Poor tiny little Tommy.
The world was not long for him and when he was two years old, they laid him to rest in Calvary Cemetery.
Jennie was eight then and barely understood what had happened to her brother, but Ellen found her solace in the quiet of the church, and every day she took her daughter there with her.
At first, he didn't pay much attention. Ellen's overattachment to her church was only natural; it would wear off soon enough.
But it didn't.
He found that out one night, when he reached for her in the bed and found her cold and unresponsive.
He felt for her breast inside the heavy cotton nightgown but she turned her back to him.
"You've not made your confession in months. I’ll not have ye planting another child in me."
He tried to make a joke of it. "Who wants to make a baby? All I want is a bit of lovin'."
"That's even worse, then," she said, her voice muffled by the pillow. "It's sinful and I'll share no part of that sin."
"Is that what the priests have been dunning into your ears?
To deny your husband?" She didn't answer.
He gripped her shoulder and forced her to turn toward him. "Is that it?" he asked fiercely.
"The priests have told me nothing. What I do is of me own doing.
I know the Book enough to know right from wrong.
And stop your shouting. You'll be waking Jennie in the next room."
"I’ll stop shouting," he said angrily, as the heat of her shoulder came warm into his hands and the fever rose up in him and he took her by force.
The spasm shook him and he subsided into a heavy-breathing quiet atop her, his eyes staring into hers.
She looked up at him quietly, not moving, passive as she had been all through his assault upon her.
A last shiver drained his vitals. Then she spoke.
Her voice was calm and distant and detached, as if he weren't there at all.
"Are ye all through spending your filth in me?"
He felt a cold sickness rising in his stomach. He stared at her for a moment more, then rolled off her onto his side of the bed.
"I'm all through," he said tonelessly.
She got out of the bed and knelt beside the tiny creche she had placed beneath the crucifix.
He could sense her face turning toward him in the darkness.
"I shall pray to the Virgin Mother that your seed has found no home in me," she whispered harshly.
He closed his eyes and turned his back.
This was what they'd done to her, spoiled everything between them.
A bitterness began to gall him.
He never set foot in a church again.
5.
It was quiet here in the nave of the church.
Ellen Denton, on her knees before the holy statuary, her head bowed and her beads threaded through her clasped fingers, was at peace.
There was no prayer on her lips, no disturbing thoughts in her mind – only a calm, delicious emptiness.
It permeated her whole being and closed off the world, beyond the comforting walls.
The sins of omission, which plagued her hours while she was outside these walls, were but faint distant echoes.
Little Tommy lay quiet in his grave, no reproach on his tiny rosebud lips, for her neglect during his illness.
No memories rose to torture her of her white, naked body, writhing in passion and pleasure, while her son lay dying in the same room.
It had seemed just a tiny cold, a cold such as children have so often and awaken free from in the morning.
How was she to know that while she lay there, whispering her delight into her husband's ear, a minute piece of phlegm had lodged in her son's throat, shutting off the air from his lungs?
So that, when she got up to adjust his covers, as she usually did before she closed her eyes for the night, she found him strangely cold and already blue.
How was she to know that this was to be her punishment for her own sins?
Father Hadley had tried to comfort her in her grief.
"Do not blame yourself, my child.
The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.
His will be done."
But she'd known better.
The memory of her joy in her sin was still too strong within her, though she sought to free her soul of its burden by a thousand visits to the confessional.
But all the soothing words of the priests brought no solace to her soul. Her guilt was her own and only she, herself, could expunge it.