“You can’t?” he inquired, a brittle edge entering his voice. “Or you won’t?”
Eleanor was sure that the priest had taken notice of them. He had a long white beard and sharp dark eyes under bushy brows. “Sinclair, I think we should leave now.”
“No,” he said. “Not until we have asked the assembled congregation—”
“What congregation?” The other Sinclair, the one she dreaded, was coming to the fore.
“Not until we have asked the congregation if any of them knows of any just impediment to our being wed.”
“That’s meant to come before the vow,” she said. “Don’t make any more of a mockery of this than we already have.”
She knew that they had to go. She could see, out of the corner of her eye, the priest disengaging himself from the Portuguese aristocrats.
“We are making a spectacle of ourselves,” she whispered, “and it isn’t safe. You know that better than anyone.”
He fixed her with a dull glare, as if wondering how much further to go. She’d seen that look in his eye before; he could be tipped over—from mirth to fury, from kindness to callousness—in an instant.
He had just opened his mouth to speak when she heard a rumbling in the stone slabs beneath her feet, and from the wall behind the altar—a wall that had stood for centuries—she saw the heavy crucifix tilt, then sway. The priest, who’d been striding toward them, stopped and looked up in horror as cracks rippled through the plaster. All around her, people screamed, or threw themselves to the floor with their hands clasped in prayer.
As Sinclair and Eleanor stepped back, the cross broke free, ripping bricks from the wall and throwing up a cloud of white dust. Sinclair dragged her behind a column and they huddled there, expecting the earthquake to level the entire church around them. The great stained-glass window fractured like sheer ice on a pond, then crumbled into a thousand shining shards of glass. Dust and debris billowed out into the nave. Eleanor clutched her handkerchief over her mouth and nose, and Sinclair raised the sleeve of his uniform over his own. Through the cloud, Eleanor could discern the priest, crossing himself, but pressing forward…toward them.
“Sinclair,” she said, coughing. “The priest, he’s coming.”
Sinclair turned around and saw the man waving the plaster dust out of his path.
“This way,” he said, leading Eleanor toward one of the side chapels. But a couple of men—the ones wearing fine velvet tail-coats—were standing there, aghast but stubbornly unmoving, and he had to suddenly change course. By the time he did, the priest had intercepted them, and was clutching at the gold braid on Sinclair’s doublet and shouting angry words that they could not understand. His arms waved, as if indicating that the chaos had been brought on by some terrible sacrilege Sinclair had been performing.
Had it? Eleanor wondered.
Sinclair batted the man’s hands away, and finally, when that didn’t stop him, he drew back his fist and punched him hard in the belly. The old priest fell to his knees, then, gasping for air, toppled over into the dust. Clutching Eleanor’s hand, Sinclair hurried down the nave and out a side door near the chapel of the knight in armor. The bright sunlight blinded them for a moment, and the earth gave another jolt. People were still fleeing from their shops and houses; dogs were barking and pigs were squealing in the street. They turned down a flight of winding steps and into a cobblestoned alley. Loose red tiles skittered off a roof and shattered in their path. A few minutes later, they had lost themselves in the mayhem of a panicked marketplace.
It was not the wedding day that Eleanor, as a young girl lying in a meadow in Yorkshire, might have imagined.
And now? Now she was standing in front of the squat white box—the fridge—her breath shallow, and the room in the infirmary fading to white before her eyes. She put out a hand to steady herself, but her knees were weak. She let herself sink and came to rest with her head against the cool surface of its door. Inside it, she knew, was what she needed, and without really willing it, her fingers found the handle. She opened the box, and took out one of the bags, with the blood sloshing inside. It said “O Negative” on it. She wondered what that meant, but not for long. With her teeth, she tore it open, and there on the floor, her soft white robe spread out around her, she suckled at the bag like a newborn babe.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
December 22, 10 a.m.
SINCLAIR WASN’T SURE what had awakened him. He was slumped forward on a high stool, his head lying on the altar, the book of poetry under one hand and his other hand resting on a nearly empty chalice. A sputtering candle sent a thin trail of smoke into the air.