Charlie’s Apprentice

of a priest ever exhausting the capacity to pray. Finally, as he’d always known he would, which wove thorns into the guilt, Snow went to the mission chief, appalled at his own hypocrisy.

‘Father,’ he said. ‘Would you please hear my confession?’

Forty-two

The dust fell about him when Snow parted the curtains, filling his throat and mouth and banding his chest more tightly. The slide of the dividing grille jammed when Father Robertson initially tried to draw it back, never quite fully opening the space between them.

‘Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. For these and all my other sins that I cannot remember I humbly ask forgiveness.’ Even the rote of the beginning was difficult. The dust seemed to be blocking the way to his lungs and his chest positively ached, but Snow knew the agony had nothing to do with any of it, solely caused by the enormity of what he was doing.

‘Go on,’ urged Robertson, when Snow did not continue after several moments.

It was still some further time before Snow could speak and then, initially, the words were badly chosen and disjointed, sentences half finished, the worst parts of all delivered scarcely beyond a whisper.

But Snow told it all, in every detail. He fought against the wheezing breathlessness to force himself to talk and had a greater, choking struggle to keep Father Robertson listening in the linked cubicle. The older priest positively tried to stop the admission, of everything, protesting he would hear no more and scuffling to his feet, so that Snow had to break the ritual – as Father Robertson was breaking the ritual – and insist, over and over again, his mouth tight against the grille, that Father Robertson’s vows made it impossible for the man to refuse to let him finish.

‘Men have confessed to murder in a confessional and been heard!’

‘Continue.’ Father Robertson’s voice was strained tight, as if he were having as much difficulty to speak as the younger priest.

Snow talked on, but Father Robertson heard the last few minutes in such utter silence that Snow thought at one stage that the man had slipped out anyway. Then, almost imperceptibly, he detected the faintest sound: short, sharp intakes of breath, a man gasping.

The continuing silence, when Snow finished, was absolute. Snow waited a very long time before speaking further. ‘I seek absolution.’

‘No! This is a travesty! Obscene!’

‘I demand absolution.’

‘Absolution is for the repentant. Are you repentant?’

He wasn’t, not at all, Snow accepted: what he’d done was right. What he was doing now was a sin greater than any he had committed outside this dust-swirled box. For this he would be damned. ‘I am repentant.’

‘I will not give you absolution!’

It didn’t matter, accepted Snow, sadly. The old man had been right. What he had done that morning was a travesty and it was obscene, and the point had not been to seek forgiveness. This moment, Snow supposed, marked his failure as a priest. But what about as a Jesuit, a Soldier of Christ? He didn’t think he had the intellect or the theological philosophy to answer that question. That was a question to be put to other priests and other judges far away from Beijing, before whom he accepted he would have to place himself.

He heard the swish of the curtain pulled back in the other stall and smelled the dust driven through the lattice. He followed more slowly, so that Father Robertson was already some way across the nave when Snow emerged. Snow followed, more slowly: only when he neared the end of the walkway connecting the church to their living quarters, coming close to the room in which Father Robertson normally worked, did Snow become concerned that the older man might have gone out into the city.

He hadn’t.

Father Robertson was at his desk, bent slightly forward as he had when he was ill, and tremors were vibrating through him as they had then. Snow’s renewed concern was that the mission chief was suffering another collapse. He remained uncertainly at the door. Finally Father Robertson straightened, looking up at him. The man’s eyes were wet and red-rimmed, like the eyes of a person who had been crying.

‘Do you know what you have done?’

‘What is talked about in the confessional is sacrosanct.’ Snow wanted Father Robertson to know and to think about it, but never to talk about it. Which he couldn’t.

‘You dare lecture me on ritual!’

‘I did not wish – do not wish – to endanger the mission.’

‘You have! You know you have! This Englishman who’s been arrested! He’s all part of it, isn’t he?’

‘I don’t know. I think so.’

A shudder worse than the others went through the old man. ‘Lost. Everything could be lost.’

‘I was told to get out,’ disclosed Snow.

The rheumy eyes came up to him. ‘When?’

‘Soon after Li began taking an interest.’

‘Does he have something incriminating to put against you?’

‘Possibly.’

‘Does he?’ Father Robertson’s voice creaked, so it didn’t come out as the intended shout of anger.

‘Yes.’

‘Terrible. This is absolutely terrible.’

‘I could not have left without permission from the Curia, in Rome.’

Father Robertson looked directly at him again, one hand gripping the other, physically clutching himself for control. ‘That is true,’ he agreed, but doubtfully, more curiosity than anger in his voice.

Snow hesitated. ‘In exceptional circumstances, a head of mission in our Order could grant such dispensation.’

Father Robertson became suddenly and completely still, all the shaking gone, face suffused in livid outrage. ‘You bastard! You absolute and utter bastard!’

Snow hadn’t imagined such an outburst – he hadn’t imagined anything – but he accepted at once that it was true, that he was a bastard. He was surprised Father Robertson was so quickly realizing, in its entirety, what he had done. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You’re not! There’s no contrition: that’s why I wouldn’t grant you absolution …’ The old man stopped, mouth slightly apart at a further awareness. ‘You weren’t even seeking absolution, were you?’ He paused, momentarily beyond speech. ‘I’ll inform the Curia! See to it that you are dismissed the Order you are disgracing.’

‘What is talked about in the confessional is sacrosanct,’ repeated Snow, quietly.

Father Robertson’s mouth gaped fully, in complete comprehension. ‘You’ve actually abused it, to save yourself! Knowing I can’t bring any complaint against you because of how I learned what you’ve done: what you are! You are beyond belief …’ The priest twisted his own word. ‘You can’t believe, to behave like this!’

‘I am prepared to face the judgement of our superiors. To explain myself, my way. Not have a case presented for me: against me.’ Snow was hating the confrontation: hating himself. Despising what he’d done and how he’d done it, unable to find any vindication, any excuse. A man was suffering unspeakable horrors because of him: the Jesuit mission in Beijing was endangered because of him. And all he could think of doing was to run away, like a coward. But wasn’t that the mitigating factor, the only thing he could do? Without him there would be no corroborated case against the arrested Englishman. Who would have to be released, eventually. And just as the man’s safety depended upon his getting out of the country, so did the continuing existence of Father Robertson’s precious mission. So he was not acting cowardly – he was not ceasing to be a Soldier of Christ- by running. It was an act to save others first, himself very much last.

‘Get out!’ rejected Father Robertson. ‘Out of Beijing as soon as possible! Go to Rome. You need help: a great deal of help. You’re surely going to strain God’s compassion.’