Vow of Silence Page 7

  ‘I know, Reverend Mother, and I’m sure she will be the greatest help, but I don’t want the children to get the impression that I’m shielded by her skirts so to speak. I hope to establish my authority on its own merits.’

  ‘You sound as if you were going forth to do battle instead of teaching at a very obscure little school.’

  The smile and voice were ice cream.

  ‘If I were more confident then I’d take Sister David along with me,’ Sister Joan confessed.

  ‘I can see that you seek always to challenge yourself.’ The voice and smile were warmer. ‘Run along then, Sister. Or ride along, should I say?’

  The slim hand was raised and the Prioress turned, graceful in her purple habit, to speak to Sister Katherine.

  Saddling Lilith Sister Joan felt the small surge of independence she had felt the day before. She frowned slightly, reminding herself that she was still under strict obedience, that if there was ever conflict between her teaching and the religious life the latter must be served first.

  Nevertheless she led Lilith out of the stable with a jaunty step. Sister Hilaria was just crossing the yard, a neat little pile of black books in her hands. Sister Joan recognised the books. Every novice was given one in which a daily examination of conscience had to be written down and shown every week to the Novice Mistress. Her own, she recalled, had been crammed with trivialities with the real struggles left out.

  ‘Good morning, Sister!’ She raised her voice slightly.

  Sister Hilaria paused, looking round vaguely, then said as her gaze lighted on the other, ‘Were you the one who said Good morning?’

  ‘No, it was the horse,’ Sister Joan said flippantly.

  ‘With Lilith that would not surprise me.’ Sister Hilaria smiled. ‘Such a pity she is not a donkey.’

  ‘I beg your pardon, Sister?’

  ‘If she could speak,’ Sister Hilaria said, coming forward to stroke the velvety nose, ‘she might tell us many things, eh, Sister Joan?’

  ‘Might she?’ Sister Joan echoed in bewilderment.

  Sister Hilaria’s slightly prominent grey eyes turned towards her. Her features were fine-drawn and delicate, the hands that now took a firmer grasp of the books surprisingly large.

  ‘You are going to teach in the school this morning?’ she asked.

  ‘This morning and every morning, provided any of the pupils turn up,’ Sister Joan said cheerfully. ‘Sister, I really ought not to ask but is Veronica Stirling settling down? I travelled down with her on Saturday.’

  ‘Oh, she will be quite perfect,’ Sister Hilaria said, a smile touching her mouth. ‘Not as perfect as Sister Magdalen, of course, but one cannot hope to find two Magdalens in one convent.’

  ‘But she left, didn’t she?’ Sister Joan said.

  ‘I wish I knew why,’ Sister Hilaria said wistfully. ‘If she had come to me and confided any problems she had – but she never seemed to have any problems. She was so happy, so full of enthusiasm. Mother Emmanuel says that occasionally a novice will take it into her head to leave, but Sister Magdalen gave no indication, none at all. You have not been to the Novitiate here, of course, since it is out of bounds to the professed, but it is a most comfortable nest for my four little chicks.’

  ‘It isn’t part of the main house?’

  ‘There is a small dower cottage at the other side of the old tennis court,’ Sister Hilaria told her. ‘We use that as the Novitiate. Mother Emmanuel and I have our sleeping-quarters there, but really they are all good girls, requiring little supervision. I was on my way somewhere?’

  ‘With the Conscience books,’ Sister Joan reminded her.

  ‘Ah, yes, so I was,’ Sister Hilaria said, looking at the small pile of books as if she had never seen them before and couldn’t imagine why she was carrying them. ‘Good morning, Sister Joan. If I don’t hurry Mother Emmanuel will scold.’

  But Sister Hilaria as Novice Mistress ranked ahead of a former prioress, Sister Joan thought, mounting up thoughtfully. It might be a case of a woman of strong character who dominated a weaker character, but it was Sister Hilaria whom the Prioress had appointed as Novice Mistress.

  ‘Any nun who sets out to train novices must combine firmness with common sense and find exactly the right balance between devotion and practicalities,’ Reverend Mother Agnes had said.

  Judged by those criteria Sister Hilaria was surely wildly unsuitable. Sister Joan reminded herself sharply that the other probably had hidden qualities that fitted her for the task and rode round to the front of the building with her mind fixed firmly on the morning ahead.

  Unlocking the school door she drew a deep breath and consciously straightened her back. The neat fob watch pinned to the bodice of her habit informed her that it was fifteen minutes to nine. She wondered how many parents bustling their children off to school realised that the teacher had already been up four hours.

  There was a large, old-fashioned bell hanging in the porch. She stepped out and rang it vigorously. A few minutes later a pick-up truck disgorged half a dozen chattering children. The driver, a man in overalls with straw-coloured hair, was obviously one of the fathers taking his turn in the roster. The truck was followed by a pony trap out of which tumbled three children whose neckerchiefs and hoop rings betokened the Romany.

  As two other children mounted on the same pony came trotting down the track she began to anticipate a full attendance. No doubt they had come to have a look at the new teacher, and it depended on the impression she made as to how many returned regularly. It was, she thought, ushering in one pigtailed child, a challenge.

  By the time break came she was beginning to wonder why she had ever decided to teach in the first place. Probably because she wasn’t gifted enough to make a living from her art. The twelve children who had finally drifted in were split into two distinct camps. There were the farm children, their accents so broad that she had difficulty in understanding everything they said, who sat stolidly and listened without saying very much, and there was the smaller, more vociferous, group of gypsy and travelling children who were more lively but also more restless, constantly interrupting, shoving one another, their eyes bright as squirrels.

  At least she had made some kind of start, she consoled herself, watching them run out to play, both groups still separate. She had placed the desks in a wide semicircle and had spent most of the time on her feet instead of on the high chair. She had taken the names for the register, found out the standards they had attained in reading, writing and counting, and now silently blessed Sister Margaret who had given her a flask of coffee and a couple of apples at breakfast time.

  She took them out into the fresh air, perching herself on the low wall as she munched and drank. The children, she hoped, would come back when she rang the bell again. For the moment she enjoyed the peace.

  A young man was striding along the track. A hiker, she guessed, noting the thick-soled boots, the windcheater and backpack. Certainly not handsome, she thought as he came within view, but athletic and tough with wind-roughened fair skin and reddish hair that curled defiantly despite the aggressively short cut. He caught sight of her, hesitated, then veered in her direction.

  ‘Good morning.’

  His tone threw doubt on the statement. It was belligerent and the blue eyes meeting hers were wary.

  ‘Good morning.’ She answered him pleasantly. ‘It’s a fine day for walking if the rain holds off.’

  ‘Been a bad month for rain,’ he agreed. ‘You’re from the convent?’

  ‘From the Daughters of Compassion, yes. You’re from round here?’ She had heard the flat vowels of Derbyshire in his accent and so gave him a questioning look.

  ‘Never been here before,’ he said tersely. ‘I’ve come to see Brenda.’

  ‘Brenda?’ In the split second she asked the question she saw the box of paints in the big desk, the name pasted inside the lid. ‘Do you mean Brenda Williams?’

  ‘You’ll know her then?’

  ‘No, I
don’t think so. Would you be referring to Sister Magdalen?’

  ‘Magdalen.’ He snorted as he let the backpack slide to the ground. ‘Magdalen, if you please! What’s wrong with Brenda?’

  ‘I don’t think there has ever been a saint called Brenda,’ she said pacifically. ‘Nuns always take the name of a saint unless they are fortunate enough to have been christened with such a name already. I was already Joan when I entered the religious life.’

  ‘Do you know Brenda?’ he broke in with scant regard for politeness.

  ‘I’m new here so I never met her, Mr –?’

  ‘Johnny Russell,’ he said abruptly, not holding out his hand. ‘I’ve come down to see Brenda and I’m not leaving until I have seen her.’

  ‘But she left three months ago, if you are talking about Sister Magdalen,’ Sister Joan said.

  ‘Left? Transferred to another convent you mean?’

  ‘She left the Order. Novices can leave whenever they choose provided they give one month’s notice.’

  She wondered suddenly if Sister Magdalen had done that.

  ‘That’s allowed?’ He looked disbelieving.

  ‘Nuns aren’t kept against their will, I do assure you,’ Sister Joan told him. ‘The keys are on our side of the doors. Look, I have to ring the bell and get the children inside again. Classes finish at twelve thirty, so if you can wait until then –?’

  ‘I’ll not be persuaded to change my mind,’ he said stubbornly, ‘and what’s to stop you telephoning the convent and having her hidden away before I can get there?’

  ‘I can see that you’re not a Catholic,’ she said wryly. ‘Only a non-Catholic would have such mediaeval notions. There isn’t a telephone here, Mr Russell. Perhaps you’d like to come in and check before I ring the bell? Or perhaps you’d like to ring the bell yourself in case there is some secret signal related to the spiriting away of nuns when young men come calling?’

  He had the grace to blush and grin, immediately looking more pleasant.

  ‘I’ll wait,’ he said, and strode off, trailing his backpack over the grass.

  Ringing the bell she put Sister Magdalen out of her mind with some difficulty and saw with relief that the children were returning.

  For the remaining hour and a quarter she devoted time to getting to know her pupils a little better by encouraging them to stand up in turn and tell her something about themselves. Now that she was becoming accustomed to the accents the children themselves seemed less intimidating. She was relieved to make the acquaintance of the child whose drawing on the wall had obliterated the male figure and discover that Daddy had merely taken off with a local barmaid, leaving very little grief behind. Conscientiously she waited until exactly the half-hour before dismissing them and was inclined to regard the morning as not entirely a failure when one of the travelling children fixed her with soulful dark eyes and announced,

  ‘You’m none so bad, Sister Joan. We’m comin’ again tomorrow.’

  The last of them had barely scampered off towards the approaching pick-up truck when Johnny Russell uncoiled himself from the patch of bracken and marched towards her, the light of renewed battle in his eyes.

  ‘Come into the schoolroom and we can talk,’ she invited. ‘I take it that you’ve come to see Brenda Williams who took the name Magdalen?’

  ‘If you don’t know her how come you knew her surname?’ he asked suspiciously.

  ‘Is this her box of paints?’ She produced it.

  ‘She loved painting,’ he said, lifting the lid. ‘Yes, that’s her printing. What’s it doing here?’

  ‘Well, I’m making an assumption,’ Sister Joan said cautiously, ‘but nuns don’t have personal possessions, not in theory anyway. Novices are certainly not allowed to retain any personal possessions so she probably handed this in and someone thought it would come in handy at the school. I’ve only been here a couple of days myself so I’m guessing.’

  ‘You said she’d left.’

  ‘Three months ago.’

  ‘That’s not possible,’ he said flatly. ‘You’re just saying that, to keep me from seeing her.’

  ‘Mr Russell, this may come as a bitter disappointment to you,’ Sister Joan said in exasperation, ‘but we have quite sufficient to occupy our minds with the sisters who stay without having to resort to melodramatic devices to keep the ones who want to leave. As far as I know the novice Sister Magdalen left the Order in February.’

  ‘But she’d have come home, back to Matlock,’ he said blankly.

  ‘She didn’t?’

  ‘No, she didn’t.’ He sat down abruptly on one of the small desks, scratching his mop of reddish curls. ‘Her mum and dad think she’s still here. They don’t even know I’ve come.’

  ‘I take it that you were her boyfriend?’ Sister Joan sat down too.

  ‘Yes, I was, not that there was ever any funny business, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘I know what you mean. Go on.’

  ‘We live in the same street, went to the same school. Her family’s Catholic and mine isn’t, but that never mattered much. I wouldn’t have minded getting wedded in church and having the children brought up as Catholics, not that we were ever actually engaged, but I made it clear what I wanted and I respected her, Sister Joan.’

  ‘I’m sure you did,’ she said gently.

  ‘So it makes no sense. It never did make any sense.’

  ‘Her deciding to become a nun, you mean?’

  ‘After she left school she did a year of Secretarial College,’ he told her. ‘And then she came home and it was all different. She was different. She’d got it into her head that she wanted to be a nun. She’d read about some woman, Marie something or other.’

  ‘Marie van Lowen, the Dutch woman who founded our Order. She died in Dachau.’

  ‘I told her it was a crazy idea and she’d hate it, but she wouldn’t listen. She was full of bullshit – oh, begging your pardon.’

  ‘Granted. Go on.’

  ‘That’s it,’ he said simply. ‘She insisted and I lost my temper, and she came down here to the convent. That was last September. She never wrote to me or to her parents.’

  ‘For the first year a novice is in strict seclusion.’

  ‘She said something about that before she left. Anyway I tried to forget her, but the truth is that I can’t. I can’t forget her and I want to see her one more time to give her the chance to say she made a daft mistake.’

  ‘There are four novices here at the moment,’ Sister Joan told him. ‘We are not a large Order like the Benedictines or the Sisters of Mercy. In fact our organisation is slightly different from theirs. We have no Mother General for example. Each Prioress is responsible for her own House of which there are three in England, two in Holland, one in France, and two overseas in the mission field. There is co-operation between the various Houses, of course, a certain amount of movement within the Order to keep the numbers correct, which is why I came to replace a sister – two sisters who died; and a new novice, Sister Veronica, came to take the place of Sister Magdalen who left in February.’

  ‘Then why didn’t she go home?’ he said.

  ‘Would her parents have been angry at her leaving?’

  He shook his head. ‘Mr and Mrs Williams are good Catholics,’ he said, ‘but they didn’t really want to let her go into the convent. They always approved of me as a boyfriend.’

  ‘How old are you?’ Sister Joan asked gently.

  ‘Twenty-one, I was in a higher class at school than Brenda. I’m working in my dad’s shop now. Well, not at this precise time – I’m on a walking-tour in the Lake District.’

  ‘I think you went adrift somewhere or other,’ she said lightly but his face remained sombre.

  ‘She’d have gone home,’ he said. ‘I know she would.’

  ‘Mr Russell – look, may I call you Johnny? Would you be willing to trust me for a day or two?’

  ‘Why?’ he asked bluntly.

  ‘Because I’m asking you t
o trust me,’ she said simply. ‘I’m new here as I told you, but I’m – perturbed about certain things that have been going on around here. One of the old nuns who died recently was worried too.’

  ‘What things?’ he said, still suspicious.

  Sister Joan hesitated, aware that gossip about the internal affairs of any religious Order was undesirable.

  ‘When a novice leaves,’ she said finally, ‘she must give one month’s notice. During that time she must search her heart and conscience, talk over everything with the Novice Mistress or the Prioress because once she does leave she is not allowed to return to the Daughters of Compassion though she may decide to enter one of the other Orders. When she does leave she is given a ticket to wherever she chooses to go, and the money – we call it dowry – that she brought with her. Then her original clothes are returned to her and she leaves quietly, without seeing any of the other sisters. From what I have gathered Sister Magdalen was as happy as a lark. Her Novice Mistress was astonished when she left.’

  ‘Perhaps the Novice Mistress is lying?’ Johnny suggested.

  ‘Sister Hilaria is a very holy nun,’ Sister Joan said severely. ‘She is something of a mystic. No, she was not lying.’

  ‘Perhaps Brenda ran away?’

  ‘But after giving a month’s notice she could have left anyway. Was she the kind of girl who was apt to run away?’

  ‘Brenda was a sensible girl,’ Johnny said firmly. ‘The only stupid thing she ever did was to decide to become a nun, and she said she’d thought about that for quite a long time while she was away at Secretarial College.’

  ‘Johnny, is it possible that she met someone else while she was at college?’

  ‘No,’ he said simply. ‘She was a straightforward girl. If she’d met someone else then she’d have told me about him. I wouldn’t have liked it but I’d have put up with it. No, there wasn’t anyone else.’

  ‘Have you enough money to stay in the district for a few days?’ Sister Joan asked.

  He nodded.

  ‘I want to make some discreet enquiries before doing anything further,’ she said, wondering what on earth to do if her enquiries were fruitless. ‘Perhaps you could book in at one of the local inns.’