Saint (Priest Book 3) by Sierra Simone

Author:Sierra Simone [Simone, Sierra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-09-06T18:30:00+00:00

33

Somewhere after Sens, our train car empties out nearly completely, so that it’s just Elijah and me sitting across a table from each other, and a young woman fast asleep at the end of the car.

We’d had a fairly easy morning, if an early one. The brothers had already been awake for vigils when it was time for us to leave and so had given us all warm, friendly handshakes as we piled into the Renault with Brother Xavier at the helm. He’d even spoken a little—a very little—as we drove, asking how we’d enjoyed our stay and the beer.

I had joked that we’d be piping his spring water into Kansas, and he’d laughed, and then he’d told us a little about the French abbey we were visiting and the honey beer they brewed there. Apparently, it had been rated one of the best beers in the world, but they refused to make more of it than they needed to pay for their needs. And so with a very constrained supply, the demand for their beer was, in a word, nutballs.

The monks only sold it at the gates of the abbey, never to nearby liquor stores or bars, and purchasers were limited to one case at a time. Orders were only opened up once every six weeks, and the orders had to be placed over the phone, like it was the olden times or something.

The phone!

There had been instances of beer enthusiasts enduring entire spiritual retreats just to drink the beer; twice in the last five years, the offsite bottling facility had been robbed not of equipment but of the brew itself. It was the rarest beer in the world, and on the beer bucket list of thousands.

Brother Xavier confessed he was jealous since he’d never had a chance to drink the Our Lady of the Fountains beer himself. We promised to smuggle him a bottle if we could, and he thanked us profusely, shaking our hands as we decanted ourselves out of the Renault and got our things.

It was a pleasant farewell to what had been a pleasant stay, but as we’d boarded the train and found places for our suitcases, Elijah had said, perceptively, “Semois isn’t the one for you, is it?” and I’d answered with a reluctant nod.

Semois had been lovely: the beer was good, and the faith more than evident from all the brothers there. But there was no denying it was the mid-priced gray sedan of abbeys. An abbey too decent and well-engineered to say no to, but not the kind of thing to excite the heart. And I might as well stay at Mount Sergius with the people I already loved and my big hill and my creek if I wasn’t going to fall in love with anywhere else.

Anyway, from Luxembourg to Paris we went—me napping the whole way—and then we changed trains and headed south.

And now it was full daylight, and I could see farm fields and distant hills and dark hazes of small forests in the distance.

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