Andy watched him poling himself back up the drive on his stick, and the nun stopping to wait for him, and the two of them turning and setting off along a path under the trees, the two of them limping.
AT FIRST THE NUN WOULD TELL QUIRKE NOTHING, YET HE WAS SURE she had not appeared from that doorway by chance. They walked along together in silence, their breaths misting in the winter air. They had acknowledged, with no words but only from each of them simultaneously an ironic, diagonally directed glance, the melancholy comedy of their like conditions, his smashed knee, her twisted hip. There were ragged patches of snow under the trees. The path was paved with wood chips. The sharp, resinous odor of the chips reminded him of the pine woods behind the big stone house at Carricklea. All around them quick brown birds, seemingly unfrightenable, were pecking busily among the dead leaves. Grackles, were they? Choughs? He knew so little about this country, not even the names of its commonest birds. The sky among the tracery of branches was the color of dulled steel. His knee had begun to ache. The nun wore no coat over her habit. “Are you not cold, Sister?” he asked. She shook her head; she had her hands folded before her, using the broad sleeves of her habit as a muff. He tried to guess her age. Fiftyish, he thought. Her limp was not so much a limp as a toppling, sideways heave at every other step, as if the pivot that held her upright had suffered a corkscrew twist halfway along its length.
“Please,” he said, “tell me about the child. I’ve no intention of doing anything. I simply want to hear what happened.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.”
“You’re a doctor, right? Were you involved in the birth?”
“No. That is, not directly. I’m a pathologist.”
“I see.”
He doubted that she did. He scuffed at the wood chips with the tip of his blackthorn stick. Out of nowhere a picture came to him of Philomena the nurse astride him in the wan light of a Dublin afternoon. To have been there, and then here; these things, he thought, that seem so straightforward and are not.
“Tell me at least who the family was,” he said, “the family that adopted her.”
The nun snorted.
“Adopted!” she said. “We don’t bother with such legal niceties here at St. Mary’s.” She stopped on the path and turned to face him. Her lips were blue from the cold and her angry eyes were red-rimmed and teary. “How much do you know of what goes on here, Mr. Quirke?” she asked. “I mean here, and where you come from, too-the whole thing.”
He braced the walking stick at an angle to the ground and gazed at it.
“I know,” he said measuredly, “that Joshua Crawford finances a scheme for children from Ireland to be brought out here. I suspect Christine was one of them.”
They walked on.
“A scheme, yes,” she said. “A scheme that has been going on for twenty years-did you know that? Yes, twenty years. Can you imagine how many children that is? How many babies taken over here and handed out like…like…” She could find no word sufficiently encompassing. “They call it charity, but that’s not what it is. It’s power, just naked power.”
Somewhere behind them a bell began to clang with a hectic urgency.
“Power?” Quirke said. “What kind of power?”
“Power over people. Over their souls.”
Souls. The word had a ring to it, urgent and dark like the peals of the bell. A planter of souls, Josh Crawford had said.
They did not speak for the space of half a dozen paces. Then the nun said:
“They care nothing for the children. Oh, they think they do, but they don’t. Their only interest is to see them grow up and take their place in the structure they’ve devised.” She paused, and gave a meager laugh. “St. Mary’s, Mr. Quirke, is a forcing house for the religious. The children are delivered to us, some no more than a few weeks old. We make sure they’re healthy-that’s my job, by the way, I’m a physician”-again she laughed thinly-“and then they’re…distributed.” The bell had stopped. The birds, at some sound in the aftermath of the pealing that only they could hear, flew up in a flock, their wings whirring, then quickly settled again. “We hand them out to good Catholic homes, people we can trust-the respectable poor. Then when the children are old enough they are taken back and put into seminaries and convents-whether they want to be or not. It’s a machine for making priests, for making nuns. Do you see?”
She looked at him sidelong. He was frowning.
“Yes,” he said, “I see. Only…”
She nodded. “But it doesn’t seem so bad, right? Taking in orphans, finding them good homes-”
“I was an orphan, Sister. I was glad to get out of the orphanage.”
“Ah,” she said, and nodded once more. They had come again in sight of the Buick; the engine was going, and pallid wisps of smoke were trailing from the exhaust pipe. They stopped. “But you see, it’s unnatural, this thing, Mr. Quirke,” the nun said. “That’s the point. When bad folk take it on themselves to do what are supposed to be good works it makes a sulfurous smell. I think you’ve had a whiff of it, that smell.”
“Tell me about the child,” he said. “Tell me about Christine Falls.”
“No. I’ve told you too much already.”
He thought: Just like Dolly Moran did.
“Please,” he said. “Things have happened, wicked things.” She cast a glance inquiringly at the walking stick. “Yes, this,” he said, “but worse, too. Far worse.”
She looked down. “It’s cold, I have to go back.” Yet still she stood, gazing at him thoughtfully. Then she came to a decision. “What you should do, Mr. Quirke,” she said, “is ask the nurse, the one who looks after Mr. Crawford.”
“Brenda?” He stared. “Brenda Ruttledge?”
“Yes, if that’s her name. She knows about the child, about little Christine. She can tell you, some of it, anyway. And listen, Mr. Quirke.” She was looking past him to where the Buick waited on the drive. “Watch out for yourself. There are people-there are people who are not what they seem, who are more than they seem.” She smiled at him, this huge man standing stooped before her, asking his awkward questions. Yes, she thought: an orphan. “Good-bye, Mr. Quirke,” she said. “I wish you well. From the little I’ve seen of you, I think you’re a good man, if only you knew it.”
29
MOSS MANOR WHEN QUIRKE GOT BACK TO IT GAVE THE IMPRESSION OF having been flung wide open, like a door. There was an ambulance outside and a pair of automobiles, and in the entranceway two grave, sober-suited men were engaged in a hushed conversation; they paused and looked at him with curiosity as he entered but he ignored them and went through into the house and lurched from room to room. He was angry again, he was not sure why, exactly, for what he had learned from Sister Anselm had not been news to him, not really. He had begun to consider the possibility that this unfocused anger would be the condition of his life from now on, that he would have to keep bouncing along before it helplessly forever, like a piece of litter buffeted by an unceasing wind. In the main drawing room he came upon the mousy maid, he could not remember her name, arranging dried flowers in a vase on the lid of the grand piano on which he was certain no one had ever played a note. A great fire of logs was burning in the fireplace. The maid quailed before him. He asked her where Miss Ruttledge was. She looked blank. “The nurse,” he said, beginning to shout, and thumping his stick on the floor, “Mr. Crawford’s nurse!” She told him Brenda was with Mr. Crawford now, and that Mr. Crawford was very poorly, and her lower lip trembled. He turned from her and hauled himself up the staircase, cursing the dead weight of his leg. At what he knew to be Josh Crawford’s room he knocked perfunctorily and pushed open the door.