by Mary Stewart
Jenny said, directly: ‘Supposing she had mentioned me, and asked you – you and Doña Francisca – to write, and you had neglected to do so. Supposing—’
But Celeste, flushing scarlet, interrupted her with patent indignation.
‘But she did not tell us! I have told you, mademoiselle – she did not! What you’re suggesting is wicked! Monstrous!’
‘No,’ said Jennifer evenly, ‘not wicked. Merely negligent. Enough to make you as reluctant as you apparently are to answer questions. What are you frightened of, Celeste?’
‘I? Frightened? That is absurd, mademoiselle!’ And indeed she looked, now, not frightened so much as angry. ‘Why should I be afraid of you?’
‘I wondered about that. And you weren’t at first. It was only when I asked you why you’d gone to get the gentians.’
The girl’s eyes fell, once again her face went blank. She said nothing.
‘Was it because you knew you’d made a mistake?’
The dark eyes lifted. ‘Mistake? I don’t understand. What sort of mistake?’
‘Never mind. But why should you mind my asking you about them?’
‘I don’t,’ said Celeste, and, surprisingly, smiled.
‘Very well,’ said Jennifer. ‘Then tell me this – and I think I shall know if it’s the truth: why did you take my cousin gentians?’
Celeste stared, perplexed. ‘I told you. I was – I was fond of her.’
‘Yes, I know. But why gentians?’
‘She liked them.’
‘Did she say so?’
Bewilderment showed still in the girl’s eyes, with, behind it, a kind of relief. As if, thought Jennifer, these, at least, were easy questions to answer.
‘Yes.’
‘What did she say?’
Celeste lifted her hands a little, helplessly.
‘Mademoiselle, I do not understand.’
Jennifer was patient. ‘When she said she liked the gentians, what did she say? Did you bring them to her, and did she just say thank you, and how pretty they were, or what? Try to remember for me, Celeste; after all, she was my cousin, and any little thing she said – I could bring gentians too, tomorrow …’
Celeste, being too young and too accustomed to the symbolic trappings of everyday convent life to see the sentimental absurdity of this, gave Jennifer a still bewildered but softer glance, and knitted her brows. Jennifer waited, her throat suddenly constricted with excitement.
‘No,’ said the girl at length, ‘it was not like that. I remember how I got the idea that they were her favourite flowers. It was soon after she came. I had brought in a big bunch of flowers – all sorts – and I was putting them beside her bed. She lay watching me, and then she put out her hand – oh, so slowly’ – her own hand moved out in a remembered gesture – ‘and touched the gentians. She said, “The blue ones, Celeste, what are they?” I said gentians. She said, “They are so beautiful. I never saw such a blue. Put them closer where I can see them.” So after that I brought them every day.’
‘Thank you,’ said Jennifer, on a long breath, and Celeste, seeing the look in her face, drew back with some of her former alarm.
‘Is that all, mademoiselle?’
‘That’s all,’ said Jennifer, and laughed, an excited, breathless little laugh. ‘And please forgive me for having suggested that you were lying before!’
‘It is nothing. And now, mademoiselle, if you’ll excuse me—’
‘Of course. You have to see Doña Francisca, haven’t you?’ Jennifer fought hard to keep her voice even. ‘Would you be good enough to show me the way to the Reverend Mother’s room, please?’
‘I – yes, of course.’ And Celeste, with a return of her old nervousness, threw Jennifer a strangely wary look as she passed her to lead the way out of the chapel.
Jennifer, following her hurrying guide across the hall and up the wide staircase, tried vainly to compose her churning thoughts into some semblance of order. What she had just listened to had certainly been the truth: the story had begun to hang together, even if, in so doing, it became more deeply a mystery. The dying woman had actually asserted that she had no relatives – and the dying woman had not been colour-blind.
She had not, in sober fact, been Gillian Lamartine.
And where, thought Jennifer, jubilant and desperate at once, as Celeste led her into the light of the upper corridor – where do we go from here? Where, in God’s name, do we go from here?
For the second time that day she met the bright brown gaze of St. Anthony, staring at her over his cactus-bristle of candles. A lot of candles, a lot of answered prayers …
Rejoice with me, for I have found that which was lost.
She put out a hand, and lightly touched one of the wreaths of everlastings on the saint’s pedestal, then turned as her guide stopped in front of the nearest door and raised a hand to knock.
‘No!’ said Jennifer sharply. The girl stopped, her hand still raised.
Jennifer’s face was flushed and her eyes were dark with annoyance. ‘I asked you to take me to the Mother Superior. That’s not her room, is it?’
‘Why, I—’
‘That’s Doña Francisca’s room, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. I only thought—’
Jennifer’s eyes and voice were cold. Mrs. Silver would have had to look twice to recognize her gentle daughter. She said: ‘You were asked to take me to the Mother Superior. Kindly do so at once.’
Celeste’s hand fell to her side. With lowered eyes she sidled past Jennifer and led her to the door at the far end of the corridor.
‘This is the Reverend Mother’s room, mademoiselle.’
‘Thank you.’ As the girl stood aside, Jennifer knocked. There was a gentle ‘Come in.’
As she obeyed, she had a confused impression, behind her, of Celeste whisking away, back down the corridor. The Reverend Mother’s door closed behind her. Further down the corridor, like a soft echo, another door shut, too.
8
Blues
The first thing that met Jennifer, as she advanced into the Mother Superior’s room, was the sunlight. Through the tall undraped window it poured, and beat back in tangible waves of bright heat from the cream-washed walls and ceiling and from the white boarded floor, where a single narrow rug emphasized the fact that here, too, the rule of Spartan poverty was upheld. The two straight chairs, the plain wood table, the uncarved faldstool, bare even of a kneeling-pad, bore this out. There was nothing to mitigate the shining bareness but one plaque on the wall, a plate-shaped affair in high relief depicting the Virgin and Child. Remembering the chapel, Jennifer glanced at this with interest as she entered, then with surprise; it was a crude affair of the cheapest, a Brummagem Della Robbia, bought probably in Lourdes.
‘Come in.’ The gentle voice spoke again from the window-seat, where, full in the sun, steeping in its rays, sat a very old nun. She did not turn her head, but gestured with one soft old hand towards a chair.
Jennifer took the chair. ‘I am Miss Silver, Madame Lamartine’s cousin. I came up to see my cousin, and was told that she had died some days ago.’
This time the old nun did turn towards her. Against the brilliant light Jennifer could not see her at all clearly, but she got the impression of a round, pale old face, softly wrinkled with age like a hand that has been in soapy water. The wrinkles were not so much the lines etched by character, as a gentle blurring of the features. The forehead under its black coif was quite smooth, and it was certain that the brows had not frowned for a very long time. The expression of the faded eyes could not be seen, but the line of the mouth was sweet.
‘I heard that you had come, mademoiselle. I was sorry that you had to find such news awaiting you. It was a sad affair: it is always a sad thing for the friends of one who dies so young.’ She smiled. ‘It is not easy, I know, to regard death as a beginning rather than an end.’
‘No.’
‘You have seen your cousin’s grave, child?’
‘Yes,
ma mère.’ She paused, wondering just how to begin asking her questions, shaken in spite of herself by the tranquil normality of the old woman’s demeanour. Suspicion and uneasiness seemed very far away … Age lived with kindness in this bare and pleasant room.
Mistaking the reason for her silence, the old Prioress began to talk, with gentleness but without sentiment, in a way which would have brought comfort to Jennifer had she felt herself truly bereaved, but which under the circumstances made it merely more difficult to begin her inquisition.
At length she approached the subject in what she felt to be a sufficiently roundabout way.
‘I talked to Doña Francisca and Sister Louisa today,’ she said, ‘and I understand that my cousin had papers …’
‘Certainly.’ The Reverend Mother spoke readily. ‘You must take them, of course. She managed to bring them with her, in a handbag that she tied to her wrist. Doña Francisca took charge of the baggage that was brought up later from the car, but I have the papers here.’
She rose and pulled open a drawer beside her, groped in it for a moment, then turned with a flat leather handbag in her hand. This she gave to Jennifer.
‘This is just as she brought it, my child. Take it with you. It’s yours now.’
‘Thank you.’ Jennifer sat clutching the bag, her fingers a little unsteady on the clasp. ‘Do you mind if I open it, ma mère?’
‘Of course not. Do as you wish,’ and the Prioress, back in her seat by the window, bent her head over a rosary she was fingering, as if to give her guest an illusion of privacy. Jennifer thrust hasty fingers into the bag, pulling out its contents and laying them one by one on her lap … comb, powder, mirror, a Lancôme lipstick, keys, a roll of bus-tickets, a purse stuffed full of paper money, and a thick envelope similarly full. Jennifer counted it, over a hundred thousand francs – a hundred pounds or so. She frowned at the bills. Yes, Gillian might easily have closed her banking account, and taken out what remained of her savings; she had half-intended to stay here for ever, after all.
She turned over the envelope. Across the top corner was the printed sign of a Bordeaux bank, and the envelope was addressed, in a flowing French hand, to ‘Madame Lamartine, 135 R. de la Pompe, Bordeaux’. The little sheaf of identification papers bore the same legend.
There was nothing else in the bag.
She began, slowly, to put the things back. The Prioress had turned towards her, her fingers stilled. She said now, gently:
‘There is something more, isn’t there, child? It isn’t only your cousin’s death that is upsetting you? What else, child? Can you tell me?’
Jennifer raised her head, blinking a little into the level glare of the late-afternoon sun.
‘Yes, there is something more.’
‘Will you tell me what it is?’
‘Ma mère—’ She took a deep breath. ‘What I’m going to say must seem very queer to you, but I hope you will forgive me, and listen.’
‘I am listening.’
So Jennifer told her. Not of her suspicions that Doña Francisca and Celeste might know more than they said, but of the difficulty she herself had in believing that the woman buried in the convent yard was Gillian; of the strange fact that, even in delirium, the dead woman had apparently never lapsed into English, nor spoken once of England or of her own family.
‘But you,’ said Jennifer at length, ‘you would visit her yourself, of course. Was she conscious when you saw her? Did she really say nothing?’
‘To me, nothing. When I was told that you had come this afternoon, I was shocked and grieved that you should find such news awaiting you …’ She hesitated, then said quietly: ‘I was sorry, too, that you were not brought straight to me. But—’ She appeared to hesitate once more, then reject what she had been about to say. ‘Doña Francisca was the one who was with your cousin most of the time, after all. Yes, mademoiselle, I was shocked, but also astounded at your coming, for nothing that your cousin said gave us to understand that she had relatives. I only hope you will forgive us for a fault we could not help committing …’
‘Of course. Because it’s as I thought! She said nothing of her relatives because she had none – this woman was not my cousin, of that I’m convinced!’
‘Mademoiselle—’
‘A moment,’ pleaded Jennifer. ‘Listen, ma mère. That is by no means the oddest thing about it …’
And she told the Prioress about the gentians, about the blue that the dead woman had recognized and loved, and that Gillian would never even have seen.
The Mother Superior listened without moving.
‘So you see,’ finished Jennifer, ‘why I’m so convinced that it was somebody else, not my cousin, who came here that night. And, if that’s the case, where on earth is my cousin?’
There was a little silence.
‘Yes,’ said the old nun at length. ‘I see. It is certainly odd. It is more than that, it is hard to believe that any mistake so serious could have been made …’
‘I know that. But you can see that I don’t feel I can let it rest there, and just go away?’
‘Yes, I see that too. But surely, mademoiselle, if you are right, and your cousin is alive, why does she not get into touch with you? Or with us? You say she knew you were coming here?’
‘Yes, she knew. But something may have happened to her, and that’s what’s worrying me.’
‘But what can have happened to her? And why, if the dead girl was not Madame Lamartine, did she permit us to address her so, more, why did she carry Madame Lamartine’s papers?’
‘I can’t imagine, but—’
‘That car that crashed that night was also your cousin’s car.’
Jennifer said nothing.
‘And if your suspicions are true,’ went on the Prioress, quietly, inexorably, ‘we must not only ask “where now is Madame Lamartine?” but also “who, then, was the woman who died?” ’
Another pause.
‘This affair of the gentians,’ said the old nun at length. ‘It is this that really decides you, isn’t it?’
‘I think so. Yes, it is.’
The Mother Superior nodded. ‘This way you could identify your cousin beyond mistake?’
‘Only negatively. I mean, if the woman who died wasn’t colour-blind, she couldn’t have been Gillian. But it could almost be a positive identification too; women are very rarely colour-blind, and the blue-yellow kind is very rare indeed.’ She broke off suddenly, her hand to her head. ‘What a fool I’ve been! Talking of positive identification, and all the time I’ve never tried the obvious thing! I was thinking about other things when I talked to Celeste, but I should have thought of it straight away.’
‘And that thing?’ queried the nun gently.
‘What she looked like!’ cried Jennifer triumphantly. ‘This girl who died – what did she look like?’
The old nun sat for a moment, quietly, while the little smile touched her lips again. ‘My child, I can’t tell you. I never saw her. Nobody saw her but Doña Francisca and Celeste.’
Jennifer stared at her in bewilderment. ‘Nobody saw her? But I thought you said you visited her.’
‘I did.’
‘Then what do you mean?’
‘I mean,’ said the Reverend Mother, ‘that I am blind, my child.’
And, with her back to the mocking glare of the sun, she smiled again, a little wistfully.
‘I – I’m sorry,’ said Jennifer lamely.
The old nun smiled. ‘There’s no need. I often think others are more conscious of my blindness than I am myself.’ Then she sat up and her voice took on the briskness of authority. ‘It seems to me, child, that the least we can do is to offer you our hospitality. I am, myself, certain that an error such as you are imagining is too bizarre to be at all likely … I’m sorry, for your sake, but I am sure that your cousin is dead. When we have time to examine the facts a little more calmly, we shall without doubt find a simple explanation for everything.’
Jennifer said not
hing. Her hands were clasped together tightly in her lap, and she hardly heard the rest of what the nun was saying. To stay actually in the convent … with infinite opportunities to watch, to inquire, to check with innocent bystanders the statements Doña Francisca had made … this was more than she had hoped for.
The Prioress was still speaking. ‘But you must make what inquiries you think fit, and the place you will obviously wish to start from is here. If you will come to us—’
‘You’re very good. But I feel that I should be abusing your hospitality if I did as you suggest.’
‘It’s the least we can do. The convent is guilty – albeit through ignorance – of a fault, in letting you make this sad discovery in such a way. You must allow us to atone.’
Jenny smiled. ‘You don’t have to atone. But I’d like to come. Thank you.’
‘Then come tonight.’
‘So soon, ma mère?’
‘The sooner your mind is put to rest, the better, mademoiselle. But if you feel your hotel might make difficulties—’
‘I don’t think they will. I made it clear that my booking was provisional … My cousin had suggested I might come here, you see.’
‘Then we’ll expect you tonight, if you can manage it. If not, tomorrow. We’ll be glad to see you any time, child. Even if your inquiries only lead you back to the melancholy truth of your cousin’s death, I’m sure that our quiet community here has something to offer you in the way of comfort.’
It was time, Jennifer saw, to let her suspicions lapse into silence. ‘Thank you,’ she said, simply. ‘I’ll be glad to come. This is a beautiful place, and I imagine that if one can find peace anywhere, it is here.’
The Reverend Mother’s face lighted. ‘You feel that? I am so glad.’
‘I came through your chapel just now,’ said Jennifer. ‘It’s quite wonderful, that altar – unexpectedly so, if I may say so, for such a little community, and one so isolated.’
‘Ah, yes. The place is simple, of course, but the plain style of building is in harmony with these high valleys. It would have been a mistake to build a St. Bertrand de Comminges in the Vallée des Or ages. Here, in this stormy valley, we build sturdy white walls, and our windows have no need of coloured glass because they frame the mountains.’