“What happened to her?”
        “She died of the consumption.”
        Suddenly, Emma felt guilty, but now that she'd asked for his sad secret, there was nothing she could do but listen.
         “It was so bad at the end, I couldn't watch,” he said. “After she died, I stayed on for a while. The war was over, and most of my shipmates had gone home. The ones who stayed found their way to the nearest bar, but I toured the churches. Each one was like a museum, filled with famous pictures of saints.”
        Emma recalled her mother's holy cards. She brought them out on nights when her father worked an extra shift, and her mother stayed up late, drinking tea and coffee in bed to stay awake until he returned safely. Sifting through the pictures of saints, her mother recounted the lives of the young, female martyrs for Emma, praising their ethereal beauty, their vows of chastity, their painful austerities.
         “Saint Rose of Lima rubbed her face with pepper to hide her beauty,” her mother said. “When someone noticed the shapeliness of her fingers, she rubbed her hands with lime. It was so painful she couldn't dress herself for a month.”
        When her mother reached the picture of Saint Teresa in Ecstasy, Emma studied the saint's schoolgirl face tilted upward, her eyes rolled back, mouth agape. An angel, more beautiful boy than a vision, grasped a fold of her veil, poised his fire-tipped arrow above her heart. On the back of the holy card, Emma read about Teresa's spiritual marriage with Christ, the angels piercing her heart, and how the sweetness of her excessive pain surpassed all desire to be rid of it.
         “That one was always having the ecstasies,” her mother said.
         “What is an ecstasy?” Emma asked.
         Her mother quickly slipped the card to the bottom of the stack. “Our bodies are like overcoats for the soul,” she said. “Until you are married, you must never let a man touch or kiss you anywhere but on the cheek or the hand. If you find yourself alone with a man, pretend that you are with Jesus.”
        Caleb's fire was dying, but she could feel him beside her, see the shape of his long and elegant fingers laced across his chest as he looked up through the canopy of trees into the clear night sky. Alone with him, she had to remind herself that he was a regular man, not Jesus, and that she could allow him to touch her anywhere he wanted. She imagined him unraveling her chestnut hair from its long braid, finger combing it down to her waist. She felt a pleasing ache travel down through her chest and stomach, and she wondered if this were the beginning of a pain that could be so sweet she'd never want it to end.
        “I wish I could have seen some of those churches with you,” she said quietly.

                                5