Secret Honor (Honor Bound 3)

She had just finished repairing the tear-caused damage to her mascara when Sarita returned.

“Father is on the left veranda, Señora.”

“Thank you.”

“You are going to wear that cross, Señora?”

“Obviously, wouldn’t you say, Sarita?”

Claudia went into her bedroom, then passed through a French door to the walled private garden just outside, and then through a gate in the wall, and then walked to the veranda on the left side of the sprawling house.

The Reverend Kurt Welner, S.J., was a slim, bespectacled, fair-skinned, and elegantly tailored man of forty-four with thinning light brown hair. Claudia found him leaning against the wall. His legs were crossed, and he was holding a crystal Champagne glass by its stem.

As she approached, he raised it to his mouth and drained it. Then, stooping slightly, he set the glass on a small table beside him, took the bottle of Bodega San Felipe Extra Brut from its resting place in a silver cooler, refilled his glass, straightened up, and had another sip.

“A little early for that, isn’t it, Father?” Claudia challenged.

“My dear Claudia,” he said, smiling at her. “Certainly a good Christian like you is familiar with Saint Paul’s words in his letter to Saint Timothy? ‘Take a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine other infirmities’? And besides, we have something to celebrate. The Cardinal Archbishop has come down, if not very firmly, on the side of indulging our Anglican brothers and sisters.”

“Well, that’s good news,” she said. “When did you find out?”

“He called me to the chancellery about ten last night and told me. I decided it was too late to drive out then.”

She smiled at him.

“There are two glasses,” he said. “May I?”

“I shouldn’t,” she said.

“But you will?”

For answer she picked up the glass on the table and filled it herself. “To your amazing diplomatic skills,” she said, raising the glass. “Thank you.”

“No thanks required,” he said. “I am but a simple priest doing what he can to ease the problems of the sheep of his flock.”

She laughed.

“That’s Jorge’s cross, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Jorge’s peace offering cross,” she said. “I don’t even remember what he did, but to judge by this, it must have been something awful.”

“They were doing The Flying Dutchman at the Colón,” he said, smiling, referring to Buenos Aires’ opera house. “You gave a dinner, at which he failed to appear. He showed up at the Colón during intermission, deep in the arms of Bacchus, and took improper liberties with your person.”

“He was as drunk as an owl,” she said, now remembering, without rancor. “He’d been playing vingt-et-un at the Jockey Club. And he’d won. A lot. Enough to buy this incredibly vulgar cross!”

“Which you have chosen to wear on the day we can schedule his son’s wedding,” Welner said. “How appropriate, Claudia! Good for you!”

“Oh, Father, I wish he was here.”

“I was just thinking the same thing,” Welner said. “I think he would be delighted with this union.”

“That would make three of us,” she said. “You, me, and Jorge.”

“I think you must add the bride’s mother, the groom’s aunt, and even, believe it or not, Señor Howell to your short list. You may be right about the others, unfortunately.”

“I thought the groom’s grandfather hated all things Argentine,” she said. “You really mean that?”

“Now that he is about to become the great-grandfather of another Argentine, I think he has been reevaluating his feelings vis-à-vis all of us.”