St. Peter's Finger (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Who’s there? What do you want?”

  “Fire! Fire!” squealed the unknown. There was a nerve-trying noise of crackling somewhere at hand, but Mrs. Bradley, sniffing, could not smell any smoke. She gripped the hammer, which she had placed underneath her bolster, and flung open the door, prepared for trouble. Nobody but poor Sister Bridget stood outside. She clutched at Mrs. Bradley, gibbering anguishedly. Mrs. Bradley gathered, fairly soon, that she thought her pet mouse was in danger. Mrs. Bradley went with her to her room. The crackling here was now a triumphant roaring. The bed was on fire, and part of the window curtains, as Mrs. Bradley entered, fell in a mass of flame. Mrs. Bradley picked up the bolster which the smouldering fire on the bed had not yet reached, and used it to put out the flames, beating away with the heavy, unwieldy thing as men beat out a prairie fire with branches.

  Suddenly there was a squeal of triumph, and in the midst of what looked like hell, with Mrs. Bradley chief devil, danced Sister Bridget. She had the mouse on her arm. She ran to the door, pulled it open and then shut it behind her with a crash, leaving Mrs. Bradley inside. Fortunately the lock did not jam, as Mrs. Bradley half thought it might with this treatment. She picked up the ewer, which was empty, dashed for the bathroom, filled the ewer and, returning, emptied it freely all over the bed. After the third jugful the flames gave up the fight, and she went out to find Sister Bridget. She called her name quietly in case she was in hiding but there was no response, so at last she went back to bed, but lay awake with something nagging at her consciousness. She turned over several times, fretted, racked her brains, but could not account for her own disturbed state of mind. She was too much accustomed to dealing with homicidal patients to allow her nerves to be upset by the hammer-throwing incident, and Sister Bridget, she was certain, had not been hurt in the fire. It was of no use to try to reassure herself, however, so she got up again, lighted the gas, took out her notebook and studied it. Any last doubts which she might have had respecting one aspect, at least, of the affair, had been dispersed by the hammer-throwing incident. She had no doubt that the hammer had been slung directly and deliberately at her head, which must have made a good target, dead black against the light of the solitary candle before which she had been seated to read her little book and look at its pictures. Somebody obviously held the opinion that she was becoming a nuisance, and this fact gave Mrs. Bradley the considerable satisfaction which some American editors experience when people begin to plug at them through the window. She wondered whether, when she told her tale in the morning, Mother Benedict would still refuse to consider the possibility that the child had been murdered. She began to dissect her mind to discover the true cause of her uneasiness, and decided that she was thinking of Sister Bridget.

  “Nonsense,” she said, denying the truth of her own diagnosis of her symptoms. “There’s nothing to fear from that source.” She even felt under the bolster for the hammer as soon as she got back to bed.

  So her nagging mind let her alone, and she slept at last, but not deeply. When she woke, she discovered that her hand, almost paralysed with cramp, was under the pillow, and that she still had the hammer in her grasp.

  (2)

  The hour of Prime was ordinarily at six-thirty, and the choir-sisters, upon rising, always went straight to the church. The lay-sisters rose about half an hour earlier than the choir-sisters, and did more than an hour’s work before their half-hour of meditation.

  Mrs. Bradley was not the only person in the guest-house who had slept badly. Sister Margaret, whose week on duty it was, had been disturbed, as had everyone else, to some extent, by the storm which had swept on its way south-westwards until two o’clock in the morning, but even when it died down she had not settled to sleep. Why this should be she had not the least idea. Her conscience was clear, except for a few uncharitable thoughts about Sister Genevieve, the boarders’ matron, with whom she had never found herself in complete accord since that time last summer when they had had a difference of opinion over some towels torn on the gooseberry bushes where Sister Margaret had spread them out to dry. These uncharitable thoughts she proposed to confess, as usual, to Father Clare, together with one or two other specific but undetailed sins of a venial nature which she customarily added as makeweight in case Father Clare should think her confession lacking in Christian humility, but, beyond all this, which was pure routine, there was nothing, and yet she could not sleep. So she got up and said a few prayers, but even these did not bring her repose, although she found them as comforting as usual. At four o’clock in the morning she was still awake, so she got up, dressed, and very quietly got through most of her Sunday morning’s work. Then she went noiselessly out of the guest-house with the pious intention of cleaning the windows of the metal-work room—a job, as she had noted on the previous afternoon, that badly needed doing, and was usually given to the orphans as a penance.

  She did not get far, however, for there was work to do nearer at hand. She picked up the key of the gatehouse from the table in her room, and, holding it in her hand—it was a large, impressive key about five inches long—she walked briskly round the angle of the wall from the guest-house to the convent entry. It was Mother Ambrose’s key, and Mother Ambrose had been vexed at having to lend it, for the key which Sister Margaret should have been able to borrow was the spare one which hung in the Common Room. That key, unaccountably, had not been there when she went to look for it on the Friday. It was seldom that anyone wanted it, and enquiry had failed to elicit the exact last time when it was known to have been hanging on its hook on the chimney-breast, underneath a little metal plaque of St. Anthony.

  So, key in hand, and shivering in the raw cold of the early March morning, she came to the convent gate.

  But the gate was already open, and not far along the gravelled path lay the sprawling obscenity of a body clad in a thick, long-sleeved nightdress over most of its underclothing. It was the thick black woollen stockings which, for some reason, struck the most disgraceful note, in Sister Margaret’s opinion. Perhaps it was because there was so much of them, for death—if this were death, and it looked exactly like it—is no respecter of persons, and had contrived to make poor Sister Bridget—for she it was, as Sister Margaret could see at half a glance—look not so much dead as completely and shockingly inebriated, and this effect was enhanced by her iron-grey, short, sprouty hair which was matted with dried and clotted blood. The weapon with which her injury had been inflicted was lying on the gravel path beside her, where her assailant had dropped it after striking her on the head. It was a hammer, and there was no doubt of its complicity in the affair, for the end was bloody, and a few grey hairs adhered.

  Sister Margaret, innocent of all knowledge of police procedure, picked it up and rubbed the blood-stained end upon the grass. Then she laid it aside very carefully, because it was convent property and the convent was very short of money, and turned her attention to the body.

  She found herself reluctant to touch poor Sister Bridget, but she straightened and tidied her clothing as well as she could, and then, taken suddenly with panic, a feeling for which she could not afterwards account, ran screaming like a maniac towards the cloister.

  (3)

  By nine o’clock the whole household, including the boarders and the orphans, were in receipt of the exciting news, although how it had been passed round was not, in the opinion of Mother Francis, at all easy to conceive. She stood before the twenty private school boarders at nine-thirty, dead white except for two red spots on her cheeks (frightened, said some of the children, furious, said the others), and her mouth in a dead straight line, but to the general disappointment she did not refer to the cause of all the excitement except indirectly.

  “You will not, my dear children,” she said, firmly, “go beyond the limits of the school garden to-day on any pretext whatever. You will remain in church”—it was Sunday—“until you are sent for to go across to the refectory.”

  And that was very nearly all the share that the boar
ders had in what happened during the rest of what they felt, with envy, and a certain amount of reason, must be a very exciting day. Even so, they told one another, they had scored over the day girls, who, so far, knew nothing about it.

  Sister Bridget, by some miracle, was not dead, and Mrs. Bradley and the doctor who usually attended the convent worked with goodwill to keep in her the little flicker of life which still remained.

  She was, as the doctor remarked, a tough old party, and Mrs. Bradley was tough, and the doctor himself was a man who took pleasure, as he informed them, in keeping the religious out of heaven as long as ever he could in order to spite them. His view was that unmarried women were unnatural anyway, but that women who remained unmarried from choice and took vows of chastity were anti-social, and should be persecuted for this reason.

  “Whole lot of you ought to be in gaol,” was his expression of this opinion to Mother Jude, who liked him. She beamed upon him when he was present, and prayed for him when he had gone. So did Mother Ambrose pray for him, but this chiefly because he charged the convent only half a crown a visit instead of his customary fee.

  It became a battle for Sister Bridget’s life, and Mrs. Bradley and the doctor laboured, and the nuns watched and prayed. They also fetched and carried, obeyed every instruction as though upon it depended their salvation, and reaped some part of their reward when it became increasingly evident that Sister Bridget would live. Upon receipt of this news, Mother Mary-Joseph, Infirmarian to the Community, occupied a brief and popular period of notoriety by pitching down the Common Room steps into the cloister and breaking her left arm. She had borne the brunt of the night-nursing in addition to heavy teaching duties during the day. She was also keeping the Lenten fast, and in various ways was mortifying the flesh. Therefore, said the doctor (who, in addition to a general disapproval of the religious life, held strong views on the subject of fasting, putting it on a par, loudly and violently, with the twin crazes of slimming and Physical Fitness), she deserved to faint and fall down steps, and smash herself up, and have to take time off from school.

  “But I am not going to take time off from school,” said Mother Mary-Joseph in the deceptively gentle tone of the iron-willed; neither did she remain away from her classes for so much as half an hour. Mrs. Bradley protested to the Superior, but the old woman answered:

  “Be easy, my dear, and let her be. She is young and very ardent. If the life is not a soldier’s life, what is it?”

  As Mrs. Bradley had no idea, she could not make an adequate reply.

  “If her health were likely to be seriously endangered, she would take the doctor’s advice and follow his orders,” the Superior went on. “She is under obedience, you understand.”

  Meanwhile Mother Ambrose and Mother Jude had been far from idle. They had examined carefully Sister Bridget’s room to see whether they could find any cause for the outbreak of fire, and had discovered an overturned candle thick with grease, and also a quantity of cotton-wool, purloined, it turned out, from the medicine chest in the staff room cupboard at the school. The quantity of cotton-wool found by the nuns coincided, so far as they could tell, with the amount that was missing from store. It had not been burnt in the outbreak because it had not been placed near the candle which appeared to have caused the fire. Sister Bridget herself had purloined it, they were almost certain, to make a soft bed for the mouse.

  All this they reported, but Mrs. Bradley, who had her own reasons for wanting to know a good deal more about the matter than this meagre information implied, asked that the room should be kept permanently locked and that she herself should be the only person in possession of a key. Three more keys to the room were surrendered, thereupon, by Mother Jude, who merely smiled beatifically at Mrs. Bradley’s expression of surprise. This was on the Thursday following the attack on Sister Bridget. Mrs. Bradley sent George with the keys to her bank in London. George returned next day with Ferdinand Lestrange, who remarked that he could stay until Tuesday.

  “Not here, dear child,” his mother observed immediately. She banished him to the village, chided George for bringing him anywhere near her, and went to find Mother Francis. As it was Friday afternoon Mother Francis was teaching. Her subject was drawing, and, although she was not the equal of Mother Benedict she was a very fair artist of the photographic-likeness school. That this was again coming into its own, Mother Francis was not aware, Mrs. Bradley concluded; this for the simple reason that she did not realise that it had ever given place to the impressionistic school, cubism, post-impressionism, or the erotic iniquity of surrealism.

  “Ah, so you have come to look at the children’s work!” Mother Francis exclaimed, the teacher in her come uppermost, Mrs. Bradley was interested to remark. Shuddering slightly—a gesture of dissent which was noted and appreciated by the eighteen girls in the fourth form, who received it with leering triumph—their opinion (taken collectively) of their work being on a par with the visitor’s own—Mrs. Bradley was drawn to the supererogatory work of inspection.

  That over, and comments suitable to Mother Francis’s rather hen-like attitude having been passed, Mrs. Bradley, whose eyes had been alert for Ulrica Doyle, remarked, as Mother Francis accompanied her to the door,

  “I see that those children are still here.”

  “We are still waiting for Mrs. Maslin to leave the guest-house and take Mary with her,” Mother Francis replied, as she followed Mrs. Bradley into the corridor and closed the classroom door behind them both. “I spoke to her on the subject yesterday, but she replied that she was glad of the rest and change because she had been so much worried by family business matters arising out of Ursula’s death. I know that you expected us to send the girls off last week, but we have had so much anxiety in connection with the attack on Sister Bridget, that, short of sending Ulrica to New York, I have not been able to think of what to do with her.”

  “Have the police found anything to go on?” Mrs. Bradley asked, more for the sake of prolonging the conversation than for the gaining of knowledge.

  “No. They suspect, as we do, that the attack was the work of those uncontrolled young men from the village of Brinchcommon who came here after the death of Ursula Doyle and did so much damage then, but it seems very difficult to prove it.”

  “There have been no more of those demonstrations, have there?”

  “You would have known as soon as we should, if there had been. They made, last time, the most dreadful howling noises for more than an hour. The orphans, poor children, were terrified, and so were some of the guests. The Spaniards said to Mother Jude that they had supposed this country to be free from terrorism. It was very dreadful for them. Their nerves are very bad. Some who were ill were set back in their convalescence.”

  Mrs. Bradley said sympathetically that she supposed so, and reverted to the question of the cousins.

  “I fear I did not urge you sufficiently strongly to get rid of them from the school,” she said. “I meant it most sincerely. They are a danger to themselves and to one another. I have no doubt that the grandfather’s great fortune is somehow at the root of the business, and I think you ought to act immediately. It is only because of the excitement and terror consequent upon the accident to Sister Bridget that nothing more has happened in the Doyle affair, I believe.”

  “You speak of the accident to Sister Bridget,” said Mother Francis. “Are you convinced this time, then, that what happened was accidental?”

  “I most certainly am,” said Mrs. Bradley with emphasis. The nun looked as though she were prepared to argue the point, and Mrs. Bradley was ready with an explanation of the presence of the hammer with which the aged sister had been struck. But all that Mother Francis asked her was:

  “Then why did you insist upon our calling in the police?”

  Mrs. Bradley replied:

  “I thought it would do no harm in the village if the youths there learned that there was a point at which the police were prepared to act, and the convent to ask for protection.”
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  “I see,” said Mother Francis. She said no more, but Mrs. Bradley felt, not for the first time, considerable respect for the self-control of the religious. Anybody but a nun would have asked questions, she was certain. She glanced at Mother Francis, and then remarked:

  “The blow was not intended for Sister Bridget. I am sure it was intended for me. Whoever set fire to the room did so with the intention of driving out its occupant, thinking that I still slept there. This person, whoever it was, did not know that Sister Bridget had been given her old room back again.”

  She told Mother Francis then about the hammer-throwing incident in the nuns’ Common Room.

  “I see,” said Mother Francis again. “I ought to remind you, however, that Sister Bridget loves playing with matches, and probably set her bed alight by accident.”

  “Thank you,” Mrs. Bradley replied. “But you will agree, I think, that she did not hit herself on the head with the hammer. Further to that, although, as I said before, it does no harm to let those youths feel that we are under the protection of the police, I think it unlikely that they had anything whatever to do with the attack. But the real culprit may as well be misled into imagining that we blame the youths, I think. By the way, did Mrs. Maslin arrive by car?”

  “Yes, I believe she did. In fact, of course she did. She was angry, Sister Saint Jude told me, that we have no garage at the guest-house, and grumbled at the inconvenience and expense of garaging the car in the village.”

  “I see. In church, on the evening when I had sat with you all in the Common Room—you remember?—and begged you to send those children home, there was a sound like a cough. You wouldn’t have noticed it, perhaps?”

  Mother Francis’s eyes narrowed a little.

  “Somebody started the engine of a car. I remember perfectly well,” she said. “It was just as the storm was rising. The wind was very loud. Our singing sounded weak and thin against it, and I thought of the might of God. I was born in the West Indies. We have great winds there.”