Obscurity

Chapter 16

Séverine knelt at her prie-dieu, her black veil covering her head, her fingers intertwined before her. She did not pray the lord's prayer, for it no longer suited her. She did not pray the rosary, for it no longer nourished her. Instead, she just sat there.

She should feel guilty for her dalliance, she thought, for taking a lover into her bed. Indeed, she was still a married woman in the eyes of the Church and would be considered a harlot for such crimes. And yet seemingly overnight had no use for such stipulations and now determined to remove all trace of them from her mind.

She was disinterested in being yoked to some sense of regulatory goodness. That path only subjected her to the depraved tortures of her husband and the insidious haunting of his unmurdered soul. Instead, she resolved to follow her own sense of goodness, and those were much easier set of steps to determine.

Though she did not know what her purpose was or if there was such a thing, that only instilled in her the need to protect those near to her. Though she did not know where her soul would rest when she died, that only instilled in her the need to fight for each moment. There were no hours to pray, no scriptures to read, no penance to do, she had only to live her one and precious life and see that it was lived to the full.

She still adored her Catholic faith, but no longer for its truth. She attended mass, but only to admire its beauty. She pondered the Virgin Mother, but no longer required her virginity. She meditated on the resurrection of her son, but she no longer required that act literally. She cherished the stories of the bible for they enriched her contemplative life, but her faith no longer depended on their truth to exist.

Where once religion had provided all the answers, now she allowed herself to question, and in that question, she found a new sense of freedom — as though Divine Providence had been slowly unraveling the fabric from which she had been woven and now she was free to be fashioned into anything she liked.

How long ago it seemed, that she bore the guilt of her husband's supposed death, and how far she had come since then. Moving to la Nouvelle-Orléans had been a gift, a gentle freeing of her spirit. She was under no obligation to live life by any other means save her own, she realized, and sometimes love, and even murder, could be acceptable aspects of that life, if used under the appropriate conditions.

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Across the marshes now hardened by the sun, where the muddy streets of la Nouvelle-Orléans began to dry and the stench of sewage began to recede, the city once rendered sordid by the spring, became sultry by the summer. The air hung heavy above the cathedral, as the bishop rang his bell and errant feet quickened to their pews.

The cathedral was yet unfinished, allowing vines to creep in through the exposed roof and rays of sun to pour through unpaned windows. The heat from those rays was intoxicating. Over clad women fanned sweat from their necks, attempting to keep each drop from falling between their breasts. Equally over clad gentlemen sweat into their coats as their eyes lingered at so sinful a sight. Latin words drifted above that tropical tableau, but no ear paid them any attention. An islandic fever had taken hold of every mind until it could think of nothing else save the impending allure of a warm afternoon triste.

Religion was important to these individuals, bien sur, for it provided, if not the moral foundation for their society, then at least the societal one. Piety, or at least the appearance of it, came with a certain status and prestige and they used it to separate those wretched individuals who were exiled to their city from the more devout Catholics who came to save it. They even invented hierarchies for it — ones that would place them at a higher standard merely by their ancestral conformity to it.

The rule of limpieza de sangre, as it became known, was created to certify that an individual's lineage was free from heresy for at least five generations. This was difficult to achieve in a place so diverse as la Nouvelle-Orléans, and for all that, a more coveted a position.