Quiet as a Nun

by Antonia Fraser

  'Jemima, I want you to help us. I told you there isn't much time.' It was a return to the old voice of authority. 'I want you to find out what is going on here amongst us. No, please don't say no, not immediately. I have prayed long and earnestly about this. Think about it.'

  One bell tolled in the distance. One bell for Reverend Mother.

  'My bell.' Mother Ancilla arose and with surprising alacrity for a sick woman approaching seventy, moved to the door, automatically putting one finger in the tiny holy water stoup and crossing herself. 'I have arranged for you to have lunch in the refectory with the children, dear Jemima. They are thrilled at the prospect, naturally. They are all great fans of yours. Sister Clare will give you coffee later in the Nuns' Parlour. A visit to the chapel, perhaps?'

  I smiled noncommittally. Things were going altogether too fast. I wanted to retain what control I still had of the situation. The chapel represented a form of capitulation I was definitely not prepared to make.

  My last sight of Mother Ancilla was of a figure like a little black bird skimming down the corridor. The corridor itself was plain except for a series of alcoves containing incongruously garish statues of assorted saints.

  'Miss Shore,' said a gentle voice more or less at my elbow. I realised that a little nun, hardly more than a novice from her face, had been waiting for some minutes to speak to me. With her twitching mouth and neat nose, she looked rather like an unhappy rabbit.

  'I'm Sister Edward. I must talk to you.' Sister Edward: the name rang a bell. Yes, the nun who had so unfortunately not revealed Sister Miriam's crazy plan of self-purgation. And only sounded the alarm about the locked tower when it was too late. I also realised from her voice that Sister Edward had been that intruder in the headmistress's study whose appearance had been so unwelcome.

  'Talk away,' I replied with false cheerfulness, my voice unnecessarily loud.

  'Not here.'

  At that moment the bell sounded again, three strokes then four. Sister Edward literally blanched.

  'My bell. I must go.' All the same she continued to stand twisting her hands. 'They're after me. They don't want me to talk to you—'

  'Sister Edward, I really think—'

  By way of reply, Sister Edward dragged me into the narrow alcove beside me.

  'She killed her,' she said, panting, and poking her little face into mine. 'She wanted her dead. So she killed her.'

  'Who? I might have said 'What' with equal force. I had no idea what Sister Edward was saying.

  'Why Mother Ancilla of course.' The rabbit's face was turned up in innocent surprise. 'Mother Ancilla killed poor Sister Miriam.' The next moment Sister Edward was in her turn skimming down the corridor towards the nuns' part of the building. Another black bird. I knew that it was Sister Edward. But of course from the back it might just as well have been Mother Ancilla or any other nun. They really did look exactly alike.

  I was left alone except for a statue of St Antony holding the Infant Jesus in his arms.

  4

  A balanced programme

  Lunch in the refectory did not last long. Actually the refectory had been turned into a cafeteria since my day, complete with counter and plastic cases for food. All the nuns behind the counter had beaming rather flushed faces. We used to divide nuns into Snow Whites and Rose Reds, as the religious life (or the wimple) seemed to have the effect of sending their complexions to one or other extreme. These were all Rose Reds.

  The food was delicious. I said as much to the girls sitting with me at table. They all affected considerable surprise.

  'Would you like a second helping, Miss Shore?' enquired a girl at the end of the table politely. It was the first remark she had made throughout the meal. She had a long, interesting face, with a straight nose, like a crusader modelled on a tomb. As she brought back the plate, she bent over my chair and said quite low: 'This was Sister Miriam's favourite pudding as well, you know.'

  Afterwards I asked Mother Ancilla who she was.

  'Why, that's Margaret Plantaganet!' cried Mother Ancilla. She sounded delighted at my cleverness in picking out such an eligible candidate for my attention. 'Lady Margaret Plantaganet,' she added in passing – no-one could throw away a title like Mother Ancilla. 'The Bosworths' daughter.'

  'It's not a very Catholic name,' I muttered. In my irritation at having given Mother Ancilla such an opening, I quite forgot to ask how a mere schoolgirl could have known of my friendship with Rosa.

  'It's true that her mother was—' and Mother Ancilla mentioned some incredibly grand-sounding Italian name which I had genuinely never heard before, although I should have tried to look blank in any case. 'Lord Bosworth is a convert. But Margaret herself looks pure Plantaganet, don't you think?'

  It was clear that Mother Ancilla regarded the presence of Margaret Plantaganet at the Convent of Blessed Eleanor as a latter-day triumph for the Counter-Reformation.

  I did not go to the chapel.

  I did receive coffee from Sister Clare in the Nuns' Parlour. Sister Clare was extremely plump, and the sight of her swelling front beneath her black habit tempted me to wonder anew whether nuns wore bras (another perennial topic of discussion, and one which as far as I was concerned had never reached a satisfactory conclusion). If we had been on television I would have asked her, 'Sister, there is one question I know our female viewers are dying to ask...' Everyone would have expected something about sexual frustration; instead of which I would have continued: 'In an age when many women are boasting of burning their bras ...' and so forth. We were not on television. I put temptation from me. It was unlikely that Vatican II had left the topic untouched in any case, whatever the mode when I was at school.

  To distract myself, I reapplied my attention to the pasteboard brides in and out of their portfolio. At least I could picture Lady Margaret Plantaganet featuring here in a few years' time, stern in white, on the arm of some suitably aristocratic bridegroom. And the convent would send them a wedding present of table napkins embroidered by the nuns in which the Plantaganet arms mingled with those of the Blessed Eleanor ... This agreeable fantasy lasted until I had finished my coffee.

  Shortly after that I made it clear to Mother Ancilla, kindly but firmly, that Jemima Shore, Investigator, was a character who existed more or less for the benefit of television. I could not undertake a special secret mission to iron out the problems of Blessed Eleanor's. My encounter with Sister Edward had nevertheless given me an inkling as to the nature of these problems. Clearly a host of celibate women cooped up together could ferment from time to time like yeast. In the middle ages Sister Edward would have seen visions. Nowadays she merely accused her superior of murder. She probably watched too many thrillers on television. The gift of an old girl. In St Joseph's Sitting Room.

  As I drove back to London, I felt that the long fingers of the past had stretched out to grasp me. And I had eluded them. I was sorry for Mother Ancilla. But I could not help her.

  Besides, I was shortly off to Yugoslavia with Tom.

  Two days later, he took me for dinner in our favourite restaurant, a trattoria behind Victoria station, discreet, convenient for the House of Commons. I wore my treasured Hanae Mori dress. A motif of scattered hearts. The heart: my lucky symbol. I tended to scribble a heart on my notes to Tom. Not so lucky tonight, it seemed. For I was not in fact off to Yugoslavia. Or at any rate, not with him. The Welfare Now Group, on which Tom had lavished so much of his prodigious idealism, was calling for urgent meetings with the Minister before the autumn session of Parliament. In the expectation that these meetings would be unsatisfactory - and they always were - there was to be a rally in Trafalgar Square. Tom of course would be one of the principal speakers. His tall thin figure, bowing slightly in the gale of his own words, was an inseparable part of the W.N.G. platform.

  'It's not that I can't get out of it,' Tom said unhappily. 'It's just that I don't want to. We've got to make them see that our demands are reasonable. You understand what I mean, darling.'


  As a matter of fact I did not understand. It occurred to me that the Archangel Gabriel with the resources of Maecenas would not be able to satisfy the demands of the W.N.G. But this was not a time for saying so.

  'Tell me we shall go to Yugoslavia one day.' My voice had a mournful spaniel's note which I disliked.

  'I promise.' Tom was a totally truthful person, even sometimes when I wished he wouldn't be. I believed him. Perhaps it was Tom's honesty that now compelled him to let drop the news that Carrie's mother was also unexpectedly altering her plans and coming over from the States. To me at a suffering distance, Carrie's mother had the power and caprices of a Byzantine Empress. Much of Carrie's innate disturbance of personality was laid by Tom at her door. Carrie's fear of having children for example:

  'Can you wonder with the sort of mother that she had, that she doesn't want to take on the role herself?'

  'Why don't you adopt a Vietnamese orphan pour encourager?

  Tom looked reproachful. Vietnamese orphans were not subjects for humour. I was well aware of that. My own programme on the subject had been deadly serious. He also looked reproachful now when I murmured how convenient it must be for Carrie to have Tom with her after all to help stave off her mother's onslaughts. But I did not pursue the point.

  That night was perhaps the tenderest we had ever known. It was also a whole night. I do not know what story, if any, Tom told Carrie. She was quite forgotten by us both, along with everything else.

  The next morning at breakfast I told Tom all about Mother Ancilla and the Order's inheritance and Rosabelle's will and her intention to leave the land away from the Order. I did not, of course, mention poor crazy Sister Edward's accusation. Then, out of nowhere, or so it seemed at the time, we quarrelled violently about Rosa's right to give away the convent lands. I felt buffeted by a series of prejudices, my own and his. On the one hand Tom had clearly not overcome his innate revulsion for convents, nuns and their like. The words 'black crows', although not spoken again, were implicit in several of his remarks. On the other hand, he criticised anew a social system which allowed an individual -Rosa - to own so much land.

  I pointed out several times that Rosa's ownership was an anomaly, which it was intended that time would set right. Community ownership after all was exactly what Sir Gilbert Powerstock had in mind when he handed over the buildings to the Order. I also pointed out that the nuns had worked the lands honourably for many years - generations of them - long before Sir Gilbert bought it in fact and, like the working-class residents of the Powers Estate, were now in danger of seeing the fruit of their labours handed over to another body. All this because of an arbitrary accident of birth which gave Rosabelle Powerstock the legal - if not moral - right to do so.

  'Well, she's dead now. Your old friend. So you can't argue with her,' replied Tom heatedly. 'Mind you, I still think there's something fishy about her death. A little too convenient if you ask me—'

  It was those last words that did it. That, and the cruel awareness of three blank weeks in my life. A week later, I was once again driving down to Churne. It was precisely the date on which I should have been boarding a plane to Dubrovnik with Tom, I reflected, as I pressed into the deep countryside. Various skeletal trees reminded me that winter was coming. How quickly autumn passed! Like every pleasure, it seemed momentary.

  It was dark when I arrived at the convent. The same small hedgehog of a nun let me in at the gates. On the telephone I had been brief and reserved to Mother Ancilla. I merely told her that after all I had decided to accept her offer of a few weeks' relaxation at Blessed Eleanor's. To the curious, it might be hinted that I was contemplating a programme on women in religious orders in the modern world, i.e. post Vatican II.

  'I am not sure that we are the best example of such changes,' said Mother Ancilla drily down the telephone. 'A great deal of prayer and thought has persuaded us that to move with the times is not necessarily to move according to the will of God. Or indeed the intentions of Our Blessed foundress.'

  'Precisely. A balanced programme. In other words, it takes all sorts.'

  I did not see Mother Ancilla that evening. The girls had already eaten. The small nun - Sister Damian - brought me supper on a tray in the Nuns' Parlour. The food was delicious. Each dish not only tasted good but was also exquisitely presented, reminding me of food in Japan. Later Sister Damian took me to the guest corridor. Botticelli (a Virgin), Titian (a Madonna with Child) and Fra Angelico (an Annunciation) were represented on the walls. By the bed I observed two books. One, bound in black leather, turned out to be the Treasury of the Blessed Eleanor, a work whose name if not its contents, was familiar to me. The other, still in its dust jacket, was the recent autobiography of a prominent Roman Catholic. I knew him from a rather unsuccessful programme of mine about birth control.

  Under the circumstances, I picked up the Treasury of Blessed Eleanor.

  I read: 'As a Tower points towards heaven, so should a man build his whole life in the direction of God. Yet even the highest Tower can never touch the sky; nevertheless man by the grace of God and his own Faith may expect to reach heaven one day. This is the supreme mercy of God, to set man higher than his highest buildings, to make of him a living Tower who will one day touch the sky.'

  Towers clearly obsessed Blessed Eleanor. She had been born a French princess and briefly married in youth to an ageing English king. Childless widowhood had clearly suited her; she had made no effort to marry again, but had retired thankfully to Churne Palace which formed part of her marriage jointure. To the palace she had affixed the buildings of a large convent, and founded the Order of the Tower of Ivory.

  It wasn't quite clear if that name actually dated from the lifetime of the Blessed Eleanor. There was some suggestion that she had already thought of commemorating her own name. Would the nuns have been called Queen Eleanor's Own, I wondered, as a modern regiment is named for royalty? Be that as it might, the O.T.I, as it had become, was certainly a very old foundation in Mother Ancilla's words. Even the vicissitudes of the Reformation period, the years of persecution, had been overcome without extinguishing the Order altogether. The Order itself transferred to Belgium, the buildings, less mobile, transferred to the ownership of a friendly Catholic-sympathising family. Then in the happier times of the nineteenth century and Catholic Emancipation, the O.T.I. was ready to flourish on English soil all over again.

  As Reverend Mother, Blessed Eleanor continued to inhabit Churne Palace, leaving her nuns to the somewhat lesser state of their convent. Even her retreats had not exactly been taken in the bosom of the community. That was where the tower - Blessed Eleanor's Retreat -came in. Now all that was left standing of the ancient foundation, it had originally been constructed slightly apart from the convent for a sinister reason. Outside its extra thick walls, Rosa had ghoulishly assured me, the screams of the Blessed Eleanor, as she scourged herself remorselessly in penance for her sins, could not be heard.

  'She did not want to be rescued from herself,' Rosa went on, large eyes opened wide. She loved to impress me with the more horrific details of her Faith. I shivered. It reminded me too vividly of the details of poor Rosa's own death: and I was not ready to think about those tonight. I should have to think about them and many other things tomorrow.

  Let the Blessed Eleanor, dead for so many years, rest. And Rosa too. Requiescant in pace. But I could not wrench my thoughts so easily away from the pair of them. It came back to me, unbidden, that the Blessed Eleanor too had died in her tower. In her case there had been an Arthurian deathbed, with the dying woman carried to the tower by six black nuns, and laid on the stone flags.

  I could not resist checking the story in the brief biography of the saint at the back of her Treasury. Yes, I was right. And there was something else too which I had forgotten. 'And then our blessed foundress called for her royal robes, the robes of a Queen of England and a Princess of France, and they brought them to her, whereon the lions and the lilies were splendidly entwined. Now good sisters at
tire me, she commanded them. And they wondered that she who had given up the riches of the world so willingly should call for them in the hour of her death. But she reproved them for their lack of understanding, saying, "Is it not thus in my finest raiment that I should go to meet my bridegroom, the King of Heaven?..."' And so on, till the Blessed Eleanor with a great many last words and admonitions and pious ejaculations, finally expired. Leaving her body to perform those necessary miraculous feats of healing which ensured her beatification in the nineteenth century.

  I felt rather more warmly towards the Blessed Eleanor after learning that she had insisted on dying dressed up in full royal gear. Personally, I was not deceived by the excuse she gave the nuns. Once a queen, always a queen. She wanted to sport those lions and lilies once more. Otherwise why preserve them all those years?

  My attention was caught by something outside the narrow world of my own thoughts. Far away there was a small distinct sound. The sound of a door opening and shutting. No, the sound of swing doors being gently helped to close. There were two swing doors to the left and right of the guest corridor. One led to the children's dormitories and the other to the vast nuns' wing. That was quite an unknown area to me. Nevertheless I assumed it included a stairway directly to the chapel.

  Then why was someone attempting to leave the nuns' wing as silently as possible, in order to descend to the chapel by the visitors' staircase? For I could now hear distinct soft steps on the flight outside my door.