Necessary Sins

by Elizabeth Bell

  At first, the sound of Tessa’s voice gave him solace: it was irrefutable proof she had survived. Then the words dispelled peace with pain: “Am—Am I deformed in some way?”

  Joseph sank onto the bench. For a moment, he was thirteen years old again, exposing himself to Dr. Moretti, waiting for approval. He had purchased his Priesthood by surrendering his modesty. These past few hours, how many people had seen Tessa even more vulnerable, even more ashamed? That was the cost of her motherhood. But she was not a mother.

  A mature black woman, probably the midwife, responded to Tessa first, her voice heavy with compassion. “No, honey.”

  “You are perfectly formed,” Joseph’s father assured her.

  “Then why couldn’t I hold onto Bean?”

  “I wish I could give you an answer,” Joseph’s father sighed. “The truth is: most of the time, we cannot explain why a pregnancy fails.”

  “I must have done something wrong,” Tessa argued weakly. “I should never have left the city; I shouldn’t have—”

  Joseph’s father interrupted: “You did not cause this by riding in a carriage or walking up stairs or anything else.”

  Hélène spoke up next. “If you want to blame someone, blame me.”

  “You?” Tessa asked. “Ellie, how could this possibly be your fault?”

  “I told Bean to hurry up, didn’t I?” Her voice broke. “I told her we couldn’t wait to meet her.”

  “Sometimes, the good Lord just gathers these little ones to Himself right away,” the midwife soothed. “Sometimes, it’s a mercy, I think. In Heaven, your Bean is never going to feel hungry or sick—she is safe and happy and waiting for you, Miss Teresa.”

  For several long moments, Joseph heard only muffled sobs.

  “What I do know is this,” his father continued. “My own wife suffered such a loss, and so has Cathy. A miscarriage does not mean you cannot have healthy children.”

  “But I want Bean,” Tessa whimpered. “May I hold her again? Please? Just a few minutes longer?”

  Joseph heard water splashing again, then Tessa’s breath hitched anew.

  “You take as long as you need, honey,” the midwife said.

  “Oh Ellie, she must have been terrified!” Tessa cried. “I am so sorry, Bean!”

  Joseph closed his eyes. This was not the first miscarriage he’d attended. A few months ago, he’d arrived in time to speak the cold, conditional words: “If thou art a human being, I baptize thee…” What else would it be? Its mother still loved it desperately, no matter its appearance, no matter that it clung to life only long enough to receive the Sacrament. He’d been glad for the Latin; he’d hoped the mother had not understood.

  Joseph made himself stand, clutching his breviary against the chest of his soutane, begging God to give him the right words.

  His father came through the triple-hung window, blocking his path. Above the waist, he was stripped to his shirt and smeared with blood, yet he frowned at Joseph’s attire. “If you are going to increase that young woman’s misery, turn around right now.”

  Joseph did turn around, but only because someone was approaching. Hannah. He returned his attention to his father. “Do you think I am heartless?” Joseph hissed.

  “No, but your Church often is.”

  “It’s not—” It’s not MY Church, it’s THE Church, he would have said.

  But his father had already moved past him to ask Hannah where he and Hélène might change their clothes.

  Cautiously, Joseph entered the bedchamber. Hélène moved from her friend’s side to ask: “Joseph, Edward and his father think that because Tessa hadn’t felt Bean moving yet, she didn’t have a soul yet. Is that true?”

  This explained their behavior, though it did not excuse it. Joseph shook his head. “Bean has a soul—as immortal as yours or mine.”

  Tessa raised her bloodshot eyes to him, but only for a moment.

  Hélène promised to return soon, and the midwife left them too.

  Propped on pillows, Tessa was swaddled in a baggy blue dressing gown with her knees drawn up beneath the bedclothes. On this support, she cradled in both hands something so small Joseph could not see it even as he came to stand beside her. She sheltered it as one might a baby bird fallen from its nest. As if its stillness were temporary. As if sheer will might infuse it with life again.

  “Edward wouldn’t even look at her,” Tessa whispered.

  Joseph gathered the courage to share her pain. The sight was more terrible than he had imagined—not because the little body did not resemble a child, but because it did. What Joseph saw first was an impossibly tiny hand, balanced on Tessa’s thumb—utterly perfect yet fragile as glass. Ears, nose, and mouth, already formed. Bean’s skin was translucent, revealing the delicate tracery of arteries. Her eyes were veiled promises beneath the surface, just like a baby bird’s. Tucked into a folded handkerchief, she filled Tessa’s palm, but nothing more. Three inches? Four?

  “I baptized her as quickly as I could,” Tessa said. “I know the mother isn’t supposed to do it, but no one else knew how.”

  For a moment the image seared through him: Tessa alone but for the slaves and the tiny being in her trembling hand, ignoring her own agony in order to save her child. Of course she was a mother, no matter how brief her daughter’s life. “Bean was born alive, then?”

  Tessa closed her eyes and shook her head. “The Baptism wasn’t valid, was it?”

  Joseph stared at his breviary. “No. I’m sorry.” Did his father expect him to lie? Tessa had been a catechist; she knew this truth as well as Joseph did. It was right there in the Gospel of John and in Bishop England’s catechism: “Is Baptism necessary to salvation? Yes; without it, we cannot enter the Kingdom of God.”

  “My daughter is damned?”

  Yes. But he must soften this. “Are you familiar with Limbo?”

  “Isn’t that part of Hell?”

  That was how Albertus Magnus had conceived it; Limbo meant “border.” Saint Augustine believed unbaptized children suffered the pains of Hell, only to a lesser degree than wicked adults. Scripture simply did not address the fate of unbaptized children, and the Church had never explicitly confirmed or denied the existence of Limbo. In the absence of a clear revelation, theologians could only speculate about where and how such souls would spend eternity. But in Joseph’s experience, people were even more reluctant to accept “I don’t know” from a Priest than they were from a doctor. “We do not believe unbaptized children suffer the pain of fire.”

  “Is their banishment temporary, like Purgatory?”

  “No.”

  “Bean cannot ever enter Heaven?”

  “Although she committed no fault of her own, because she wasn’t baptized, the stain of original sin has not been—cannot now be—washed from her soul. So she can never enter the presence of God.”

  “Because of my sin?”

  “Because of Eve’s sin, and Adam’s.” Transmitted to her through you.

  Tessa stroked her daughter’s tiny head. “Bean won’t have to spend eternity like this, will she? She’ll have a better body than I could give her? Her eyes will open, and she’ll be able to run?”

  Joseph clung to Politi’s theory: “Yes. At the Resurrection of the Dead, even unbaptized children will be given perfect bodies. She will be a young woman.”

  “Can I see her, then? Can I—”

  “No.”

  Tessa’s grief leaked unceasingly, from her eyes and her nose. “I tried! I tried, Bean!”

  The Stratfords offered Joseph breakfast. He ate without tasting anything. He searched for a gentle way to tell Tessa that Bean could not be laid to rest in consecrated ground. But she already knew. They decided to bury the little girl there on the plantation, at the edge of the Stratford family plot. Hélène helped Tessa fashion a casket from a jewelry box. Inside, they also placed a single kidney bean from the kitchen.

  Liam carried his sister to the cemetery as if he were rescuing her from a collapsi
ng house. One of the negroes brought a chair for her. Another slave bore a shovel, but Joseph’s father took it from him and dug the little grave himself. Hélène carried the tiny casket. The elder Mr. Stratford did not join them, and Edward looked as if he would rather be anywhere else.

  Joseph was forbidden to perform funeral rites, but he offered a prayer: “Lord, as we commit the body of this child to the earth, we commit her soul to Your judgment. Though You have not revealed to us the full fate of these little ones, we trust in Your infinite mercy.”

  He read from the Psalms: “Show me Thy truth… Have mercy upon me, for I am desolate…”

  Joseph closed his breviary. Tessa sat motionless, staring down at the fresh grave. Liam and Hélène stood on either side of her. Tessa gripped their hands so tightly that her knuckles were white, as though she might fall into the earth if she let go.

  After several minutes of silence, Liam inquired gently: “Tessa, are you ready—”

  Instead of answering, she murmured: “Will it be like she never left my womb?” Tessa glanced to her brother. “Do you remember the Irish name for Limbo?”

  He nodded. “Dorchadas gan Phian. Darkness without Pain.”

  “Is that right, Father?” Tessa asked.

  Joseph hesitated. Most of the theologians who argued against the pain of fire argued for the pain of loss. Other writers, like Saint Thomas Aquinas, concluded that unbaptized children must remain ignorant of their exile from Heaven. “Bean isn’t suffering,” Joseph answered. “She doesn’t know what she’s lost.”

  But Tessa knew.

  Chapter 28

  Evening crowned the city with peace and plenty…midnight saw its habitations enveloped in devouring flames… One woe is past, and behold another woe followeth hard after.

  — Reverend Thomas Smyth, Two discourses on the occasion of the great fire in Charleston (1838)

  When Tessa returned to her house in town, she told Joseph: “Edward doesn’t want me to be churched.”

  Joseph frowned. “Did you tell him that churching isn’t only about your attending Mass again? That you cannot resume your…conjugal relations until the rite is completed?”

  She nodded and looked away. “But I think he intends to—” She broke off and drew in a ragged breath. Whether she shuddered at the thought of violating the Church’s prescription—which he knew the Irish took particularly seriously—or simply at the thought of intercourse with her husband, Joseph wasn’t sure. “Edward says everyone will see me there, kneeling outside the cathedral with my unlit candle, and they’ll know…”

  “We could do it early in the morning, when the cathedral is empty.”

  “I suggested that. Edward said someone is still sure to see.”

  Joseph hesitated, then decided: “I can give you the blessing here, in private.”

  She looked up at him with such longing. “Truly?”

  He nodded. The abbreviated, private rite was intended for women too ill to rise from their beds months after childbirth. But surely he could make an exception for Tessa.

  In January, Tessa conceived again. She confided to Joseph: “With Bean, I felt wonder, excitement, thanksgiving… Now, all I feel is fear.”

  The Blessing of an Expectant Mother was intended for her confinement. Joseph did not wait. “O God, accept the fervent prayer of Thy handmaid Tessa, as she humbly pleads for the life of her child… Let Thy gentle hand bring her infant safely into the light of day, to be reborn in holy Baptism…”

  Every day when he celebrated Mass, Joseph named Tessa in his prayers. Liam, Hélène, and Joseph’s mother and grandmother joined in a novena. Reluctantly, Edward agreed to abstain from his marital rights until Tessa was safely delivered and then churched. The stakes were higher now. Fate had turned their unborn child into a prince.

  The Stratfords owned a fishing sloop and trained slaves to handle it. Early that spring, Edward’s eldest brother Miles was out hunting marlin when a squall caught him in open water. His body washed up the next morning. Miles had had an understanding with a neighboring planter, but he’d been waiting for his betrothed to come of age; he’d left no children.

  Edward found another lawyer to complete Liam’s apprenticeship. Edward himself had always been more interested in agriculture. Even knowing he would not inherit it, he’d helped manage his family’s rice plantation, Stratford-on-Ashley. Now, Edward’s father altered his will: the property would be Edward’s—if he and Tessa could produce an heir. If they failed, Stratford-on-Ashley would go to Edward’s nephew, his brother Laurence’s second son, who had never even set foot in South Carolina.

  To Tessa, this inheritance was closer to a nightmare than a dream come true. Stratford-on-Ashley was nothing without its slaves—nearly one hundred of them. That was not the legacy she wanted to leave the child she carried. Headaches plagued her, and sleep eluded her.

  Edward’s father sent his own physician to examine her. There was nothing to worry about, he proclaimed. Tessa was a foreigner still acclimating to the Low Country.

  Joseph’s father wasn’t so sure: “There is so much we do not yet understand—especially about women’s bodies.”

  Tessa rested as much as she could. To fill the long anxious hours, she learned to paint. She claimed her work was nothing remarkable. Hélène and Liam disagreed, urging Joseph to see for himself.

  During Holy Week, he was able to do so. Tessa was capturing the finest blooms in her garden. She was no Renaissance master, it was true; but there was life and beauty on the canvas—Joseph’s pleasure and praise were no lie.

  He was so entranced, admiring the anemones taking shape on her easel, he did not realize Tessa had turned away from him. She walked straight through her flower-bed to clutch the balustrade of the piazza.

  “Tessa?” When he saw her face, Joseph rushed to her side, not caring what he trampled. She was as white as death.

  Tessa closed her eyes tightly. “No, no, no, no…” She wavered and lost her grip on the balustrade.

  Joseph caught her before she could fall. “Hannah!” he shouted into the house. Through the cloud of skirts, he found the bend of Tessa’s knees and gathered her into his arms. She clung to his neck, and he felt her hot tears against his cheek. Joseph muttered a prayer as he carried Tessa up the steps of the piazza.

  Hannah met them in the entry hall.

  Joseph stammered: “I—I think…” It’s happening again. He couldn’t say it aloud, as if this alone would make it true.

  She bled for days. On this slow, inexorable tide came the tiny body in its sac. A little boy this time, but still no sign of life. No hope of Heaven or reunion.

  Tessa buried her son beside his sister at Stratford-on-Ashley. Shortly after Easter, she walked with Joseph from the plantation house to the two small graves. Her dress was lavender.

  “Edward still won’t let me wear mourning,” Tessa explained. “‘Must everyone know our business?’ he says. I pleaded with him: ‘I could say someone in Ireland had died.’” Tessa stopped for a moment and murmured: “’Tis a sin to lie, Father, I know.”

  “I imagine that wasn’t the reason your husband refused?”

  She shook her head and resumed their path. “He told me: ‘Black makes you look like a corpse. It’s our first social season.’”

  Joseph gritted his teeth. Edward wanted to show off his beautiful wife. He cared only that she present a pleasing exterior, not about the misery beneath her masquerade.

  “He isn’t a cruel man; you mustn’t think that,” Tessa added quickly. “But ’tis as if…he cannot see through anyone’s eyes but his own. Our children aren’t real to him like they are to me. He didn’t carry them; he didn’t hold them. I suppose ’tis easier for him, to believe they don’t have souls. To Edward, our children are only broken promises, something he would rather forget.” They reached the two small markers. “I had to beg him for these.” Tessa knelt at the stones. “But Edward said I could name our children whatever I wanted.”

  Joseph knelt besi
de her and read the inscriptions:

  Bridget Stratford

  November 12, 1837

  Beloved Daughter

  Conlaed Stratford

  April 14, 1838

  Beloved Son

  Joseph smiled at Bridget, the name her husband would have rejected for a living child. “Conlaed is also an Irish saint?”

  Tessa nodded. “He was the first Bishop of Kildare. And Conlaed was my family name, before the English changed it to Conley.”

  She should have been Miss Conlaed. “Do you know what it means?”

  “‘Chaste fire.’” She smiled a little too, and then her face clouded again. “When I lost Conlaed, I told myself: ‘At least Bridget isn’t alone anymore; at least they have each other.’ But how can they— You said that children in Limbo don’t know what they’ve lost.”

  “If they did know, the spiritual torment would be greater than any fire. So they must be ignorant of Heaven.”

  “But they cannot be ignorant only of Heaven, only of their separation from God!” Tessa cried. “If Bridget and Conlaed knew how much I love them, that I think about them and miss them every day, they would grieve as much as I do; they would be suffering! That means—” She could scarcely breathe through her tears. “Do they even know they are sister and brother?”

  He had meant to comfort her. Joseph clasped her gloved hand, and she stilled, waiting desperately for his response. “Just as truth is hidden from them, it is hidden from us as well, while we are on Earth. We know only in part; ‘we see through a glass, darkly.’ Our mortal minds cannot fathom the miracles of God. I am certain that in some way we cannot yet understand, Bridget and Conlaed know they belong together, and they know how much you love them, without yearning for more.”