Convent on Styx (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “I hope it isn’t the typewriter,” said Sister St. Elmo, rather anxiously mentioning this expensive item. It was not the typewriter. The missing article—“and I’ve checked everything, positively everything, Sister”—was the list of names, addresses, and telephone numbers of the secular staff, all of whom lived away from the school and the convent and were now on holiday.

  “There is only one thing that can mean,” said Sister St. Elmo. “More of these wretched anonymous letters, I suppose. I shall have to bring the police in, as it’s a case of breaking and entering, but I doubt whether they’re going to thank me, as nothing has been damaged or anything of intrinsic value stolen.”

  Before she could put her resolution into practice she received another report that confirmed her, however, in her resolve to inform the police that the school had had unauthorised visitors. The report came from Mrs. Polkinghorne and Miss Lipscombe, who had waited their turn to speak with the prioress. She took them to the convent parlour, for seculars were not admitted to the Community Room.

  “If it’s about the little Cartwrights,” she said warningly, “you surely must know that they slept upstairs last night and could not have disturbed you.”

  “And thankful we are to know that they did sleep upstairs,” said Miss Lipscombe earnestly. “I have said my say about them in the past, but not any more. Why, the poor mites might not be alive today if they had slept on the ground floor. Mrs. Polkinghorne, dear, tell Sister what you heard last night.”

  “It is true, I think, that somebody climbed into the room from which you removed the little girls,” said Mrs. Polkinghorne. “As perhaps you know, I moved next to that room because Miss Lipscombe thought the niñas might disturb her. Well, I do not always sleep so good, and I think I hear strange sounds from that room.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I put my head under the bed-covers and pray to the Blessed Virgin,” said Mrs. Polkinghorne piously and without shame.

  “It might have been better to have turned the key of the room. It was left on the corridor side when the room was vacated. Anyway, you should have roused the household and let some of us deal with the intruder, if indeed there was one.”

  “And frighten poor Sister Ignatius into her grave?” exclaimed Miss Lipscombe, breaking in. “It could not be done. Besides, I heard the man getting out again. I do think, Sister, that something should be done about those loose bars.”

  “Yes,” said Sister St. Elmo, who would not have credited a word of their story had she not known that the school had already been broken into, “you appear to be justified, Miss Lipscombe, in suggesting that. However, it may interest you to know that the intruder, whoever he was, mistook the building he was looking for, and made his exit, as you say you heard him do, as soon as he realised his mistake, so you and Mrs. Polkinghorne were never in danger.”

  “You mean he mistook the convent for the school?”

  “We think so, but no damage has been done. You had better know that some mischievous village boys, we think, got into the school and left a lot of litter about, but that can soon be put right. However, I will think about having those loose bars cemented in, although I am not at all anxious to do it, because that room is an exit in case of fire.”

  “Well!” said Miss Lipscombe, when the prioress had gone and they had the convent parlour to themselves. “What do you think of that?”

  “I think I am glad when those bars are made firm,” said Mrs. Polkinghorne. “Do you think it was secuestrar—I mean high-jack—those children?”

  “You mean kidnap them? Well, now, that is just what I think myself. Such a lot of this kidnapping goes on. I wonder whether Sister got wind of what was likely to happen, and that’s why she moved the children upstairs?” They wagged their heads solemnly over the question. “Knowing that the children had been left here,” went on Miss Lipscombe, warming to her theme, “they tried the school first, only to be foiled. This made them angry, so they did as much damage and made as much mess as they could out of revenge for being thwarted. The world is in a sad pickle, Mrs. Polkinghorne, when miscreants dare to break into a convent to kidnap children.”

  Mrs. Polkinghorne remarked,

  “Mess, perhaps, the intruso he make, yes, but Sister say no damage. No damage, so no police, do you think?”

  “Police?”

  “No children this secuestrador get, and no damage done. Perhaps something was stolen, though.”

  “Sister would have told us if there had been anything taken. If nothing has gone, there would be no need for the police, as you say. Oh, well, I think I’ll go back to my room and write my letters. What are you going to do?”

  “I think I take the bus into town and drink a coffee and eat a cake there. You will be busy writing your letters, so I do not disturb you to ask you to join me.”

  “You wouldn’t have asked me, in any case, not intending to treat me, you mean old gipsy,” thought Miss Lipscombe venomously, as she went tramping along the corridor in her cheap old shoes to occupy herself as she had indicated.

  “You will write one letter too many in God’s good time, you old bruja,” thought Mrs. Polkinghorne, thus numbering herself, with King Saul, among the prophets.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Nuns Are Perplexed

  “I am bubbled, I’m bubbled, O how I am troubled!

  Bamboozled and bit, my distresses are doubled!”

  John Gay

  At the end of their second week the little Cartwrights went home. For several days they had seemed distressed and unhappy. Sister St. Elmo put it down to homesickness and thought no more about it. The last of the school volunteers gave up coming to feed the animals, so Tom Quince and Sister Honorius were left alone to cope. Nuns went on leave and other nuns returned from it and no more anonymous communications came to the convent.

  Sister Hilary and Sister Wolstan spent whole mornings over at the school checking lists, rearranging classes and making alterations on the school timetable of which, when it was settled and approved, Sister Wolstan would make a fair copy before term began. As for the police, called in by Sister St. Elmo, they came and went, unable to do more than leave advice about fitting mortice locks and making sure that gates were locked and ground floor windows at the school were closed at night.

  The prioress was summoned to a three-day conference at the Mother House of the Order and took Sister Elphege with her; Sister Mary Fabian, stepping back to look at her painting of part of the school grounds, misjudged the distance and immersed herself in the largest of the three ponds; Sister Marcellus shopped and cooked and grumbled as usual. She had no relatives nearer than America, where two of her nephews were FBI men, so she did not take any home holidays and told Sister St. Elmo that, in spite of various dispensations that holiday nuns could claim, she preferred to remain in her own convent rather than spend her annual leave in any other house of the Order.

  On one occasion she said that her name in religion ought to be Amata, as it was the nearest she would get to being one, she supposed, a remark in which Sister Romuald, to whom she made it, could see no sense at all until, in the middle of the night, it suddenly dawned on her what the ex-lay sister had meant, and she startled herself by laughing.

  The school vacation ended at last and the new term began to get into its stride. The first indication Sister Hilary received that there was more trouble brewing came in the person of Mrs. Fennell, the teacher who took “remedials.” This meant that she gave special coaching in small groups to children who needed extra help in such matters as reading, simple mathematics, speech defects, Latin, and French. She described herself as Jack of all trades, master of none, but this opinion was completely erroneous, as she was a fine musician, a skilled embroidress, and possessed considerable talent in painting.

  Mrs. Fennell had a quiet, charming voice, the eyes (said old Sister Ignatius) of a saint, and a sensitive, beautiful mouth. Children always responded well to her, the rest of the staff liked and trusted her, and
Sister Hilary who, because of her long and varied teaching experience, was seldom deceived by people, relied on her to make her own timetable and do her work in any way that suited herself and fitted in with the plans of the rest of the staff. She had also made Mrs. Fennell deputy head of the school, though not a shareholder in its profits.

  There was no financial reason why Mrs. Fennell needed to work at all. She lived with her architect husband in a large house on the suburban outskirts of the town and came to school to avoid the otherwise unavoidable coffee parties of her neighbours and friends and their endless gossip and small talk. She was the form-mistress of the “special advantage” group, commonly known as “the backwards,” and fitted in her remedial work when these went off to art, cookery, simple woodwork, gymnastics, dancing, music, and games.

  It was in one of these periods that, urged to it by Miss Webb, she returned her “remedials” to their own forms and went to knock on Sister Hilary’s door. The headmistress was correcting some Sixth Form English papers based on the previous term’s “A” Levels, but she rang the little bell that invited callers to come in and smiled graciously when she saw who the caller was.

  “Why, good morning, Mrs. Fennell,” she said. “Something I can do for you?”

  “Well, if you’re busy, Sister, perhaps some other time?”

  “No, no. Sit down and tell me all about it. Unless this lot”—she smacked her hand down on the papers she had already corrected—“buckle down to their set books, we’re not going to get any English “A” Levels next summer. And the spelling! I think you’ll have to have a go at them. But what did you come to say?”

  “You remember, at the staff tea party last term, you mentioned to Sister Mary Wolstan and the prioress some nuisance-letters that had been sent to the school?”

  “And sent to the convent, too. Those to the school, as you probably know, referred to the accident to a village child in which our car was involved; those to the convent related to the old lady who left one of our guest rooms to go and live with her relatives.”

  “I think you intended the rest of us to overhear what you were saying.”

  “Yes, certainly I did. What is more, no other letters of the same sort have been sent either to the prioress or myself. I was fairly certain in my own mind who the writer was, and I guessed that my mention of the police would have some effect.”

  “And you were right, so far as the school and the convent were concerned, but . . .”

  “Yes? You don’t mean that similar letters have been sent to you?”

  “Not only to me. It seems that other members of the staff have had them. The letters were sent to our home addresses, so, in most cases, were not read until people came back from their holiday places. What is more, they are still being sent. Naturally I have shown mine to my husband, and now he has had one, too, and wants to go to the police. His letter is about me and is scurrilous in the extreme, but I did not know that anybody else had received one until Miss Webb showed me hers. That made me wonder, in view of what you had said at the tea party, whether anyone else was being victimised, so I brought the matter up in the common-room while the Sisters were at lunch over at the convent. It turns out that we three women have all had letters accusing us of the most fantastic and ridiculous things.”

  “Well, that clears up one little mystery,” said Sister Hilary. “During the holiday somebody broke into school, rifled my desk and filing cabinet, and turned Sister Wolstan’s little office upside down. The only thing taken away, as far as we could discover, was Sister’s list of the private addresses of the secular staff. It looks as though I may have been wrong in my deductions. The letters sent to the prioress and myself may have come from outside, after all, and my mention of calling in the police therefore made no impression on anybody who was at the tea party because all were innocent. I must admit that we suspected old Miss Lipscombe.”

  “Would she foul her own nest, so to speak?”

  “I thought of her first, I suppose, because, of course, she misses the incessant warfare that used to go on between her and Mrs. Wilks, and is pining for a little excitement, poor old thing,” explained Sister Hilary. “I believe, you know, that we have to accuse her to her face, disagreeable though such a confrontation will be. However, do you think you could ask your husband to hold his hand about calling in the police, at any rate for the present?”

  “Certainly I will. Neither he nor I would want to proceed against anybody in the convent if it can possibly be avoided.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Fennell. I know that you have our best interests at heart. Before I actually confront Miss Lipscombe, I will give her one more chance to redeem herself. I have a little plan based on the one the prioress and I used at the end-of-term tea party, but worded a little more specifically.”

  The headmistress wasted no time. She went straight over to the convent to see the prioress and propound her “little plan.” This was that the two old ladies should be informed that “poison-pen” letters were still being disseminated, that these were being collected ready to be handed to the police, and that the prioress would be grateful for the cooperation of Mrs. Polkinghorne and Miss Lipscombe. It was hoped that they would be prepared to hand over any objectionable correspondence they themselves might receive, so that it could be added to the rest of the pile for police inspection, as it was now essential that the police be brought in.

  “And if that doesn’t work,” said the headmistress to Sister Mary Wolstan, when her suggestion with regard to the two old ladies had been carried out, “there is no doubt that it will have to be the police. We can’t have mud slung at the school. It is not only the secular staff. It may get to the parents if we let it go on, and then where shall we be? The ‘poison-pen,’ whoever it is, may have written to some of them already, or, what would be worse, plan to send some of this anonymous stuff to the girls. There is no telling how much this sort of thing may escalate unless we do something to stop it here and now.”

  Miss Lipscombe and Mrs. Polkinghorne produced two anonymous letters apiece during the following fortnight and (in the opinion of the prioress), what was far more worrying, all the nuns were now receiving offensive communications. A feature of the letters that differentiated them from those sent at first was that that they were no longer hand-printed, but, like the note that had dropped out of Sister Hilary’s programme, were made up from words and phrases cut from printed matter of some sort and pasted on to lined paper.

  “It makes me wonder whether another lunatic hasn’t taken a leaf out of Miss Liposome’s book,” said Sister Mary Hilary to the prioress.

  “Oh, dear! Surely we are not justified in going on naming names, are we?”

  “In public, no, I agree that we are not, but between ourselves I think we are. The difficulty is to know what to do about it.”

  “I suppose we might—I might—speak to her quietly, suggest that we are sure she wrote the first set of letters and ask whether she can give us any idea as to the identity of the sender of this latest batch.”

  “But what happens if she denies that she wrote the first batch?”

  “Perhaps Father MacNicol will speak to her. She would hardly tell lies to him.”

  “She may have mentioned the letters to him already.”

  “In Confession, you mean? Yes, I suppose that is possible. It would tie his hands, in that case. It would be utterly impossible for him to mention anything he had heard that way, even if somebody had confessed to murder. Besides, we can’t really be sure about Miss Lipscombe. The letters may come from the village, as we thought at first.”

  “Well, wherever the first batch of letters came from, those we are receiving now can hardly come from the village.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “If the letters and phrases were cut out of newspapers I could not be sure, of course, but it is not newspapers that are being cut up, but printed books.”

  “No doubt the villagers, or some of them, possess books.”

 
“Well, yes, I suppose so. All the same, Sister, I have a very good mind to examine all the school printed stock. When the list of the staff’s private addresses was stolen by that intruder, it would have been easy enough for the thief to have removed a book or two at the same time.”

  “I thought the children provided their own books.”

  “They do, of course, but they only take home those that are required for homework or holiday reading. But it is not those classroom books I mean. I am thinking of the school library. An intruder could have slipped in there and purloined books with the greatest of ease.”

  “They would have been missed by now, wouldn’t they?”

  “Not necessarily. They might be assumed to be on loan. I have thought for some time that we ought to have a better system. The girls are supposed to sign for any book that is actually removed from the library itself, but, knowing as much about children as I do, I would not like to commit myself to declaring that every book that leaves those shelves is signed for by the person who takes it out.”

  “Well, perhaps you can check on that, although I don’t think it’s going to help us, even if we can find the mutilated book or books—they will have been returned to the shelves by now.”

  “It will be a beginning, anyway.” There was a pause, then the headmistress said, “And, of course, we have a library here in the convent.”