Quiet as a Nun (8 page)

There would thus be no need for an inquest. No further tussles with the coroner, the unfriendly magnate of Churne, he who had criticised Blessed Eleanor's and Sister Edward herself so sharply after the death of Sister Miriam. That was a relief, at least. It would not have done to have the remotest suspicion of foul play or even suicide directed towards another inmate of the convent. Even supposing the coroner held his fire on this occasion - which was unlikely - the local population would not. The sidelong glances in shops to which Mother Ancilla had referred in her original letter would scarcely diminish.

As it was, Sister Edward could be placed tranquilly in her coffin -such a little coffin. But then Sister Edward herself had hardly been much taller than Sister Damian, the minuscule portress. On the whole the teaching nuns were considerably taller than the so-called lay nuns. These latter attended to the domestic duties of the convent. For the greater glory of God. And of course to free the other nuns from such menial tasks. It occurred to me how little I knew about the pathetic rabbit-like person who had escorted me that day by the statue of St Antony.

'What was her name - before?' I asked with sudden curiosity. I hoped that was a tactful way of phrasing it.

'Veronica O'Dowd,' Sister Boniface now added a sniff to a snort. 'She was in the school here since she was six years old. I knew all about her asthma. Many's the night I sat with her, choking her heart out. And soothed her. And said my rosary. She liked the click of the beads. We used to joke together. Sister Bonnie's rosary - the patent cure for asthma.'

Sister Lucy said nothing. Her silence suggested more that Sister Boniface must be allowed the licence of her great age than any form of agreement with what she said. From time to time Sister Lucy wiped her eyes surreptitiously with her handkerchief, large, white and rather masculine in type, the sort of handkerchief that all the nuns used. Then after a bit, to distract herself from Sister Boniface, she began to type up her medical notes.

Obviously as infirmarian she too must have seen a lot of Sister Edward with her chronic asthma. As a trained nurse - Sister Lucy had worked at a big London hospital before she discovered her vocation - she was certainly likely to be right in her notion of how to treat an asthmatic. Frankly, the remedies of Sister Boniface, prayers and so forth, struck me as not so far from the practices of a witch doctor. Or a witch.

Veronica O'Dowd. The name struck a bell. Hadn't the nun Mother Ancilla quoted to me as having left the convent so amicably, been called O'Dowd?

'Yes, they were sisters,' confirmed the former nurse. 'But Sister Edward was of course much younger.'

'The first and last daughters of a lovely Catholic family. Nine of them in all. Five girls and four boys - two boys priests and the first and last girls given to God. That's the way things should be,' muttered Sister Boniface. Given to God indeed: my indignation had not altogether left me. One sister had gone back into the world after fifteen years of wasted seclusion. The other sister was dead at the age of - what? her early twenties, I would say.

'Beatrice O'Dowd should never have chosen the name of John in religion.' There was no stopping Sister Boniface now. 'I told her. It may be the name of the disciple Our Lord loved, but He certainly doesn't love nuns called John in this convent. Sister John Brodsky died in a train crash before the war - an amazing thing to happen to a nun in those days. We hardly ever went in trains. Sister John had to have false teeth and she was on her way back from the dentist. She must have been so sad to have wasted the community's money. Being on her way back. When she got to purgatory, that is.'

Sister Boniface chomped her wrinkled cheeks.

'Sister John Megeve died of diphtheria. She had never been immunised, being brought up abroad. And then Sister John O'Dowd getting all these newfangled ideas and leaving us. I warned her.'

'Edward wasn't a very lucky name, either,' I said, drily.

'Stuff and nonsense,' replied Sister Boniface. 'Sister Edward Walewska joined the Order when she was sixteen. And lived to be over a hundred. As a little girl in Poland she watched Napoleon dance at a ball with her aunt, from a balcony. I knew her quite well as a child here. What do you say to that, now?'

I had nothing to say to that. Except the obvious fact that nuns under the old order of things often lived to a ripe old age. Nowadays they often died young. Or left the convent.

Nevertheless the roots of the late Sister Edward's hysteria were beginning to be uncovered. Her sister leaving the convent after, presumably, a period of indecision and doubt would have been traumatic enough. Then there was Sister Miriam's secret, her ghastly death, the coroner's public castigation. It could all have added up to a pattern of imbalance in a much stronger person. But Sister Edward had been an asthmatic since childhood. While asthma itself was frequently of nervous origin.

Naturally I wasted no thought on Sister Edward's allegation that Sister Miriam had been deliberately killed. Not even the news that Mother Ancilla had been the last person to see Sister Edward alive sent my thoughts in any particularly sinister direction. Why should it? Sister Edward had felt faint during benediction, and later retired from the nuns' supper. It was quite proper that Mother Ancilla should pay a visit to her cell after supper. The younger nun seemed sleepy but the faintness had passed. She was certainly not breathing quickly.

No-one else saw Sister Edward alive.

Whether she called out as she fought for breath in the narrow cell could not be known. Whereas the children's wing and classrooms, together with the refectory, had been built in the late twenties in red brick, the nuns' wing and the chapel had been constructed in the throes of the Victorian gothic revival. From the outside the bland modern style contrasted with the heavily arched Gothic of the convent proper. I gathered that the nuns' cells, through their swing doors, had been recreated according to a Victorian notion of a mediaeval cloister.

The walls were thick. Not as thick as the walls of Blessed Eleanor's Retreat perhaps. But the intention was the same. Noise, human noise, was not intended to intrude into the great silence of God.

The Tower of the Blessed Eleanor was also an unexpected topic of conversation that night at supper. I had decided to eat my main meals in the refectory-cum-cafeteria with the girls. I did not fancy the solemn service of the Nuns' Parlour. Sister Damian continued to enchant me, but I found Sister Clare's portly figure, labouring along with her tray, an increasing trial. Besides, I was becoming interested in the girls themselves, the girls in general and Margaret Plantaganet in particular.

Tom would like Margaret. The thought came to me, unspoken, that evening in the refectory. She was not unlike one of his devoted acolytes at the
W.N.G
.,
a girl called Emily Crispin. Emily had come forward as a helper without pay - which was just as well as the
W.N.G
.
were as fierce in their determination to keep all their funds for the poor as, say, the Powers Estate Projectors. It subsequently turned out that Emily could well afford the sacrifice, being the daughter of a rich man, although you would not otherwise have guessed it from her demeanour - or her clothes. Margaret had the same air of secrecy about her, an individuality which had nothing to do with her name or birth. It did have something to do with her physical appearance, the long crusader's face with its helmet of straight brown hair: and her silence. Emily Crispin, I once told Tom with irritation I did not bother to hide, sits for hours at your elbow without opening her mouth, like a dog asleep.

'That explains why I always get the impression she agrees with every word I say,' Tom replied.

Margaret Plantaganet herself never spoke much at meals. She left that to her chatterbox friend Dodo Sheehy.

It was Dodo, at supper on the Feast of All Souls, who enquired: 'I wonder if anyone saw the black nun last night?' Her tone was rather-bright. Dodo was such a pretty plump little thing with fair curls and a Cupid's bow mouth, that nothing she said sounded completely serious.

But I noted a wry expression on Margaret's face, a slight compression of the lips.

'Aren't all nuns black?' I responded lightly. The death of Sister Edward had not cast a notable shadow on their spirits: she was too young to have taught them. But I wanted to get the conversation away from the events of the night before.

'I'm talking about The - Black - Nun.' Dodo gave the three last words sepulchral emphasis. 'An apparition. Did you never see it when you were at the school?'

'No - wait, I do remember something vaguely. Doesn't it haunt the chapel? Or is it the tower?'

Margaret said: 'And the convent itself. Sister Miriam told us she actually saw the Black Nun when she was a girl at school.'

'She didn't tell
me.
It must have only bobbed up after dark. I was a day girl. You tell me.'

'Dodo, you tell.' Dodo was nothing loath. It transpired that the Black Nun was commonly held to appear shortly before or shortly after the death of a member of the community. Yes, of course, all nuns wore black, but the point of the Black Nun was that you suddenly came across a nun you didn't recognise, a nun you had never seen before. You imagined: a novice, a transfer from another convent. But the next day you heard of the death of a nun. And of course you never saw the Black Nun, that particular Black Nun again.

I burst out laughing.

'You don't believe us,' said one of the other girls at the table rather grumpily. 'But some of us saw the Black Nun three nights after Sister Miriam ran away. And that turned out to be the night she must have died.' Much chattering followed. Yes, a strange nun, a nun they had never seen before, a nun with a strange face, passing them at night, in the corridor, on their way to ... their way to where? Why, the chapel. To make a novena to Our Lady. And that night, they learned later, Sister Miriam had given up the ghost in the tower. Surely I had to admit it all added up.

On the contrary, it all sounded deeply implausible to me. Another enigmatic novena in the middle of the night: something I was fairly sure was not allowed by the rules.

When I was informed that the Black Nun had first appeared to Blessed Eleanor herself, goodness knows how many years ago, I scoffed openly. Six black nuns were supposed to have carried her to her tower, and at the last moment a seventh unknown nun appeared. Blessed Eleanor asked the stranger who she was, and the answer came back pat: 'I am Death itself, who comes before you as a Black Nun.'

'None of that delightful story appears in the Treasury of the Blessed Eleanor,' I commented in a fairly acid voice.

'Exactly. Sister Miriam told us about it. She used to tell us ghost stories after lights out.' I was glad to hear that in one respect at least my old friend had not changed. Ghost stories and ghoulish information generally had been Rosa's speciality.

'Anyway, somebody did see the Black Nun last night,' said the grumpy girl suddenly. Blanche, Blanche Nelligan, was her name. She did not look like a Blanche, being beetle-browed with rather a bad complexion.

'Tessa Justin, that girl with plaits in the Lower IVth. I was on prefect duty in the big dormitory and Sister Agnes was doing the rounds. Suddenly young Tessa appeared, shrieking her head off, plaits flying, saying a strange nun had interrupted her in the loo. That must have been the Black Nun.'

At this we all laughed. A minute later the chairs were scraping back for grace and supper was over. I decided not to give another thought to the Black Nun. I enjoyed my solitary tray of coffee after the girls' chatter. Then I climbed up the visitors' staircase to my own retreat. I really felt that I had quite enough problems on my hands without the question of a spectral religious haunting the junior school bathrooms. The Black Nun was scarcely likely to bother me.

Once I was installed in my room and had looked at the papers on my desk, I saw that I was wrong.

'If you don't believe in the Black Nun' - so ran a typed message on a sheet of plain paper placed on top of my copy of
The Times
- 'why don't you come to the tower one night and see for yourself? Tomorrow night for example.'

There was no superscription and no signature. Jutting out from the paper, on the front cover of
The Times
I saw a photograph of Tom on the platform at his
W.N.G
. rally. That looked like Emily Crispin at his elbow with some papers on her lap. Neither of them looked particularly ghostly. The photograph gave me no consolation whatsoever.

7

Forewarned

In the night the wind got up. The change of noise from the steady downpour on the chapel roof to the gusts and rattling of my windows awoke me. Lying, somnolent, I was aware of some other noise quite close at hand. The guest room next to me - my temporary sitting room - was empty. Beyond that lay another guest room, also unoccupied. Beyond that the communal bathroom. If anything the noise was located in the furthest guest room, next to the bathroom. The walls here in the modern block were not particularly sound-proof. The vigorous sound of Sister Perpetua's broom scouring my bedroom regularly disturbed the peace of my sitting room.

I felt too drowsy to investigate. Besides, I needed my sleep. For I was always awake early in the convent, what with the chapel bells and the shuffle of the children going to early mass. In London I considered myself, and allowed the world to consider me, an early riser. I prided myself on my ability to take testing telephone calls at full strength from eight o'clock onwards. But I had to admit that the need to appear fresh and purposeful for a refectory breakfast at 7.45 was another matter altogether. As I drifted into sleep, I made a mental note to explore the convent grounds the next day. Such an expedition might be combined with a talk to one of the nuns. The tower above all presented an emotional problem. It might be better not to visit it for the first time after Rosa's death, at night - and alone.