The Headmaster's Wife (59 page)

“I know, but something has come up. Actually it came up before all that stuff with you and school exploded, but then your mother and I didn't have time to talk it out because we wanted to get up to see you. We've talked about it a little since, and we thought—thought, really—that we'd leave it up to you. Because I'm ambivalent. So you can decide. The future of the family is on you.”

“Excuse me while I go back to bed and sleep for a month,” Mark said. “I turned sixteen two months ago. I don't want the future of the family to be on me.”

“Hear me out,” Jimmy said. “I've had an offer, like I said, from the London Symphony. To spend a year there as composer in residence. If I took it, we'd take you and Geoff and move to London for a while. Not just a single year, you know, because we wouldn't want to have you jumping around to different schools. We'd stay at least three years so that you could finish high school. We'd put you and Geoff both in the American School. We'd buy a house—”

“Wait,” Mark said. “London? Are you serious? For three years? Doesn't Mom hate this? I mean, she's got stuff to do here. She's got teaching. She's got television.”

“She's willing to give up the teaching,” Jimmy said. “According to her, it's started to depress her. She'd keep the office here and still do CNN on and off, four or five times a year. She's talking to the BBC about some kind of arrangement over there. And I told her I'd buy her a house in South Kensington near the Natural History Museum. I don't know why, but it seems she's always wanted a house near the Natural History Museum. There's a big one up for sale, six stories or something. I offered to buy her something in St. James Place, but she's adamant about the Natural History Museum.”

“We used to go there practically every weekend before my dad got sick,” Mark said. “She's right. I'd rather be in South Ken than St. James Place. Or Grosvenor Square, which is the other biggie where Americans buy expensive houses in London. Three years? In London? Seriously?”

“I take it you're in favor,” Jimmy said.

“Hell, yes, I'm in favor. I'm surprised you got her to agree to the American School. She didn't used to like it. She kept saying that if we were going to be in school in England we should go to English schools.”

“Apparently, it's too late now. You were supposed to start in sixth grade. Although how you can start high school in sixth grade is beyond me.”

“It's a different system,” Mark said. “Think of the Harry Potter books. They start at Hogwarts in what we'd call sixth grade. They're eleven. You're sure she doesn't mind this? She isn't going to get over there and resent the fact that she's had to jerk around her career?”

“Does your mother look like somebody who would offer to do something if she thought she'd resent it later?”

“I don't know,” Mark said. “Nothing like this has ever come up before. You're really serious here. Mom actually wouldn't mind this?”

“I think she's actually gung ho in favor of it, to tell you the truth,” Jimmy said. “She lives out here because of you two, but I don't think she's a country girl at heart.”

“Well, damn,” Mark said. “Yes. If I get to decide, definitely yes. Is Geoff okay with it?”

“We haven't told him yet.”

“Don't worry about it. I'll work on him. And it'll help that we go to the same school, even if we are in different divisions. Will the American School take me? My grades are sort of sucky this year, what with everything and—”

“They'll take you,” Jimmy said. “Your mother's already asked. I don't think they're going to get overly worried that you've got a B minus average this year instead of an A minus one, assuming they're going to ask for a transcript at all, since that school of yours seems to be imploding. Your mother says she hated that place from the start. Why didn't you?”

“I have to hate every place that she hates?”

“No,” Jimmy said, “but I met some of those people. You should have known better.”

“They weren't the same people I met,” Mark said. “They weren't on the admissions committee or anything. Never mind. London. For three years. I wonder if I could take A levels even if I am in the American School. I'll bet they get people who want to do that. Maybe I could go to Oxford. Wouldn't that be a gas?”

“I thought you wanted to go to UCLA and study film.”

“There's always grad school,” Mark said. “Listen, I'm going to go make something to eat, okay? I'm starving to death. I actually jogged into the Depot. You want me to make you something?”

“No, thanks. I'm at that age where if I eat it, I wear it.”

“Right.” Mark had no idea what Jimmy was talking about, but it didn't matter. He was very, very happy, and he went down to the kitchen thinking he'd actually take some trouble this time and cook the frozen pizza in the oven instead of doing Pizza Rolls in the microwave. Geoff wasn't going to be happy at first, but he'd be able to change that. He knew he would. He wondered if Christina still lived where she was living the last time he was in London. He remembered her from Westfields Primary School, and she'd beencute then; but when he'd seen her last year, well—that had really turned out okay. Better than okay.

In the kitchen he threw the newspaper on the counter and went looking for frozen food. Alice Makepeace's face stared up at him from a smudged photograph in those odd colors the
Times
used when it was trying very hard not to be black-and-white.

Something about the light, or the angle at which he was standing, made the picture seem to shimmer and change.

All of a sudden, Alice Makepeace looked like a gargoyle.

Hardscrabble Road

Coming soon in hardcover from St. Martins Minotaur

There was no thermometer outside the door of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Monastery, but Sister Maria Beata of the Incarnation didn't need one to tell her that the temperature was well below zero and getting worse. She reached through the heavy wool folds of her habit for the leather sack purse she had pinned to the pocket of her skirt. The pocket was pinned, too, rather than sewn on, and for a moment she found herself thinking the kind of thought—
why in the name of God can't we at least force ourselves into the eighteenth century?
—that had kept her doing penance in Chapter for most of her formation. Behind her, Sister Mary Immaculata of the Child Jesus was unwinding herself from the bowels of the cab. There was a wind coming down the dark street, whipping stray pieces of litter into the air and then sucking them out of sight, heavenward. The old men who materialized out of nowhere to sleep in the monastery's bam on cold winter nights were already lined up at the door. One of them was wearing a bright red cap that was not only clean but looked new. Beata found the correct change and enough of a tip not to embarrass herself, and paid the cabbie.

“Sister,” she said, as Immaculata came around to the curb, shaking out the folds of her cape against the wind.

Immaculata didn't say anything, but Beata didn't expecther to. Immaculata was a very old nun, old chronologically and old in the order. She didn't approve of much of anything. Beata didn't think she ever spoke unless she was spoken to, and even then she seemed to hate it, as if the act of speech had been taught to her as the one necessary element of any mortal sin. And maybe it had, Beata thought. It was hard to know what people had been taught in Immaculata's day.

Beata went up the stone steps to the monastery's front door and rang the bell. Sister Marie Bernadette of the Holy Innocents opened up and stepped back to let them pass, holding out her hand for the briefcase Beata carried in the process. Beata shook her head, and Marie Bernadette retreated.

“You must be frozen,” she said. “I've rung upstairs for Mother. She left word you were to meet her in the office as soon as you got back. Immaculata, you ought to go somewhere and have a cup of tea.”

Immaculata inclined her head. Beata bit her lip to keep from laughing. “I'll go on through to the enclosure,” she said. “The Cardinal asked us all to pray for him. I told him we already did, every day. I didn't tell him we prayed for him to retire. Somebody ought to open up for the men out there.”

“Are they out there already? We're not supposed to open until six o'clock.”

“It's cold,” Beata said.

Marie Bernadette had her keys out and was fumbling with the door to the enclosure. It had an old-fashioned lock, the kind that took a heavy iron key with a little cutout square hanging at the end. The door swung back and Beata went through it.

“If we don't get someone out there soon, we're going to have at least one corpse before morning,” she said. “Their bodies can't handle this cold.”

The enclosure started with a hallway, long and narrow, with a crucifix in a wall niche at the very end. Beata unhooked her cape and pulled it off her shoulders. It was as hot in here as it was cold out there. She put the cape over her armand went down the hall, genuflecting quickly when she got to the crucifix. Then she turned to the right and went down yet another hall to Mother Constanzia's office. At least the ceilings were high, she thought. It was odd that it had never occurred to her that enclosure could cause claustrophobia.

Mother Constanzia of the Assumption of Mary was already waiting, standing at the window that looked out onto the enclosure courtyard as if there was something she could see out there that she hadn't seen a thousand times before. Beata cleared her throat.

“I knew you were there,” Constanzia said. “I was just thinking. I tried to talk you out of becoming an extern sister, didn't I?”

“You threatened not to admit me to Carmel if I insisted on becoming an extern sister.”

“It's another example of how God knows better than we do what we need. I've got to admit that I never did think we'd need a lawyer.”

“We have lawyers.”

“I mean a lawyer we could trust.” Constanzia turned around. “I'm not going to say that I don't trust the Cardinal or his lawyers, or that I don't trust the order and its lawyers, but—”

“You don't trust either.”

“Something like that. You did well in law school, didn't you?”

“Tolerably well,” Beata said. “I was only ninth in my class, but it was a fairly big class, and it was Yale.”

“Sorry.” Constanzia motioned to the chair in front of the desk. “I'm a little on edge. This hasn't been the best month of my life, let me tell you. Are we in as much trouble as you thought we were?”

“Pretty much.” Beata let her cape fall over the back of the chair, put the briefcase on the desk, and sat down. “First, let me confirm what I thought this morning. The Justice Project
is
taking this very seriously. They're bringing in Kate Daniel herself to handle it—”

“Good grief. That woman.”

“She's a very smart woman. She's a brilliant attorney.”

“She's an anti-Catholic bigot.”

“I don't know that she is. She does see this as an opportunity, and I don't blame her. But the game she's after isn't the Catholic Church.”

“It's the game she's going to get.”

“Then she'll count it as a loss. What she wants is Drew Harrigan, stuffed like a turkey and served up for Thanksgiving dinner, and if you ask me, she's going to get him. In the process, she may drive us into bankruptcy, or worse, but I don't think that's what she's after.”

“She won't mind if she does.”

“Maybe not,” Beata said. “But Reverend Mother, the issue here is procedural, really. It's a matter of timing. Mr. Harrigan deeded the Holland Street lots to the monastery two weeks ago Wednesday. That was after he'd been indicted for illegal possession of prescription drugs, along with about two dozen other things, and after Sherman Markey filed suit against him for defamation and false accusation. After. It's the after that's the problem.”

“Because it looks like Drew was trying to shield his property from the lawsuit.”

“Exactly.”

“Because it looks like an
arrangement,”
Mother Constanzia said. “It looks like the whole thing is fake. That Drew deeded us the property so that Mr. Markey couldn't get it in a court settlement, and then we'd give it back to him when Mr. Markey was taken care of and had gone away.”

“That's it, yes.”

“Does it matter that none of that is true?” Constanzia said. “Oh, I'm not saying Drew didn't deed it to us out of spite against Mr. Markey. Drew is Drew. But there isn't any arrangement. The fact that we want to sell the properties ought to be proof that there isn't any arrangement.”

“We might want to sell them, keep the cash, and turn the cash over to Drew after his legal troubles were over.”

“Does the general public actually think that nuns are that Machiavellian?”

“It's not the general public we have to convince. It's one sitting judge, and he's going to side with Markey. He has to, really. The fact of the timing looks bad. The fact that the buyer insists on remaining anonymous looks bad. The fact that Mr. Harrigan is your brother looks worse.”

“I ought to go in there and tell that idiot that Drew may be my brother, but I've been a registered Democrat all my life.”

“I think that would break enclosure.”

“I'd wear a veil. And it can't break enclosure any worse to testify in a court than to vote, and we always vote.”

“I'm trying to get a handle on what it would look like on the news. You sitting on the witness stand with your face covered by an exclaustration veil—”

“Be serious,” Constanzia said. “Where are we now? What can we do?”