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imagine—or what does she imagine—he would do if she were to be baptized as a Catholic?”
    â€œI asked her that, more or less. She thinks he would kill her—possibly hyperbole, but she is afraid. In any case, he would” throw her out, which at this point in her life might amount to the same thing.”
    â€œSurely there was a prenuptial agreement,” Sister Brody said. She was a practical person.
    â€œYes. She knows she signed some sort of agreement, but she doesn’t know what she signed, nor was she represented by an attorney. She’s not very bright, Sister, and don’t lecture me on feminism. She is simply not very bright. My guess is that the premarital agreement gave her nothing.”
    â€œI can’t imagine that any lawyer who isn’t completely a scoundrel would agree to draw up anything like that.”
    â€œLawyers are like other people, and there are scoundrels, and money will buy advice for sale.”
    â€œThen what hope is there for Mrs. Castle?”
    â€œI don’t know. That’s why I depend on your very perceptive and keen intelligence.”
    â€œOr else you’re using me as a cop-out. Which is it, Monsignor? If she decides that she wants to join the church, well, where do we go from there? Wreck her marriage, which is still better than sleeping in the street, or maybe get her killed by the man she’s married to? Haven’t we enough trouble? And it’s not even our parish. Just suppose that she decides to take on the church and that her husband can be talked into it. Oh, they’ll love that at St. Michael’s, taking the wife of a Back Country millionaire and dragging her off to money-strapped St. Matthew’s—another parish.”
    â€œSister, a practical turn of mind is one thing, but you don’t turn away a human being pleading for help.”
    â€œPlease don’t lecture me, Monsignor. I will talk to her and we’ll see. But I will not push her into the church, and I will ask her to consider the consequences to her personal life.”
    The monsignor did not reply to that, thinking that in Sister Brody, he might well have taken on more than he had bargained for.

Six
    R ichard Bush Castle was related neither to the Bush who had been president some years back nor to the family that had once owned Bush-Holley House, a small period museum in Greenwich, built some two centuries ago by a Jew who liked the notion of living in Greenwich. Castle’s family had put no middle name on his birth certificate, so he simply appropriated the name “Bush,” an action legal in Connecticut. He felt that it gave him style and importance.
    In the normal course of things, he certainly would never have asked Monsignor Donovan to dinner. He disliked Catholics, with passion and undisguised contempt. As he had put it once to Sally, “They’re worse than Jews. They all belong body and soul to the Vatican, and their endgame is to take over!” His own religious roots, if they could be called that, were small-town Baptist, but he had discarded that in years past, leaving them in the Georgia village where he had been born. He was shrewd, cunning without foresight, but bright enough to get through Georgetown University, to get a job in government, and to work himself up to a spot in the Reagan administration as Assistant Secretary for Latin American Affairs.
    He moved to Greenwich in 1982, abandoned the government—because there was no money in it—and became an investment banker and money trader. During the nineties, he blossomed in the financial world.
    Thus, when Sally asked a question that would have evoked a storm of anger from him at another time—whether she could invite Monsignor Donovan to the dinner party—he agreed, deciding that it was better to know why a monsignor might desire to see him than to wonder how much anyone in Greenwich knew about certain incidents during his time with the