Sister Joan repressed a sigh. She had forgotten that in certain communities nuns were regarded as harbingers of bad luck, living omens to be avoided or jeered at. Brother Cuthbert had said there were few Catholics in the district but he had not mentioned there might be prejudice. Well, the only way to combat prejudice was to try to ignore it. She raised her chin in the manner her father had always called ‘Our Joan’s bulldog look’, and spoke clearly and pleasantly.
‘Good morning. I need some groceries. Can you tell me where the grocer’s shop is?’
The small boy stared at her wordlessly. At the same moment the door behind him opened suddenly and a voice called sharply, ‘Come away in, Dougal!’
‘Are you Dougal’s mother?’ Sister Joan stepped briskly to the gate. ‘I’m hoping to buy some groceries. If you would be so kind as to direct me to the shops?’
‘The store’s at the top of the hill.’
The owner of the voice had come to the open door and ventured as far as the front step. Sister Joan smiled across the yard at the thin young woman with her hair tied severely back and her garments covered by a large apron.
‘Thank you. That’s very kind of you. I’m Sister Joan –’
‘We don’t hold with being converted here,’ the young woman interrupted.
‘I’m not in the business of conversion,’ Sister Joan said mildly. ‘Good day to you.’
She turned and went on up the cobbled hill. Behind Dougal’s voice was raised shrilly.
‘Is she a witch, Mam? Is she?’
The answer was inaudible. Dougal had evidently been yanked indoors.
A double-fronted store which obviously sold a wide range of goods occupied a large corner building at the top of the hill. Sister Joan paused to look at the plate-glass windows crammed with merchandise. A couple of women emerging with laden baskets glanced at her curiously.
Where, she thought wryly, was the traditional friendliness the travel brochures always talked about when they advertised the Highlands? Perhaps if she had not been clad in ankle-length grey habit and short veil over a white coif that hid her short dark hair people would have nodded and greeted her in the soft accent that was so attractive.
She entered the store which was as crowded with wares as the windows, sacks of potatoes vying with plastic pots of yoghurt and some brightly jacketed paperback books sharing a revolving stand with picture postcards depicting views of the loch. Towards the back of the store a long open-ended counter was presided over by a middle-aged woman who gave her a slightly startled look, then moved forward.
‘Ah, you’ll be come to stay up at the hermitage,’ she said.
‘At the retreat, yes.’
‘Not often anyone comes there these days. Out of fashion, I daresay. I’m Dolly McKensie.’
‘Sister Joan.’ Shaking hands Sister Joan added, ‘You’re not from this area?’
‘Carlisle, and why I ever left I’ll never know. Must have been meeting my late husband. Born and bred at Loch Morag he was and we spent our married life here until – but what can I get you, Sister?’
Here at least was someone who seemed friendly enough. Sister Joan handed over her list and watched Mrs McKensie run her eye down it.
‘I can supply all this, Sister,’ she said obligingly. ‘Were you wanting potatoes? The monks grow sufficient for their own needs, but it’d be better for you to take a small sackful from me. I can send Rory over with the lot as soon as he gets in.’
‘Your husband?’
‘My son. My husband – he’s been gone nearly six years now.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Sister Joan’s hand rose to trace a cross just as Dolly McKensie said vigorously, ‘Oh, he’s not dead, Sister. No such luck for me! He ran off nearly six years ago and nobody’s seen hide nor hair of him since. Not that he was the best husband in the world when he was around but still it’s hard to bring up a lad without a father. Rory turned out well though. I’m proud of him.’
‘I’m sure you are,’ Sister Joan said warmly, adding, ‘perhaps it would be a good idea to buy some potatoes from you. The brothers have been very generous but I don’t want to take advantage of them.’
‘I’ll have Rory bring the lot up,’ Dolly McKensie said. ‘Was there anything else you wanted while you were here, Sister?’
‘Nothing, thank you. You’ve been very helpful,’ Sister Joan said.
‘You’ll not find many so friendly in these parts,’ a voice said from the doorway. ‘We don’t take to outlanders hereabouts as a rule, especially if they’re Catholics.’
Turning, Sister Joan looked up at a tall, raw-boned young man whose reddish hair and long upper lip betokened the Celt.
‘Outlanders?’ she queried.
‘Anyone not born in Loch Morag,’ the newcomer said.
‘Sister Joan is come to buy some groceries for herself,’ Dolly said. ‘This is my son, Rory, Sister.’
No more than twenty, Sister Joan reckoned, shaking hands. He had grey eyes beneath shaggy brows and a fresh complexion with a faint stubble along the jaw.
‘Groceries?’ The shaggy brows lifted. ‘I thought you’d be fasting.’
‘Only on Fridays and on Tuesdays when the moon is full,’ Sister Joan said solemnly. ‘Why don’t people like Catholics and what are outlanders supposed to do to get accepted into the community?’
‘They don’t.’ He answered her last question first with a slight lifting of the lips that might have passed for a smile. Why, my mother’s been here for more than twenty years and she’s still regarded as an immigrant.’
‘And you’re not Catholic?’
The smile darkened into a scowl. ‘We are not,’ Rory said curtly.
‘But you don’t mind serving them. That’s a relief.’
‘We like to make a profit,’ Rory said in the same curt tone. ‘We don’t give credit either.’
‘I wasn’t asking,’ Sister Joan said mildly, bringing out her purse.
‘And it’s twenty-five pence extra for deliveries,’ he added, ignoring his mother’s embarrassed frown.
‘Fine,’ Sister Joan said. ‘I’ll pay you when I see the goods outside the door of the retreat. Thank you, Mrs McKensie. I’m obliged to you. Mr McKensie.’
She nodded coolly and went out into the street again. Behind her, just before the door closed, she heard Dolly McKensie say angrily, ‘Will you never learn to behave like a civilized being, Rory? Is it her fault now that she’s a Papist?’
Papist! Sister Joan’s lips twitched as she walked down the hill. She hadn’t realized that the old term of insult was still used anywhere. Papist sounded vaguely threatening, bringing with it memories buried deep in the racial subconscious – the smashing of stained-glass windows and the execution of priests at Tyburn and the martyrdom of Margaret Clitheroe at York. Ancient times with a legacy of bitterness best forgotten.
Someone threw a stone.
It missed her, bouncing sharply on the cobbles as she swung round in time to see a towhead duck behind the nearest wall. Dougal’s house, Sister Joan thought, remembering the young woman’s anxious cry of ‘Come away in’.
She hesitated, not wanting to make more of the incident than it warranted, but feeling a distinct disinclination to turn the other cheek.
‘You come out here, Dougal Mackintosh!’
A voice that echoed her own suppressed wrath bellowed down the narrow street as Rory McKensie strode down past her, leaned over the wall, and hauled up the child by the lapels of his jacket, dangling him in the air threateningly.
‘I didna mean no harm,’ Dougal piped, looking less terrified than Sister Joan would have felt in the same situation.
‘Don’t you know that the sister here has the power to turn you into a frog?’ Rory demanded.
‘Oh no I haven’t,’ Sister Joan said coldly. ‘And if I had I wouldn’t try to improve on nature!’
‘Behave yourself or I’ll hand you over to the brothers,’ Rory said grimly, letting the child drop.
‘You had no business to say such a thing,’ Sister Joan scolded. ‘How can we ever have mutual toleration and forgiveness if you go putting ideas into the child’s head?’
‘Your own remark wasn’t all sweetness and light,’ Rory commented, picking up a large sack which he had deposited in the road and hunching it over his shoulder as he fell into step beside her.
‘My besetting sin,’ she admitted, ‘is a too ready tongue. The Lord knows what dreadful trauma I’ve caused the poor child.’
‘Dougal Mackintosh,’ said Rory calmly, ‘will be all the better for a trauma or two. He’s growing up into a hooligan. Since I’m here I’ll walk along with you.’
‘Those are the groceries?’ Sister Joan eyed the sack in surprise.
‘My mother added a few extra,’ Rory said, suddenly looking embarrassed.
‘That was very kind of her.’ Sister Joan found it difficult to keep the surprise out of her voice. ‘Are you – you’re not Catholic, you said?’
‘Meaning that only Catholics do good turns for other people?’ The hostility was back.
‘Meaning that Catholics don’t seem to be too popular round here.’
‘This is John Knox territory,’ Rory said. ‘The kirk and very boring Sundays and if you’re enjoying yourself then there’s sin in it.’
‘We have our puritan side too. So you’re …?’
‘My father was a Catholic,’ Rory said. ‘I was brought up as one but I lost my faith when – I lost it.’
They had left the village and were crossing to where the gully ran between the high rocks. Sister Joan refrained from comment and after a moment or two Rory said defensively, ‘You haven’t said anything about praying for me.’
‘It always sounds a bit patronizing and pious to go round threatening prayer,’ she said mildly. ‘Of course I probably will, sooner or later. But that needn’t worry you too much.’
‘I won’t let it,’ Rory said sharply.
‘Good.’ Sister Joan grinned at him amiably.
‘My mother isn’t Catholic,’ Rory said, imparting further information as reluctantly as if she had asked for it. ‘It was a mixed marriage, but I was reared as a Catholic. I stuck to it until – well, one outgrows it, you know.’
‘I’m afraid I’m retarded then,’ Sister Joan said apologetically.
Rory uttered a shout of laughter which he turned hastily into a cough. He was still very young, she thought, and felt a twinge of amused compassion. Young men leaping out of boyhood reminded her of colts trying to jump a high fence.
‘What beats me,’ Rory said as they began the climb up the slope, ‘is why someone like you should ever enter a convent. I mean, you’re still quite young, aren’t you?’
‘You think I ought to have waited until I was drawing my old-age pension?’ Sister Joan paused to catch her breath. ‘What an odd idea of nuns you have. And you a cradle Catholic too!’
‘Now you’re making fun of me.’
‘A little bit,’ she confessed. ‘However you are being slightly impertinent, don’t you think? My reasons for choosing the religious life are private.’
‘A failed love affair? If so, then I apologize for upsetting you,’ he said stiffly.
Sister Joan’s vividly blue eyes misted over with the memory of forgotten dreams. No, she and Jacob had not failed. Only the barrier between them had grown too high for either of them to breach. Jacob had reverted in the end to his Jewish heritage and she had found it impossible to give up her Christian one. But that, she reflected, hadn’t been the real reason why she had chosen the religious life. It had merely provided the particular circumstances in which she had begun to think seriously about it. The real reason was love, she suspected. A greater love seeking a lesser love in order to experience itself.
‘If you think I’m about to provide you with my life story, forget it,’ she said crisply.
‘Meanie.’ He gave her the grin that he must have worn as a schoolboy.
They had reached the steps and he stood aside to let her go first.
‘Oh, I can be terribly mean,’ Sister Joan assured him. ‘D’ye need a hand with the sack? It looks heavy.’
‘My mother put in a lot of tinned stuff,’ he told her. ‘She has a kind of liking for Catholics.’
‘Well, she married one.’
The remark, innocently meant, brought a flush of anger to his face, and the gaze he turned upon her was a stormy one.
‘She’s told you then? About my father, I mean? She often mentions it to strangers as if she’s hoping that one day someone will say, “Wait a moment! I met the man that you’re describing only last week”. She still thinks that he might come back one day. Not that she’d admit it to me.’
‘You don’t want your father to come back?’ Sister Joan opened the door and went through the narrow entrance into the cave. Behind her Rory was pulling the sack through after him.
‘No I don’t.’ He stood straighter, the sack at his feet. ‘We get on very well without him, Mum and I. He was always wandering off anyway – sales representative when he should have been taking some of the load off my mother’s back and helping her run the shop. Then one weekend he simply didn’t come home. We waited a couple of weeks and then Mum went to the police.’
‘She didn’t go immediately?’
‘He often stayed away for days but never for a fortnight before. Anyway she didn’t get much change out of the local Constabulary. They made some enquiries in case he’d had an accident but nothing turned up. They did find out that he’d given up his job a few days before he left. But they never found him or his car. Mum was upset.’
‘And you?’ Sister Joan asked as casually as she could.
‘I was fourteen already and not a silly kid.’ He shrugged his shoulders in a disparaging fashion. ‘We were never close anyway – my father and I, I mean. Not that I was a mother’s boy if that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘I wasn’t,’ Sister Joan said. She judged it unnecessary to let him know that she had noticed the time when his father had decamped had coincided with his loss of faith.
‘Delivery,’ he said, with an air of changing the subject, ‘is extra.’
‘And cheap when one considers the effort involved.’ She dug in her purse and found the coins. ‘Please thank your mother for the extras. It was very kind of her.’
‘I’d better be off then.’ He bent slightly beneath the rough stone lintel, and turned to face her again as they stepped outside. ‘Look, I don’t hold any brief for the pious brigade but if there’s anything else you want …?’
‘Thanks but I’ll be fine,’ Sister Joan began, then hesitated. ‘There is one thing, probably not important. Is there anyone around here who rides along the shores of the loch on a black horse?’
‘Most people have motor cars,’ Rory said.
‘This was a horse – a big black one. It was late evening and I couldn’t see distinctly. The rider was a woman.’
‘Maybe you saw Black Morag,’ Rory said.
‘Black who?’
‘Morag. The woman the loch is named for. She used to live hereabouts and then – well, this was back in the eighth century, of course.’
‘And you’re about to embark on the local ghost story.’
‘Not that anyone really believes it,’ Rory said, ‘but the legend is that Morag rode a black stallion and was very beautiful. Then one day the Vikings raided and she was –’ He stopped short, blushed hotly and went on rather hastily, ‘Well, you know what Vikings did.’
‘When they’d finished pillaging,’ Sister Joan said.
‘Morag went crazy,’ Rory said. ‘She leapt on her horse and rode it into the loch. Since then she’s been seen from time to time, galloping her stallion along the shore.’
‘Have you ever seen her or met anybody who has?’
‘No, I can’t say I have,’ he admitted with a sheepish grin, ‘but some
of the old folks roundabout say they knew people who did see her. Me, I think it’s just a story. There aren’t any spirits.’
‘None that gallop about on black horses anyway,’ Sister Joan said. ‘On the other hand it’s possible that certain places can be imprinted vividly with the memory of some tragic event and then under certain conditions – atmospheric, maybe, the event is re-enacted, like a film being reissued. But Morag’s spirit, if she ever existed, has been at peace for centuries.’
‘If you say so, Sister.’ The mockery had returned to his eyes. ‘Anyway, that was probably what you saw. You weren’t scared, were you?’
‘Just curious. Thanks again for bringing the stuff up here.’
He raised a hand in farewell and went down the steps at a pace that argued a familiarity with steep places that she envied.
Going back into the cave she emptied the sack, noting that Mrs McKensie had added several tins of sardines and salmon and a large currant cake. Also, she noted happily, a shiny tin opener. There was something ironic about a woman stocking tinned fish when the local waters must be teeming with fish, but there were still people who didn’t think fish was real unless it came out of a tin.
By the time she had put the tins in neat pyramids at the side of the cave, heated and eaten a tin of soup and washed her bowl, the morning had fled, and her itinerary was shot to bits. The afternoon was supposed to be spent in spiritual reading and exercises, but through the open door the sunlight shafted temptingly.
She closed the door, took her Bible and sat, cross-legged on the floor, her concentration focused on the passage she had marked. If she ever made it through the heavenly gate, she decided, she would love to find out exactly what ‘Revelations’ was all about. The cadences of the sentences had a dreamy quality that half hid, half revealed the meaning. Like spray thrown up from the deep water, half hiding the figure on the black horse – and it had been no ghost. That being so, then why had Rory tried to plant the idea in her mind that it had been? Why not simply tell her who owned a horse and liked riding it as darkness began to cloak the lochside?
Vow of Sanctity Page 3