Doors to the convent were few. The Orphanage had its separate entrance, but evidence, supplied later on, proved what appeared, even at first glance, and at night, to be the case, that the entrance was barred up and never used. There was no entrance to the convent grounds, in fact, except by way of the gatehouse. Even the convalescents, if they wished to walk in the gardens of the convent, were obliged to come out by one of the guest-house doors and go in through the gatehouse entrance.
Seawards the breeze freshened. The church, with its high boundary wall running parallel, almost, with the coast, had its north side fronting a cliff along which ran a little path. The moon showed the path up clearly, and Mrs. Bradley followed it westwards for about a quarter of a mile, and discovered that it branched off from a coast-road which swung south of the convent and which had crossed the track by which she had mounted the hill.
The sea beneath the moon looked calm, as though the waters themselves, in meditation, induced the long thoughts which she found herself thinking as she watched them. The tide was in and came to the foot of the cliffs. Below, she supposed, there were caves. The landscape was a perfect setting for smugglers, and the hill-track by which she had come was their mule-road, she thought, across the moor.
She looked back at the convent buildings. High in the church tower burned a steady light. Saint Peter’s Finger they called it in the village. It was the warning to ships which the convent still made it a duty to show every night, although a new lighthouse, half a mile farther along the coast, had released it, in effect, from its ancient obligation to mariners. But as Saint Peter’s Finger its glow was still noted on charts, and the nuns kept watch, two by two, in the lamp-room at night. The light itself, Mrs. Bradley thought, looked friendly. The high walls and the gaunt, stark church threatened those without, yet gave an impression of guarding those within. But all dark deeds seemed possible—she had noticed it before—in tall buildings seen by moonlight. One view of the convent made it look as though it had been gutted by fire. There seemed no glass in the windows and the buildings had an empty, neglected look. She turned back and continued her tour.
Along the east wall she detected the presence of pigs, but, apart from the fact that all lights, except the beacon-lantern in the tower and the glimmer over the gate, were now put out, there was nothing else to be discovered, and she turned to walk back to the village.
She found herself thinking about her chance acquaintance, the elderly man with the bicycle. She wondered how long he was going to remain in the neighbourhood adding to his collection of horrors. She remembered that some of his information had been picked up in the bar of the pub at which she and George were staying. George, too, was adept at acquiring information in pubs. She resolved to compare the results of his researches with what the cyclist had told her. If the child were an heiress, no wonder the village was full of sinister rumours.
The way back seemed short, with the slope of the hill in her favour, but the path was rough, broken and rutted, and several times she stumbled on outcropped stones.
chapter 2
inmates
“Hopeless immortals, how they scream and shiver,
While devils push them to the pit wide-yawning
Hideous and gloomy, to receive them headlong
Down to the centre!”
isaac watts: The Day of Judgment.
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The convent, behind its defences, slept uneasily, and some of the inmates, nuns and lay-sisters, orphans and private-school boarders, did not sleep at all. The disturbances to which they had been subjected (beginning with the dreadful fact of the death of Ursula Doyle on the Monday, and ending with the hooligan attack on the building which had made the following Saturday night a time of anxiety and fear) were all too recent to make peaceful sleep a possibility.
There were twenty boarders, among them two cousins of the dead girl. The dormitories, presided over by the nuns in turn, were divided into cubicles, and, each in her narrow bed, Ulrica Doyle and Mary Maslin lay still, and feared and brooded.
The course of events had been bewildering, strange and terrible. On the Monday evening had come the news, broken to them separately by the Mother Superior, of their cousin’s dreadful death. They were not supposed to know—Reverend Mother had not told them, and neither did she tell them at any time subsequently—that Ursula was believed to have killed herself, but of course it had come out, for although newspapers were forbidden to the boarders, the nuns could hardly keep the day-girls from them, and the tidings were all round the school on the Wednesday morning.
The two girls had not seen their cousin before she was taken away. Ghoulish accounts of bodies eviscerated by doctors doing a post-mortem examination had been passed in thrilled whispers round the school, and although they had not come directly to Ulrica’s ears her nights had been waking nightmares ever since she had gathered, from overhearing them, the purport of all the rumours. Mary suffered less in this particular way. For one thing she was younger, for another less imaginative. Then, too, she was accustomed, and her mind acclimatised, to horrors, for her form was entertained by Mother Bartholomew once a week to the more revolting stories of the martyrdom of saints. These ancient contes et légendes were given by the old ex-actress with a lack of reticence which amounted to the Rabelaisian, and had stiffened the hair of many generations of girls, who, with the sadistic tendency of extreme youth, on the whole enjoyed them very much, but were not always edified by them in exactly the way that their mentors and preceptors might have wished.
Still, even Mary, when night fell and the buildings were hushed and dark; when the restless sea on the grim shore broke in a far-off thunder, cuddled her knees to her chin, and lay and watched the curtains of her cubicle to see when horror entered; to be ready to fight for her life and, if necessary (so, in anti-climax, do the thoughts of children run), to scream and scream with fear.
It was all particularly upsetting; to young Mother Mary-Joseph, whose week on duty it was in the senior dormitory, as much as to anybody except, perhaps, the cousins. Four times since Wednesday she had guided Ulrica back to bed, for, like a sleep-walking Lady Macbeth, Ulrica, nervous and clever, strode and muttered, waking the lighter sleepers and causing Mother Mary-Joseph the most acute uneasiness, for the dormitory was right at the top of the stairs, and to the stairhead Ulrica’s steps each time had been directed, except once, when she went to an open window instead.
In the junior dormitory Mother Patrick, blessed, in spite of an apparently domineering personality, with the kindly spirit of laisser-faire which is one of the glories of the Irish, made silent rounds every night and paused beside Mary Maslin and did not rebuke her for her unorthodox, pre-natal, curled-up attitude in bed. Instead, she bent over her, murmured a benediction, and tucked in the warm, protective bedclothes to a reassuring tightness.
She knew nothing of Mother Mary-Joseph’s anxious vigils, for the young nun did not mention them except in confession to the Reverend Mother Superior, for on the Friday she had fallen asleep and had only just wakened in time to get to the girl at the stair-head before she pitched headlong down.
Mother Patrick herself did not sleep. There was evil abroad, and all the Community, not only the Irish, knew it. The horror of the child’s death, the dismay at the verdict of suicide, the realisation that things went on in the convent of which, with all their perspicacity and careful supervision of the children placed in their charge, the nuns knew, it seemed, less than nothing, darkened the solemn season, gave dreadful, intimate meaning to the customary Lenten fast, and made voluntary penance this time acutely personal.