Cedric is caught thinking

“I know what you’re thinking,” Father Faelan said at last, breaking the silence that had accompanied them up the stairs. “But sadly—or perhaps fortunately—it’s no surprise to me. There’s good to be found in the worst men, for those who are knowing where to look and how to call it up. I’ve been a priest for nearly forty years, Cedric, and seen many men to their deaths, but I’ve never met a truly evil man.”

This seemed a surprising statement on several grounds, but Cedric chose to challenge him on the least painful, least awkward of them.

“How old are you?” he asked dubiously.

Faelan laughed. “Grant an Irishman his part of exaggeration, Cedric. Let’s say it has been nearly thirty-​five. But I was only sixteen when I was ordained.” He winked and nudged Cedric playfully with the back of his hand. “I was exaggerating my age a wee bit even then. You won’t tell?”

“No!”

“Mind you, my conscience is clear about it. The bishop was learning of it later, and—grizzly old Irishman though he was—he merely congratulated me on my zeal. But the oldest man does get the warmest spot by the fire,” he said with another wink, “so don’t be telling the father of you. Thinks I’m older than he.”

“I think you get the warmest spot because you’re a priest,” Cedric scoffed.

“Is that it, then?” Father Faelan chuckled.

Cedric waited for him to say more, but the priest folded his hands into his sleeves and walked on in silence. Without Faelan’s buoyant humor to lift it up, Cedric’s good cheer fell, fluttering down like a leaf the moment the wind dies.

“Father?” he asked softly. “May I ask you a question?”

“Hmm?”

“When did you decide to be a priest?”

“Ach!” Faelan laughed. “I think I always knew, from when I was a wee boy. In those days,” he said grandly, “my kin, we were the poorest family in all of Ireland! And the largest, too—”

“The poorest?” Cedric asked skeptically. “Isn’t that a bit of an exaggeration?”

“Not a bit! And I was the youngest out of thirty children, Cedric, so you can imagine—”

“Thirty?” Cedric smiled. “You’re certain it wasn’t eight or ten?”

“Did I say thirty?” Faelan asked innocently. “I meant thirteen. So you can imagine, by the time the bowl got passed down to little me, there was naught left at the bottom but the chicken lips and the mutton wings.”

Cedric giggled as he tried to reassemble these strange Irish animals in his mind.

Faelan continued, “But little me soon noticed that when the priest came to dinner, ach! he was always eating his fill. And Cedric,” Faelan said ominously, “our parish priest in those days was the fattest priest in all of Ireland.”

“Was he, then?” Cedric lilted in imitation of Faelan’s accent.

“Aye, he was!” Faelan shook his head dazedly. “So fat was he, that when he was a-​coming, all our chicks and hens would go to roost, thinking the night was falling! And when he was a-​going, it took him two trips to leave!”

Cedric laughed.

“And I decided that was the life for me,” Faelan concluded with a sigh.

“But you aren’t fat now,” Cedric said after a moment’s thought.

“Hmm. Perhaps I’d already made a habit of being lean, by sixteen. But there’s more to being a priest than eating one’s fill, I’m finding.”

“Does being a priest make it easier to be less gluttonous?” Cedric asked hopefully.

Faelan snorted, but he appeared to consider the question before replying.

“I’m thinking… it’s only because I go into the homes of so many poor and hungry people.”

“It didn’t bother your parish priest back in Ireland.”

“Let us not be hasty to judge, Cedric,” Faelan said with the gentle, jerky voice of a man who was carefully choosing his words even as he pronounced them. “Perhaps my old parish priest had already made a habit of being fat by that time. But I can’t forget how poverty and hunger feel, particularly to the wee laddies who are trying to grow.”

Cedric looked down at his boots and sucked on his bottom lip. He had never been truly hungry in his life. He had never been poor. He felt strangely ashamed.

“Aside from picking out one’s clothes in the morning,” Faelan said, “I wouldn’t say being a priest makes anything easier, Cedric.”

“Father Matthew says it makes it harder,” Cedric muttered.

“Did he?” Faelan lifted his head in surprise. “Did you ask him?”

“We were talking about my father,” Cedric said. “I mean, about discipline. He said being a priest doesn’t make it make it easier to avoid wrathful thoughts. Or—”

He found he could not pronounce “lustful” before a priest. Indeed, he could not remember ever having pronounced the word to another person, though he had said a great many more vulgar things in his life, at least among boys.

“Or—thoughts about… you know.”

Immediately he felt like an idiot—what could a priest know about it? Then he remembered the many penitents whose confessions Faelan must have heard—including Cedric’s own father…

And then he remembered the penitential. He often grumbled at Colban over his supposed fascination with it, but in truth Cedric himself had not stopped thinking about it for days—and nights, too. He could feel its presence in the castle like a fire at his back everywhere he turned.

Worse, he had not even been present at its second reading, when the boys had discovered the section devoted to the sins of ladies. Cedric already had some idea of what boys could do, but his affected disinterest in the book had cost him an opportunity to pull back the veil on some of the mysteries of girls. He could only smile and nod knowingly when the boys debated whether any woman truly could or would perform some of the activities it described, or why it was a greater sin for a girl to defile herself with her hands than with a foreign object—

And did a man’s saddle count as a foreign object?

“Are you thinking about it, then?” Father Faelan asked mildly.

Cedric’s gasp came out as a squeak.

“Forgive me for interrupting your thoughts,” the priest winked. “But I haven’t lived eighty-​five years for nothing. I can tell when a boy’s considering it.”

Cedric swallowed, which only made his throat feel still more harshly dry. He knew there was one undeniable, uncontrollable means of telling when a boy was thinking about it, but he had no idea there was subtler signs. Was he sweating more than usual? Was his face strangely flushed? Or could priests somehow simply know?

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Faelan said. “But I won’t tell anyone if you don’t like. Am I wrong, though?”

Cedric whispered, “No…”

“I thought so,” Father Faelan smiled, apparently so pleased with his deduction that he could not make himself appear stern.

When it was clear that he was not about to be lectured, Cedric felt a rush of reckless courage. Perhaps Father Faelan would understand.

“I think about it all the time,” he blurted. “Well—not all the time, of course… but a lot of the time. And I don’t know what to do.”

“Hmm.” At last the priest’s brows lowered slightly in concern. “You’re a little young to be thinking about it a lot of the time, Cedric. Perhaps you worry and doubt a little too much. There’s still time for you to be a boy before you commit yourself.”

“I know…”

“I suggest you pray a bit if you’re not knowing what to do. Leave your cares and worries to the Lord for a time. But if you have any questions, you may always ask me.” He leaned his head close to Cedric’s and winked, as was his way. “I can tell you what it’s really like,” he whispered. “I don’t think Father Matthew will tell you that, bless his dear heart.”

“You… can?” Cedric whimpered, horror-​struck.

“I may be a hundred and thirty-​three, but I was a boy once, too, Cedric. I remember. Though in those days I myself was thinking of food a lot of the time,” he chuckled.

Cedric tried to smile.

“And speaking of food…” Father Faelan clapped Cedric on the back and turned him about to lead him towards the door. “Let us take a stroll past the kitchens and see what’s being offered to priests in the name of pie. Advent though it may be—God forgive us—we two have earned it today,” he sighed.