The Sisters Mortland

by Sally Beauman

  I cover my face with my hands. When I next look, my mother’s figure has gone; all I can see is glass and the sun’s glint. I look away. My camera eye pans that courtyard, one last long, slow pan, searching for the unseeable, for the something I know is wrong. I scan the patched and altered walls of the Abbey, rose brick, stone, and knapped flint; I scan the creepers clinging to those walls and the shrubs crouching at their feet. The bells are still pealing in the valley; I can hear Julia’s calls and her grandfather’s shouts. Beneath the arches of the cloister where I’m standing the shadows are deep, and they’re beginning to speak. The arch nearest me is pitted and worn; lichens bloom on its stone. Tucked away at its apex, where the pillar meets the vaulted cloister roof, there’s a swallow’s nest, mud, and, just visible, a tiny gaping beak.

  I’ve never felt such desolation, before or since. How many seconds have passed? One, two? It’s very brief.

  I back away, onto the grass. And then, in the very corner of my eye, at the far periphery of my vision, something moves. It’s like Icarus in that Brueghel painting, a tiny inverted detail, an error in the far corner of the world. To my left, a nestling. To my right, something small, something silent, something terrible, begins its fall.

  Maisie doesn’t cry out, and neither do I. Shock slows her fall, so to my eyes there’s a moment when she’s still cradled by air, when I can believe the air will hold her up. Even when I see her land on stone, at that hideous angle, and her arms and legs fly up, and the ground tosses her, twists her, and throws her down again, I still hear nothing, and I can’t seem to understand: There are so many voices in my head. My Gift has tricked me. I was expecting pain, fearing death, but I’d thought Finn was at risk. Running across the grass, I still believe that, though I know it cannot be: Finn isn’t here; Finn wasn’t wearing a blue dress. I reach Maisie’s side. I still can’t understand, but I can see at once how terribly broken she is. I think I give a cry. I kneel down. Maisie has come to rest on her back, with her arms and her legs flung out and her eyes shut.

  She makes a strange, low, mewing sound, and then there’s silence. Pinkish bubbles have appeared at her lips. I see that a glistening patch is spreading out like a cloak beneath her shoulders. I lift one of her hands and chafe it. I start saying her name. Her hand feels warm; she must be alive—but that warmth is ebbing. There’s blood trickling from her ears and her eyelids—and something else, too, from her nostrils: a leaking colorless fluid. I don’t know the name of this substance, but I fear it: I know what it is.

  I bend over her, my one instinct to protect her, to cover her, and I have nothing to cover her with. I’ve started unbuttoning my shirt when I hear footsteps running across the cloister. I hear Julia’s scream and a broken cry from an old man, but it’s Nick who reaches my side first.

  “Don’t touch her—don’t move her, you mustn’t move her,” he says.

  Then he’s down on his knees beside me, and I can see him resting his doctor’s fingers against her throat. I know what he’s about to say, but the rules are being broken here, just as they were at my birth, so instead he tells me she’s alive, that she’s still breathing. “Call an ambulance, Dan,” he says. He pulls off his jacket. “Now. Now. Do it quickly. Move.”

  As I stumble toward the hall, I look up at the Lady Chapel windows. The middle one, closed before, stands wide open. I pick up the telephone. I can hear the sound of a car on the drive at the back of the house. Stella and Finn have returned—returned to this.

  As I’m dialing the third nine, the long-case clock whirs, hesitates, and strikes eight.

  part vii

  Ten of Swords

  Mine own sweet dear heart, I write in stealth and at speed . It is VIII of the clock. The field boy swears he will carry this message to you. I promised him a kiss, and two coins, since the coins alone would not content him.

  Oh my love, what a place this Abbey is! You would not think my eyes so pretty now, for I can scarce open them for lack of sleep. No sooner do I lie down to think of you, than I must pray in the dark and the cold—my knees are worn out with this praying. For all that, it is not as dolorous a place as I feared, this labyrinth. I may keep my orange silk kirtle and my bracelets and the dear little dog you gave me Sister Maria Agnes said that for a trifling sum, I might have mine own room, as she does, with a fire on cold nights, and fine linen sheets, too, for I could not sleep in their hempen ones, which scratched me half to death. This Sister and I are become great allies, our predicament is alike: what a curse it is, to be the youngest of six, with a dowry so small it is of no interest to a sweet young man, and of less interest to that young man’s noble father. Still, I find my poor dowry serves me well here; it swells

  Dear heart, mark me well: this prison has doors that unlock; there is a place nearby where true lovers may meet for an hour in safety—will an hour in the woods content you, my sweet?

  I shall not be the first to make such an escape, nor the last, I warrant you. and I shall write again; believe me I cannot live until I am clasped in your arms again. So I say as always: Come, come, come, mine own darling. But be warned: I grow stern and chaste since last you saw me: you will need all your dear arts, and hard application of them, too, my love, to overcome my novice modesty. They have made me cut my lovely hair, so prepare yourself for the boy who will greet you. In the dark

  Will you recognize me?

  —MS SFC Bel 209/83.5 [?circa 1450] writer and recipient unknown; Belcamp collection, Suffolk County Archive, Ipswich [MS damaged and indecipherable in places; marginal annotation in a second hand also indecipherable]

  [ twenty ]

  Corporal Body

  I’ve returned to my Highbury bed. I lie there listening to that striking clock at the Abbey. It’s dark and cold, and the helicopter’s gone. In this world, I have no idea what time it is. I close my eyes at last, I slip into sleep—and it’s a deeper sleep than I’ve had for months. I dream. In my dream I have a long conversation with a woman, an interchange that leaves me healed and refreshed. I feel that I know her, but I’m not sure who this woman is. When she finally leaves me, she leaves regretfully, with many a backward glance. Just as she’s about to disappear, I see that she’s an empress, a Mozart queen of the night. She’s carrying a crystal ball and an ivory scepter, and she’s clad in a white slipper-satin dress. Ten thousand coupons, Danny, she whispers. I reach out my hand to detain her, to call her back, and I wake up. I think: Today is the first day of my new life.

  Well, all right, I’ve thought that before. I’ve said that before, and once, when I was at the lowest of low ebbs, I even wrote it down. I later tore it up. But this time it’s different. This time I feel confident of success.

  I don’t have a hangover, for one thing—and I’ve had a hangover for the last six weeks. I feel oddly purposeful. Last night’s retrospective has been of use. I know what I need to do today, I have a very exact program, and I’m going to start on it at once. Mens sana in corpore sano, I tell myself as I turn on the shower. That’s the first item on the agenda: no mind-altering substances—no alcohol, no coke, speed, blues, or reds. My brain is clear on this point, but my body is recidivist—it starts to voice a few doubts. I blast it with very hot water, then with very cold—and that shocks it into silence, that shuts it up. By the time I’m showered and shaved and into clean clothes, the body’s taking a humbler line; it’s prepared to negotiate. How about black coffee, how about a cigarette, how about a triple vodka or some cough mixture? it’s saying. What’s so wrong with the gradual approach?

  I march the body downstairs. In the hall, both mind and body, ego and stroppy id, remember for the first time that on the other side of my sitting room door there’s a young woman, asleep on my Milanese sofa. An awkward and manipulative young woman. At this,
the body’s pleas for booze or something stronger rise in pitch. I march it downstairs to the basement kitchen, and when it sees that, the body has a major relapse. It looks at the overflowing bins, the unwashed plates, the dishwasher that had a seizure weeks ago, and it feels desperately faint. It feels it needs to be taken back to bed and covered up again. It’s not five yet, it says. What the hell’s going on? Welcome to the new regime, I tell it. This is the second item on the agenda. Now: Get this place cleaned up.

  Mirabile dictu, the body obeys. It actually does what it’s told to do. It starts finding plastic bags and stuffing things into them. It deals with the green Eternaloaf and the one-month-old Christmas Day’s uneaten chili-sauce kebabs. It doesn’t balk at the fridge—or the smell in the fridge. It whisks through that lot, and before you can say “Highly unlikely,” it’s emptied the fridge and washed it out with some piney disinfectant stuff. Then it moves on to the cupboards, and it’s out with the Nicey-Spicey sauces, out with the prehistoric Herby Toppings that have been our loyal companions for umpteen years in umpteen bachelor flats. It’s got the bit between its teeth now, my body: Abracadabra, it says, dunking dishes in a fine sudsy froth in the sink. Takes no time at all, it remarks cheerily as it yanks out the sick dishwasher, dekinks its hose, shoves it back, and voilà—it’s cured and ready for the next blitz.

  It’s alarming, this manic burst of energy. Let’s not go mad here, I tell the body as it starts running up and down stairs, dumping eight trillion sacks in the garbage cans. No problem, mate, it says. How about I wash the floor? Wipe down those dodgy worktops? Clean the windows, maybe? Give me five minutes, and you won’t know this place.…

  Well, I need to rein it in, but I have to say that this unlikely workman, this NCO from some bad Brit war movie, makes a good job of it. This billet gets clean. It’s ready for inspection. It’s so orderly, it’s alarming. The cupboards are empty. The fridge is empty. The last packet of Marlboro is empty, too—but even this catastrophe doesn’t faze Corporal Body. He takes ten minutes to nip down to Mr. Patel at the open-at-dawn corner shop—he actually runs there—and he returns with a sackful of booty. There are eggs from unhappy hens and bacon from Danish pigs. I have supplies of Nescafé, Eternaloaf, and “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Axle Grease.” I have a notebook and pen, cornflakes, milk, sugar, and marmalade; there’s a five-pack carton of cigarettes.

  We sit down at the table, my body and I, safe in the knowledge that its surface has been cleaned with a lemony vitriol fatal to every known bacterium in the universe. We share some cereal, some Nescafé, and a Marlboro. We congratulate ourselves on the fact that we now have the means to get Miss Amyl Nitrate out of our life. Politely. She will be given breakfast and then dispatched. She’ll be gone by eight-thirty at the latest, and then we can get on with our new life. We’ll be leaving for Wykenfield, obviously; but before we do that, we need to talk to Nick, and we need to see Lucas. I look at the pages I wrote last night. There are questions to ask Lucas, as became very evident during my Abbey retrospect.

  What’s more, he’s going to answer them. We feel confident of that. By now—we’re on the second cigarette—we’re in complete accord, the body and I. We’re at one again. Time to make a list. I draw out the pristine notebook, flick it open, and pick up the Biro. I write: Today I will… Then stop.

  Maisie wrote lists. Not just recited them, also wrote them down. We knew this, but even Finn and Julia hadn’t realized how many lists there were and how meticulously they’d been organized. We discovered how many she wrote, after that sad leap into the unknown by then officially designated as “Maisie’s accident.”

  We found this library of lists three days after her fall, when she’d been moved from the first hospital, the former cottage hospital at Deepden, and was beginning a medical odyssey that finally ended in London, in a specialist ward for coma victims. But that event was still in the future. In those first frantic three days, I’d embarked on a quest. I was convinced that Maisie’s fall was no accident. For three days, I’d been replaying the sequence of events that led up to her fall, and I was certain that, if this action of Maisie’s was willed, she would have left behind some explanation. There had to be a note, a letter, something. After three days of argument, I persuaded Finn and Julia to help me look for it.

  Stella and Gramps were at Maisie’s hospital bedside all day, every day—at that point she was in intensive care in Ipswich, and the number of her visitors was strictly limited. A search in their presence was out of the question. Both clung obstinately to the accident theory, and to query it caused distress. Now was the perfect opportunity, I argued. If we could understand Maisie’s reasoning, we’d know what to say to her now—and that was vital. There were numerous cases of coma victims returning to consciousness when the right words had been spoken to them or the right music had been played or the right memory triggered. Nick reluctantly confirmed this, while pointing out gently that Maisie’s injuries were extensive and she might not live. I could see that privately he thought this a waste of time, of therapeutic use to us, perhaps, but not to Maisie. That made me all the more desperate. I was drowning in guilt; I was a man possessed.

  So Finn and Julia, persuaded by me, helped me search. We searched that large house, with its million hiding places; we searched it from attics to cellars. All we found—and we found them immediately—were Maisie’s notebooks. They could hardly escape our notice. Some were lying open on her writing table; the others had been labeled, indexed, color-coded, numbered, and arranged by subject matter on the shelves by her bed. Mammals and birds, gods and goddesses, verbs and adverbs, stars in their spheres, victims of the guillotine, wartime airfields, etymology, and entomology, the Abbey dogs, the Office of the Dead, each office with its designated psalms, nocturns, and canticles. There were two hundred notebooks, at least—maybe more. We read them in silence. This was a language none of us spoke.

  When we found nothing—no hidden envelope, no letter disguised as an entry and tacked on to a list—we went through her books. Maybe the missing note that made all clear had been tucked inside the pages of Darwin or Enid Blyton. It had not.

  “We’ve missed it,” I said. “I know it’s here. Maisie’s secretive; she’s clever and she’s cunning. Something’s hidden here—and the hiding place won’t be obvious. We have to try to think the way she did. Imagine you’re Maisie. Now—where would you put it?”

  “I’m not sure she’d write anything,” Julia replied. “At first, I thought it was possible, but now I look at this…” She hesitated. A sea of troubles, a sea of notebooks, lay on the floor all around us. “It could have been a spur-of-the-moment decision. She was hiding in the house somewhere. She went into the library, looked at the windows—and then she jumped. She was unhappier than any of us had realized—and beyond that we’ll never know why she did it. Maybe there is no why. Let’s stop this.”

  “I don’t agree,” Finn said in an obstinate way. “I think Dan’s right. I think she planned it. It was eight o’clock when she did it—and you say she’d been missing for an hour and a half, at least. She could have done it at seven-thirty, or seven, or even earlier—so why didn’t she?”

  “Maybe she was afraid,” Julia said. I knew she had no wish to discuss the timing here. Neither had I. “Maybe she couldn’t summon the nerve. I don’t want to talk about this.”

  I said nothing. I was thinking of the many occasions when Maisie had explained her nuns’ Liturgy of the Hours to me; the many occasions when I’d cut her short. “Eight o’clock is the time the nuns retire to their cells,” I began slowly. “Immediately before they retire, they observe Compline. It’s the last prayer period of the day, and it begins at seven-thirty. The term Compline comes from the Latin Completorium. It marks the ending of the day and the prayers for the night. Roughly translated, the word means—”

  “A state of completion. The completing of things,” Julia said.

  “And the prayers for Compline would be said in the Lady Chapel,” Finn continued
after a silence. “She chose the day, the time, and the place. We should have known that at once. Maisie never acted on impulse. She was disciplined. And if she decided to leave a message, it wouldn’t have been a general one, it would have been specific. She’d have decided to whom it was addressed, and she’d have left it in a place where that person would find it. That person and no one else.”

  There’s another pained silence. I’m looking at Finn: I’m wondering if she’s realized she’s just used the past tense. I want to take her in my arms. I’ve been wanting to take her in my arms for three days and three nights. I want to show her that torn scrap of dress material—and I can’t do that, either. I want to talk to her. Somehow, I can’t. I’ve lost the right, I’ve thrown away the right—and besides, Finn bars me. She bars everyone. Finn walks around now as if she’s shell-shocked; the message “Noli me tangere” is stamped on her face. I can see the effort it costs her to function at all, to speak, or lift her hand, or turn her head. She looks the way Maisie looked when she sleepwalked. Her eyes are open, but their sense is shut. She’s looked that way since she returned from London. She looked that way when I intercepted her and her mother in the hall—and that was before I’d had the task, the appalling task, of telling them what had happened.

  I can’t understand why that should be. But I know Finn is closer to Maisie than anyone else, far closer, for instance, than Stella or Gramps. I trust Finn’s instincts more than Julia’s rationality—and what she’s said strikes me as astute. “If that’s the case,” I say, “who would that person be? Would it be you, Finn?”