Forty years ago, when the Order sent her to the mission they maintained here in the East End, Sister Theresa started scratching in the cement-hard dirt of the tenement courtyard. The heavy forged-bronze crosses that had been nailed to the front doors then were long gone—stolen some twenty years ago when a new breed of souls began moving in. Now everything had changed. The front doors themselves were made from steel, and there were bars over the dormitory windows. Those bars were the last things Sister Theresa saw each night before she fell asleep. She was as grateful for their protection as she was disheartened by the need for them.
But Sister Theresa’s garden endured. The soil beneath Gotham’s debris wasn’t dead; it had merely slept until a gentle, knowing hand awakened it. Now there were crocuses and daffodils by the dozens, with a dense mass of tulips rising behind them. The lilacs were budding with color. And the roses—Sister Theresa stepped carefully from one old cobblestone to the next, bent down and scattered the mulch with her large, knobby hands—had all survived the winter.
The rose she examined had been lifeless just yesterday, but was now showing crimson growth. It was a Peace rose, her favorite. She allowed herself the luxury of remembering the girl she had been when a young man gave her a single Peace rose with a diamond ring circling its stem. The years had eroded the pain; only the happiness was left, the warmth like the spring sunshine spilling down on the coarse black cloth of her veil.