Kit always thought that the Pope had been at her mother and father's wedding. There was this picture of him in their house—a different pope, a dead one—and the writing underneath said that Martin McMahon and Mary Helena Healy had prostrated themselves at his feet. It had never occurred to her to look for him in the wedding picture. Anyway, it was such an awful photograph. All those people in embarrassing coats and hats standing in a line. If she'd thought about it at all Kit might have assumed that the Pope had left before the picture was taken, got on the mail boat in Dun Laoghaire and gone back to Rome.

That's why it was such a shock when Mother Bernard explained that the Pope could never ever leave the Holy See; not even a war would make him leave the Vatican.

"But he went to weddings, didn't he?" Kit said.

"Only if they were in Rome." Mother Bernard knew it all.

"He was at my parents' wedding," Kit insisted.

Mother Bernard looked at the little McMahon girl, a mop of black curly hair and bright blue eyes. A great wall-climber, an organizer of much of the devilment that went on in the schoolyard, but not until now a fantasist.

"I don't think so, Katherine," the nun said, hoping to stop it there.

"But he was." Kit was stung. "They have a framed picture of him on the wall saying that he was there."

"That's the papal blessing, you eejit," said Clio. "Everyone has them . . . they're ten-a-penny."

"I'll thank you not to speak of the Holy Father in those terms, Cliona Kelly." Mother Bernard was most disapproving.

Neither Kit nor Clio listened to the deta...