Convent on Styx (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Here?” The prioress looked astonished. “Yes, I know we have, but . . .”

  “Seculars have no access to the convent library, so I do think that, if only in fairness to Miss Lipscombe, an investigation of our own books is called for, as well as those belonging to the school. Don’t you think so?”

  “Since you put it like that, yes, perhaps I do think so. Sister Leo is the convent librarian. I will speak to her.”

  “We all have books on the shelves in our rooms, too.”

  “How do you mean, Sister?”

  “Only that I think all books should be closely inspected.”

  “You realise, do you not,” said the prioress, after a pregnant pause, “that, even if we find a mutilated book, it will not lead us to the mutilator?—I thought you agreed about that.”

  “I still think it would be helpful, Sister, if we could find out exactly which book or books are in question. A clue to ownership might be a clue to the culprit. It would be much better if we could uncover her identity, rather than leave it to the police.”

  “Well, if you will have the school library inspected, I will do the same for our library here, but I think we must go into conference before we inspect people’s private bookshelves, you know.”

  “Surely everybody will lend support to any plan that will help us? We have no need to carry out such an inspection ourselves.”

  “Look, Sister,” said the prioress, “it does not matter who searches the two libraries, but do you not realise that nobody can be allowed to inspect her own books for the purpose of discovering whether any of them have been chopped about?”

  “Oh, really! But that means you do think it possible one of ourselves may be the culprit!”

  “The religious have been known to go mad before now, Sister—a fact that may have to be faced if we are to be honest with ourselves,” said the prioress, concluding the interview. “I shall call a general meeting.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Conclave and After

  “The serpent he did not question, knowing him to be the prime mover in the transgression; but he first pronounced a curse on the serpent . . .”

  Irenaeas of Lyons

  Sister St. Elmo, with a certain sense of theatre, as it were, had elected to hold her conference in the refectory. Meetings that the whole Community was called upon to attend were usually concerned strictly with convent matters or with advice, fiats, or liturgical changes that affected the whole Order. This particular meeting, Sister St. Elmo had decided, fell into a different and, fortunately for the Community’s peace of mind, an unusual category.

  The nuns, therefore, instead of sitting more or less comfortably round the big Community Room, were established at the long refectory table and seated on the upright refectory chairs. At the head of the table sat Sister St. Elmo, as prioress and also as chairman of the meeting. Her back was to the only valuable picture the convent possessed, a study of the Feast at Cana painted (reputedly) by Giacomo Palma the Elder. Facing her, at the other end of the table, was Sister Mary Fabian, who had chosen her place deliberately, partly so that she could look at the picture and partly so that she could look at the rest of the Community, which she did with an appreciative artist’s eye.

  At the right of the prioress sat Sister Ignatius, one-time head of the Order, very small, very frail, and very old, with a wrinkled-apple, little, yellowish face, a totally deaf right ear, and the bright quick eyes of a robin. Next to her was Sister Mary Elphege, waspish, shrewd, alert; a sardonic, thin-lipped, elderly Frenchwoman with nothing beautiful about her except her large, extremely fine hands.

  There was never much competition to sit next to her, for she was given, in meetings, to making sarcastic, pointed “asides” in comment upon what was being said, and as these comments, though often justified, were seldom witty, nobody particularly wanted to be their recipient. So, by dextrous manipulation, the chair on her right had been left to the ingenuous, moon-faced Sister Mary Raymund, the latest-joined member of the Community, who, coming last in the procession to the refectory meeting, had perforce to take the only vacant seat.

  To make up for this (in Sister Raymund’s opinion) Sister Mary Romuald had taken the next chair, to be flanked by Sister Mary Leo, nervous, intense, extraordinarily devout, and looking like a particularly well-scrubbed Truman Holmes, Jr, a picture that Sister Mary Fabian (herself the daughter of a painter) had once seen in a folk-art collection in Virginia.

  On the left of the prioress sat the headmistress, next to her came Sister Wolstan, then Sister Honorius (whose name, Sister Elphege had suggested, should have been Sister Francis, since she seemed to have cette affinite avec animaux vivants), and then came the flat-faced, suspicious-eyed Marcellus, full of her wrongs as usual.

  “A meeting!” she said, as she took her place resentfully at the table. “Everything to do in the kitchen before one can think of one’s bed, and my turn on the rota to do the washing-up for all of you; yes, and to be up first in the morning to make sure you are all roused in good time for your duties, which are all much pleasanter than mine And now this meeting!”

  So, at the foot of the table, sat the lively, easy-going Sister Mary Fabian, thinking wistfully of what a picture the nuns would make if only she could be allowed to paint it. Her grey eyes clouded over for a moment. She, like Sister Mary Hilary, was a late-comer to the religious life. Before she entered, somebody—a man—had once told her that, with her straight-cut fringe of pale gold hair (which she was allowed to show again), her wide-set eyes, and her air of self-possession, she could have been the model for a famous picture by a French impressionist. Even at that time she had demurred. “If you knew anything about art at all,” she had retorted, “you would see that what I could have been is the model for an archaic marble kore. If you are ever in Athens, go to the Acropolis museum and look at the Phaedimus statue called Peplophoros.”

  The prioress waited until everyone was seated and Sister Marcellus had ceased to mutter, then began the speech she had prepared. She had asked for no advice and had taken nobody, not even Sister Hilary, completely into her confidence. She knew what she wanted to say and she intended to say it. The only person to whom it might come as a complete surprise, she conjectured, was old Sister Mary Ignatius; but in this she was mistaken. Sister Ignatius had only one operational and functional ear, but that was wide open. She had been present at the end-of-term tea party and had been sufficiently intrigued to enquire later of Mrs. Polkinghorne, whose Latin mentality was nearest to her own, the purpose of Sister Mary Hilary’s references to the police.

  “I have called this meeting,” began Sister St. Elmo, “to ask you all to do something to help us. I’ll begin by asking a question. Is there anyone here who has not received an offensive, unsigned letter?”

  “I have received no letters at all for a long time now,” said old Sister Ignatius.

  “My letters all come from America,” said Marcellus.

  “I see,” the prioress went on. “It is as I thought. Well, the first letters of the kind to which I refer were handwritten, you may remember, in rough capitals and were directed to Sister Mary Hilary and myself, but later (and much more objectionable) ones are formed from words and phrases cut out of printed matter and pasted on to sheets of lined paper. The inference is that the material is provided from books, and I am hoping that those books are not the property of the Community.”

  There was a shocked silence. Then, “What about the school?” asked Sister Fabian from her seat at the end of the table. “Judging by the two letters sent to me and which I have shown you, I should imagine that a nasty-minded child could have concocted them.”

  Sister Mary Hilary raised her boldly marked eyebrows and looked at the prioress, who said, “The school library is being closely inspected, of course. My immediate concern is to make certain that none of our own books has been defaced.”

  “We should hardly deface those,” said Sister Mary Leo. “That is, if you suppose . . .”

  �
�Of course not. But the front and side doors here are always open until sunset at this time of year and our own rooms are left unlocked.”

  “If I may speak . . .” said Sister Hilary.

  “I cannot see how it will help us if we do find that some of our books have been defaced,” said Sister Elphege, interrupting her. “It will bring us no nearer to discovering who the culprit is, and it is insufferable that we should be put into such a position. To suspect one another of these abominations is intolerable! If base decisions and accusations are to be made—”

  “Oh, come now,” said Sister Honorius, “nobody has said anything like that. Surely it is only reasonable that we should submit our own books for inspection before we begin to go more deeply into the matter. It’s like clearing the decks for action, that is all.”

  “Reasonable!” cried Sister Elphege. “It is not reasonable! It is degrading and insulting. Besides, who is to carry out this inspection? If it is to be done at all, it should be done by someone from outside, someone who does not know us, someone . . .”

  “Which brings me to what I was about to suggest,” said Sister Hilary, interrupting her previous interrupter. “Before I received the Faith and long before I entered religion, I was in college with a student named Laura Menzies. I was in a hostel for the older students, but we became acquainted because I used to referee the hockey practices when the first played the second eleven. We still keep up a somewhat desultory correspondence, although she never took up teaching, but became secretary to the famous psychiatrist Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley. She also married and is now Mrs. I. R. D. Gavin, wife of Assistant Commissioner Ian Robert David Gavin, who is head of the Crime Squad, as I believe it is called, at New Scotland Yard.”

  “Surely Scotland Yard would not be interested in our little troubles, would it?” asked the prioress, who felt the meeting slipping out of her hands into those of the headmistress.

  “No, of course not, Mother,” replied Sister Hilary, invoking the obsolete title to nullify her tone of impatient rebuke, “but I thought that if I could persuade Mrs. Gavin to interest Dame Beatrice in those “little” troubles, she might prove more able than ourselves, or even the local police, in finding and naming the author of these abominable letters.”

  “But we know who is the author of them, don’t we?” said old Sister Ignatius. “She goes out every Saturday when Sister Prioress is at church doing the flowers; and you and Sister Wolstan are in the school dealing with school matters; and Sister Mary Raymund or Sister Romuald is driving the car; and Sister Marcellus is doing the shopping, and the others are marking school books or preparing the next week’s lessons, or whatever it is. Then she buys the stamps. I have seen the look on her face when she comes back with them, and her face wears no pleasant expression, if you’ll please to believe me.”

  “You don’t know she buys stamps, though, do you, Sister?” asked Sister Mary Romuald in gentle tones. Old Sister Ignatius looked at her out of brilliant, intelligent, Florentine eyes and did not reply except to say, “Psychiatrist: that is the answer.”

  “Well, well!” said Laura Gavin, who, in the breakfast-room of the Stone House on the edge of the New Forest near the village of Wandles Parva, was sorting out the morning’s correspondence as usual, and had come across a letter addressed to herself. “Surely I know this uncompromising, bold, determined, swashbuckling handwriting, don’t I? The last time I saw it was on an envelope containing a Christmas card. Wonder what Sister Mary Hilary, OCP, wants with me at what must be the beginning of the autumn term? Not to help as a stand-in for absentee staff, I trust!”

  “What do the letters OCP stand for?” Dame Beatrice enquired.

  “She belongs nowadays to a Roman Catholic religious community called the Order of the Companions of the Poor,” explained Laura. “I’ve never bothered you with her before, because I’ve never canvassed your views on my being acquainted with nuns. Anyway, she wasn’t always a nun. Remember the old days at Cartaret College? Well, this Mary Hilary, as she now calls herself, used to be an inhabitant of Rule Britannia’s, otherwise known as Columba Hall, the hostel, if you recollect, where they parked all the old hags of twenty-five years and over. In those days she was known as Cecilia Brownrigg and used to ref. the practice games on the first eleven hockey pitch. She was, in that and in all ways, a man and a brother until she saw the light and took the veil.”

  “I had experience of a convent once,” said Dame Beatrice. “It was some years before you and I became acquainted. I was called in to investigate the death of a pupil at a convent school in Devon.”

  “So you know all about convents.”

  “That is not a claim I should have the effrontery to make.”

  “Well, let’s hope Sister Mary Hilary doesn’t want us to investigate the death of one of her kids,” said Laura, slitting open the letter. “No, not a death,” she said, when she had read it, “merely a matter of anonymous letters. She wants me to use my powers of persuasion, if any, to induce you to go along and look into the thing.” She handed the letter to her employer and added, “it can’t be this week, anyway. You’re all booked up.”

  “Oh, dear!” said Dame Beatrice, when she had read what Sister Mary Hilary had to say. “It seems that the letters are not really anonymous, after all. The nuns are convinced that they can name the writer, but have no proof and cannot bring themselves to make an open accusation without concrete evidence. I sympathise with their point of view, but I think they are being unnecessarily squeamish in considering the feelings of this mischievous person, this Miss Lipscombe.”

  “But suppose they are wrong?”

  “From what I know of nuns, that is very unlikely.”

  “So they suspect this elderly, unmarried convent boarder. But if they can’t find any proof, will you be any luckier?—not that I doubt your powers, but if there were any proof, wouldn’t they have found it by now, since they’re so sure of this poison-pen’s identity?”

  “What kind of woman is Sister Mary Hilary?”

  “Well, of course, it’s donkey’s years since I actually met her, and we don’t correspond very often, but, as I remember her, she was a vigorous, downright, you-can’t-do-that-’ere sort of person, who would send you off the field as soon as look at you if she thought there was mayhem being committed. Not that she ever needed to send anybody off in the ladylike scuffles that used to go on between the first and second elevens at Cartaret, of course.”

  “The trouble about anonymous letters is not only that they are offensive, abusive, and frequently blasphemous, but usually they rest upon a foundation of fact, however insecure that foundation may be,” said Dame Beatrice. “Sister Hilary states that members of the Community have received these letters, so it would seem as though the writer has intimate knowledge of the convent and its ways. The most likely persons to be so well informed are the inmates themselves, of course, so no wonder they have fastened upon a scapegoat.”

  “Good heavens! You’re not suggesting . . .”

  “One never knows. The convent, however, houses other inmates besides the nuns. Further to that, if suspicion had been fastened upon one of the Community, it would have been an internal matter to get that suspicion confirmed. They would not be calling in an outsider to solve their problem. A convent, I imagine, is like a school or a college. You don’t wash the dirty linen in public except as the very last resource of all.”

  “So you think they’re right to suspect Miss Lipscombe?”

  “She seems to fulfil most of the classic conditions.”

  “What sort of anonymous letters would be sent to nuns, I wonder?”

  “Speculation is idle. What interests me more is what triggered off the letters at all.”

  “No smoke without fire, you mean.”

  “Your letter states that earlier letters came only to Sister Mary Hilary herself and to the prioress, but she does not say why.”

  “And now the nuns and the school secular staff have had them, too. Sounds like somebody w
ho’s got a grudge against both school and convent and is determined to pile on the agony. Well, what are we going to do about it?”

  “I see the school is on the telephone. I suggest you go through the list of our commitments and then tell Sister Mary Hilary that I will come to the convent at the first possible opportunity. Meanwhile I would like her to collect any letters that have not been destroyed, and show them to me when I arrive.”

  Laura hastened to carry out these instructions and was heartened by an enthusiastic response from Sister Hilary.

  “I’m so grateful,” she said. “So far, of course, the letters have had nothing but nuisance value, very unpleasant though they are. My fear is that the next people involved may be the schoolgirls and that would be dreadful. I quite understand that Dame Beatrice is a very busy person, but how soon do you think she could come?”

  Laura had looked up the list of Dame Beatrice’s immediate engagements, although she knew it off by heart, and was able to suggest Wednesday of the following week.

  PART TWO

  STYX

  CHAPTER 10

  The Styx Is a Pond

  “Or is it weed, or fish, or floating hair?”

  Charles Kingsley

  “My thumbs are pricking,” said Laura to Dame Beatrice on the following Tuesday morning.

  “Dear me! I have learned to fear these manifestations of occult power.”

  “Don’t joke about it. My maternal grandmother had the Gift.”

  “Was she the seventh child of a seventh child?”

  “No. She was the ninth child in a family of nine.”

  “Did her thumbs prick?”

  “I’ve no idea, but her grandmother foresaw the Tay Bridge disaster of 1879.”

  “And what disaster do you foresee?”

  “If I knew that, I might know what to do about it. I suppose it’s no good asking you not to go to this convent tomorrow?”

  “I feel that I am committed.”