Just One Evil Act

“Dwayne Doughty, as I’ve said from the first. The plan from start to finish was his. Why he wanted the child to be taken instead of merely reunited with her papa . . . ? This I do not know and I did not ask.”

VILLA RIVELLI

TUSCANY

Sister Domenica Giustina was harvesting strawberries when she was summoned. She was using scissors to cut the fruit from the plants. She was humming an Ave that she particularly liked, and its sweet air moved her among her plants with a lightness of gait that she hadn’t known in all the time she had been in this place.

Her long period of punishment was ended. She’d bathed and clothed herself anew, using upon her many wounds an ointment she herself had made. These wounds would cease their suppurating soon. Such were the loving ways of God.

When she heard her name called, she rose from the strawberries. She saw that a novice had come from the convent, the fresh breeze stirring her pure white veil. Sister Domenica Giustina recognised the young woman, although she did not know her name. A badly repaired cleft palate had left her face uneven, giving her the appearance of permanent sorrow. She was no more than twenty-three years old. That she was at this age a novice in the order of nuns spoke to how long she had lived among them.

She said, “You’re wanted inside, Domenica. You’re to come at once.”

Sister Domenica Giustina’s spirit leapt like a doe within her. She had not been inside the holy body of the convent in years, not since the day she’d learned she would not be allowed to live among the good sisters who were immured in sanctity there. She’d only been permitted a few steps inside the kitchen on the pianoterra. Five paces from the door to the huge pine table where she left for the nuns whatever she’d gleaned from the garden, made from the milk of the goats, or gathered from the chickens. And even then she entered only when no one else was present. That she knew this particular nun—her summoner—by her appearance was owing to having seen her arrive in the company of her parents on a summer day.

“Mi segua,” the novice told Sister Domenica Giustina. She turned, expecting the other woman to follow.

Sister Domenica Giustina did as she had been told. She would have preferred to wash the dirt from her hands, perhaps to change her clothes. But to be asked into the convent—for surely that was the intention, no?— was a gift from which she could not turn. So she brushed off her hands, shook off her linen shift, clasped a pocketed rosary in her fingers, and followed the nun.

They went in through the great front doors, another gift to Sister Domenica Giustina and surely a sign as well. These gave onto what had once been the immense soggiorno of the villa, a reception room whose walls soared up to a fresco in which the magnificent god Apollo drove a chariot across an azure sky. Far beneath him, what affreschi had decorated the walls had long ago been whitewashed over. And whatever great silk-covered divani had been positioned to accommodate guests to the villa were ages gone and replaced by simple wooden pews that fanned out in front of an equally simple and rough-hewn altar. This was covered by fine, starched linen. On it stood an elaborate tabernacle of gold, accompanied by a single candle encased in red glass. The candle in red indicated that the Sacrament was present. They genuflected before it.

The air was tinctured by the unmistakable scent of incense, a heady fragrance that Sister Domenica Giustina had not smelled in many years. She was pleased when the other woman told her to wait in this place. She nodded, knelt upon the hard tiles of the floor, and crossed herself.

She found she couldn’t pray. There was too much to see, too much to experience. She tried to discipline herself, but her excitement was great, and it drove her gaze first here and then there as she took in the place where she’d been left.

The chapel was dark, its windows covered by both shutters and grilles. The great doors to the loggia at the rear of the villa and behind the altar were boarded, and tapestries made by the fingers of the women within this place hung from these boards and presented scenes from the life of St. Dominic, namesake of the order of nuns who celebrated him in their needlework. Corridors led to the right and to the left from the chapel, taking one into the heart of the convent. Sister Domenica Giustina longed to wander along them, but she remained. Obedience was one of the vows. This moment was a test, and she would pass it.

“Vieni, Domenica.”

The voice asking her to come was barely a whisper, and for a moment Sister Domenica Giustina thought the Blessed Virgin herself had spoken. But a hand on her shoulder told her the voice was not disembodied, and she looked up to see an ancient lined face nearly hidden within the folds of a black veil.

Sister Domenica Giustina rose. The old nun nodded and, hands tucked into the sleeves of her habit, she turned and made for one of the corridors. Its opening was covered by an intricate lattice of wood, but this moved inward upon the slightest push and soon enough Sister Domenica Giustina and her companion were in a whitewashed corridor with closed heavy doors along one side and shuttered windows along the other. A few paces took them to one of the doors upon which the vecchia knocked softly. Someone spoke behind it. The old nun indicated that Sister Domenica Giustina was to enter, and when she had done so, the door was closed behind her.

She was in an office, simply furnished. A prie-dieu stood before a statue of the Virgin, who gazed lovingly down upon anyone wishing to pray at her feet. Across from her, St. Dominic held out his hands in blessing from a niche. Between two shuttered windows stood an uncluttered desk. At this desk sat the woman Sister Domenica Giustina had met only twice: She was Mother Superior, and she looked upon Sister Domenica Giustina with an expression of such gravity that Sister Domenica Giustina knew the moment of import had arrived.

She’d never felt such joy. She could sense it blazing out of her face because she could feel it coursing throughout her body. She had indeed been a terrible sinner, but now she had finally been forgiven. She had fully prepared her soul for God, and not only her own but the soul of another.

For years she had been penitent. She had striven to illustrate to God, through her actions, that she understood how weighty her sins had been. To pray that an unborn child—the child of her own cousin Roberto— would be taken from her body so that her parents would never learn she had carried it . . . To have that prayer granted on the very night that her parents were gone from the house . . . To have Roberto there to dispose of what had been forced so painfully from her body there in the darkness of the bathroom . . .

It had been alive, fully formed and alive, but even this matter had felt the hand of God. For a mere five months inside her had not been enough for it to live without help and that help had been denied. Or so she had come to believe because Roberto had it, Roberto had taken it, and Roberto had disposed of it. Girl or boy, she did not know. She had never known . . . until everything changed, until Roberto had made everything change.

Sister Domenica Giustina did not realise she had spoken all of this aloud until Mother Superior rose from behind her desk. She leaned upon it, her knuckles a stark white contrast to the colour of the wood, and she murmured, “Madre di Dio, Domenica. Madre di Dio.”

So, yes and yes, the child from her body had not died because God worked in ways too miraculous for His humble servants ever to understand. Her cousin had returned their child into her keeping to shelter her from harm, and this is what Sister Domenica Giustina had done, up until the moment when God took the girl’s father in a terrible accident among the Alps. And she—Sister Domenica Giustina—was left to try to understand what this meant. For beyond the miraculous, God also worked in incomprehensible ways and one had to struggle to understand the messages contained within His works.

“We all must prove ourselves to God,” Sister Domenica Giustina concluded. “She asked me for her papa. God told me what to do. For only by doing His will—no matter how difficult—do we achieve the complete forgiveness we seek.” She crossed herself. She smiled and she felt beatific, blessed by God at last to come into this place.

Mother Superior was breathing shallowly. Her fingers touched the golden ring she wore. They pressed against the crucifix upon it as if asking the martyred Lord for the strength to speak. “For the love of God, Domenica,” she said. “What have you done to this child?”