Benedetto Bianchi

The rain over San Severino di Centola did not wash the cliffs; it dissolved them. By October of 1888, the village smelled of wet lime & rot, its vineyards long since dead to the phylloxera bug. Father Renato adjusted his stole near the altar. The wool was greasy, stiff with years of dried sweat. He watched Benedetto scrub the stone steps with a rag soaked in cold river water. The boy was twenty-five now, quiet, with the thick hands of an illiterate laborer & the vacant, untrustworthy stillness of a man who had survived a long fever. "The English woman is still at the inn," Renato said. His voice was flat, scraped raw by forty years of hearing confessions that never changed. "She brought paper signed by her Queen." Benedetto did not look up from the flags. The dark veins under his forearms twitched as he wrung out the rag. "Her Prince dies of the same thing?",he asked. "She says his fever speaks in Old French," Renato replied. "She thinks you are a holy man because you lived through it." A door latched in the rear vestibule. I stepped into the aisle, my wool coat heavy with rainwater. The church was freezing, smelling of stale tallow & damp earth. I pulled the Queen’s letter from my breast pocket, the red wax seal already cracked from the moisture. "The steamship leaves Naples on Tuesday," I said, stopping three paces from the altar rail. "Her Majesty does not request your presence, Father. She bought it." Renato looked at the paper, then at the bruised skin beneath Benedetto’s collar. He remembered the night ten years ago in Elio’s house, the tallow candles going out, the foul air & the unnatural way the fifteen-year-old’s, Benedetto's joints had cracked in the dark. It had not been a victory. It had been a hand sliding off a throat because it grew tired of squeezing. That night Benedetto was freed from the presence & became an exorsist. "Take him," Renato said, turning his back to the crucifix. "He does not belong to the Chapel anyway."