Quiet as a Nun

by Antonia Fraser

  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 Shore, 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 passed 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 multitudinous 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 shivered. 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 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 tol
d 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 we
re 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.