Jennifer nodded. She had learned in the last few weeks that it was never any good to argue with Tom; it was better to go around him.
“So you’ll come to the Caribbean with me?”
She nodded. “But I have to go back to my office. You go downtown; I’ll come and meet you as soon as I make my arrangements with Handingham.”
“I’ve already talked to him about it,” Tom said.
“You did?” She pulled away, looking surprised.
“Yes, that’s what I called him about the day you thought I was on the phone to the police. I said you’d been under some stress, and he agreed you could have some medical leave. It’s no big deal, honey, your job will be there when you return.”
“Well,” she said, controlling her anger, “then you can also call the coroner and ask him to go over the autopsy results again.”
He shook his head. “Darling, I love you. I think you’re wonderful, but there’s no case there. I can’t do anything. You can’t do anything. I know you’re upset, but I’m telling you, your mind is playing tricks on you. Lidocaine stays in the blood, in the skin tissues. If it was there, they would have picked up traces in the autopsy.”
“Sure, if they were like the doctors on TV. But they’re not. Why is the mayor always firing coroners if they’re so good?”
Tom was being rational, but she no longer trusted his cool logic, his faith in the system, in the rational world. She thought of what Phoebe Fisher had told her, how people were trapped inside their logical world and couldn’t accept the mystical. But she wasn’t. Not any longer. She had seen Margit in her living room, and she realized there was only one person now in New York City who would listen to her story and believe what she had to say.
ECCLESIASTICAL INVESTIGATION
RELATING TO THE VISIONS AND
MIRACULOUS CLAIMS OF VERONICA
BORROMEO MISCELLANEA MEOICEA
THE YEAR 1621 STATE ARCHIVE OF FLORENCE
Account of the visions, miraculous claims, and sins of the flesh as related by the Abbess Veronica Borromeo
to the Papal Nuncio, Giuseppe Bonomo, Bishop of Siena,
on the thirteenth day of September, 1621.
On the First Friday of Lent of the year 1620, while in bed between the fourth and sixth hours of the night, I contemplated the sufferings of Our Lord the Most Holy Jesus Christ, and our Master appeared to me in the flesh, holding in His bleeding hands His most Holy Cross. Our Saviour was alive, and he asked me if I would suffer His own crucifixion and death.
I made the sign of the Cross, thinking that the Devil had come upon me, but our Lord said to me that He was God and he wished me to suffer His death. He instructed me to get out of my cot and lay upon the stones in the form of the cross, as He wished to implant the wounds of the crucifixion upon my body.
When I followed as He had told me, I felt great pains in my limbs and breast and saw that blood was oozing from my flesh, but afterward, I felt only peace and contentment.
During the following week, from day to day, each morning, I studied my limbs and saw nothing, no marks or signs, but on the Friday next, from twelve until three, the hours that our Lord hung upon the cross, I, too, bled from my hands and feet, and from the right side of my breast, and the nuns of the convent came and ministered to me, and I begged them, beseeched them in our Lord’s name not to tell the laity of what had occurred to me here within our monastery walls.
Each Friday I joyfully suffered as our Lord had suffered, and then on Easter Sunday, after our Saviour had risen and ascended into Heaven, I was praying in the cloister garden when suddenly there appeared to me an angel dressed in a blue garment. He had long white and gilded wings, and he said to me, “Our Lord is well pleased by your sufferings, and He wishes you to surrender your body to him again, living on in this world the life of a saint, and suffering, as the saints have, for the greater glory of God.”
Afraid that I was being sorely tempted by the Devil himself, I fell upon my knees and begged for God’s guidance. The white angel took me to our church, to our humble priest, Father Giovannetto, who told me on behalf of Jesus Christ that I was not being deceived by the Devil, and I knelt before him and received the Holy Eucharist. The angel revealed himself to me again and said that his name was Gabriel, the archangel Gabriel, who brought great joy to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and that he would stay with me now in my hours and days of great need.
From that day forth I suffered many travails, as I had wished. I was visited by the Devil in the form of a handsome young man who sought to corrupt my body and soul. In my vigils in our chapel, the stones beneath my bare feet were set ablaze by the Devil and his minions, but still I kept the name of Jesus on my lips and prayed incessantly for the strength to keep my faith.
And then our Lord came upon me another time, and said I was to be His bride.
I opened my arms to him, then, and Jesus raised his golden sword and cut away my simple heart and took it to his own, and said to me, “Lovely lady, I give you my heart, as any bridegroom must,” and slipped his heart into my breast, where it lodged, too large and glorious for my body, and then he took my left hand in his and slipped upon my finger a wedding ring, and in all my life I have never felt such great contentment.
Account of the visions, miraculous claims, and sins of the flesh of the Abbess Veronica Borromeo
as related by Sister Maria Sinistrari to the Papal Nuncio, Giuseppe Bonomo,
Bishop of Siena, on the second day of October, 1621.
I saw her open her arms and then kiss the fourth finger of her right hand and mumble her thanks to God, saying over and over again, “I am not worthy, O Lord. I am not worthy, O Lord.” Then I heard her say, “I want to have her sit on that first chair and to explain her life,” and she quickly went to where our Lord sat. And she told me the candles she had lit symbolized the thirty-three years that Jesus lived in this world, and the three largest ones were the three years closest to his death.
Next she spoke of how Christ had taken her heart and given her the wounds of His crucifixion. Then she said many things which I cannot remember, and I knew she was not herself. Her voice did not sound like her own. Then she prayed for several hours. We knelt together on the cold stones and prayed together.
When she was finished, we shut out the lights and left the choir and retired to our cells. She was in great pain, and would go to her cell at night and sit beside her. She kept telling me that a dagger was striking her body, bleeding her heart, and she would take my hand and press it against her breast so I might feel her great pain.
She would tell me, “Hold me,” and as soon as I touched her heart, it would quiet her. I asked her what was causing the great pain, and she said it was Jesus testing her virtue.
And then she began to call me often to her bed. It was always after my disrobing, and when I came to her, she would force me down into her bed and kiss me, as if she were a man, and then she would stir on top of me, like a man, so that we were both corrupted.
She would do this in the most solemn of hours. She would pretend that she had a need, a great pain, and call me to her cell and then take me by force to sin with her.
And to gain greater sinful pleasure, she would put her face between my breasts and kiss them. And she would put her finger in my genitals and hold it there as she corrupted herself. And she would kiss me by force and then put my finger into her genitals, and I would corrupt her.
She would always seem in a trance when she did such corruption, and call herself the angel Michael, and speak like a man. She would wear a white robe with gold-embroidered sleeves and a gold chain around her neck. She let her hair loose, and it curled at her thin neck, and she crowned her own head with a wreath of flowers taken from the convent’s garden.