Quiet As A Nun Part 3

Unnatural lives Shortly after my scream, two things happened. Someone or something rushed past me into the chapel from the outside, by the route I had used, out by the nuns' door and away.

The flesh turned out to be a face turned up towards mine in a rather dazed way. There was a nun kneeling at the end of the pew I had touched.

'Miss Sh.o.r.e,' said the nun in a low voice, 'I'm sorry if I startled you.' 'Who was that?'

A rustle. The nun rose to her feet. I could not see her face and did not recognise her voice. 'I'm Sister Agnes.'

'No, who was that? The other person who rushed past us.' I was still trembling and could not let go of the pew. 'Who blew out the candle?'

'There was no-one else here, Miss Sh.o.r.e; see, the chapel is empty.' Deftly Sister Agnes took the candle from my shaky hand and relit it at the shrine. I saw that the statue was of the adult Jesus pointing to a large red heart prominent on his breast. Sacred Heart of Jesus. Sacre Coeur! I felt like exclaiming it aloud as a relief to my feelings.

'I've been on duty in St Aloysius' dormitory, the big dormitory. I came here on my way down to say my night prayers. I'm sorry to have disturbed you.'

'Down the visitors' staircase?' I enquired sharply. If Sister Agnes was surprised at my inquisitorial tone, she did not show it. But she did take a moment to reply. Then she said easily: 'It is quicker that way than going back into the nuns' wing and all the way round by our own stairs. I'm making a novena to the Sacred Heart of Jesus,' she added.

'Then I'm sorry that I disturbed you, Sister Agnes,' I answered politely. I was recovering my poise. 'I will leave you to your prayers and peace.'

With as much dignity as I could muster I turned to go back up the winding staircase to my little room, which now seemed like a haven compared to the rustling chapel.

'Let me put on the stair light for you,' said Sister Agnes. 'No wonder you were frightened. We nuns get used to the darkness here in the chapel.'

Sister Agnes stepped swiftly ahead and flipped a switch outside the door. Light flooded the stairs. Enough light to show me an alcove at the bottom of the stairs. It was sufficiently large to conceal a person who might shrink back into it. A person who knew they were being followed and did not want to be seen.

For of course Sister Agnes could not be telling the truth. There was no question of that. There was no way in which she could have slipped out of the children's wing, down the visitors' stairs and reached the pew to be kneeling there calmly and silently ahead of me. Her story was implausible from many angles. For one thing there had not been enough time. For another, the mysterious prowler had definitely come from the nuns' not the children's wing. In any case, if Sister Agnes had arrived from the big dormitory why did she not use the ordinary front staircase to the main chapel entrance, past the refectory?

Last of all, there had been another human being there with us, someone as yet without a face, behind me in the alcove, who blew out my candle before beating a fast retreat to the nuns' part of the building. Ergo: she was a nun. Ergo: Sister Agnes must have seen her over my shoulder, her eyes accustomed to the darkness, my candle held high. Ergo: Sister Agnes was lying.

All of this occupied my mind as I pa.s.sed back up the staircase to my room.

My last sight of Sister Agnes was of an upturned face wearing an expression of gentle concern. She reminded me of someone. Then I realised that she resembled a Murillo I had once admired of St Agnes with her lamb, the saint as a charming young creature with dark eyes and loosely playing locks. Perhaps it was that resemblance which inspired my new friend to choose the name of Agnes in religion. I had no idea what the inspiring virtues of St Agnes might be beyond a weakness for lambs like Mary in the nursery rhyme. Or was that merely a play on her Latin name? In any case it was tempting to think that Sister Agnes had secretly been prompted by human vanity. I was still thinking of the story of the Blessed Eleanor and her royal robes. It struck me that Sister Agnes must have been a pretty woman once.

Later, when the door of my room was safely shut, it occurred to me further that Sister Agnes probably still was a pretty woman - under that confining coif and veil. It was a commonplace at Blessed Eleanor's that one could never tell the real age of nuns. The tell-tale throats and foreheads were securely hidden. From my brief glimpse of her, I put Sister Agnes at no more than thirty. The thought of that motionless figure in the pew, waiting, remained with me as I fell asleep.

There was no doubt that the life of a nun was an unnatural one. At the age of thirty an attractive unmarried woman like Sister Agnes would be better employed meeting her married boss after hours from the office than keeping lonely trysts in a chapel. At the age of thirty, I myself had been doing just that. With the great Cy Fredericks himself, my married boss at Megalith. He had not of course been quite so great in those days. But he had been married all right. With all the heartbreak of the relations.h.i.+p, I doubt if I should ever have emerged as Jemima Sh.o.r.e, Investigator, without his help. It was not a case of string-pulling. He was just naturally infectious. You could not help catching confidence off him, like a cold.

There was no doubt that the life of a nun was an unnatural one.

I drifted into sleep.

'I expect you feel that we all lead unnatural lives here, Jemima,' said Mother Ancilla the next morning, in her tiny study. It was her no-nonsense, head-of-the-school tone.

*I wouldn't say that exactly, Mother,' I replied carefully. 'From my time here I respect the logic of your existence. Even if I don't share in it.'

'I a.s.sumed that to be so. Otherwise you wouldn't be here' - even brisker. 'But that wasn't my point. I was referring to the fact that our lives do have an order, an order of their own. Which is not the slightest bit unnatural, for two reasons. First it is an order dedicated to the service of G.o.d. We are convinced that as best we may, we are carrying out G.o.d's will for us on earth. Secondly, it is not unnatural because we are all here voluntarily. Of our own free will.'

I received a slight jolt.

'You look surprised, my child. But what I am saying is perfectly true. We are not living in the Middle Ages. A vocation is a difficult thing to a.s.sess of course. Only Almighty G.o.d can truly see into our hearts. But we do our best to choose the members of our community with care, even today when vocations are so much rarer. That is G.o.d's will too, and we must accept it.' (But I got the impression that Mother Ancilla might have a thing or two to say to G.o.d on the subject when the twain finally encountered each other.) Meanwhile, she was marching on: 'Sometimes of course, in spite of all our precautions, our long probationary period of postulancy and novitiate, we are just plainly mistaken. Or a nun is mistaken about her vocation. And then she is released from her vows and returns into the world. You may remember Beatrice O'Dowd from your time here. She was a nun for fifteen years, and left us last year. We regretted it but we did not try to stand in her way.' All the same I got the impression that Beatrice O'Dowd, like G.o.d, was not in Mother Ancilla's best books.

'And Rosabelle - Sister Miriam?' I was thinking of Tom. What, no incarcerated nuns, no immured and helpless victims, no white faces behind grilles?

'Exactly. Sister Miriam never asked to be released from her vows. Even when she had her nervous breakdown, she begged the community not to reject her.'

I had to believe all that she said.

'Tell me about some of the younger nuns here,' I replied, changing the subject. 'I must know everything possible about the community if I am to help you. Do they not feel, well, restless, with all the changes in the modern world? Someone like,' I appeared to search for a name, 'Sister Agnes, for example.'

Mother Ancilla's eyes met mine, level, watchful.

'Ah, I see you have noticed the resemblance then. I wondered whether you would.'

'The resemblance?'

'Sister Miriam. They were first cousins - although of course Sister Agnes is considerably younger. She was born a Campion, Agnes Campion when she was at school here. She did not change her name in religion, which is of course rare in our Order. In fact,' Mother Ancilla added rather crossly, 'it used not to be allowed. Our Blessed Foundress ...' She rolled her eyes to heaven, but so automatically that I felt her mind was distinctly on earth. 'Our Blessed Foundress commanded us to throw away all earthly things in her rule, including the names our parents had given us.'

'While keeping her own?'

'Royalty. That's different.' Mother Ancilla swept on without embarra.s.sment. 'A symbol for leaving our own houses for the house of G.o.d. There was a technical relaxation of the rule last year' - Mother Ancilla managed to cram an extraordinary distaste into the word 'technical' -'but I must say I was surprised when Sister Agnes took advantage of it.' After that Mother Ancilla's roving mind abandoned the subject of Sister Agnes's unexpected independence and returned to that of Rosabelle: 'The resemblance is of course much more marked in the religious habit. The eyes are so similar, don't you think? Sister Agnes had much darker hair, really jet black. Such a pretty child, her Spanish blooda"'

I felt the subject of the ancestry of the Campions looming once more and said hastily: 'I did sense something familiar.' And so I had. 'But of course I never saw Rosabelle after she became a nun. I only heard indirectly that she had joined the community.' And that, in its own way, was true too.

Hadn't there been a letter? A long, long letter, all very earnest. In which Rosabelle examined herself and her problems in her small neat handwriting for page after page. She was in effect consulting me as to whether she should enter the convent. I knew it. Her father had recently died, she wrote, and she felt herself to be alone. Alone that is, except for the love of G.o.d. And - me. My friends.h.i.+p. An outsider. Not even a Catholic. I would be able to bring a fresh eye to it all: I had such a clear mind. And I would remember all our discussions on the subject in time gone by.

Yes, there had been a letter. And I had not answered it. Time gone by. It had arrived some time during my second year at Cambridge, when I was in the throes of enjoying that coveted place. Won with such grim concentration, it was now to be savoured. I had put the letter aside: Rosa and her problems seemed as remote as the time of the Blessed Eleanor.

Later I heard by chance from a cousin of hers at Cambridge, Celia Campion, a cheerful type, product of another convent school and rather improbably reading Maths: Rosabelle Powerstock had entered Blessed Eleanor's. Or as Celia put it, 'Cousin Rosa has taken the jolly old veil.'

'Mother Ancilla,' I said, 'I imagine that I am free to wander as I please while I'm here, to talk to whom I please, to ask what questions I like.'

'But of course, dear Jemima.' Mother Ancilla threw up her hands. 'That's what you are here for. An outsider's eye to see clearly what perhaps we, so close to it all, have missed.'

'In that case I think I should try to talk to several of the nuns singly, on the excuse of my television programme of course, try and feel my way round a bit.' That seemed to Mother Ancilla an excellent plan. Why not start tonight? Nothing wrong with that either. It was, she pointed out, the Feast of All Saints and thus a whole holiday. This evening there would be Solemn Benediction in the chapel which I might like to attend? Yes, I would like to attend it, the music at Blessed Eleanor's being a speciality not to be missed. Afterwards the children would be watching a film - The Sound of Music, as a matter of fact. Such a lovely uplifting film. Had I ever interviewed Julie Andrews? No, what a pity - but any member of the community would be free for a chat.

In this way I had intended to ask to see Sister Edward. I thought I might just as well grasp the nettle of her hysteria at the beginning of my investigations, rather than let an unpleasant and fundamentally rather pointless interview hang over me. I shall never understand what impulse led me to subst.i.tute the name of Sister Agnes for that of Sister Edward. I certainly did not believe in such split second decisions being manifestations of some divine plan. More likely it was something in Mother Ancilla's manner, a conviction that she was unwilling to discuss Sister Agnes, which prompted me.

Besides I was already falling half in love with my own cover story of a programme about women in orders. Why not, after all? Once I had cleared up Mother Ancilla's little problem for her. From the point of view of television, Sister Edward would be quite hopeless. But Sister Agnes now, so calm in a confused situation as I had already discovered. In her appearance, come to think of it, there was more than a hint of Audrey Hepburn in A Nun's Story. I should have remembered that I was supposed to be on holiday from my programme and not listened to the whisperings of the television devil.

Under the auspices of Solemn Benediction, the chapel seemed to be involved in some vast royal wedding service. The priests wore heavy white robes traced with gold and silver. Great golden ta.s.sels hung down from their copes. Candles filled the chapel, a series of bright tiers, which it must have taken the sacristan nun a laborious age to light. How different the chapel seemed from the menacing darkness of the night before! As the censors were swung gravely to and fro, first to the altar, then to the congregation, the heavy fruity smell of incense began to permeate the air. It would linger, I knew, in the still air of the chapel, long after those bridal candles were extinguished, and Sister Agnes knelt alone in the darkness before the sanctuary lamp, saying her novena.

Sweet Sacrament divine All praise and all thanksgiving Be every moment thine Sweet Sa-a-a-crament divine ...

People talk of the purity of boys' voices in a choir. But to me that evening there was a purity and an anguish about the female voices singing, which lingered in my mind long after the voices were still, as the incense lingered in the chapel. All that was missing was the bride: no doubt each lonely heart imagined that she was the bride in the centre of this superb ritual: the bride of Christ.

The nuns knelt or stood on one side of the chapel, the girls on the other. Visitors occupied seats at the back of the school benches. I glanced across at the nuns. It was no longer true that one nun looked much like another. I was beginning to be able to distinguish them again quite easily. Sister Damian the hedgehog, Sister Clare the plump coffee-bringer, and one or two nuns who had certainly been there in my day. That was Sister Elizabeth for sure, hardly changed, Sister Liz, the famed teacher of English, for whom Wordsworth and the lyric poets occupied roles in her pantheon not much below the saints. And Sister Hippolytus, the Hippo, who stood towards history as Sister Elizabeth stood towards English. Here the long history of the convent was the thing to conjure with, preferably in terms of the many doc.u.ments and records perused by Sister Hippolytus in the convent library, to which no-one else paid any attention - foolishly, in the opinion of Sister Hippolytus. Many a history lesson had been hopelessly misrouted by a casual enquiry from Rosa or myself: 'Sister, is it true that the O.T.I. isn't really an English foundation at all? But Belgian.'

'Our Belgian sister house is a post-Reformation foundation' - Sister Hippo would begin fiercely, unable to resist the bait. Nevertheless, once concentrated on such matters as the Age of the Enlightened Despots, a strict teacher in contrast to the effusive Sister Liz. I owed a lot to them both, I had come to realise ... How could the younger nuns hope to compete with these established figures, who had enjoyed all the certainty of the old-style Church? Nuns in the modern world indeed. No wonder Rosabelle had collapsed under the strain. And Sister Edward looked like following her ... I really would have to talk to Sister Edward tomorrow. It was only fair.

My chat with Sister Agnes took place in the empty guest room next to mine, by permission of Reverend Mother. She told me that I could use it as a sitting room. The decor included the a.s.sumption by Murillo and various other scenes in the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Sister Agnes did indeed have a Murillo-like air as she faced me across the mock fire-place with its single electric bar. She looked both demure and collected. She did not in truth greatly resemble Rosabelle, except around the eyes, but then, as Mother Ancilla pointed out, I had never seen Rosa in her habit.

And Sister Agnes, in response to my questions, remained demure and collected throughout. She gave the impression of a cricketer who has been instructed by his captain neither to score runs nor to let a ball pa.s.s by. Yes, these were difficult times for women in religion with so many new opportunities open to their contemporaries. No, she did not feel they were specially difficult times: for when had the life of women in religion been easy? You did not give yourself to G.o.d expecting an easy time. And so on and so on. Nothing I could not have written down in advance for myself.

So I was surprised that when our anodyne interview was concluded, Sister Agnes did not immediately leave the room. She stood, her hands clutching the top of the ugly guest room chair, much as I had supported myself on the pew the previous night.

'Miss Sh.o.r.e, there is one further thing I should tell you,' said Sister Agnes in her well-modulated voice. 'You will discover nothing to your advantage here. Nothing. Do you understand me? Nothing.' Her voice was not raised a half-tone from our previous conversation and the words in themselves hardly sounded dramatic. But it was her eyes. She could not control her eyes. They were dilated, either in fear or anger, I did not know her well enough to say.

'Why don't you go home while you can?'

With this, Sister Agnes pa.s.sed swiftly from the room. According to the noise of the swing doors she had gone directly to the nuns' wing. Not to the chapel this evening for her novena, unless she had taken the long way round by the nuns' staircase.

It was not until the next morning, the feast of All Souls, that I learnt of the death of Sister Edward, suddenly in her cell, during the night.

6.

The Black Nun The feast of All Souls, following All Saints, proved as doleful a day as I could remember. It even rained. The leaves in the drive ceased to scutter in the wind but congregated in sodden heaps. More leaves were driven off the dripping trees. Altogether it was a day of lamentation in the fullest tradition of the ancient faith. Now the black vestments of the priests matched with the black habits of the nuns. The girls wore short black veils over their hair in chapel in contrast to the flowing white veils of the previous feast day. The mult.i.tudinous flowers of the night before, great pyramids and obelisks of white chrysanthemums, had vanished. Whatever happened to them? A hospital, I wondered vaguely. But the nearest hospital was miles away and Churne Cottage Hospital had been shut down.

At least that question was answered a day later. I found it macabre that the same flowers, still in their festive pinnacles, were used to flank the plain wooden coffin of Sister Edward as it lay in the chapel in the days before burial.

The Commemoration of the Dead, I reflected bitterly, was a gloomy enough subject without the additional demise of a young nun from a heart attack following an asthmatic fit.

Dies Irae, Dies Illae, day of mourning, day of weeping. As the magnificent sombre words of the requiem rang out in the chapel, I thought of Mother Ancilla in savage terms. She, with the rest of the community, would probably consider it a happy coincidence that Sister Edward's poor weak heart had chosen November the second to give up the struggle for life. While her lungs still struggled for breath. Look how her coffin benefited from the flowers of the previous day's feast: Holy economy! I was in that kind of mood.

'Her medicines were all within reach,' Sister Lucy told me desperately. There were tears in her eyes. 'If only she had had the strength to take them.' Sister Lucy was the young nun who had recently succeeded old Sister Boniface as infirmarian. I was glad to see those tears in her eyes. She was human enough for that. Sister Boniface, on the other hand, sitting like an aged tortoise at the end of the dispensary, showed no emotion. I was unfair, I was being unfair, and I knew it. But I got the impression that Sister Boniface regarded the death of Sister Edward as a kind of defeat for modern stimulants.

She had apparently expressed considerable doubts as to the wisdom of dosing Sister Edward so consistently. But Dr Mayhew, who attended the convent, had been a great believer in the therapeutic power of such things.

'He said: with all these aids, there was no reason why she shouldn't lead a normal life,' Sister Lucy repeated. 'In so far as a nun's life is normal. I mean, that's what he said.' Sister Lucy was clearly in a state of great distress. Sister Boniface snorted and twitched her rosary. Her fingers were incredibly gnarled, like the roots of trees in an Arthur Rackham drawing. Arthritis: the endemic disease of ageing women living in damp conditions. Probably the nuns' quarters were not even heated - or only for one month of the year or something mediaeval like that. I s.h.i.+vered. Pain did not however stop Sister Boniface being as garrulous as ever.

My new mood of bitterness towards the convent and all its works had its origin in guilt. I could not rid myself of regret that I had not chosen to interview Sister Edward, as I had intended. It was not that I felt she had now taken her secrets with her to the grave or anything ridiculous like that. Just that something so chancy as a heart attack must depend on so many elements. My interview, the relief of talking to an outsider, might have even saved her from the fatal bout of asthma.

The dispensary lay just outside the infirmary which, like the convent itself, was divided into a nuns' and a children's section. Dr Mayhew had just left, after signing the death certificate. There was no doubt about it. Sister Edward had died from natural causes - if you could call anything about a nun natural, to echo the doctor's own words.

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 G.o.d. 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 surrept.i.tiously 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 G.o.d. That's the way things should be,' muttered Sister Boniface. Given to G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed. 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 cla.s.srooms, 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 G.o.d.

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-c.u.m-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.