The Sisters Mortland

by Sally Beauman

  Finn stands up. I think it’s Finn. I hear her chair scrape back. She says: Maisie, what’s wrong? Dan, stop this. Maisie isn’t well. I hear this distinctly, and at that point—though I know it’s forbidden—I reach out to touch the crystal. It flies up to meet my grasp; then it plummets. I can hear the distant sound of smashing glass.

  Before I know it, I start falling, too. I fall a very long way and land outside, in the small dark yard at the back of the cottage. I’ve landed in a curious position, with my head between my knees. Julia and Finn are fussing about somewhere, and Dan’s brought me a glass of water. I drink it down thirstily in one great, reviving swallow. My stomach gives a heave and up it comes, all that bleeding beetroot and fleshy pink blancmange.

  I feel restored immediately. It’s shaming to be sick in public, but I don’t care—I feel cleansed. Julia’s moaning in disgust, of course, and worrying about her new white dress; she keeps a safe distance, but Finn and Dan are more practical. Finn fetches a bowl of water and a cloth, and Dan cleans me up. “There you are, Maisie,” he says. “Clean as a whistle. And your color’s coming back. Always better out than in.” I’m grateful to him for being so cheerful and businesslike, but I’m worrying about the crystal. I know I smashed it. “Don’t you fret about that,” Dan whispers. “Accidents happen. Plenty more where that came from. There’s another nine in the kitchen cupboard. Gran likes to keep a good supply.”

  His old voice has returned. He gives me a hug, and I find that comforting—but I’m not certain I believe him. However many replacements Bella may have, I’m sure it’s bad luck for everyone present when a crystal gets smashed. Dan lifts me up and carries me into the kitchen to say good-bye to Bella. He’s reassuring and hearty—but he can’t meet my eyes.

  “Better call it a day, I think, Gran,” he says as we reenter, with Finn and Julia crowding in behind us. But it’s too late. There are shards of glass all over the linoleum, the teapot’s upset and smashed, but Bella is still seated at the table, and she’s spread out the tarot cards. She doesn’t look up when we enter, she’s so concentrated. She’s moving them this way and that, feverishly fast, picking them up, slapping them down, altering the arrangement. The cards are very powerful—even more powerful than the crystal: Bella’s explained this many times. I stare down at the table from my vantage point against Dan’s strong, broad shoulder. I love these cards, with their beautiful enigmatic pictures, but you have to be skilled and wise to read them. What they seem to say and what they’re actually saying can be opposite things.

  Bella’s using the Rider-Waite deck, her favorite. She’s using the Celtic Cross spread. I can see some of the Major Arcana: I see the Lovers, I see the Tower (a dangerous card). I see the Hanged Man—I’m sure it was those cards, though I was looking at them upside down. The Empress is reversed; the Tower is reinforced by—oh, calamity!—the Five of Cups. Then Bella brings her fist down, smack, on the table. She spreads her fingers, gathers up the cards, then sweeps them on the floor, all seventy-eight of them. They tumble down in a flurry of colors, spinning this way and that. When they land, they all land facedown. All of them, every single card in the pack, facedown—except for one.

  We stare at that one card in silence. I can sense that Finn and Julia are spooked. I can feel the tension in Dan. I feel odd and light and unworried. I listen to the world outside. I can hear a tractor in the distance. A child cries for its mother. My hearing’s so acute. I can hear the elms growing. I can hear the larks singing half a mile away in Acre Field.

  Finn bends down and, before Bella can stop her, reaches out to the one card that’s facing upward. “Don’t touch it—oh, Finn, don’t,” Julia whispers, but Finn ignores her. She flips the card over, so we can’t see that frightening picture anymore. Then she rises, turns back to Dan—and that look happens again. For one second, I think he’ll have to kiss her; but he doesn’t.

  Finn takes me in her arms. “Come on, Maisie,” she says gently. “You’re tired. It’s time to leave.”

  At that point, Bella recovers. I can see her making a huge effort. She cranks herself up. She becomes brisk and rings down the curtain. She stops being Ocean’s daughter. She reverts to Dan’s gran, chief meddler and general factotum at the Abbey. She says it’s time for Dan to get cracking with the brush and dustpan. She says she could do with forty winks. She says we’ve worn her out; she says that’s more than enough jiggery-pokery for today and more than enough hocus-pocus.…

  “I blame that pie,” she says, regarding me sidelong. “I had my doubts about the pie from the start.” She gives my arm a sharp pinch. And sends us home.

  There, the nuns are waiting for me: I see them clearly for the first time. Welcome, Sister, says Isabella, and she lets me hold her rosary. Five decades of jade beads, single silvers for the Paternoster, mined in the Orient and powerful with prayers.

  Made for my hand: Each bead fits snugly in that cross on my palm.

  [ four ]

  Mixed Doubles

  My hour is up.

  “Well, well, well,” Lucas says, putting down his pencil. Lucas has been listening intently to this episode in our history, but I’m not sure he’s understood it—or enjoyed it. This may be because, being an unbeliever, he doesn’t take such events seriously—a mistake, in my view. But I suspect he disliked one aspect of it. It was unwise to have mentioned that look, I feel. Sometimes I think that Lucas, for all his gifts and alleged genius, is jealous of Dan. They’re friends, but there’s an edge to that friendship that I don’t understand.

  They met up in their first Michaelmas term at Cambridge, when they had rooms on the same staircase at Trinity, and they’ve been like brothers ever since. Julia moved on the fringes of their set while she was at Newnham, but she was a year ahead of them and never as close a friend as Finn has become. Lucas and Dan adopted Finn the second she arrived at Girton. They became famous as the “gang of three,” as the “Unholy Trinity”; they became inseparable. So Lucas must be envious of Dan rather than jealous, I decide. He’s certainly envious of Dan’s glorious ancestors, and who wouldn’t be? I am.

  “Just one card remained face-up?” he says, closing the sketchbook before I can sneak a look at it. “I think I can guess which card that was.”

  “I’m sure you can,” I reply with irony. I dislike it when people underestimate my stories—it’s presumptuous, precipitate, and irritating. So I tell him that, true to the card’s prediction, my pet hamster died the following day. In fact it was two weeks later, but the cards can see a long way—years—into the future, and I feel a little adjustment is perfectly fair. In any case, as I know but suspect Lucas doesn’t, the Death card doesn’t indicate a death—or not of the obvious kind. That would be a very crude, immature, foolish reading, Finn says. The point is, we experience deaths all the time. There’s the death of love, for instance; the death of hope or innocence—and the death of the heart. It can be these kinds of death that the card indicates. Shall I tell Lucas that? I decide I won’t. Stories require symmetry and a good firm ending. “His name was Hamish, and he died in agony,” I add. (Not strictly true, either. He just keeled over. Hamsters do.)

  Lucas says that is truly extraordinary, that he has a new respect for Bella and her powers, etc., etc., but I can tell he’s only humoring me. People are always humoring me; it’s very tiresome indeed. “That’s enough for now,” he adds, glancing at his watch. “I’m going for a swim. This time tomorrow, okay?”

  “I can’t come tomorrow,” I remind him. “We’re all going to Elde. We’re going to see the Viper. It’s the annual visit. I told you. We’ll be out all day.”

  Lucas gives a shrug. He’s preoccupied by something, and besides, he’s not interested in the Viper or our family crises—money means nothing to him. “The day after, then,” he says indifferently. “Run along now, Maisie, there’s a good girl.”

  I’m told to “run along” a dozen times a day. “That’s fascinating, Maisie,” Gramps said this morning when I was explaining prime number
s to him. “Tell me later, darling. The test match will be on in a minute. Run along now—I expect Stella could do with some help in the kitchen, don’t you?”

  And he was right: Stella did need my help. Stella values my assistance; she likes to know where I am; she likes me by her side. I skinned the tomatoes for her—dip them in boiling water and watch their skins shrivel, watch them curl. I skinned eighty-seven expertly and told Stella the story of Marsyas, who was flayed alive by Apollo. Stella had a headache; she seemed anxious and tired.

  “That’s such a cruel story, Maisie,” she said, looking at her watch. “I’ll finish those, darling. It’s time you went down to the refectory. You mustn’t keep Lucas waiting. Run along.”

  Now, Lucas stands in the refectory doorway, watching me leave. I’m supposed to go straight back to the house; that is the rule. But I told Stella that Lucas would be drawing me for two hours, not one—so I have sixty minutes of freedom. Three thousand six hundred seconds—the nuns don’t approve. They shake their heads; they make tut-tutting sounds. Little girls shouldn’t lie—and to lie to their mothers… Is there no end to this rebelliousness, this wicked guile?

  I creep past them, averting my eyes. I make for the house, and then, when I’m past the cloister wall, so I’m sure Lucas can’t see me, I double back. I have a plan. This house and this garden are so ancient, they have centuries of secret routes—and that knowledge is useful on occasions like this. There is only one path to his studio, as far as Lucas knows. It is flanked either side with huge, impenetrable walls of yew, and it’s made of gravel. It leads directly from the cloister to the refectory, where it opens out into a small courtyard, also graveled. It then continues on, through the old convent gateway to the fields outside the nunnery’s enclosure. It crosses a deep ditch, where the moat once was, and descends to the valley and village below. So anyone approaching his hideout from either direction will be seen or heard—or so Lucas believes. He always keeps one ear cocked for the telltale crunch of foot-steps on gravel. Well, he won’t hear them today.

  The sisters who founded this convent were devout—so devout that they chose to renounce all contact with the outside world. But I’m not the only rebellious one. Some of their number must have rebelled, too, or been less devout than they appeared, because the nuns constructed secret entrances to their enclave—and two of those entrances, or perhaps exits, still remain. One is in the corner of the Lady Chapel, now the library, built into the paneling and leading to a flight of hidden stairs. The other is in the far corner of the cloister—and it’s this one I make for now.

  I pause, just to check no one’s looking for me or watching, though it’s only midday, so I’m sure I’m safe from alarm for a while. Stella will be in the kitchen, making lunch for the tribe. Gramps will be in the library, listening to the test match. Bella will have finished making beds and brushing dust under the carpets; she’ll be on her way back to the village by now. I climb up onto one of the buttresses, which gives me a view of the whole house and the gardens below. This south front of the convent is three stories high; it has twenty-one windows, twenty-one eyes. They sparkle darkly. Those in the library, where I saw Dan materialize that day, are wide open. I can just hear that measured male voice that punctuates English summers: “And D’Oliveira steps up to the crease,” it says. That’s Gramps taken care of. No sign of Stella, and little danger from that quarter until the clock strikes one. Stella’s making tagliatelle for lunch today. She’ll be fully engaged ironing out sheets of pasta and feeding them through her latest acquisition, a fiend of a machine. Or she’ll be reading at the kitchen table, as she likes to do while pots simmer. It’s Jane Austen at the moment: Mansfield Park for the twenty-fourth time.

  I look down at the gardens: I have plans for these gardens. Apart from the vegetable and soft-fruit section—looked after by Stella and Joe Nunn and flourishing—they’re in a state of disgraceful neglect. In my mind, there’s a pergola—I’ve already selected the roses to climb on it; there are wildflower meadows, an arboretum, and a parterre. I’m going to be a Horticulturist—and for that you need vision. A kind of double vision, perhaps. When other people look at the Abbey gardens, all they see is untamed nature, roses reverting to briars, bridal swathes of bindweed, seedlings in the paving, and so on. My eyes are more clear-sighted: I see an orderly Eden. I shall start to create it this summer—next week, maybe. Soon.

  Meanwhile: Where are Julia and Finn? Answer: Safely occupied on the old rutted grass tennis court, below me. They’re playing a game of mixed doubles with Dan and his friend Nicholas Marlow. Nick is a junior doctor at a London hospital now. He has a week’s leave and is staying at the Old Rectory with his parents, but he spends most of his free time here. He is partnering Julia. Dan is partnering Finn.

  The match shouldn’t take long in that case, and its outcome is inevitable, I decide. I assess the players: Nick plays a strong, reliable club game. Julia has a vicious serve and a mean backhand; she is fiercely competitive. Dan has moments of erratic brilliance but, unlike the others, has never had tuition—and it shows. Finn can run like Atalanta; she’s extremely agile and graceful, so I love to watch her, but her motivation is nonexistent. It’s just a game, she says haughtily: Who cares who wins?

  Julia cares, for one. As I watch, she powers down one of her unkind topspin serves, aimed at Finn’s unreliable backhand. To my surprise—I can scarcely see the ball, and on this court the bounce is always unpredictable—Finn gets her racket to it. She hits a lob—probably by accident, but it could be intentional, with Finn you never know—and it’s a stroke of great delicacy. The ball sails upward in a slow, high, lovely curve. It sails over Nick at the net and over Julia, who stretches for it but misses. It’s bound to go out, I think, but it doesn’t. At the very last moment it appears to hesitate, to redirect. It lands on the newly painted baseline with a puff of white. “Love–fifteen,” shouts Dan.

  “Good shot, Finn,” calls tall, dark-haired Nick Marlow. He’s wearing traditional whites; he’s more sporting a partner than Julia prefers. Julia scowls at the sun and says nothing. She’s readying herself to serve again, this time to Dan.

  I look at Dan, who stands on the baseline waiting to receive. His manner is nonchalant. Dan has been transformed by Cambridge, where he had a brilliant, much envied career. He plans to become a great film director. He no longer looks awkward or gauche, and he’s handsome again—oh, that Romany rock-star look, Julia says in a cold, dismissive way, but I don’t care what Julia thinks or pretends to think. To my eyes, Dan is one of Ocean’s princelings again. He has grown his black hair long, so its Gypsy unruly locks touch his collar. He’s playing tennis in a white cotton shirt and torn blue jeans. He’s tall, tanned, muscular, and strong. He’s not wearing sneakers, and his brown feet are bare. He looks at ease, capable of anything—and his voice has changed again, too. The Suffolk has disappeared totally, but the vowels are no longer painfully ironed. It’s now impossible to place him. You can’t put him in one of those English pigeonholes of region or education or class, as some people (the Viper, for instance) like to do. If you didn’t know about his Roma ancestry, you might guess he’d been born Irish and blessed with Irish charm. If you did, Dan would never reveal that you were wrong.

  Julia scowls at him, raises a golden arm, tosses the ball high, and smashes it down the center line. Dan doesn’t move his racket. “Foot fault, I think, Julia,” he calls in a lazy, provocative tone. Julia proceeds to double-fault twice. When she loses her temper, her game becomes more aggressive and her aim less accurate. Things aren’t always the way I imagine they are, I remind myself, and—occasionally, not often—I read situations wrongly. Maybe this match will take longer than I’d anticipated—and maybe its outcome isn’t so certain after all.

  I watch my long-limbed sisters for a few seconds more, then remember my plan. I have fifty minutes of freedom left: I mustn’t waste time. I jump down from the buttress and wriggle under a great tangled arch of brambles in the corner below it. I’ve hol
lowed out a little crawl space here, and it’s not too prickly. Only one scratch: I lick the beading blood on my hand. Six feet in, I reach the part of the cloister wall that’s now crumbling, where the door and the secret stairs must once have been. A wicked part of the Abbey: I hang by my hands over a steep drop, where the moat was. Then I let go. I fall ten feet, land on soggy ground, and roll over like a parachutist—no harm done. I creep along the length of the old moat, a deep ditch that follows the outer line of the cloister walls. I’ve made a good, well-trodden path here, concealed by long grass, elder bushes, and a tangle of hawthorn. Finally, I reach my perfect espionage point, a huge black yew (Taxus baccata) planted by my father as a boy. No one’s clipped it since he died.

  It’s a good twelve feet thick and fifteen high. When I lie down under its black branches, I’m invisible—and I have an uninterrupted view of the refectory, its windows, and its door. I lie there, in heat and darkness. The scent of the yew is pungent. Yews grow well in graveyards, Bella says. They like the rich graveyard food. In the distance, a shotgun fires. Someone’s after rabbits or pigeons; someone’s on the hunt, on the prowl.

  When I was little, Stella taught me that poems could cure nervousness. It’s the concentration that’s involved. The boy stood on the burning deck, / Whence all but he had fled, I chant. I move on to the intricacies of Hiawatha. I begin my favorite section, “The Ghosts.” Its rhythms soothe:

  Then the shadows ceased from weeping,

  Ceased from sobbing and lamenting,

  And they said, with gentle voices:

  “We are ghosts of the departed,