The Sisters Mortland

by Sally Beauman

  “No reading at the table, Stella,” her father used to say when she smuggled a book into meals. So she’d put it away—Kidnapped, or Jane Eyre, or Great Expectations—and then continue in the yard and (with a torch) under the sheets half the night. Except she wasn’t in the yard or in bed, of course, she was in that other world. She was trapped in a treacherous tower; she was watching mad Mrs. Rochester rend Jane’s wedding veil; she was staring at Miss Havisham’s spider-infested bride cake.

  “Those books still color my life,” she says now, sighing. “Maisie, when will I learn? Books, books—an addiction to stories. No one should live like that. I do know that—but I can’t cure myself.”

  I don’t want Stella to be cured—besides, if it hadn’t been for the books, she might never have come to England, never have met my father. Think of the consequences: I wouldn’t have been born. I wouldn’t exist. Luckily, Stella was not cured of the book addiction. When she was eighteen and left school, her parents gave her a special present, the one gift for which she’d yearned. They gave her a year in England. She would travel to England, and—staying with a network of aunts, cousins, and parental friends—she would finally visit the places she’d dreamed of so long. She crossed the sea on a huge liner, traveling steerage. She arrived in Liverpool and at once took a train to her native Edinburgh. It was the autumn of 1938: That weakling fool Chamberlain was promising peace for our time.

  Stella spent a week with two maiden aunts in Morningside, and then the great journey began. I love the details of this pilgrimage and the way it winds me into sleep. Using a complicated network of trains, buses, and charabancs, Stella worked her way southward; she went to Walter Scott (the Borders), then Wordsworth and Coleridge (the Lakes)… During the winter of that year, she walked the moors at Haworth with the three Brontë sisters, strange companions and unsettling ones; but Stella, who knew their work by heart, was well prepared for this. She visited Lawrence in Nottingham and Tennyson in Lincolnshire. Arm in arm with Dickens, she explored the streets of London, then she sped northwest to Shakespeare, the forest of Arden, and Warwickshire. There she stayed with yet another spinster aunt—for some considerable time. After that it was Thomas Hardy and Dorset; then—it was late summer—Jane Austen in Bath. Stella pursued her beloved Austen to Lyme Regis and finally to Hampshire. That September, she was in Winchester Cathedral paying homage at Austen’s grave when she became aware of a stir among the other visitors. She closed her copy of Mansfield Park (then being read for the fifth time). She was puzzled by whispers in the nave and by a discernible outbreak of excitement—or was it fear? She left the cathedral and approached the knots of people gathered outside. She asked what had happened. They told her war had been declared.

  Stella’s mind had been so deeply lodged in Austen’s world that for one moment she failed to understand them. But she adjusted swiftly. When, the same day, her parents wired her from Canada and begged her to return, she refused. By then, Canada did not feel like home anymore, and she was determined to help the war effort. Luckily, the Shakespeare maiden aunt was happy to accommodate her—so she remained. Of course she remained, I think, closing my eyes: Stella had to stay, because the cards were going to deal her a husband, and he was then only a few heartbeats, the next hand, away.

  There was a dull interim period, it’s true, in which Stella undertook various kinds of war work in London and elsewhere. I don’t really listen to that section of the story—I’m still mapping the route of that book pilgrimage, and I’m noticing for the first time what an unnatural number of maiden aunts Stella possessed. How odd that not one of these women survived long enough to feature in our lives—they’ve never visited, they’ve never written, they’ve just disappeared. Maybe they’re all dead and gone, I think. Maybe the war wiped out all these spinsters.… I’m beginning to drift off on an eddy of maiden aunts, but I’m fighting sleep, determined to stay awake. For at last the dull interim period is over, and Stella, a farmer’s daughter, has found her wartime métier. She’s become a land girl, first on a farm in Warwickshire (Shakespeare again), then briefly in Norfolk, and finally on a tenant farm in Suffolk, run by a Mr. Angus McIver and situated in the village of Wykenfield.

  “And there,” Stella says, “on a beautiful June evening—it was quite late, and I’d been working since five—I walked up from the valley to Holyspring. I sat there, below Nun Wood, for a while. It was such a calm place—so quiet I could hear the river below. I lay back on the grass and watched the swallows. I remember listening to the bomber planes, setting off from the base at Deepden. You’d hear them leave every evening, and every morning you’d hear them return—”

  “What were you wearing?” I ask, though I know, but even on the edge of sleep I want it confirmed.

  “Well, nothing very alluring, I’m afraid,” Stella says in a dreamy way. “I was still wearing my work clothes—boots, dungarees, an old checked shirt. I was sweaty and dirty—I probably had hay in my hair, because I’d been working with the horses that day.… Anyway, there I was, in the fields just below the Abbey. And for some reason, I decided to walk back that way. The house was closed up then, it was too run-down and not really big enough to be requisitioned. Gramps was in London… well, I didn’t think of him as Gramps, of course. I just knew the house belonged to a Mr. Mortland—and that there was a son, a son who was a fighter pilot, stationed in Sussex somewhere.…”

  “And Sussex was a long way away.”

  “So it never occurred to me that I’d meet anyone that night. I walked up past the woods to the lane. And I stopped by the old nunnery gates, just below the refectory. The light was beginning to fail. It was so peaceful that it could be hard to remember the war, though I always tried to, because… well, those planes would go over, and the next day not all of them returned—”

  “And then you heard footsteps.”

  “And then I heard footsteps, coming down the path from the house. I turned round, and I saw a young man. He was standing by the refectory door, looking up at the sky. He was very tall, with fair hair. He didn’t realize I was there at first—I think I startled him. Then he turned toward me, and I saw he had the most astonishing eyes—the darkest blue eyes I’d ever seen. We looked at each other, and—”

  “It was love at first sight.”

  “Something like that,” Stella says, and I can hear the sound of a smile in her voice as sleep gathers me up. “Something marvelous and strange, certainly. Something I’d never experienced before—though the books had prepared me, of course.… Are you awake, Maisie?”

  I’m sure I hear the question, but I don’t seem to be able to answer it. I drift in a tide, and while I float there I hear the door shut softly. I dream myself back into a wartime summer’s night. I’m listening to the sound of Daddy’s footsteps on gravel, and I dream his approach so well that I rise up from my bed to greet him. I tiptoe to the windows, and once there, knowing he’s close, I ease the curtains aside and wait.

  But then that dream eddies away as it so often does, and, hearing music, I begin dreaming my sisters. They and three young men are still awake on this long summer’s night. I dream cigarette fireflies and the pouring of wine. I dream my sister Finn reciting a charm. She says, The brink of life, the brink of life. Then someone—is it Dan?—hears the charm and stands up. He begins to dance, and gradually the others rise to their feet. I dream them moving to the music in the moonlight, the three men threading my sisters between them, so their dresses look like bright silks woven through a dark tapestry. I curl up by the window. Music billows the curtains; moonlight glitters like a knife.

  At three-thirty exactly, I wake. The air is cool, the floor is cold, and the room is full of shadows. The cloister is deserted and the music has ended; I stretch out my limbs, which feel stiff and antique. The shadows in the room are very deep, and I could be afraid of them. I decide I’ll go to Finn, who will always take me in and protect me at night. The Abbey sighs, but I tell myself that there are advantages to sleeplessness. The whole h
ouse is in darkness. The whole house is mine. Now it’s the hour for Vigils: I can go anywhere and see everything. Why should I fear ghosts, when I can be a ghost myself?

  I step out onto the landing. This house has seven staircases, one for each day of the week. Below me, nuns pray; a clock ticks.

  I visit Julia first. She, Finn, and I all have rooms on the same corridor. I creep along the passage. No mouse could be quieter; not a single board squeaks. I ease open Julia’s door—what a catastrophe of a room this is! Moonlight shines in—Julia never draws the curtains. She never hangs her clothes away, either. There they are, all her flower-child dresses, drenched in moonlight, silky skins she’s sloughed off. I can smell her favorite scent, L’Heure Bleue, but there’s something else, too, something that smells like incense. It’s a secret scent, the scent of something she smokes, of a substance she brought back from California. This substance, which she’s concealing from Stella and will not explain to me, has magic powers. It can transport you, my sister says.

  I creep across to her dressing table. Its looking glass shows me Maisie. I startle myself. On the wide, tumbled bed behind me, Julia stirs.

  I turn to look at her. She is naked. She has kicked the sheets aside. The moonlight makes her limbs marble. I look at her round, sculpted breasts, at the long curve of hips and thighs. The moon is bleaching her amber hair to palest gold. One lock is twined about her throat, the rest tumbles across the pillow—her hair is so thick, so long. Her face is calm with sleep, heavy with sleep. I would give almost anything to look like Julia and to know what I know Julia knows.

  I creep back to the dressing table and check the right-hand drawer. I ease it out silently. Lacy stockings, gossamer underwear—who pays for these things she’s recently acquired? White lace, black lace—and underneath, just as they were the last time I looked, her contraceptive pills. There’s also the white plastic scallop-shaped box with her Dutch cap, acquired from a special clinic in London, because our doctor—Dr. Marlow, Nick’s father—will not prescribe contraceptives to unmarried women. Julia boasted about this device when she was up at Cambridge, but she doesn’t need it now. I count the little pill capsules: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Moanday, Tearsday, Wailsday, as Julia calls them, quoting someone. Yes, she’s up-to-date, as I knew she would be. Julia takes care of herself. Julia is a goddess—“Vénus toute entière,” Dan says of her, and I don’t think it’s a compliment—but the goddess is a sensible girl.

  It’s Finn who’s the rash one in this family—though most people would never suspect that, for Finn is covert and quiet. I creep along the passageway to Finn’s room now and open the door carefully—Finn, unlike Julia, is a light sleeper. Even when she dreams, Finn remains wary and alert for the least sound.

  This room, striped with moonlight, is in perfect order. It’s very plain: My nuns approve. There’s a drugget mat on the floor; the walls are lined with bookshelves; the looking glass is tiny; the dressing table’s bare. This room smells of air. The window is wide open; the curtains move like phantoms in the breeze. The narrow white bed is neatly made, and it’s unoccupied. At four in the morning, it seems, my sister Finn is—where?

  “Where?” I say the word aloud, and it startles me. Where, where—I have to find her. I creep along to the end of the corridor, go down one flight of stairs, up another, through an anteroom, and out again. What a warren Gramps created when he restored this house. Cross a landing, and you cross centuries. I’m in the Middle Ages; I’m in the modern world. The water pipes clank, the nuns pad past me silently. In her cell, my Reverend Mother falls to her knees. Where is she, Maisie? Where is your sister? she asks. I fetch a stool, because I know I’ll need it—I’m not tall enough yet to spy unaided. I open a door—it looks like a cupboard door but isn’t—and step into the concealed corridor, the Abbey’s secret world.

  I position the stool, climb up, and apply my eye to the small, square, ancient aperture. It’s very cunning, this Squint. It’s an architectural, ecclesiastical mystery. Other squints exist—they’re not that rare in churches, but they’re usually placed in the transept and angled to give a view of the altar in the nave. But in a nunnery, and angled away from the altar? That seems strange. All I know is that in the mid–fifteenth century, when the nunnery was already over two hundred years old, this device was inserted—and Isabella says it breaks her heart. For reasons unknown, someone liked to watch the nuns at their orisons. Whoever watched them was tall. The aperture is set six feet two inches from the floor—I’ve measured, so I’m sure.

  I approach it cautiously. I look down into the dark. My gaze angles down a tiny tunnel, through four-foot walls to the Lady Chapel below. It’s the library now—and my nuns have absented themselves. I can see the lamp on the Indian table and the snarl of the lionskin rug. Propped up on the sofa cushions is my grandfather, deeply asleep. There’s a half-empty whiskey bottle next to him—the prospect of visiting his childhood home has taken its usual toll. I had thought my sister might be here, talking to Gramps and trying to cheer him.… I’m wrong. I look and I look and I look, but there’s no Finn here.

  Finn isn’t in the kitchen, either. She’s not in the drawing room or the dining room or the scullery or the pantry or the hall. I scurry up the back stairs to the corridor where Dan has his usual room. I daren’t open that door, but I press my ear to its panels. What a little spy you are, Maisie, Dan has said when he’s caught me meddling. I don’t deign to answer. I’m the girl in the corner, the girl everyone fusses over, the girl everyone ignores. No one ever tells me anything. If I didn’t spy, I’d be in the dark eternally. I live in a maze of unknowing—Maisie’s maze—and I hate it. I need to be informed.

  Dan is asleep. I listen closely. I listen lovingly. Alone and asleep—I’m certain of that. I press my ear to the door panels. I can hear a man’s deep, regular breathing. No Finn there.

  I run back downstairs and creep outside to the cool of the garden. I try the cloister and the beech avenue. I creep down past the yews to the refectory, but Lucas can’t be working tonight: There’s not a chink of light from between the shutters and no sound. I edge back toward the house along the yew path. The moon has passed behind a cloud, and the darkness alarms.

  All the shadows are filled with desolation. I can see shapes that seem to beckon: Over here, they whisper. Look, Maisie, over here. The flagstones in the cloister are cold under my bare feet, and they make me think about the dead, all those dead—generations of nuns, those tenant farmers who once lived here, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons—all those dead who have to lie for an eternity underground.

  This way, Maisie, they whisper, holding out their arms. But I won’t lie down with them. It must be so cold. And so dark. Never to see the sun again, never to breathe air. Or to be dust, like Daddy. It fills me up with fear.

  I hasten back to the house and wait where I feel safer, in the shelter of its walls. Isabella joins me there. She wraps me in her cloak and warms my hands in hers. Benedicite, she begins, and her blessing unfurls. Before five, the sky begins to warm and the birds begin to sing. There’s a nightingale in Nun Wood, and it pours out its heart to the dawn. The scents of the roses intensify, and color steals into their petals. A fox barks. When the sun is stronger, the buds will unfurl.

  At six, it’s the hour for Lauds, and the nuns commence their morning prayers. Quicumque vult salvus esse, they whisper with me. At six-fifteen, just as they’re readying themselves for Eucharist, I hear quiet footsteps, stealthy footsteps, on the refectory path. I shrink back, and a pale shape steals toward me. I’ve seen them before, these transgressives, these shadows, creeping back to morning prayers. This phantom doesn’t see me; she hesitates in the cloister and scans the house, with its twenty-one watchful eyes. She’s barefoot. She’s carrying her shoes. She glances over her shoulder, hesitates, paces back and forth in the shadows, and then—as if suddenly resolved—runs inside. I follow and confront her in the hall. I see that this ghost is my sister. It’s Finn, and I’ve startled her.
She cries out, “Who’s there?”

  She’s afraid. She swings round and stares at me. I stare at her. I have a sentence prepared, and it’s accusatory—but when I see her close up, it won’t be spoken. Her face silences me. She looks so blinded, so stupefied. She’s very pale, and her breath is coming fast. Her white dress is patterned with delicate scarlet flowers, and in this light it looks unearthly, as if she’s bleeding from every vein. The fine cotton is crumpled, and the skirt is torn. Her lovely hair is disheveled, and there is a mark on her neck, a dark purplish plum-size, thumb-size bruise. We look at each other in silence, my sister and I. All the questions I want to ask won’t be said. What’s the point in asking? I know part of the answer, anyway: I can read it in her eyes. She’s been with Lucas—and he hasn’t been painting her. Lucas is a strange man and is capable of many things, but even Lucas can’t paint portraits in the dark.

  I know that much—and it tells me nothing. Something has happened here, and it’s something from which I’m barred. Finn could tell me, but words wouldn’t get me there. She’s in a remote country, and I don’t speak its language, I don’t know its tongues.

  “Oh, Finn, what if Dan finds out?” Out the sentence spills. I wait for retribution, for Finn’s inevitable rage. Finn hates to be spied on. She hates to be interrogated. She’ll never forgive me for this. I take a step backward, but to my astonishment, there’s no anger, no reprimand. Finn gives a strange sigh and falls to her knees. She clasps me around the waist and hugs me to her tightly. When she lifts her white face, it’s transfigured. “Oh, Maisie, I’m so happy,” she whispers. “I’m so miserable. And so afraid.”

  I look at her doubtfully. I know there’s no point in asking her to translate: I wouldn’t understand. She scrambles to her feet and grabs my arm. “Promise you won’t tell,” she whispers. “Promise me, Maisie. Give me your hand.” We clasp hands, and I promise. I would never betray Finn, and she knows that. I swear eternal silence, even so.