by Mary Daheim
Sorcha knew her face had turned grim, and she was annoyed by Mother Honorine’s perspicacity. “We are Highlanders,” she said woodenly. “We keep close together.”
In her mind’s eye she could still envision Dallas Fraser refusing to hear of Rosmairi’s professed desire to enter a French convent. “One son heading for the priesthood, one daughter in love with a man who is a priest and yet not a priest—and now this, a budding nun! By the Virgin and all the saints, was ever a mother so bereft of sensible children!” Dallas had stormed and raged for the better part of two days, only to surrender when Iain Fraser had threatened to marry each of his unwed offspring to the first tinker or tart who asked for them.
“Let the bairns find their own way in the world, no matter how ill chosen it may seem to you,” he had admonished his wild-eyed wife. “At least Magnus is well settled with Jean Simpson. Didn’t we promise long ago not to manipulate our children into futures they found repugnant?”
So, at last, Sorcha and Rosmairi had followed Rob to the Continent, each sister nursing a broken heart. As the months passed, Rosmairi became more like her former self, though with a new aura of gentle dignity. Sorcha’s peace of mind proved more elusive.
Rosmairi had disappeared inside the henhouse. Mother Honorine turned back to Sorcha, as a pair of sparrow hawks darted overhead, then soared toward the river. “Your sister has shown signs of preferring a more contemplative life, perhaps.” The black veil that fell from a stiffly starched linen crown fluttered in the May breeze. “But you, ma chère, you might find yourself suited to the role of a lay tertiary. I am told you get on very well in the village. They call you L’Écossaise Noire, n’est-ce pas?”
Sorcha was unable to suppress a smile. It was true—her foreign accent, the dark hair, and olive skin, had earned her the nickname of the Black Scotswoman. On the three days a week she spent in Le Petit Andely tending the ill, helping the poor, cheering the elderly, teaching the young, Sorcha forgot her own aching heart and allowed the townspeople to accept her into their community.
Still, Mother Honorine’s suggestion of becoming a Dominican lay tertiary seemed premature. “It’s fulfilling,” Sorcha admitted as the mother superior paused at the end of the vegetable garden, where two nuns were chattering a few feet away by the stone well. “Not so very long ago, I should have scoffed at the notion of living in a convent. Now I find it … soothing.”
Mother Honorine nodded deeply. “Just so. For your sister, too, though she is quite different from you.” The slate-gray eyes were frank, as always. “Yet I must ask myself, is it that you young people from Scotland—and England—have had so little opportunity to practice your faith that you find greater freedom here within the convent than at home? Freedom of the spirit, that is—you comprehend?”
It was not a question Sorcha had ever considered. While she chafed from time to time at the monotony of daily prayers and services, she had rarely rebelled, even within herself. There was a certain satisfaction in self-discipline. Yet Sorcha could not honestly state that she felt her soul growing closer to God. Perhaps, instead, she had grown further away from the world, which was not necessarily the same thing.
The nuns at the well had erupted into gales of laughter. Mother Honorine glanced inquiringly over her shoulder; the women subsided immediately. The reverend mother was not strict, but she was demanding when it came to excess of any kind. If there was one rule that superseded all others at Sainte Vierge des Andelys, it was moderation—in food, in speaking, even in religious devotion. Several weeks earlier, at the beginning of Lent, one of the young novices had declared a fast for the entire forty days and had vowed to remain at prayer in her cell except for morning Mass. Before the sun set on Ash Wednesday, Mother Honorine had the young novice in the refectory, taking bread and water.
Guilelessly, the reverend mother turned back to Sorcha. “Perhaps it is too soon for you to know.” She removed her hands from the graceful draperies and gazed at the ring that had joined her to Christ. “I had many doubts.” She frowned, then exposed those large front teeth in yet another smile. “Though my family did not. ‘A fourth daughter,’ said my dear departed papa, ‘is a dowerless daughter. Guise though she may be.’ And so it was into the convent I went, yet at the time I would have preferred a strong young husband and babes in the cradle.” She arched her shoulders and back in a characteristic shrug. “But later, I found there was much joy here, great satisfaction. Though,” she emphasized, waving a long, tapering forefinger at Sorcha, “not such peace as you might think. Oh, non, non! A convent, at least one where its inhabitants work in the world, is no place for escape!”
Sorcha started to respond, but Sister Marie Françoise was approaching in her plodding, bowlegged manner. Not that Sorcha had ever seen the middle-aged nun’s bare legs, but she could guess from the woman’s stride that she had spent much of her early life on horseback in her native Brittany. “It’s the bees,” Sister Marie Françoise was explaining, direct as ever, “the young are dying in the hives.”
“The late frost, perhaps.” Mother Honorine nodded to Sorcha before allowing Sister Marie Françoise to lead her back down the path toward the granary, where the convent’s half dozen hives were kept. For a few moments, Sorcha waited, watching the henhouse. But either Rosmairi was still inside tending to her chores, or she had left through the back door. No matter; Sorcha preferred a few moments alone. Mother Honorine’s inquiries had brought Sorcha’s hidden thoughts out into the open.
Glimpsing her murky reflection in the well, Sorcha tried not to think of Gavin Napier. Over two years had passed since he’d left her at Fotheringhay, bereft of his love and bewildered by his rejection. If Sorcha couldn’t quite forgive him, neither could she forget.
Upon Napier’s departure, his brother had come to offer the comfort of the Church of Rome to the doomed Queen of Scots. Sorcha never learned whether Mary knew there had been a change of identity. Father Adam Napier had only a few, furtive moments alone with the Queen before her execution. Then he, too, was gone, riding out after midnight, across the Northamptonshire plains. Sorcha never even saw him.
She did, however, see the Queen one last time. During the night Mary Stuart was permitted to spend her final hours alone with her loyal subjects. She distributed her last few belongings, wrote down some personal requests, and attempted—in vain—to shore up her companions’ crumbling courage. For Sorcha, who had not known the Queen as long or loved her as well as the others, the long, pathetic night still had been deeply disturbing. Several times she felt her eyes brim with tears, and at one point, near dawn, when Mary Stuart offered that familiar, engaging, charismatic smile, Sorcha buried her face in her hands and turned away. At last, as the Queen was led away to the executioner’s block in the great hall, she embraced Sorcha with as much fervor as rheumatic joints and royal dignity would permit. It was a piercing, brittle moment. Mary Stuart, so often foolish, reckless, obstinate, and flighty in her youth, wore both her royal diadem and her martyr’s crown with an unquestionable assurance. She had drawn away from Sorcha and placed her gnarled hand over her heart. “It is here, ma petite, that truth dwells. May God keep you in His tender care. Adieu.”
The attendants who had spent so many years in captivity were allowed to accompany their mistress into the great hall, but Sorcha and Gillis Mowbray were ordered to stay behind. To her shame, Sorcha was immensely relieved. She had spent the next few minutes in prayer for the Queen’s swift and holy death, but Mary’s final words kept intruding. Had she spoken of love or faith? Had she guessed Sorcha’s feelings in some instinctive, omniscient way? Had those years of enforced patience and inactivity made Mary Stuart more observant of others? Or was she merely offering a meaningless paean of farewell?
Absently, Sorcha tossed another pebble into the well, scarcely noting its soft splash as the two nuns who had been drawing water earlier returned with their empty buckets. They greeted Sorcha, replaced the containers, and made their chattering way toward the convent’s arched entr
ance. Overhead, heavy clouds began to roll in from the north. The promise of a warm, sunny spring day seemed about to be broken.
Sorcha stood up, adjusting her drab gray skirts but unable to break the train of memory. Less than a month after Mary’s death, she and Ailis had returned to Scotland. The entire Fraser family, except for Magnus and his bride, Jean Simpson, were in Edinburgh, anxiously awaiting news from Fotheringhay. Rob was despondent over the Queen’s execution, but he was almost as dismayed when he learned from Sorcha that Father Napier had not been a real priest. Lady Fraser openly stated that perhaps this revelation would cure Rob of his clerical notions. But while he was shaken by the deception, it failed to deter him from his chosen course.
Rob’s decision had its effect on Sorcha as well. Since he was going to France to visit various religious houses, she insisted that he make every effort not only to seek out Gavin Napier—or Adam, for that matter—but to learn as much as possible about them and their background. Somewhat reluctantly, Rob agreed. When he came home to Gosford’s End that autumn, he had made up his mind to become a Recollect friar—but he had unearthed very little concerning the Napiers. Adam was a secular priest who had studied at Amiens and Cambrai. He had been captured and maimed by the Dutch. After his release, he’d recovered sufficiently to leave France the previous summer. He was said to be holy, kind, devout, and fervent to the point of militancy, at least as far as persecution of the faith in Scotland and England were concerned. Yes, he had a younger brother, Gavin, who had also lived as an exile in the vicinity. Beauvais, perhaps, or Clermont. No one Rob talked to in the Île-de-France region seemed to really know Gavin Napier, except as Father Adam’s brother.
“Forget him,” Dallas had told her elder daughter that Christmastide. Fortified by a great deal of mulled wine, she dared broach what had been virtually an unspeakable subject as far as Sorcha was concerned. “He’s a strange one, mayhap touched in the head. Don’t fash yourself, child, it’s time, and past time, you and Rosmairi both put those feckless knaves behind you.”
Sorcha hadn’t replied. That Gavin Napier was strange, at least when it came to love, was hardly a startling observation. But touched in the head he was not, nor was he a knave such as George Gordon. Napier loved Sorcha—and she loved him. It was the world that was all awry, and Sorcha was convinced she would one day gaze out from her casement and see Gavin Napier riding up to Gosford’s End.
But that day never came. And as Rob prepared to begin his studies at Compiègne and Rosmairi sighed and cried over George’s impending marriage to Henrietta Stewart, for the first time in her life Sorcha yearned to leave the Highlands. She no longer found comfort savoring ripe berries in the bramble brake by the low stone fence; she had no thrill at the tug of a fish on her line in the peaty burns; she no longer was soothed on a restless night by the caw of the night corbie from a nearby tree. And when she hunted alone, or with other members of her family, the only time her blood sang with excitement was when she thought she’d glimpsed the long, flashing legs of the Master of Ness—and then realized that he was gone, killed by the man she loved. Along with the great stag, Gavin Napier had turned her heart to clay.
There was no succor for her at Gosford’s End. While her parents did their best to cheer Sorcha, when Rosmairi made up her mind to go to France, Sorcha went with her. Whether she fled from her homeland or ran to that place where Gavin Napier had dwelt, she could not be sure. Sometimes it seemed as if her heartbreak had little to do with her disenchantment with Gosford’s End. It was as if having been forced to leave home in the first place, Sorcha’s ties hadn’t merely been loosened, they’d been completely severed. Not even Niall remained as a bridge between her youth and her coming of age as a woman. He had gone with Magnus and his bride to live at the edge of the Muir of Ord.
And Sorcha had gone to live in France, on an island in the middle of the River Seine. If she could not find peace at Sainte Vierge des Andelys, perhaps she could learn to forget.
On a soft summer night following a vigil Mass to herald the feast of Saint John the Baptist, Sorcha and Rosmairi strolled along the river’s edge, taking advantage of the long June twilight.
“Mother Honorine asked today if I would profess my wishes to become a novice,” Rosmairi said matter-of-factly as they carefully skirted the edge of the little bluff that dropped sharply to the river. “I replied that I needed more time. At Advent, perhaps.” Rosmairi lifted her chin, smiling serenely, if a trifle smugly, at the darkening periwinkle sky. It was an expression that she often assumed and that annoyed Sorcha considerably.
“You risk the wrath of our Lady Mother.” Sorcha’s remark was intended to goad.
But Rosmairi ascended from serene to sublime. “Even our dear mother should hardly complain if I became a Bride of Christ. Each day I pray that she may be filled with the grace of understanding and acceptance.”
A molehill caused Sorcha to falter just enough to stifle her response. The idea of Dallas Fraser being enveloped in an ethereal glow of submissive comprehension seemed to demonstrate Rosmairi’s apparent inability to distinguish fantasy from fact. Rosmairi’s brief flirtation with reality had been short-lived. While their mother was still opposed to Rob’s vocation, at least Iain Fraser had managed to coax his wife’s acquiescence with allusions to bishops’ miters and even cardinals’ red hats. Unfortunately, such goals were beyond a nun’s aspirations.
“The fact remains,” Sorcha asserted, deciding upon a more conciliatory note, “would either of us truly want to spend the rest of our lives on foreign soil, whether nun or not?”
“Oh ….” Rosmairi gazed at the first faint shimmer of stars gathering beyond the wooded hills above the village. “It might be for the best, since our old faith is being beaten out like so many late summer brush fires.”
Sorcha looked askance at the uncharacteristic turn of phrase. Yet Rosmairi was right—the previous summer, when the Spanish had sent their mighty armada to invade England and avenge Mary Stuart’s death, all English Catholics had been deemed enemies of the Crown. Even in Scotland, Papists were looked upon as traitors, no doubt conspiring with King Philip II to foment rebellion all over Britain.
When the armada was defeated, the English interpreted the victory as a sign that God Himself was a Protestant. Catholics might disagree, but this was not the time or place to voice such an opinion. Clearly, Elizabeth of England and her Protestant faith were riding the high tide of political favor and influence in Europe.
“Just think,” Sorcha said, pausing to observe how the dying light touched the slim silver spire of the Gothic church in the village, “in our grandparents’ time, or mayhap before that, there was no such thing as different religions. People didn’t fight over which version of the Bible was right, or whether prayers should be said in Latin or Scots, or if a clergyman should marry or be celibate.” As she uttered the last few words, Sorcha frowned and looked down at the patch of clover that cushioned her feet. Even after she had discovered that Gavin Napier was not a priest, he had still refused to marry her. Why? she asked herself for the thousandth time—and, as always, found no answer.
“It would seem that men must always fight over something,” Rosmairi said, sounding less ethereal and perhaps aware of Sorcha’s sudden distraction. “In France, Catholic and Huguenot quarrel. Yet it seems more confusing than at home. Who is which?”
Sorcha resumed walking, though she turned toward the river as a fish jumped and then disappeared under an ever-widening halo of water. “At home, I felt people were sincere—if misguided—in their beliefs. From what we’re told in France, religion is more weapon than dogma.”
Rosmairi again wore her sublime expression. “How inconsequential to spend one’s life using religion instead of being used by it. I wonder—if I were to become very holy and extremely wise, would Henry III listen to me as the Dauphin heeded Joan of Arc?”
In the twilight, Rosmairi couldn’t see the vexed glance that darted from Sorcha’s green eyes. “He might,” she replie
d with some asperity, “though you ought to consider brave Joan’s rather crisp demise.”
“Sorcha!” Rosmairi’s hand flew to her mouth. “You blaspheme!”
“Rot.” Sorcha turned as the Angelus bells sounded from both the convent and the village. She couldn’t help but give Rosmairi an impish glance as they crossed the little wooden footbridge that spanned a tiny stream flowing from the duck pond down the bank into the Seine. “If you wish to advise an errant king, you should have stayed in Scotland with Jamie.”
Rosmairi tossed her head, the white linen veil whipping against her cheeks. “Jaimie wanted my admiration, not my counsel.” The smug, serene aura had fled, replaced by resentment and a touch of chagrin. “Oh, aye, he found me fetching and a sop to his uncertain ego, but it was you, Sorcha, whose wit he craved.”
Pausing to face Rosmairi, Sorcha stood with her hands shoved deep into the huge pockets of her simple gray gown. Beyond the wooded hills, the darkened sky was sprinkled with stars. “What poor Jamie really wanted was to be assured that he could function in the company of females. He will soon take a bride, you know.”
Rosmairi nodded, her expression faintly rueful. “A Dane, isn’t that so?”
“An odd choice, it seems ….” Sorcha stopped, as the frantic movement of a lantern across the river caught her eye. It was just upstream from the village, near the Chai Vieux, the abandoned quay once used for boats crossing the Seine to the convent before the river had cut a new channel.
“What is it?” Rosmairi had turned, her linen veil catching in the folds of her wimple. “A lantern, is it not? Is someone signaling to us?”
An unwarranted sense of caution made Sorcha put a finger to her lips. It seemed that their voices carried unusually well on this fair summer night. “It may be. That far from the village, no one on the island but us could see the light.” She moved a few feet to the very edge of the bank, treading carefully lest the ground be undermined. “Wave back, Ros. Whoever it is might be able to see your white robes.”