Vow of Sanctity

by Veronica Black

  For the moment she might as well get on with her work. She jammed her sou’wester over her head and plodded back to the scriptorium. After her large breakfast she would be able to work right through until evening without stopping.

  She took off the oilskins, draped them over a bench, blew on her chilly fingers, and set to work again, sketching and shading the outlines. This would be a night study, she resolved, with snow gleaming under a single star and a mellow light beaming out of the open door of the church.

  As usual the joy of creation pushed everything else to the back of her mind. One more session would do it, she decided, and propped the blank canvas on the easel – beginning to transfer the sketch she had completed in broader, more sweeping lines before she mixed her colours.

  The chilly atmosphere was forgotten as she worked on. The complete absorption she could find in painting had worried her once. Other people found the same satisfaction in prayer. Mother Agnes, her first prioress, had untangled her feelings in her usual dry, cool manner.

  ‘Sister, prayer and devotion may be expressed in many ways. Provided your subject is worthy and your treatment of it spiritual, then your work becomes a prayer in itself.’

  Her old boyfriend, Jacob, had held different views. Art should shock and startle, rouse people out of complacency, alter their conceptions of beauty. Yet in the end Jacob had returned to his own faith and she had entered the religious life. She thought of him so seldom that to think of him now gave her a little shock as if she had opened a door into a room she had locked years before.

  ‘Sister Joan, Brother Brendan has sent over a mug of soup and some bread,’ Brother Cuthbert said, coming in after a brief rat-tat on the door.

  ‘How very kind.’ She looked in some dismay at the steaming mug and hunk of bread he had put down in a cleared space on the long table. Everybody seemed bent on feeding her up, which meant a definite conflict between rules. Greed was to be avoided and discouraged at all costs; on the other hand one must accept with humble gratitude anything that was offered without having asked for it.

  ‘When two rules seem to conflict then follow the one that causes no hurt to other people,’ her novice mistress had said.

  And jolly sensible too, she decided, picking up the wide mug and dipping a sliver of bread into the spicy vegetable broth.

  ‘I say, Sister, this is absolutely super!’ Brother Cuthbert was regarding the two paintings with youthful enthusiasm.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘Not that I know anything about painting,’ he deprecated. ‘Strumming a lute is the only artistic talent I have, and some musically aware people might be a bit doubtful about that. But why have you made the paintings so lonely?’

  ‘Lonely?’ She squinted at them critically.

  ‘No people going in and out of the church,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, Sister – I really don’t know anything about the subject. I’d better get on – see you later.’

  But he was right, she thought, staring at her work. At the heart of it was an emptiness she hadn’t noticed before. A church symbolized more than a lovely building set in a beautiful landscape.

  ‘Bother the boy!’ she muttered under her breath, removing the new study and replacing it on the easel with the finished painting. ‘Bother him, but he’s absolutely right.’

  She began swiftly to outline a small figure, dwarfed by the height of the church, looking up at the sky with its cerulean blue and tiny, lamb-white clouds.

  The task completed and the soup eaten, she exchanged the paintings again, spent a happy hour on the winter study and laid down her brush at last with a pleased sigh. Her arm ached and the energy that had fuelled her was draining away.

  She damped the covering cloth in the little toilet room, put on the oilskin coat and sou’wester again and went out into the mist. It was clammy and vaguely unpleasant; breathing it in was like breathing in water and made her cough.

  It had been a good session. She walked towards the church, seeing its outlines take shape through the whiteness. Her footsteps sounded curiously muffled in the silence. When she reached the church door she was surprised to discover that she was trembling slightly. Nerves had no place in the cloister. Another maxim from her old novice mistress came into her head, and she frowned. Her brain seemed to be crammed full of other people’s thoughts as if she had lost the ability to think for herself. For the first time in years an old fear was surfacing. Lay people often joked that it was almost impossible to tell one nun from another, an obvious absurdity but one fuelled by the conformity of behaviour to be found in a community. She had learnt that before the individuality could flower the personality must be controlled and tempered. But she rather liked her own personality, she thought with a tiny flash of rebellion. The notion of losing herself so thoroughly in the rule that she became merely a living expression of it gave her the sensation of standing on a shifting sandbank while around her the waters drained away.

  She pushed open the door, blessed herself and went up the aisle to kneel at the altar rail. It was time to thank God for the inspiration that had moved her pencil and her brush, time to offer a prayer for guidance, to ask for mercy for the man in the loch and the one who had put him there. It was time, in short, to hand everything over to the Boss and stop imagining she could shape the course of events.

  From the dark stalls where the brothers worshipped, hidden from the lay congregation by the wooden barrier, came a sudden rustling noise. Too loud for mice or even a rat. It came again and with it a long-drawn-out sigh, a sound that hung eerily on the silent air. The short hairs at the back of her neck bristled slightly and a light sweat broke out under the edge of her veil.

  Someone was watching her. Someone, standing back in the deepest shadows, was looking over the barrier, watching her as she knelt. If she turned her head she would glimpse …?’ Had her life depended on it she could not have turned her head towards that shadowed place where someone watched her. She kept her head bent, her hands candled. If someone wanted to terrify her then they were being extremely successful.

  ‘Hail Mary, full of grace …’ Her whispered petition steadied her as the words that never changed were breathed out into the air.

  The rustling came again, so briefly that it might have been imagined, and then the church door opened and Brother Cuthbert’s feet padded down the aisle.

  She cast a swift look to her right but the feeling of being watched had gone, and she crossed herself and went to meet Brother Cuthbert with an assumption of calmness that deceived Brother Cuthbert and almost deceived herself.

  ‘I haven’t interrupted you?’ he asked anxiously.

  ‘Not at all. I was very glad to see you,’ she said honestly.

  ‘The mist is still pretty thick and it may get worse. Sometimes it hangs about for days in the autumn,’ he said, genuflecting to the altar. ‘Father Abbot thinks we’d be wise to cross now.’

  ‘Very sensible,’ she said briskly. ‘You’ll be all right coming back?’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ he assured her. ‘The wind’s dropped and I know the loch like the back of my hand. Ah, shall we take the plastic? It’s still in my stall.’

  That, she realized, had been the cause of the rustling sound – the heavy plastic rubbed between fingers that were perhaps contemplating the risks involved in covering her with its smothering folds.

  ‘The oilskins are protection enough, Brother. We’d better go.’

  She was already at the door. Brother Cuthbert cast a wistful glance altarwise and followed her.

  The mist was not dispersing but intensifying, its whiteness shrouding them. When they reached the wharf she could barely see the boat moored there.

  ‘Here we are then, Sister.’ Helping her down he said abruptly, the usual optimistic note dying out of his voice, ‘Father Abbot tells us that a body’s been found in the loch. That must have been very upsetting.’

  ‘Since I found it – yes,’ she said dryly.

  ‘You actually found it? You did
n’t say.’

  ‘I thought it more correct to inform the abbot first.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Silly of me. Father Abbot didn’t say who had actually found it. He did say there was a chance it might be the remains of someone who disappeared from the village several years ago. It’s funny that it’s not been found until now.’

  The abbot had evidently given the brothers an edited version.

  ‘It’s probable,’ she said.

  ‘Before my time,’ Brother Cuthbert said, plying an oar vigorously. ‘What a sad way to end – we shall all be praying like mad whoever he was.’

  ‘Will you be able to pick me up tomorrow if the mist has cleared?’ she asked. ‘I want to finish the second painting. Only I’d not wish you to catch a cold on my account – your habit doesn’t look very dry.’

  ‘Oh, a shower of rain or a spoonful of mist never caused me any trouble,’ he assured her. ‘Anyway I have a spare habit. A third one.’

  ‘A third one?’

  ‘The rule allows us two, worn turn and turn about. Brother Anthony has just given me another one – tells me it turned up unexpectedly and I’m to keep it.’

  ‘Who’s Brother Anthony?’ she asked sharply.

  ‘He has charge of the linen but he gets a bit muddled these days. Over eighty.’

  Then it wasn’t likely to have been old Brother Anthony who had lugged the dead weight of the body around.

  ‘Brother Cuthbert, have all the brothers got two habits?’ she asked.

  ‘Even the abbot. We must all follow the rule. Every fifteen years or so new ones are made and distributed. I’ve a while to wait. The problem is that I’m not the most careful of people so Brother Anthony reckoned I’d better have a third habit – for best.’

  ‘Do any of the brothers have only one habit?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know, Sister. If someone had lost one it would have been reported. It could belong to one of the community who died. We are buried in one habit and the other is handed down to someone else. Is it important?’

  ‘Just idle curiosity. That’s my besetting sin,’ she said evasively.

  ‘If you only have one then you’re lucky, Sister.’ He grinned over his shoulder and plied his oars more energetically.

  It was a small miracle that he seemed to know exactly where he was, she thought. All round them was the thick, white, clinging mist. Yet he landed as far as she could tell in exactly the same place as usual, jumping into the shallows to pull the boat up to the shingle.

  ‘Father Abbot says that I’m to come with you to make sure you get up to the retreat safely,’ he said. ‘In this mist you might lose your footing.’

  ‘It is bad,’ she agreed.

  ‘What they call round here a bit of a haar. Not a day for hill-walking.’

  She murmured assent and followed his tall figure as it went ahead into the whiteness. There was something reassuringly protective in his presence. Having recognized that she frowned, wondering why she should feel she needed protection.

  ‘You go first, Sister. If you slip I’ll break your fall,’ he said, pausing at the bottom of the steep, pineclad path.

  ‘And how,’ she demanded, ‘are you going to get down?’

  ‘You forget my hobby used to be walking and hill-climbing,’ he reminded her. ‘I’m very sure-footed and don’t worry about falling on me. I’m strong as an ox.’

  ‘Right then.’ She started the ascent, the pine trunks looming out of the mist as she followed the twisting path. Now and then her feet skidded on wet pine needles but the trunks were close enough to grasp and haul herself back. Nevertheless by the time they had gained the steps she was panting slightly.

  ‘Take a little rest, Sister. At your age it isn’t good to overdo things,’ his anxious voice insisted.

  ‘Very kind of you,’ she said dryly, resisting an impulse to sprint ahead and disprove his rooted image of her as someone on the edge of senility. There were times when Brother Cuthbert made her feel positively middle-aged.

  The steps were wet and slippery. Gripping the rail as she went up them she resolved to send a report to the other convents, detailing the inconveniences of retaining a retreat half way up a cliff in a Scottish loch. As far as she could tell its main advantage lay in the fact that it might prove an excellent means of disposing of an elderly nun who had become a bit of a nuisance in her convent. The irreverent notion made her want to giggle.

  ‘Here we are then!’ Brother Cuthbert said from below.

  ‘Will you come in for a hot drink, Brother?’ She opened the front door with relief.

  ‘That’s very kind of you, Sister, but I have to get back. I just wanted to make sure you were all right – and don’t worry about me slipping. I’m sure-footed as a goat. God bless until tomorrow.’

  The black robed figure turned and in a moment more was swallowed by the swirling mist.

  A nice lad if a trifle tactless now and then, she decided, letting herself in and relishing the sensation of having reached a refuge. Perhaps after all the isolation had its charms.

  She took off her oilskins and hung them at the back of the cave. Despite the ‘bit of a haar’ the inner walls were dry and when she had lit the stove and made herself a mug of tea the atmosphere became positively homelike.

  The rest of the day was her own, to be employed, she told herself severely in spiritual disciplines. First the record of her faults to be written up, then the mysteries of the rosary to be recited, then a passage from her Prayer Book to be studied and analysed. Her papers and books were piled on the ledge. It was dim in the cave, spirals of white mist trailing through the aperture through which the monks of old had kept a look-out for the Viking ships.

  She lit a candle and sat down to sort through the pile and find her book of faults. A piece of paper, torn raggedly along one edge, fluttered to the floor.

  … and feel your sweet mouth against mine and the little fluttering breaths of desire …

  The piece of a love letter caught in the tree, the tall cowled boatman striding into the grove with Morag Sinclair as the darkness shielded them. The images coalesced in her mind into a too vivid picture. That bold, black handwriting she knew, was seen last in the parlour with the notes for a sermon written by – it had to be the abbot since the parlour was his domain and he would certainly preach numerous sermons. It wasn’t the words that had seemed familiar, but the handwriting.

  Twelve

  She sat for a long time staring at the paper; her immediate impulse was to tear it across over and over; it was an impulse she resisted, remembering incidents in the past when she had been too apt to rush headlong into action. Her surmise that it had been written by the abbot rested only on the probability of the sermon having been penned by him, of his being the only member of the community who could come and go by boat in secret without the other monks knowing. The abbot, she told herself, must be in his seventies; Morag Sinclair was twenty-three. Was it even remotely likely that a man who had devoted his life to the cloister should in his old age take to writing passionate love letters to a girl old enough to be his granddaughter? Her instincts told her that it wasn’t so, that there had to be some other explanation. Her reason whispered that the most unexpected people often did the most unexpected things.

  And it had nothing to do with her. Whatever the truth she was not the keeper of the abbot’s conscience. The fragment of passionate longing had, as far as she could see, nothing at all to do with the discovery of the body in the loch.

  She folded the paper neatly and put it into her suitcase. Before she left the retreat she would be guided somehow as to the right course of action to take.

  For the rest of the day she concentrated upon her own shortcomings until her conscience felt as if it had been springcleaned. At the rate she was going, she thought wryly, she would soon need a new book of faults.

  The mist was beginning to clear. That clinging whiteness that drifted through the aperture like trails of white smoke had dispersed and the grey sky w
as flaming into an unexpected sunset. She paused to munch an apple and eat the last of the biscuits she had and lit her candle. In a little while she would get down to a good solid chunk of prayer – the sovereign remedy in times of trouble.

  Outside there was a noise, so faint that it almost died before it reached her ears. She sat bolt upright on the rock, her heart beating uncomfortably fast. Was it perhaps some animal or other? Her imagination promptly supplied dinosaurs.

  Another scraping noise and then a loud rapping on the door. Animals, she told herself firmly, didn’t knock on doors. She rose to answer it, seeing as she pulled back the heavy door, the thickset frame of Inspector Mackintosh.

  ‘Am I disturbing you, Sister?’ He already had his hat in his hand.

  ‘Not in the least. You’re much more welcome than a dinosaur,’ she said in a flurry, stepping back into the cave.

  ‘Yes, well, I hope that’s so.’ He closed the door behind him and shot her a somewhat puzzled glance.

  ‘Isolation isn’t giving me hallucinations,’ she hastened to explain. ‘I heard some scraping and my imagination started working overtime. Please sit down.’

  ‘The scraping was the sound of my boots.’ He sat down on the edge of the bed.

  ‘Yes, of course. May I offer you something?’

  ‘Not for me, Sister. A bit more light would be welcome though.’ He looked round at the shadowed rock walls.

  Sister Joan obediently lit two more candles and placed them on the ledge. When she sat down again she saw that the Inspector was studying her thoughtfully, his big, greying head tipped slightly to one side.

  ‘I’d not like my daughter to enter a convent,’ he said abruptly. ‘Not even if I was a Catholic. It’s an unnatural life.’

  ‘A supernatural life,’ she corrected. ‘A life lifted above the natural order in an attempt to create a living bridge between heaven and earth. Not that we always achieve our ends. Inspector, you didn’t climb all the way up here to discuss theology with me, did you?’