As Death Draws Near

by Anna Lee Huber

  Bree’s mouth curled into a questioning smile, and I brushed my curiosity aside, to be contemplated later. With a swift nod to Marsdale, I accepted Gage’s proffered hand to help me down.

  While he assisted Bree, I took a moment to glance around more fully at our surroundings. The grounds on which the abbey stood were quite expansive—lush, and green, and bursting with flowers. The lawns must have been freshly cut, for the scent of grass and hay was strong, overpowering that of the pine trees and sunbaked gravel. To the south, I could see the undulating green hills of the Dublin Mountains rising away from us, their eastern slopes sliding into shadow as the sun began to sink to the west.

  It seemed the last place on earth someone would be murdered, and yet Miss Lennox had.

  That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain . . .

  It was a quote from Hamlet, spoken about the villain Claudius, but somehow it seemed oddly apropos. That the sun might shine, the flowers might bloom, even though something quite terrible had happened here. Something that had not yet been explained to us.

  And never would be if we did not go inside.

  I heard Gage shut the carriage door with a decisive click before speaking to Anderley up on the coachman’s box. “See that Lord Marsdale is taken to his friend’s residence and then return for us.”

  “With pleasure, sir.”

  My mouth twitched at the valet’s cheek as the carriage slowly rolled forward. Marsdale had made no ally there. I began to turn back toward the others when something caught my eye.

  It was a trio of girls, no more than twelve or thirteen years old, all dressed in drab gray dresses with white collars at the neck and wrists, and white pinafores. It was the uniform of a school girl, and I realized with a shock as more such girls of varying ages came into view, that this wasn’t any normal abbey. It was also a boarding school.

  The girls all eyed us with unabashed curiosity even as they continued plodding ahead on some known course. I suspected this was their afternoon constitutional. My own governess had made me take one each day at the same time.

  I glanced behind me in horror, wondering if Gage had seen them, and apprehended the same thing I had. He stood watching them for a moment as I had, and then he reached a hand out to draw me forward, tucking my arm through the crook of his elbow. Bree fell in step close behind us as we moved toward the stairs, our soles crunching on the gravel, and I spoke softly over my shoulder to her.

  “You’ll be all right belowstairs?”

  “Aye, m’lady. I ken what to do,” she replied evenly.

  I nodded and she separated from us to move toward the gray door through which servants had once come and gone. I was unfamiliar with life in an abbey, but I suspected that there was still some form of caste system among nuns, and that if there were not enough sisters to manage the day-to-day life of an order—the cooking, and cleaning, and other such tasks—they must hire outside assistance. If this was the case, I knew those sort of domestics were far more likely to speak to a fellow servant such as Bree than a lady like me.

  Even so, I disliked sending my maid off alone in an unfamiliar place such as this, where we knew a murder had taken place. Surely she would be safe surrounded by these women of faith. Unless somehow faith had been the motive for Miss Lennox’s murder.

  The nun who had emerged as our carriage drew to a stop on the drive still stood next to the door waiting for us as Gage and I climbed the stairs. Her posture was as impeccable as any debutante, making me wonder if the nuns wore corsets under those voluminous black habits. I couldn’t imagine why they would, unless it was some form of penance.

  As we drew closer, I could see that her eyes were a brilliant shade of sapphire blue, made all the more startling because of her austere garments. They seemed to glint and sparkle as she watched us, as if unable to quite contain the vigor and curiosity bubbling inside her though it had been tightly leashed elsewhere.

  “I am Mother Mary Paul. Welcome to Loretto Abbey.” She spoke softer than I’d expected, still carefully restraining that energy. “You must be Mr. Gage and Lady Darby. The reverend mother has been expecting you.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I felt Gage’s arm tighten under my own.

  “She’s been expecting us?”

  Mother Mary Paul gave a single nod. “She had a letter from His Grace, the Duke of Wellington.” Her head tilted to the side as she studied Gage’s furrowed expression. “This displeases you in some way?”

  Gage swiftly masked his thoughts about the duke and his father’s presumptions. “No. I’m merely surprised by how swift the post runs.” Apparently, that letter of introduction they sent us would not be needed.

  The nun nodded in easy acceptance, but I could see her eyes evaluating, perceiving more than perhaps he wished. “It only arrived today.” Her gaze shifted to meet mine, and I could tell she was aware I had observed her assessment. Her face softened in a smile for the first time. “But the reverend mother can tell you what you wish to know. If you will please follow me, I shall take you to her.”

  She led us through the door into the entry hall with polished mahogany floors and trim, white walls, and rather minimal decoration. However, the parlor we entered through the first door on the left was far from simple. It was a large room divided into seating arrangements—one before the hearth, another two grouped around each of the front windows, and a third surrounding the far corner—and yet there seemed to be an acre of floor space between them and their Aubusson rugs. The same polished mahogany ran through this room, though the walls were covered in embossed leather wallpaper. The walls were handsomely preserved and probably original to the house, as much of the furniture seemed to be, but they also added a weight to the room that it did not need. It was far from inviting, and I found myself wishing that a fire would be lit in the fireplace even on this warm summer day just to give the room a bit of a human touch.

  As Mother Paul guided us toward the pair of settees facing each other across the hearth, a door on the opposite side of the room opened and a slight woman of middling height entered. Even without the gold pectoral cross hanging from a chain around her neck, I would have known she was the mother superior by sight alone. There was something in the way she walked, the manner in which she held herself. It was almost queenly. Her posture was just as beautiful as Mother Paul’s, perhaps even more so because it was not stiff or restrained, but seemingly natural. I did not know how much effort it cost her to make it appear so, or if it was innate to her being.

  “May I present the Reverend Mother Mary Teresa of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary,” Mother Paul said, and then turned to the mother superior and bowed. “Reverend Mother, this is Mr. Gage and Lady Darby.”

  Reverend Mother opened her arms, offering us a gentle smile. “You are most welcome. Please have a seat.”

  Gage and I sat side by side on one of the settees upholstered in a stiff goldenrod velvet with walnut trim while she instructed Mother Paul to have tea brought in. Then she settled across from us with a well-practiced swish of her habit, so that it did not get caught beneath her and pull in the back, much as any gown. She was a very striking woman. Perhaps not beautiful with her rather pointy nose and high forehead, but arresting. She looked young to be a mother superior, but then I had expected a wrinkled old woman, not someone still possessed of a rosy, almost luminescent complexion. In truth, it was difficult to tell her and Mother Paul’s ages accurately, dressed as they were in their black habits. She could have been far older than I realized. The wisdom and solemnity in her dark eyes as she regarded us certainly suggested it, though maybe that was only a manifestation of her recent trials.

  “I wish I could be welcoming you here under different circumstances, but the situation being what it is, I am glad the Lord has brought you to us now.” She spoke both earnestly and directly, setting me at ease, while also somehow making me anxious not to disappoint her. �
�What can I tell you? What do you wish to know?”

  Gage and I shared a glance before he spoke. “To be honest, we haven’t been informed of many of the details.”

  Reverend Mother’s eyes flickered in surprise.

  “We were not in London when your letter reached the Duke of Wellington,” he hastened to explain. “May I assume it was you who wrote to His Grace?”

  “It was. Being Miss Lennox’s mother superior, I was, of course, aware of her connection to His Grace. She made it known to me when she applied to be admitted to our order. Though as a general rule, I don’t believe she made it known to many here at the abbey.”

  “Why do you say that?” I asked, curious why the girl would hide such an auspicious connection. “Because she was raised Anglican?”

  Reverend Mother spoke with care. “I suppose that may have been part of it. Though she did not hide her recent conversion. After all, she was not our first convert here at Rathfarnham.” This was said with a glance at Mother Paul as she entered the room carrying the tea tray. The other woman merely nodded in confirmation, swiftly deducing what we were discussing. “It was nothing to be ashamed of, but rather rejoiced. No, I think it more likely that with the state of unrest about Ireland, she felt it best not to publicize her connection lest it upset someone.”

  “Or that someone might try to take advantage of it?” Gage pressed, not unkindly, but we needed complete honesty.

  Reverend Mother hesitated and then gave a single bob of her head. “Just so. As a postulant, she was preparing herself to let go of all worldly things, to seek the Lord’s will, but the world does not always let go easily.”

  The conversation paused as Mother Paul prepared each of our teas as skillfully as any gentleman’s daughter, before settling in a chair a short distance away with a cup of her own. These two women definitely didn’t come from inferior families. I reckoned their fathers had been prosperous tradesman, at the very least, or perhaps landed gentry. They had obviously been given an education, including proper elocution, for while their voices both held traces of that musical Irish lilt, it was faint. Reverend Mother sounded quite English at times, and at other times not, making me wonder whether she’d spent any significant period in Britain.

  She took a drink of her tea before replacing it in her saucer. “Now, you said you had not been informed of many details. What precisely do you know?”

  Gage shifted forward to set his cup on the table between us and the nun. “That a young lady named Miss Harriet Lennox, a distant cousin of the duke’s, has been murdered here at the abbey, and that the matter was to be handled with discretion and urgency.”

  Reverend Mother stared at him expectantly until she realized, with a furrowing of her smooth brow, that this was all he could tell her. “Well, that is very little information. And yet you came.”

  This was not spoken as a question, but I knew it was one regardless.

  “Because we were needed,” I replied.

  Her eyes met mine again, that wisdom I had noted earlier somehow sharpening. “Yes.” She sighed. “Yes, you most certainly are.” She set her own cup aside. “Let me start at the beginning then, shall I?”

  Miss Harriet Lennox had arrived at the abbey some four months earlier and had seemed to settle in easily enough to life at the convent. She was perhaps quieter than most new postulants, but Reverend Mother had sensed this was because she had become used to keeping things to herself as a necessity. She was a quick learner and dedicated to her prayers and study, and the students seemed to gravitate toward her. This was not uncommon. The postulants were often younger and closer to the girls in age as well as temperament, still struggling with some of the same anxieties and uncertainties of youth.

  There had been no indications of trouble until one evening about a week before her death. Miss Lennox had been caught returning to the grounds of the abbey through a portion of the garden wall that had been removed because of work being done to fix some drainage issues in the orchard after a particularly wet spring. Loretto sisters, including postulants, were not allowed to leave the property of the abbey without special permission and dispensation. She claimed she had become absorbed in following the flight of a gray heron and wanted to see whether it nested near the large pond beyond the abbey proper. This behavior was not entirely out of character, for Miss Lennox had often been observed watching the swans, and other birds and animals which populated the abbey gardens and small pond. She had even been the person to first note a den of red foxes below a beech tree at the southern end of the property. Her manner had been properly contrite, and she had done her penance without complaint, so the reverend mother had thought little more of it.

  However, a week later when Miss Lennox failed to appear for evening prayers and then the meal that followed, she couldn’t help but wonder if there had been more to the girl’s absence from the abbey than she had confessed. As the dinner hour stretched out, she began to feel uneasy about the missing girl. It was unlike her to behave in such an inconsiderate and neglectful way. She asked several of the sisters to search the abbey grounds, particularly the orchard and the area beyond its tumbled walls to see if Miss Lennox could be located. It was possible the girl had suddenly fallen ill or met with some sort of accident and needed help.

  Unfortunately, by the time they reached her, she had been beyond their earthly assistance.

  “I informed the county constabulary,” Reverend Mother explained. “But as soon as I witnessed the way they were treating the sisters, frightening the students, and bullying the gardeners, I ordered them to leave. I knew they would never uncover the truth. Not like that. Then I immediately wrote to the Duke of Wellington for assistance.”

  “I’m surprised the chief constable bowed to your wishes with a murder happening on your grounds,” Gage remarked.

  Her gaze turned shrewd. “Ah, but the murder didn’t happen on the abbey grounds, but just over the wall, about ten feet to the north. I can’t keep them away from there, but I can keep them from entering the abbey. For now.”

  Clearly she was a woman who possessed a strong backbone and some powerful connections.

  “They also wanted to examine Miss Lennox’s body, beyond what could be seen cursorily outside her clothing, but I would not allow it. It would have been entirely improper. Even if Miss Lennox had not yet professed her vows, she was still intent on becoming a bride of Christ. For any man to have touched her would have been a sacrilege.”

  I had anticipated as much, guessing that one of the reasons Lord Gage had recommended his son bring me was because I was one of the few people who possessed both of the traits this investigation required. I was a woman and I possessed a detailed knowledge of anatomy, reluctantly accrued at the hands of my late anatomist husband, but acquired all the same. I knew this, and yet I hesitated to say what must be said, unsettled as always by this familiarity and what I was expected to do with it. Given the occupation my second husband had adopted, which I had decided to join him in, this skill had proven to be a useful asset. I could not dispute that. But I still had not grown comfortable with it being so.

  Gage, for his part, did not force the issue on me, but I could see from the look in his eyes he was waiting for me to say something all the same. I wondered how long it would be before he became exasperated with me for dithering over the examination of a dead body during our murder inquiries.

  I screwed up my courage, offering Reverend Mother a tight smile. “Would you allow me to examine her?”

  Her eyes showed no surprise, only increased interest. “So it’s true then? You assisted Sir Anthony Darby with his dissections?”

  That wasn’t precisely how I would have phrased it, but few people listened when I tried to explain, so I simply nodded. “Yes. In a manner of speaking.”

  I wasn’t sure how she would react to this. Some people, especially those who held to a rather strict interpretation of the Bible, believ
ed dissection was evil, and desecrating a corpse in such a manner would mean that body could not fully rise from the dead on the Day of Judgment. Others accepted it rather calmly, distancing themselves from the act by their belief that it would never happen to them.

  Reverend Mother seemed to fall somewhere in the middle. She considered me, and I must have somehow passed muster, for she dipped her chin in affirmation. “Yes. I believe I would have.” She lifted her hands in a gesture of futility. “But I’m afraid now it’s quite impossible.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Miss Lennox has been dead for almost ten days. I postponed the burial a few days longer than normal on the chance something could be done, though at the time I wasn’t certain what. But the fact is, it simply couldn’t be put off any longer. The body, you understand, it was . . . returning to dust. And the smell . . .” She shook her head. “It would not have been right to deny her the comfort of the grave.”

  “Yes. Of course,” I hastened to reassure her. “I understand entirely.” After a week, the decay and decomposition would have been well advanced, and the scents of putrefaction would have been intolerable for anyone inexperienced with such things. Even as accustomed as I had been with it at one time, I had never grown a strong enough stomach to tolerate the stench for long. I had not been looking forward to examining Miss Lennox’s body, particularly considering how much time I knew must have passed, and the realization that now I would not need to do so felt like a reprieve.

  Reverend Mother appeared equally relieved by my ready acceptance of her decision. “We noted any details as best we could, but I’m afraid there wasn’t much. Though perhaps we did not know what to look for.” She glanced at Mother Paul, who appeared just as unsure. “I asked our infirmarian, Sister Mary Bernard, to take special note when she washed Miss Lennox’s body and prepared it for burial, so you will wish to speak with her as well.”