[RECAP: Father Gabriel has just led the poetry club, and finds his emotions towards Leonie are growing.]
Gabriel had deliberately not read out any more of the poem because he couldn't trust himself to keep his voice steady in front of Leonie. The second verse in particular mirrored much of the emotion of his own ordination to the priesthood. The struggle he had gone through, and the hours of solitude and agonised doubt.
Doubt that had only resurfaced since he had started teaching at this school.
Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night
He remembered the isolation he had felt. The sense of aloneness that no one could answer his questions or assuage his fears.
"It is up to you and your God," Canon Francis had told him. "It is a path that every man must walk alone, a fork in the road where each ordinand must decide his own direction."
One way lay the earthly world with its human love and pleasures.
The other way lay the purity of a spiritual life and the sacrifice of worldly things.
Gabriel had chosen what he believed to be the higher path. Disillusioned with love, he thought he could make more of a difference through forgoing it.
It wasn't as though he had no experience with women. Quite the opposite. Before Joanne he had played the field, dating plenty of different girls in high school and his first years of university.
He had really thought he was prepared to give all that up.
He didn't expect to be tempted - to the point of regretting his vows - by another girl. Yet alone one several years younger than him who was supposed to be his student.
After Vespers, which did nothing to ease the turmoil in his soul, Gabriel returned to the presbytery and started to prepare supper. He was cooking sausages that night. As he cut up some broccoli and potatoes, the domesticity of it reminded him of his time with Joanne. They had lived together - "in sin", as it was termed - from early in their engagement.
He had, he thought, been quite content with their life together. It hadn't bothered him that Joanne didn't share certain passions of his, literature for one. They had got on well enough. Their sex life had been okay, and he hadn't felt much more than a twinge of Catholic guilt over the fact they weren't yet married.
He had certainly never felt that overpowering, almost unconquerable desire for her that he had felt for Leonie when they acted The Crucible scene together. That need to crush the girl against him. To almost hurt her, if only to impress upon her how much she was affecting him. And in his dreams too, if he were completely honest. He controlled himself well enough in the daytime but at night the images of her came back, unbidden.
He had attributed the intensity of it to his celibate state. Pent up sexual energy that in time his body would learn to process more easily, without affecting his mind. Leonie had just happened to be the target for that suppressed energy. It could have been anyone, he reasoned. His libido was just choosing a random girl.
Now though, Gabriel wondered. The problem was that he found himself longing to spend time with her. Not just with anyone, but with her. If it were mere loneliness then he could have conversed with Father Stephen quite companionably. If he missed women's company, his colleagues among the sisterhood could have provided chaste conversation.
But he couldn't get that girl out of his mind. Her rose gold hair, the unusual, amber-green eyes. The way she smiled, and the emotion in her eyes as he had read Hopkins' poems to the students.
If the real Abigail had been just a fraction as bewitching, no wonder she had managed to seduce a devout man and lead an entire community into destruction.
Some boy out there, the one Leonie liked, was the luckiest guy in the world. Gabriel hoped the two of them wouldn't screw it up like he and Joanne had.
Actually that wasn't true. The thought of her with anyone else made him feel quite violent, though he had no right to feel so.
He turned down the heat under the fry pan, and went to set the table for the meal.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A good thing there is no other boy out there, right?
He's so blind he just doesn't see it!