and I can’t find out where, when, why. Except I suppose that my instructions directing that he be flown home were endlessly delayed by the civil war, and Crete is hot like Australia. When no one claimed him, I suppose they thought he had no one, and buried him.” She leaned forward in her chair tensely. “I want my boy back, Ralph, I want him found and brought home to sleep where he belongs, on Drogheda. I promised Jims I’d keep him on Drogheda and I will, if I have to crawl on my hands and knees through every graveyard on Crete. No fancy Roman priest’s tomb for him, Ralph, not as long as I’m alive to put up a legal battle. He’s to come home.”

“No one is going to deny you that, Meggie,” he said gently. “It’s consecrated Catholic ground, which is all the Church asks. I too have requested that I be buried on Drogheda.”

“I can’t get through all the red tape,” she went on, as if he hadn’t spoken. “I can’t speak Greek, and I have no power or influence. So I came to you, to use yours. Get me back my son, Ralph!”

“Don’t worry, Meggie, we’ll get him back, though it may not be very quickly. The Left are in charge now, and they’re very anti-Catholic. However, I’m not without friends in Greece, so it will be done. Let me start the wheels in motion immediately, and don’t worry. He is a priest of the Holy Catholic Church, we’ll get him back.”

His hand had gone to the bell cord, but Meggie’s coldly fierce gaze stilled it.

“You don’t understand, Ralph. I don’t want wheels set in motion. I want my son back—not next week or next month, but now! You speak Greek, you can get visas for yourself and me, you’ll get results. I want you to come to Greece with me now, and help me get my son back.”

There was much in his eyes: tenderness, compassion, shock, grief. But they had become the priest’s eyes too, sane, logical, reasonable. “Meggie, I love your son as if he were my own, but I can’t leave Rome at the moment. I’m not a free agent—you above all others should know that. No matter how much I may feel for you, how much I may feel on my own account, I can’t leave Rome in the midst of a vital congress. I am the Holy Father’s aide.”

She reared back, stunned and outraged, then shook her head, half-smiling as if at the antics of some inanimate object beyond her power to influence; then she trembled, licked her lips, seemed to come to a decision and sat up straight and stiff. “Do you really love my son as if he were your own, Ralph?” she asked. “What would you do for a son of yours? Could you sit back then and say to his mother, No, I’m very sorry, I can’t possibly take the time off? Could you say that to the mother of your son?”

Dane’s eyes, yet not Dane’s eyes. Looking at her; bewildered, full of pain, helpless.

“I have no son,” he said, “but among the many, many things I learned from yours was that no matter how hard it is, my first and only allegiance is to Almighty God.”

“Dane was your son too,” said Meggie.

He stared at her blankly. “What?”

“I said, Dane was your son too. When I left Matlock Island I was pregnant. Dane was yours, not Luke O’Neill’s.”

“It—isn’t—true!”

“I never intended you to know, even now,” she said. “Would I lie to you?”

“To get Dane back? Yes,” he said faintly.

She got up, came to stand over him in the red brocade chair, took his thin, parchmentlike hand in hers, bent and kissed the ring, the breath of her voice misting its ruby to milky dullness. “By all that you hold holy, Ralph, I swear that Dane was your son. He was not and could not have been Luke’s. By his death I swear it.”

There was a wail, the sound of a soul passing between the portals of Hell. Ralph de Bricassart fell forward out of the chair and wept, huddled on the crimson carpet in a scarlet pool like new blood, his face hidden in his folded arms, his hands clutching at his hair.

“Yes, cry!” said Meggie. “Cry, now that you know! It’s right that one of his parents be able to shed tears for him. Cry, Ralph! For twenty-six years I had your son and you didn’t even know it, you couldn’t even see it. Couldn’t see that he was you all over again! When my mother took him from me at birth she knew, but you never did. Your hands, your feet, your face, your eyes, your body. Only the color of his hair was his own; all the rest was you. Do you understand now? When I sent him here to you, I said it in my letter. ‘What I stole, I give back.’ Remember? Only we both stole, Ralph. We stole what you had vowed to God, and we’ve both had to pay.”

She sat in her chair, implacable and unpitying, and watched the scarlet form in its agony on the floor. “I loved you, Ralph, but you were never mine. What I had of you, I was driven to steal. Dane was my part, all I could get from you. I vowed you’d never know, I vowed you’d never have the chance to take him away from me. And then he gave himself to you, of his own free will. The image of the perfect priest, he called you. What a laugh I had over that one! But not for anything would I have given you a weapon like knowing he was yours. Except for this. Except for this! For nothing less would I have told you. Though I don’t suppose it matters now. He doesn’t belong to either of us anymore. He belongs to God.”

* * *

Cardinal de Bricassart chartered a private plane in Athens; he, Meggie and Justine brought Dane home to Drogheda, the living sitting silently, the dead lying silently on a bier, requiring nothing of this earth anymore.

I have to say this Mass, this Requiem for my son. Bone of my bone, my son. Yes, Meggie, I believe you. Once I had my breath back I would even have believed you without that terrible oath you swore. Vittorio knew the minute he set eyes on the boy, and in my heart I, too, must have known. Your laugh behind the roses from the boy—but my eyes looking up at me, as they used to be in my innocence. Fee knew. Anne Mueller knew. But not we men. We weren’t fit to be told. For so you women think, and hug your mysteries, getting your backs on us for the slight God did you in not creating you in His Image. Vittorio knew, but it was the woman in him stilled his tongue. A masterly revenge.

Say it, Ralph de Bricassart, open your mouth, move your hands in the blessing, begin to chant the Latin for the soul of the departed. Who was your son. Whom you loved more than you loved his mother. Yes, more! For he was yourself all over again, in a more perfect mold.

“In Nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti… ”

The chapel was packed; they were all there who could be there. The Kings, the O’Rourkes, the Davieses, the Pughs, the MacQueens, the Gordons, the Carmichaels, the Hopetons. And the Clearys, the Drogheda people. Hope blighted, light gone. At the front in a great lead-lined casket, Father Dane O’Neill, covered in roses. Why were the roses always out when he came back to Drogheda? It was October, high spring. Of course they were out. The time was right.

“Sanctus…sanctus…sanctus…”

Be warned that the Holy of Holies is upon you. My Dane, my beautiful son. It is better so. I wouldn’t have wanted you to come to this, what I already am. Why I say this for you, I don’t know. You don’t need it, you never needed it. What I grope for, you knew by instinct. It isn’t you who is unhappy, it’s those of us here, left behind. Pity us, and when our times come, help us.