Alvin could see, using his doodlebug, that all three scribes had fled the room. He immediately quenched the fires, since the written-on pages had already been consumed.

  “Your Grace, I hear a sort of noise,” said Alvin. “Is it something you need to attend to?”

  “No,” said the bishop.

  “Isn’t it possible that it was God’s response to our prayer?” asked Alvin.

  “Your prayer,” said the bishop.

  “When you said amen, Your Grace, it became our prayer, isn’t that right?” asked Alvin. “Your amen was an honest one, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said the bishop.

  “How could it be otherwise, from a man who has such trust within the Church?”

  The bishop glowered even more. “I’m done with you,” he said.

  “I’m not sure what that means,” said Alvin. “Are you dismissing me to return to the west of Ireland, without hindrance or harm?”

  “Do you always speak in this high-sounding way? I thought you were a frontier bumpkin.”

  “I was educated by a fine schoolmistress who taught me to speak like a gentleman, in spite of the poverty of my family. Will I be able to go on my way unmolested?”

  “Of course,” said the bishop.

  “Let me expand my question. Is there a mob of Irish citizens outside, waiting to punish me for being accused of witchcraft?”

  The bishop said nothing.

  Alvin waited.

  “I do not assemble mobs or spur them on,” said the bishop.

  “Is there a way out of this place that will not cause me to emerge from a brothel to reach the street?”

  “Yes,” said the bishop.

  “I pray that you or one of your servants will lead me by that passage, to a place where no one is waiting to punish me.”

  “That is not my responsibility,” said the bishop. “I have not set anyone there to harm you.”

  “Can you promise that none of your associates have done so, either? Reverend Philadelphia Thrower has set traps for me before.”

  “I cannot guarantee your safety,” said the bishop. “Few of the native Irish have any respect for my authority.”

  “Whose authority do they respect?” asked Alvin.

  The bishop didn’t answer.

  The man must still be planning something, and was reluctant to deny it outright, especially since his amen to Alvin’s prayer had apparently yielded real results.

  So Alvin would need more of a demonstration that Pharaoh’s power should not be extended to reach for him. It was a simple matter to weaken the boards under the bishop’s desk and chair. Alvin checked beneath the floor and saw that there was only a crawl space a few feet down, and no occupied cellar. No one would be in much danger.

  “Your Grace,” said Alvin, “my knack—a talent I’ve worked on since childhood—includes the ability to sense when nails and wood no longer hold on to each other. The floor beneath you is in a weakened state. It would be wisdom if you got up and moved to the edges of the room.”

  “Are you threatening me?” asked the bishop.

  “The weakened wood is threatening you,” said Alvin. “I am giving you fair warning that you can’t rely on this floor.”

  “Then why are you still sitting on your chair on that same floor?”

  “The floor under my chair is strong. It will hold, at least until I leave the room. If I go out the door I came in through, will there be people on the other side waiting to arrest me?”

  Since Alvin knew that there were four such men, he was not surprised when the bishop paused a long moment before saying, “I don’t have any reason to believe that you are in any danger of being arrested.”

  “But the secret doorway behind that bookshelf—there is nobody waiting for me there, right? And that passage is the one you use to enter this place unseen, so when I come out into the open air, nobody will see me, right?”

  The bishop rose to his feet. “Take whatever route you choose. All I ask is that you leave this room immediately.”

  “I had hoped to see you move away from this perilous part of the floor before I left you. What if you need my help when the floor collapses?”

  “If I need any help, I won’t want it to come from you,” said the bishop.

  “Ah. Just as the wounded traveler on the Jericho Road refused to allow the Samaritan to help him.”

  “That was a parable, not a historical incident,” said the bishop.

  “A story made up by Jesus, so perhaps we can still take it seriously as a guide to our behavior.”

  “Get out,” said the bishop.

  Alvin rose from the chair, and lapsed right back to the homespun accent of his childhood in Vigor Church. “I reckon you’ll do what you do, and I’ll do what I do, and we’ll both figure out who made the best choice.”

  The bishop caught the change. “So you’ve set your education aside?”

  “As so many of us do,” said Alvin.

  He walked to the bookshelf, and instead of looking for the hidden latch, he simply pulled forward and the bookshelves glided open, revealing a passage behind. It also revealed the cubbyhole where three scribes had watched their writing burst into flames. They were long gone, but the unburnt blank sheets and the inkwells and quills still sat there on the table, undamaged.

  Alvin caused the boards and nails under the bishop to creak and tremble, giving him plenty of time to get away to an edge of the room. Meanwhile, Alvin continued down the passage until he came to the door that he knew would lead out into a courtyard, where nobody would see him because no one was there.

  Behind him, the floorboards in the bishop’s chamber gave way, and he dropped four feet straight down into the crawlspace. Alvin made sure that the bishop was uninjured. He also made sure that the door to the chamber was stuck fast and could not be opened, no matter how much the bishop’s men, frightened at the crashing sound, might strain to pull the door open. The bishop was crying out for help, for someone to come to him, what are you waiting for, somebody tried to kill me!

  I have given him only a taste of what the power of my knack can do, Alvin said inwardly as he walked out into a small courtyard and onward to a cobbled Dublin street.

  In Alvin’s mind, he had a clear memory of the route he had taken into the city, and without going near the entrance to the brothel, Alvin picked up the path farther out and began his long walk back to the west.

  But because he had no horse and did not have to keep pace with any soldiers or bishop’s men, he moved off into the fields and began to hear the feeble Greensong of meadows. He stayed away from fields of rotting potatoes—the blight was already prevalent on farms not far from the city—and was able to draw strength from the plants and the few untamed animals that lived in this country. Soon he was running, not full out, but gently, causing no harm to the grasses and plants he ran on, for they stayed away from his light footfalls and sped him on his way.

  If the bishop sent anyone after him, they would not believe he could already have come this far; the searchers would be looking far behind him, if there were any searchers.

  Meanwhile, Alvin could only hope that the bishop would think twice and yet again before he sent anyone to interfere with Alvin’s work in Ireland. Right now, the bishop was undoubtedly feeling triumphant about the fact that he had firm confirmation that Alvin’s powers included dropping him through the floor and opening the secret door without finding the latch first.

  But on sober reflection, the bishop would probably realize that Alvin could have killed him by having the ceiling above him collapse, or by causing his desk to catch fire, or by sealing him inside the room and starving him to death. He would realize that, like Pharaoh, he was being granted his life, and that this would continue to be the case until he reached out to harm Alvin or anyone under his protection.

  Maybe this would keep Alvin safe for a while. But not forever. Pharaoh always forgot the power that was against him, and mistook the mercy shown to him for weakness. The bishop will think that I’m weak. He’ll get more and more daring.

  I’ll try not to kill anyone, Peggy, he said silently. But I will protect my people.

  If I have any people willing to come to me and sail west to America.

  Will the story of what I did to the bishop’s scribes and to the bishop himself become known? Or will the bishop keep it a closely guarded secret? Only the latter made sense—the bishop would hardly want to have it known that he was defeated but not killed by one of the very people he had vowed to destroy. But there were too many people inside that building who had heard and would see the damage to the bishop’s secret chamber, and there was no reason for the scriveners to keep secret what happened to the papers they were writing on. The story would get out. Alvin wouldn’t have to tell it to anybody himself, except to correct any errors that might have been included in the rumors.

  Is this what you sent me to do, Crystal City? Or was I a fool to go to the bishop to give him a chance to cooperate in a bloodless exodus of people with knacks? Was I wrong to demonstrate a bit of my power to him? Was I wrong to use the power so destructively? Is that what I was given it for? It should be only the power to heal and protect, to empower good people and enfeeble the evil ones.

  If Peggy were here, with her gift for seeing into people’s heartfires, she could have told Alvin what kind of man the bishop was, and what he now intended to do. But she wasn’t here, and so the bishop’s mind and heart remained closed to him. Either Alvin’s ploy had worked, or it hadn’t. Or maybe it had worked, but not for long, or not as Alvin intended.

  Are you watching all this from afar, Peggy? Am I doing well? What did you see in my heartfire, before you said that I should go? Are you saving me from some nasty doom in Crystal City? Or is my future as much a blank to you as it is to me?

  As Margaret had said several times before, sometimes knowing some things is worse than knowing nothing, because if you turn aside from your path to avoid a bad fate, you may find yourself on a path to meet a worse one.

  My path must be the wine-dark sea, the vasty deep, the whale-road, because only by crossing the jagged Atlantic can I return to you, dear Margaret Larner, my Little Peggy.

  11

  FATHER LUKASZ SLOSHED through the water onto the shore of County Waterford in the southeast of Ireland. He would have preferred to arrive in the west of Ireland, the part most staunchly Catholic, but the ship’s captain, who had some experience smuggling, told him that a shallow-water landing at this particular spot would shelter him from the view of passing strangers.

  “If you were unloading a cargo, you’d choose a different place,” said Lukasz.

  “It is against the law to unload cargo except at the designated ports,” said the captain. “That is called smuggling, and by act of Parliament the penalty is death.”

  “By hanging,” said Lukasz.

  “God has sent me harsh dreams of my neck in a noose,” said the captain. “I take it as an admonition to live my life entirely within the law. Except for delivering a servant of God to the land of his ministry.”

  Lukasz bowed his thanks and pressed a coin into the captain’s hand. The Holy See had already paid Father Lukasz’s passage, but the captain would not mind a bit of extra compensation.

  His trousers soaked, Lukasz walked over the low hill that hid the beach from view and found himself in a land of lush grass being consumed by languid sheep. He sat down in the grass, took off his boots, poured out the water, and wrung out the bottoms of his trousers. He laid his stockings on the grass to dry. He had no luggage, and carried not even the Holy Book, because he had long since committed the entire Douai translation to memory, where it waited for him to need it, alongside St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate version. The English heretics had it so much easier, having jettisoned the apocrypha from their King James Version. But if memory could not flawlessly hold the word of God in more than one language, what was memory for?

  It was a day bright with sun, once it had fully risen, and before long his stockings were wearable again. He gartered them at the knee and pulled his trousers down over the tops. The boots, however, got no sunlight inside, but at least no water came out when he tipped them over. This would have to be dry enough.

  In all the time he sat there, no one came by on the grassy track that showed signs of being used as a wagon road. Perhaps wagons only came along here during shearing or haying.

  His boots were ice cold and a little squishy, but if that was the worst thing that happened to him today, he would be relieved. He had half-expected that someone would betray him and he would be met on the beach by English soldiers. So being met by no one made him feel more optimistic about his chances.

  When he set foot on the wagon track, though, he did not do it as Father Lukasz. Now he was Brother Luke, an itinerant lay preacher of the Methodist persuasion. It was well known that Methodists had won the right to be considered as members of the Anglican church as far as the law was concerned. They were no longer classed as Dissenters, so they could hold public office and their ministers could draw upon a small emolument from the fund of the Established Church.

  Luke’s story would be that he had served as a missionary in Brittany, though he never learned their crude version of French and made not a single convert among the stubbornly Catholic Bretons. Now he was new-arrived in Ireland, and glad to be back among people who spoke English. He would soon discover why Fra Angelico praised the Irish pronunciation of English—Luke would test himself by trying to learn to speak like them as quickly as possible.

  It was a long walk on a warm day, but Luke was still a healthy man and walking had always been his exercise of choice. Keeping a horse was too much trouble, and if he hired a stableman to take care of a horse, then keeping the stableman would also be too much trouble. I will serve God best if I don’t require a noble animal to serve me.

  The wagon track led past several farmhouses, but Luke had drunk a good draught from the freshwater barrel on the boat that carried him, and he was not yet thirsty. Best to get to an inn, where the news and the gossip would be much fresher and, perhaps, somewhat accurate.

  In his coat pocket he had a small loaf of bread wrapped in an old towel, along with a miniature wheel of Azeitão cheese, made from sheep’s milk, in a town about forty kilometers from Lisboa. It was clotted with thistle flowers instead of rennet, so no sheep had to die in order to make this cheese. And the flavor was exquisite. It was a vanity to spend money to acquire the cheese in the first place, and even more vanity to bring it with him for his noon dinner on this journey, but he hoped God would not hold it against him, this taste for luxury, because if a poor person came upon him now he would share it all, including the finest cheese he had ever eaten in his life. He would not withhold his luxuries for his own use, if another child of God had need of it.

  If a rich man asked him for a bite of cheese, Luke would smile and say, “I doubt you would find this Breton sheep’s cheese much to your liking. It isn’t even aged enough to be hard.” Calling it Breton sheep’s cheese would be a lie, but he needed to seem to be recently arrived from Brittany. And he would not give up a single bite of it to a rich man. He’d rather cast it in the dirt.

  You are a rich man, Father Lukasz, said the soft voice of the Jesuit conscience that dwelt always in his mind, judging him.

  “I have lived on whatever stipend the Holy Father gave me,” whispered Luke aloud. “And I have given more than half of that to the poor.”

  “Thus you try to bribe the poor to lend you the keys of heaven.”

  This dialogue had to stop. He didn’t want anyone to see him talking to himself.

  His belly full—the Portuguese could make cheese, and the Bretons could bake bread—Luke arrived at a town and looked for a public house. It wasn’t hard to find, and at this hour it had no customers—the men would be working and the women would be tending to dinner and the children.

  The publican greeted Luke without a smile, and Luke took the cue and did not smile either. But he nodded in greeting, and the Irishman nodded back, and Luke walked up to the bar. “After a mile or two of walking, I could use a sit-down,” said Luke, remembering the English used by working-class men he had known and ministered to in England years before.

  “English,” said the publican.

  “Methodist,” answered Luke. “And I have money to pay.”

  “Not a beggar, then?”

  “A man who wishes a bed for the night and a meal before sleeping,” said Luke. And he produced a coin of much smaller value than what he had given the boat’s captain, and laid it on the counter.

  “That will buy you two nights’ lodging and meals for two days,” said the man.

  “I commend you for your honesty,” said Luke, though he knew it was enough for four days’ lodging or more. He wasn’t here to catch Irish publicans overcharging their guests—especially English ones. He would not begrudge the man his bit of extra income. The money came from the donations of Catholics throughout the world, the rich man’s largesse and the poor widow’s farthing. All gave their money to Christ, and Christ would give this man his extra payment and then forgive his sins. Even so do I forgive you, my son, thought Luke.

  If you knew who I really was, would you beg for a Mass and several baptisms in this hamlet? Or would you surreptitiously send word for soldiers to pick me up?

  This is not the place to make such a test, Luke told himself.

  “Mayhap I’ll need two nights,” said Luke. “I confess to being right weary from my day’s walk, and at my age a man needs his sleep and profits from sleeping late some mornings.”

  “We break our fast in this public house right after Prime. If you don’t come down about then, the next meal is right around Sext. But it’s a good one. Stick to your ribs.”

  “I hadn’t heard that the Church of Ireland kept the old Catholic hours,” said Luke. “Some days it’s good to remember the old ways, I think.”

  The publican cocked his head, apparently sizing up this Methodist named Luke. “I think maybe it’s good to remember them on all days,” said the publican.