by Rhys Bowen
As I took it she said, “I think that one will fit. That must have been Katy’s and you’re about the same size.”
“Was Katy one of your friends?” I asked. “Has she had her baby and left?”
Blanche shook her head. “She died.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “She fell down the cellar steps and broke her neck.”
“How terrible,” I said. “Poor girl.”
She nodded. “It was an awful shock, especially when I was feeling so low anyway. Katy was a lovely girl. So friendly and nice.”
“What was she doing going down to a cellar?” I asked. “I’ve seen how dark and old some parts of this building are. Why would you ever send a pregnant woman down there?”
“As to that I don’t know what she was doing. Perhaps Sister Angelique had something against her as well. Perhaps she found out that Katy was scared of mice or rats or spiders so she sent her down to clean some part of the cellar where there are bound to be plenty of them. She does things like that.” She shrugged.
“Sister Angelique?” I asked.
“She’s being trained to take Sister Francine’s place. Sister Jerome only likes running things and bossing people around—not the actual day-to-day work. But between ourselves,” and she lowered her voice, leaning close to me, “I don’t think that Sister Angelique is the right person for the job. She volunteered, I understand, but she’s difficult. Moody. Strange. She didn’t take to Katy, although I can’t think why. Katy was a lovely person.”
“You don’t think…” I began hesitantly, “that she maybe took her own life out of despair?”
She looked shocked. “Take her own life? Katy would never do that. She was a cheerful sort of girl, although…” She broke off.
“Although what?”
“She definitely did have something on her mind the day before she died. She was worried about something. I remember now. I asked her what was wrong and she said, ‘It’s nothing. Just something that’s bothering me and I’m not sure what to do about it. She never takes them off, you see.’”
“Who never takes what off?” I asked.
Blanche shrugged. “She wouldn’t say. She just said, ‘Forget about it,’ and walked off. And then we heard that she’d fallen down the steps that evening. But she would never have taken her own life. Never.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, because I could see she was distressed. “I should never have brought it up. It was simply a sad and terrible accident.”
“That’s right,” she said. “Poor Katy. Such a waste of a life.”
She was about to lead me out of the closet when I moved closer to her and whispered, “Sister Jerome told me about another Irish girl called Maureen. I gather she didn’t like her much.”
The ghost of a smile crossed Blanche’s face. “She didn’t. Maureen stood up to her and she didn’t want to give up her baby, so I heard.”
“And Sister already had a good home for it?” I asked.
She nodded.
“But Maureen didn’t have any option, did she? I mean she couldn’t just go out into the world with no money and a baby to look after?”
“Of course not. That’s what Sister told her, but for some reason she wouldn’t see sense.”
“So what happened to her?” I asked.
“She ran away and nobody found out until she didn’t show up at breakfast.”
“Did you know her?”
She shook her head. “Not really. She’d already had her baby when I arrived and the new mothers stay in the maternity wing with their babies. But a couple of the girls heard her yelling and shouting at someone. She said awful things, I gather—that she’d rather kill her baby than let it go to those people.”
“But she didn’t kill it, did she?” I asked in a horrified whisper.
“Of course not. Sister wouldn’t let her see it again. Took it and locked it up in her own room until the new mother could come for it. That’s probably why she ran away. She had nothing to stay for.”
“What are you two gossiping about?” came a shrill voice behind us, the accent still with a trace of French to it. We turned guiltily to see another nun standing behind us. She was small, thin, with dark eyes and arched eyebrows that gave her a surprised look. She looked at me with interest.
“This is Molly, a new girl, Sister,” Blanche said.
“Ah, yes.” The nun continued to examine me. “Sister Jerome informs me of your arrival.” It was hard to tell how old she was. Not that young anyway, with a sallow complexion and a thin line of mouth. “And were you not showing a bad example to the new girl by gossiping with her during silence hours, Blanche?”
She was glaring at us, those dark eyes boring through us. Blanche gave a little whimper.
“I’m sorry, Sister,” I said. “My fault. I was asking Blanche about where the laundry was done. And she said it was all right to ask questions about our tasks.”
“Yes, that is correct.” She was still staring at me. I wondered how much she had overheard. We had been talking in low voices, hardly more than whispers, but maybe she had been standing just outside the laundry closet door listening for some time. I felt ridiculously afraid.
“I am Sister Angelique, in charge of you from now on. Go into the bathroom and get yourself changed, Molly,” she said. “And then I’ll have you taken out to the garden. They could use some extra help picking beans. And you, Blanche—Sister tells me you are to move to the guest room. Are your things already packed to leave?”
“No, Sister. I haven’t had time,” she said.
“Time for idle chatter, I notice. Then hurry and do it now and then meet me down at the nun’s guest room.”
“Yes, Sister,” she said. She gave me a regretful glance and then scurried back to the dormitory. I prayed that she would remember Patchin Place and turn up on my doorstep in a few days. I didn’t think she’d be an ideal servant, but I was going to give her a chance anyway. I went into the bathroom, took off my crumpled muslin, and tucked it into my bag. Then I splashed water over my face and put on the gray dress and blue overgarment. They were made of coarse cloth, heavy and itchy. I wondered if the rest of the nuns wore silk and whether they all enjoyed a good life thanks to the donations Sister Jerome was taking in for them. So much for poverty, chastity, and obedience.
I noticed there was no mirror on the bathroom wall. Clearly vanity was a sin. I ran a brush through my hair, then, on a sudden impulse, I reached into my purse, took out my calling cards and tucked them into the pocket of my dress. I wondered if anything else might give me away. I remembered my wedding ring, and decided to remove that from my purse and hide it likewise in the pocket of my muslin with the calling cards. Luckily I had not brought too much money with me, nor any form of cosmetic that might brand me a hussy. Sister was waiting for me outside the door. I wondered if she might have been spying on me through the keyhole and seen me hide my calling cards. However she gave no hint of suspicion, but nodded in approval at the uniform. “Now you look suitable and ready for work,” she said. “Go and put that bag in the cubby beside your bed and we’ll be off.”
I did as she said, feeling awful again that this cubby had been Blanche’s until a few minutes ago. I wondered if she’d managed to find all her things, and it occurred to me that perhaps the same thing had happened to Maureen. Had she been told to vacate her bed and had to pack up her possessions so rapidly that some of them got left behind? I realized that I’d probably never know now. I had heard the same story of her quarrel and departure from three people. It had obviously been discussed among the girls so it would have come out if anyone had seen her go. I supposed it all made sense. She had no chance of saving her child and so she had simply slipped out of the place that night. Story solved. I had come all this way and gotten myself into this ridiculous situation for nothing. But then I remembered that Katy had been worried, had had something on her mind, and had ended up falling down the cellar steps.
Twenty-five
Having deposited my bag in the
cubby, I followed Sister Angelique down the staircase and through a door at the end of the downstairs hallway. It had been surprisingly cold in that building and the sun on my face felt welcome. We crossed an area of gravel on which lines of laundry hung limply in the hot afternoon sun. On my left a wing jutted out from the square main building and from an open upstairs window came the sound of a baby crying. I looked up at it. Sister Angelique frowned. “I don’t know what they think they are doing, leaving the window open like that. I’ll speak to them.”
Beyond the gravel we could hear the sound of voices coming from between the rows of plants in the kitchen garden. They fell silent as we came past a trellis of pole beans and I saw three young women, all heavily pregnant like myself, busy at work picking the beans.
“It seems as if there was more talking than picking going on here,” Sister said, peering down at a half-full basket. “I hope you will set a good example to our new girl. Her name is Molly and she comes from Ireland.”
They were staring at me with blank, unfriendly faces.
“I thought we had no room for another girl,” one of them said. “All the beds are full.”
“Blanche will be leaving us in the morning,” Sister said, “and tonight she has been transferred to the sisters’ guest room to prepare herself for going out into the world.”
“Blanche?” A tall angular girl asked. “Is she really ready to go then?”
“Blanche needs to pull herself together and get on with life,” Sister said. “Anyway, this is not for you to query, Peggy. I have made my decision and that is final.”
“Don’t we get a chance to say good-bye to her?” a frail-looking, little scrap of a girl asked.
“Better for her if you don’t. She would only get emotional again and that is not good for her. Now, back to your work. They are waiting for more produce in the kitchen, and you need to show Molly how things are done.”
“We’ve almost finished, Sister,” one of the girls said hastily. “Three buckets full this afternoon. That’s good, isn’t it?”
“How about the raspberries?” Sister asked. “Are they all picked?”
“No, Sister. We were going to get to them next,” the same girl said.
“You’ll find the birds have eaten them all if you don’t get a move on. You, Elaine. Take Molly and make sure those raspberry bushes are stripped by the end of the afternoon. You other two come and help them as soon as the beans are finished. And pick carefully. Don’t crush them, you hear?”
“Yes, Sister,” they muttered.
She turned on her heel and stalked off.
“Old cow,” one of the girls muttered.
“Careful, Elaine. She might hear you. You know she’s got unnatural powers of hearing.”
A tall, rather striking-looking brunette tossed back her head. “What do I care? What can she do to us after all? We’re only here for a few more weeks. And I’m actually paying for the privilege.”
“You are paying to be here?” I blurted out.
She turned those amused dark eyes on me. “I was a bad girl,” she said. “Got rather tipsy at a party and let a boy take a few too many liberties. Unfortunately I’m betrothed to someone else and he wouldn’t have taken kindly to walking down the aisle with a girl with a large belly.” She laughed and the others smiled nervously.
“You’re still going to marry him?”
“Of course. His family is rich. I’d be a fool if I didn’t. However, he’s in the Navy and luckily for me his ship is deployed to the Philippines for a year. So he’ll return. I’ll greet him on the pier and he’ll be none the wiser.” She looked at me with a smirk. “I can tell why a bed suddenly became available, can’t you, Aggie?”
“Why?” the frail-looking one asked.
“Because Sister has her redhead at last.”
“Oh, of course.” They were all smirking now.
“What do you mean?” I asked, my face turning red under their scrutiny.
“She’s been waiting and waiting for a red-headed baby,” the striking girl called Elaine said. “You don’t see too many of them.”
“What does she want a red-headed baby for?” I asked. Although I knew that I wouldn’t be here and that my child would be born within the safety of my own home, I felt a jolt of fear go through me.
The scrap of a girl, Aggie, leaned closer to me. “She’s got a couple waiting for a red-haired baby. And you can bet your life the donation will be most generous.”
“So you’ll probably be all right,” Elaine said. “A fellow Irishwoman and a redhead. She’ll probably make sure she takes good care of you.”
“Doesn’t she take good care of all the girls?” I asked innocently.
Elaine moved closer. “She leaves it mostly up to Sister Angelique, and let’s just say that one has her favorites and her nonfavorites. Me, I’m fine because I am paying to be here and because I could leave whenever I wanted to. But if you cross Sister, or she thinks you will probably have an ugly baby, she can make your life hell.”
“She didn’t seem too nice to Blanche,” I said. “I felt terrible. I certainly didn’t want to turn anyone out of her bed for me and I told Sister I could sleep on the sofa in the common room until someone left, but she wouldn’t hear of it.”
“It’s not your fault,” the tall one said. “She’s been dying to get rid of Blanche since her baby was born dead. Furious with her she was. We reckon the nuns must have been going to lose out on money that was promised them.”
“I don’t know why she stayed so mad,” Aggie said. “I hear she found herself a pretty, fair baby to take the place of Blanche’s.”
“You know Sister,” Elaine said. “Once she carries a grudge, she’s not going let up on it.”
I was trying to find a way to bring Maureen or Katy into the conversation.
“Come on, back to work, I suppose,” Elaine said, “Or we’ll never hear the last of it.” She picked up a basin and walked ahead of me past the beans and tomatoes to a line of raspberry bushes.
“Elaine,” I whispered, falling into step beside her. “Are you saying that the nuns make money from our babies?”
“Of course,” she said. “I’d say Sister has a nice little business going here.”
“But why would people pay for a baby?” I asked. “Surely they can go to the foundling institutions and find babies aplenty, free for the taking.”
“There are several reasons, I suppose. The prospective parents know that these girls have been vetted and don’t have any awful diseases, and they can request a particular type of child. Sometimes a couple wants a baby that looks like them—a redhead like yours, for example. Other times they are paying for a baby with no questions asked.”
“What do you mean?”
She looked at my puzzled face and laughed. “You’re rather green behind the ears, aren’t you? You know—a society family and the wife is worried that her baby might look like the Spanish gardener and not the fair-skinned husband, for example. Or if a touch of the tarbrush resurfaces after a generation or two.”
“‘A touch of the tarbrush’?” I looked confused.
She laughed again. “My dear, where have you been all your life? There are plenty of families, especially in the South, with Negro ancestry they’d rather forget. And it does resurface at the most inconvenient times.”
“You mean these people trade their own child for one from here?”
“Exactly. And they feel justified in donating to the good sisters knowing that the truth will never get out.”
We had reached the raspberries. She surveyed them and shook her head. “Not much here,” she said. “I love that talk about their vegetables and fruit having to last the sisters all winter. The ground is so poor here that they never get a decent crop of anything. We’re on a rock, you see. The soil is just not deep enough.” She started plucking raspberries and dropping them into the basin. I followed suit.
“Why do they need enough vegetables for the winter if the convent has money c
oming in from these donations?” I asked.
“Good question. I’ve had to help prepare the sisters’ meals and frankly they don’t eat too well—lots of soups and beans and coarse bread. Of course they may like it that way, as a continual penance.” She grinned. “But the ground is so rocky they can’t even dig graves for the nuns to be buried here, because they can’t get down far enough in the solid rock.”
“So where are the nuns buried then? I thought I was told they never left this place after they made their profession.” I looked around at the rows of plants and then the small orchard beyond. Someone had been digging up a patch of bare earth over by the orchard. On one side of us was the severe façade of the building with its turrets in the corners and sloping slate roof, and on the other three the high brick wall. I saw no cemetery.
“They aren’t,” she said, then laughed when she saw my surprised face. “There’s a crypt under the chapel and the dead nuns are put in big stone coffins down there. Poor old Sister Francine was taken down there only a few weeks ago.”
“I gather she was very kind.”
“And a good midwife too,” Elaine said. “To be honest with you, Molly, I’m not looking forward to having this baby with those sisters helping with the delivery. I don’t think either of them has much idea what to do. And they are both horribly impatient. If there’s an emergency then God help us all.”
“Couldn’t you ask to send for a doctor if there was an emergency?” I asked.
“Jerome sent for a doctor with Blanche’s baby in the end,” Elaine said, “but we have no telephone or means of communication with the outside world so sending for a doctor requires somebody to run to the nearest house. By the time he got here it was too late.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off that high wall. Now that I was close to it I saw that it was topped with broken glass. I wondered whether this was to keep intruders out or the occupants in.