Blood of the Lamb Read Online Free PDF Page A

students . . .”
    “You’re on sabbatical, aren’t you?”
    “I’m advising three theses.”
    “Our Lord has given us glorious new technologies to allow you to do that from here.”
    “I—”
    “Thomas. You and I spoke about this back in Boston, when it was barely a dream. This priceless, irreplaceable, and deeply chaotic collection needs a comprehensive stewardship, an approach of methodical care it hasn’t seen yet. The opportunity to participate in that work was why I came to Rome. The chance to take the lead in it has been what I’ve wanted most, for a very long time, and I don’t deny it. Assisting Monsignor Bruguès was the beginning. Now the entire Library has been given into my care. It’s always been my intention that you should have a role.”
    “Yes, of course.” Thomas entered the building and turned down the hallway. Outside his office the waiting student jumped to his feet. Thomas held up a delaying finger, unlocked the door, and shut it behind him. “And I hope—”
    “A specific role,” Lorenzo went on. “The overall work is important, but there’s a particular task I need you for. Your skills and your knowledge. It’s something we haven’t discussed yet. I was waiting for the right time, and now the time has come.”
    “I’m supposed to start teaching again in the spring semester,” Thomas said weakly.
    Lorenzo Cossa sighed. “Your obsessiveness as a scholar is the positive side, I suppose, of your . . . lack of flexibility. Thomas, I’m a Cardinal. I’m the Vatican Librarian and Archivist. I can get you reassigned and Heythrop College will be proud, not dismayed. I promise you. Please, come help me here.”
    Thomas shrugged out of his coat, looking around. His plants, his pictures, his books and papers. Seven years of settling in. He tossed the coat on the chair. “Yes,” he told the Cardinal. “Of course.”
    •   •   •
    The call to the priesthood had been the most compelling force in Thomas Kelly’s life. A rangy Irish redhead, he’d found baseball, girls, and garage bands also part of his South Boston youth, and he had a nodding acquaintance with illicitly acquired six-packs and smokable non-tobacco products. But behind it all, beyond the breathless rush of childhood and above the clang and crash of adolescence, hovered something still and silent. Something as calm and deep, endless and inviting, as the sea. Later he would come to understand this as faith; early on, he only knew the peace, the sense of being home, that he felt at Mass. It took him years to recognize most people didn’t feel what he did, even longer to see the path open to him. When he understood, he took to his vocation with joy and gratitude.
    He’d been an exemplary seminarian, drawn to the cerebral, scholarly life. After ordination he’d headed along an academic route, happily exploring obscure byways of Church history. His powerful intuitive gift for research had drawn the attention of other scholars, of journals and publishers. Doctoral, postdoctoral, and teaching positions had sought him out, for which he was thankful. Whatever intellectual talents he possessed were matched—no, actually, overshadowed—by a pronounced clumsiness as a pastoral counselor. His efforts to comfort the occasional undergraduate or old friend who came to him at times of crisis only left Thomas feeling intrusive, cliché-ridden. He greatly admired priests who ministered directly to people’s spiritual needs, but he accepted that his own contribution to his Church would be less immediate, more ethereal. That his work was unlikely to rock anybody’s world, however, did not lessen his joy or confidence in his vocation and the direction he’d chosen within it.
    It had therefore been a shock to him when, the fourth winter after ordination, he’d found himself plunged into a terrifying abyss by a single word.
    In the midst of consoling the young widow of a high school classmate who’d died unexpectedly