Grave Doubts (21 page)

“All that summer Sister Marie Celeste was a holy terror. Through the youngest nun she made pronouncements on spiritual matters, urged reform in the Church, commented on local politics, on matters of weather for the benefit of farmers, offered advice on affairs of the heart and marital discord, and in direct contravention to dogma and doctrine she declared
female submission anathema to the Mother of God.”

Miranda, who had grown up in the Anglican branch of the wholly Catholic church, gasped in delight. Morgan, whose parents were lapsed Presbyterian before him — which, he felt, placed him on a theological spectrum closer to atheist than agnostic — thought the sister’s radical feminism eminently sensible.

“The two priests were very well pleased to see their collection plates brimming,” Alexander Pope continued, “but they resented their servant’s success. They had to get a new housekeeper, for one thing. The nun and Sister Marie Celeste took over a wing of the rectory as their own quarters. Sister Marie Celeste’s stigmata healed over. Her companion spoke for her in a normal voice, in arranging quotidian details of their lives, but still, occasionally, the voice of Mary spoke through her when Sister Marie Celeste was inspired or provoked.”

“Why have we heard nothing of this?” asked Miranda.

“Why would you? There are small miracles all over the world every day, and cults of one sort or another are constantly forming and reforming. The Church is a cult of epidemic proportions that subsumes lesser cults for replenishment. Others fade, some virtually explode, some are erased.”

“And this cult of Sister Marie Celeste,” said Morgan, “was erased.”

“Indirectly.”

“You said she died in disgrace, Alexander. What happened?”

“Patience, Miranda. She died. It is as simple as that. In November she died. There was no warning. The doctor could not determine the cause. She expired one night, just over here.” They moved up onto the chancel, a stone platform hardly a step above the rest of the floor.

Miranda felt a tremor run down her spine. “Where?”

“Under these slabs, right here. The priests were afraid to disturb her body any more than necessary. She lay in state in an open casket for three days on a catafalque erected over the spot where she died. Here. People came from miles around to grieve, to pray for her, and many, to pray through her to God. When it was time, her casket was sealed. The floor was laid open, and a crypt was prepared in the solid rock underneath. When the crypt was ready, some weeks later, a solemn ceremony was held, during which her casket was reopened and a strong odour of violets rose from its recesses and washed through this entire building, and her flesh was not corrupt but gleamed in the candlelight and her hands lay in the shallow casket at her sides, the palms turned upwards, and small pools of fresh blood glistened at their centres. The nun who had been her acolyte and companion stood beside her and placed a hand on Sister Marie Celeste’s breast, which appeared to rise and fall from the beating of the nun’s own heart as she spoke for the final time the words of Mary in her own voice, which resounded through the hearts of all who were crowded in this building to listen.”

“What did she say?” asked Miranda, totally enthralled.

“No one knows. Perhaps she was speaking in tongues — each heard in the voice a clear message, but for each it was different. It was not glossalalia, since for everyone present it made sense, yet none could agree on what had been said.”

“Not unlike most conversations,” said Morgan. “The more engaging the utterance, the more likely we hear whatever we want, or need, to hear.”

“Morgan, you’re a cynic,” said Miranda.

“Not at all. I’m on the verge of conversion.”

“What happened next?” asked Miranda, more interested in Pope’s story than her partner’s errant soul. She relished the way Pope’s words seemed to express something deep within
that had little to do with faith, and a lot to do with how humans believe.

“The entire church became her shrine,” declared Alexander Pope, turning and facing the gloomy interior of the building, his arms raised — whether in supplication or as a rhetorical gesture, Miranda couldn’t be sure. “In death, her fame took flight. The walls on one side were painted with her story, and on the other were images from the Virgin’s life. And people came — a makeshift town spread like contagion over the surrounding fields. It was like a gold-rush bonanza. Houses made of canvas and boards sprang up helter-skelter along the road allowance. The schoolhouse was turned into a hospital to care for the sick and the dying who came seeking Marie Celeste’s intervention. Some claimed to be cured or relieved, just by pressing the robe of the nun who had been Mary’s voice.”

“Why doesn’t the nun have a name?”

“Oh, she does, but somehow the story seems more authentic if her name is generic. Her name was Sister Mary Joseph. When Sister Marie Celeste died, Sister Mary took to wearing a pale-blue habit, quite unlike the black prescribed by her order. Even after she left the church, she called herself Mary Joseph, and continued to wear a modified blue habit. Her original name was Katherine Morrison, if memory serves. She became known as the Blue Nun.”

“You said she was excommunicated. It all ends in disgrace?” Miranda was anxious for more, torn between wanting every possible detail and wanting to get on with the plot.

“The Church was not amused. There was too much about this folk saint that made them uneasy. On the one hand, they like adding saints to the canon; on the other, a saint too familiar — who speaks directly to the people with the voice of the Holy Mother, and directly to God — was, as you can imagine, unsettling.

“The priests for whom she had been housekeeper became her most dogged believers, second only to the Blue Nun in their devotion. When they altered the celebration of Mass to admit the adoration of Marie Celeste into prescribed ritual, however, the Church was incensed. This entire edifice, as I’ve said, was transformed into a shrine with a hierarchy of its own, featuring Marie Celeste as the principal object of veneration, even before Mary, and certainly before the Holy Male Trinity. Echoes of the voice rang through the revised liturgy, and women were celebrated and sexuality was removed from its burden of wickedness, set free from the pseudo-castrato divinations of a celibate priesthood.”

“Excellent,” observed Morgan, although it as unclear whether he was referring to Church reform or the speaker’s charismatic eloquence.

“Thank you,” said Alexander Pope, in no doubt about where the credit belonged. “Nothing inspires like righteousness. But then, in my story, things change. The two priests in the confessional, confessing their sins to the nun, itself a heresy the Church authorities had missed, admitted sickness of the soul so profound it could no longer be contained. Their obsessive adoration of Saint Marie Celeste was impeded, it seemed, by keeping secret a terrible crime.

“Their confessor in turn kept their secret, but demanded such awesome penance that others were appalled. The two priests, side by side, worked polishing the stone floors to a deep lustre, scrubbing the woodwork night and day, cleaning night soil from the latrines that had been erected to accommodate pilgrims, and when they were not engaged in menial and sordid activities such as these, they were to be found in postures of abject obeisance before a statuary image of Sister Marie Celeste.”

“The priests confessed to sexual abuse,” Morgan concluded.

“Of Sister Marie!” said Miranda, annoyed at the interruption, appalled at the suggestion.

“Think about it,” Morgan continued, not in the least nonplussed to be commandeering Pope’s narrative. “Beneath all the religious trappings, it is a fairly straightforward story.”

He’s right, she thought. Everything fits. She turned to Alexander Pope, addressing him almost formally, as if he might assist their investigation in progress. “The nun would never have relinquished her power,” she said. “The secrets of the confessional were safe enough. It must have been the priests, themselves, who broke. It is one thing to molest an unschooled farm girl, another to have abused a saint.”

“No, they did not break,” said Alexander. “They were broken. Rumours and gossip did them in. The more voraciously the two priests atoned for their sins through public humiliation, the more lurid their crimes became in the imagination of pilgrims and the Church alike. Civil authorities seemed indifferent.”

It was Miranda, not Morgan, who interjected to suggest perhaps Pope was straying from his documentary sources.

“Not at all,” he declared. “I would place more faith in a zealot’s diary, the correspondence of spinsters, an old nun’s memory, than in the so-called objectivity of, say, a police report. Objectivity obscures the truth, based on the illusion that reason is a suitable criterion for assessing experience, and it is not. The Church, demanding three miracles for sainthood: that is the reduction of wonder to empirical evidence, as if proof were an adequate measure of anything beyond science.”

“And science, as we all know,” said Morgan, “deals in chimerical absolutes.”

“Well said,” said Pope.

“I’m only agreeing,” said Morgan.

“As I said,” said Pope. “Well said.”

“What happened?” Miranda demanded. “It was a dark and stormy night… Then what?”

“On the evening of April 23rd, 1893, the two priests expired before a hundred witnesses, yet no one could say for sure how they died. Some said it was seizures, and some said they had consumed poison in the Eucharist wine — a nasty twist on the sacrament of transubstantiation. Some said their breath was sucked out of them by winds blowing from the sacristy as they emerged with the Host, and some said they were strangled.”

“By whom?” Miranda asked with urgency, as if some revelation were at hand.

“No one seemed to know — no one saw what happened,” he said, deflating her excitement. “Perhaps in their collective hysteria the witnesses were blinded.”

“I think it was the Blue Nun,” said Miranda. “She poisoned the wine. She had access, motive, and an obvious capacity for the most bizarre of ironies.”

“Motive?” Morgan asked.

“She alone knew what the priests had done.”

“The priests themselves granted her the authority of the confessional,” said Pope.

“To gather their sins, perhaps, but not the ability to absolve them. And even if they didn’t fess up,” said Miranda, “the Blue Nun would have known. I mean, what else would have led a young woman like Lorraine to madness, however inspired?”

“Madness!” Pope exclaimed, surprised at the turn his story was taking.

“Madness,” she reiterated.

“You are cynical, Detective.”

“And you?” said Morgan. “Surely you’re not a believer.”

“Of course I am,” said Alexander Pope. “In the story, not necessarily in manifestations of the divine. But if you can’t believe in stories, how will you ever get to the truth?”

Miranda briefly contemplated the difference between what is true and the truth, then took possession of the narrative as if she were a textual critic. “Here was a young woman, somewhat simple-minded, you said, uneducated, for sure, and quite pretty. Living alone with two men, two celibates representing an institution darkly obsessed with sex — men sick with sex because sex is deemed by their faith a sickness and they were men. Do you think they could have resisted? Thousands in the history of the priesthood have not.” She looked into the eyes of the other two in rapid succession, then down at the stone floor. “What disgusts me is that they not only shared the girl’s body, but they must have absolved each other of guilt, rationalizing to God their shameless brutality with the same facile religiosity they would have used to seduce their victim.

“People remarked on her changed condition,” Miranda continued. The story was now hers. “She became increasingly morose; her only relief from her sorrows was prayer. And she prayed to the same God who in her own simple cosmology sanctioned her abuse in the beds of his profligate priests.

“Little wonder she broke. Like a rag doll in a wringer. Of course she saw Mary. Mary was the only one in that heavenly host who wasn’t abusing her. And of course she fell mute. She had no words to describe her spiritual fusion with the Virgin Mother. Psychologists today might describe her behaviour as a hysterical response. I think it was the most natural response in the world, given her circumstances.”

“And the nun,” said Morgan. “What about her? The nun and the voice. Was that exploitation?”

“I would say the Blue Nun recognized rape in the girl’s eyes from the first moment she appeared. A survivor of sexual
assault will usually know when it has happened to another.” She glanced at Morgan for reassurance. “I would say she recognized herself in the young woman’s pain and salvation. The two are inseparable — sorrow and salvation — as the Virgin bore witness. Sister Mary Joseph merged her own story, the abuses that led to her own retreat from the world, with Lorraine Eliott’s. Together they became Sister Marie Celeste and the voice came to life.”

“Why would Mary Joseph do that? Eliminate the priests?” asked Pope. “I would think she had everything to lose.”

“Because she could,” said Miranda. “It’s as simple as that. It was within her power. The three Marys — Mary Joseph, Marie Celeste, and the Virgin Mary — had seized control of the Church, at least in this small outpost of St. Peter’s ponderous empire.”

“The provincial coroner’s report described their passing as ‘Death by Misadventure.’ That struck me as an understatement,” said Alexander Pope.

“It simply means no one was prepared to lay charges,” said Morgan.

Alexander continued his story. “The priests were posthumously reviled, and the rumour was officially sanctioned that they had taken their own lives under the influence of Satan. Church authorities lost no time in seizing control of the renegade outpost. They plastered over the walls, cleaned out anything smacking of idolatry, and declared the people’s saint a fraud, a disgrace, a blasphemy to contemplate.”

“But people went on believing, didn’t they, even to the present day?” said Miranda. “Sister Mary Joseph was cast out, and when nothing else quelled the devotion of Marie Celeste’s followers, the Church of the Immaculate Conception was declared never to have existed, and its bond with its congregants was annulled like a bad marriage.”