27 dicembre 1777 Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore Brother Tommaso Frascoli spends the day obsessing about the strange man he saw dropping things from the boat.
Throughout lectio divina his focus constantly wanders from his scripture studies.
What troubles him even more than being lied to is that he can't figure out where the boatman came from. Tommaso had been heading south and the stranger in the mist had come from the north. But to his knowledge there were only one or two islands within rowing distance, and he thought both were uninhabited.
Tommaso momentarily wonders if the man was an apparition. A spectre or demon of some sort, sent to challenge him. He quickly dismisses the notion, accepting – as the abbot repeatedly tells him – that he needs to avoid flights of fancy and egocentric ponderings.
The illegitimate child of a courtesan, all he knows about his family is what the abbot has told him. Both Tommaso and his sister were passed to the clergy soon after birth. She went into a nunnery, and he's been told that she ran away while still a novice. He does not know his father's name. His mother, Carmela Francesca Frascoli, had given the priests no verbal explanation, just what few soldi and denari she possessed, along with a note and small wooden box that she requested be handed to her child when he became a man. Tommaso has both items under his bed. He's never opened either of them.
It's the way he deals with his abandonment. By not thinking about such things, he can trick himself into believing the absence of a mother and father doesn't hurt. God has provided all the parental guidance he's ever needed.
Except lately. Lately he's been having doubts.
And sometimes, when the doubting becomes unbearable, it's rowing – not praying – that seems to be the only thing that takes the pain away. Rowing hard. Rowing and rowing until his lungs feel like bursting and the boat skims like a flat stone across the surface of the dark water.
Alone in his cell before evening prayers, Tommaso's heart is pumping as hard as any session in the monastery boat. And for good reason. Today is a special day.
It is his birthday.
His twenty-first.
A fitting time to face some personal demons.
He unwraps the tightly knotted string. Breaks the seal. Opens the box that his mother left for him and cannot believe his eyes.