‘I’m causing you a lot of work,’ Sister Joan said. She spoke somewhat absently, her fingertips itching to start.
‘Glad of it,’ Brother Cuthbert said. ‘I’ll be back later then.’
She nodded, her gaze riveted on the church with the pre-Gothic arches, the low, square tower at the end. She would make several sketches, she decided, and then work two of them up into paintings – the church in summer daylight with the wild herbs springing about its foot and the church as she imagined it would be on an evening with candleglow gilding the windows and scattering gold over the snow.
Jacob had teased her that her work was stuck in the romantic period, that only cameras were for literal representation. His own work was brilliant, spiky, often difficult to interpret. She wondered if it had mellowed in the years since they had gone their separate ways. Had he reverted completely, found a pretty Jewess who could give him Jewish children? She hoped so. Jacob had been a man who needed another person to complete him.
An hour later she had half a dozen rough sketches on her pad. She smoothed out the shadows with her fingers, realizing that she was thirsty. Perhaps there was a tap or spring around where she could drink. At any rate she’d take a look at the scriptorium since she needed to leave her heavy equipment there. The next day she would begin to translate her sketches on to the canvas, starting with the summer background.
She packed away her pad and pencils and lugged easel and stool in the direction Brother Cuthbert had indicated. Over the low wall she could see some of the monks busy among the vegetables. Bent over hoes and spades they never lifted their heads.
The main building was fortress-like with its uncompromisingly square design. Only an occasional slit of window broke the solid surface of stone. She guessed there was probably a central yard with a well in it and the inner windows looking out on it. Despite modern concessions the monastery was still a very private place. Her nose led her to the back where a couple of doors stood wide with the unmistakable smells of cabbage and onions wafting through them.
A youngish monk – she guessed a lay brother – came to the open door. His sleeves were rolled above muscular forearms and he was holding a large pan.
‘The scriptorium?’ she ventured.
The lay brother nodded towards the left where a stone building jutted out.
‘Thank you, Brother.’
Walking away she was conscious of a not altogether approving scrutiny at her back. Evidently the abbot was more go-ahead in his attitude than some of his community.
The scriptorium was deserted, the shelves that lined one wall crammed with books, a podium in one corner holding a huge, illuminated manuscript with a fine brass chain locking it down. Presumably a tradition from the olden days, since she figured it was highly unlikely for anyone to try stealing the heavy tome with its steel-bound leather covers. There were a few high-backed, hard chairs and some filled, unlit oil lamps, and against another wall a long table on which bottles of coloured inks and pens were ranged alongside large sheets of paper on which someone or other had been practising the ancient art of lettering.
A further door in the corner led, to her relief, into a small lavatory, with a washbasin. When she turned the tap water trickled out, reluctant but clear. She scooped some into her hand and quenched her thirst.
Footsteps sounded in the long apartment beyond. Sister Joan hastily pulled the door closer, feeling a sudden shyness. Emerging from a lavatory was nothing to be embarrassed about, she reasoned, but on the other hand she had no desire to disrupt the quiet monastic routine by any sudden appearances.
The footsteps paused uncertainly. She had a sense of someone looking round, and then, through the crack left between door and wall, issued a long sigh – no, more of a groan, she thought uneasily.
It wasn’t repeated and, after a moment, she heard the footsteps retreating again. Somewhere a door closed.
She waited a moment more and then came out into the scriptorium again, looking about as she did so. Nothing had been disturbed. She frowned, hearing again in her mind that long-drawn-out heavy sigh. The footsteps had been heavy. Someone wearing boots? The monks she had seen wore sandals but she supposed that for some tasks they wore sturdier footwear. But what had brought one of them in here? Had she been watched and followed again?
‘Sister, you’re getting neurotic,’ she muttered aloud, frowning impatiently at the illuminated manuscript on its stand.
Something had been changed. The open page of the manuscript had displayed square cut characters in a mixture of red, gold and blue. She had noticed the initial letter B with a butterfly skittering about it. The initial letter now was a D, and instead of a butterfly there was the head of a horse drawn in black ink dappled with gold. She went closer, bending over the manuscript. Perhaps it was the custom to turn a page every day. Carefully she turned back the heavily decorated vellum. No, the letter A was five pages before this one. She smoothed the page down again and wrinkled up her nose in puzzlement.
‘Sister, we’re not supposed to touch that.’
The monk who had directed her here stood in the doorway, his face and tone highly disapproving. He had exchanged the pan he’d been carrying for a tray which he now set down carefully on the end of the long table. There were some biscuits, a couple of apples and a jug of water and glass on it.
‘Someone just did,’ Sister Joan said. ‘While I was in the lavatory I heard someone come in. They – whoever it was – turned forward five pages.’
‘Only Father Abbot touches the Morag manuscript, and he never turns five pages at once,’ the monk said. ‘I brought you some lunch, Sister.’
‘Thank you. The Morag manuscript, you said?’
‘It’s what it’s known as but it’s a Book of Hours that some sixteenth-century laird had made for him by the brothers here. It has the story of Black Morag in it, with prayers for her soul.’
‘Does this page tell that story?’ She indicated the manuscript and the other came over to look, still holding himself at a little distance as if he feared she might suddenly leap forward and bite him.
‘My Latin isn’t very good,’ he said, ‘but I think that’s the page, yes. The title letter has the horse’s head.’
‘The horse on which she rode into the loch after the Vikings went away.’
‘She lost her mind, poor soul,’ the monk said quickly, as if Sister Joan had uttered some personal criticism. ‘I must get back to my duties. Leave the jug and glass here and I’ll collect it later.’
Not to save her trouble, Sister Joan reflected as he went out again, but to keep dangerous females out of his kitchen. The notion that she might be regarded as a dangerous temptation made her want to giggle.
Crossing herself, murmuring a grace, she set to on the biscuits and the apples, demolishing the lot and drinking a couple of glasses of the cold water. There was certainly a well somewhere on the island. The monks were almost entirely self-supporting. She wondered how large the community was – no more than twenty, surely, and probably fewer since the abbot had mentioned the lack of novices.
And had it been the abbot who had crept in to turn the illuminated pages and then sigh deeply? It seemed unlikely. Perhaps her too vivid imagination was playing tricks but she was sure that the person who had turned over the pages was the same person who had watched her during mass and spied on her through the peep-hole in the antechamber.
The problem had no solution because she wasn’t even certain if there was a real problem at all. If anyone particularly wished to speak to her there didn’t seem to be anything in the rule to forbid it. These were not Trappists, vowed to silence. She shrugged her shoulders impatiently, and went out again, leaving her painting equipment but carrying her sketch book and case of pencils.
As she walked towards the church one of the figures leaning over a spade beyond the enclosure wall stuck it into the earth and came striding after her.
‘Would you be wanting to go back now, Sister?’ Brother Cuthbert wiped his hot fac
e with the sleeve of his habit and smeared soil across his brow.
‘If it isn’t a trouble?’
‘Not a bit of trouble,’ he assured her. ‘To tell you the truth, Brother John will be delighted to be rid of me. I’m always rooting up what ought to stay in the ground and leaving weeds to flourish. You found the scriptorium?’
‘And left most of my things there. I’ve finished some preliminary sketches, and tomorrow I want to start translating them on to canvas. When is it possible to walk across on the stepping stones?’
‘Only when there’s a freak tide and that only happens a couple of times a month these days,’ he informed her. ‘They’re not really stones either, but the sheared off tops of fossilized tree trunks. Thousands of years ago the loch was much narrower and there was a long strip of land with trees on it that joined our land to the shore, but the sea ate it away and the trees fossilized. The water there used to be very low indeed and someone had the idea of shearing off the trunks and reinforcing them with iron to provide some kind of causeway, but the tides changed and now the water’s hardly ever low.’
‘So it wouldn’t be safe for me to try it?’
‘Not a bit safe, Sister,’ he said firmly. ‘Anyway I enjoy rowing. Watch your step now.’
‘The pot,’ said Sister Joan, nimbly boarding the small vessel, ‘ought not to call the kettle black.’
‘I’ve yet to do penance for getting my habit soaked,’ he said ruefully, glancing down at his sea-rusted garments. ‘As Father Abbot is always telling me it’s a sin against holy poverty to be careless about one’s clothes. The trouble is that it’s not easy to find a penance that isn’t pure pleasure for me to do. I mean, can you imagine doing anything more satisfying than praying?’
Sister Joan, who had always considered it would be more of a penance to be forbidden to pray, concurred with enthusiasm and they gained the shore in high good humour.
‘See you tomorrow morning. God bless, Sister.’ He pulled away strongly as she alighted, judging her distance nicely and landing on a solid tussock of grass-grown earth with reeds pointing the way to heaven all around. The loch was almost deserted now, the fishermen having presumably gone home for a meal, and only the diminishing shape of Brother Cuthbert in his boat peopled the solitude. Sister Joan moved higher up the dry ground and sat down with her back against the cliff. This was a wonderful place to meditate in, with the sky arching overhead and the loch spreading its ruffled waters like pleated silk before her. Had it been thus, she mused, in Galilee when the fishermen had sat, sharing bread, each busy with his own thoughts, all waiting for the young man with the intense gaze who widened horizons every time He came by?
Stones and pebbles spattered up painfully into her face, and she let out a yelp as she opened her eyes. Between her and the sunlit water a dark shape loomed, and she shaded her eyes with her hand, preparing to launch on a blistering reproof.
‘I didn’t see you there,’ said a voice indignantly. ‘Why, you scared Rob Roy half to death!’
‘I was praying and never heard you coming,’ Sister Joan said defensively.
‘Churches are for praying.’ The girl with long dark hair dismounted and stared down accusingly. ‘Not out here.’
‘Anywhere’s for praying,’ Sister Joan said trying to sound mild, but irritably conscious that the other was trying to put her in the wrong.
‘Well, you’re a Catholic so you’d be bound to have peculiar ideas anyway,’ the other said scornfully.
‘Sister Joan.’
Scrambling to her feet she held out her hand and, finding it ignored, leaned to pat the horse instead.
‘Rob Roy doesn’t like strangers,’ the girl said.
‘I take it he’s a Protestant horse,’ Sister Joan said, having achieved mildness, outwardly at least.
‘He’s my horse,’ the girl said.
‘And you are …?’ Sister Joan gave her a questioning look.
‘Black Morag, of course.’
‘Of course,’ Sister Joan said promptly. ‘You’ve worn very well over the centuries.’
A reluctant grin struggled to life on the pretty mouth and was killed by a scowl.
‘I’m Morag Sinclair,’ the girl said. ‘My father is the minister here.’
‘I hope he’s more tolerant than you are,’ Sister Joan said.
‘You’re not likely to meet.’ Morag had turned and was mounting up again. She was in her early twenties, Sister Joan reckoned, and certainly lovely but she would have been lovelier had her expression held more tranquillity, and had her voice been gentler.
‘And has better manners‚’ Sister Joan added.
In reply Morag jerked her head and set off at a trot that sent another shower of pebbles leaping up. The breeze, catching her hair, tugged it into a dark tail that streamed behind her.
‘Well, well, well.’ Sister Joan gazed after her thoughtfully.
If Morag Sinclair was an example of the attitude of most of the local people then it was no wonder that Dolly McKensie and her son kept themselves to themselves. No doubt Dolly had blotted her copybook by wedding a Catholic in the first place. Sister Joan felt a little wave of sadness at the intolerance that sprang up in quite small places and marred the unity of the human race.
Her peace of mind had been disturbed by the intrusion and she walked back slowly to where the slanting scree led to the steps of the retreat. The girl had been, she was prepared to swear, the same dark rider who had galloped along the shore on the evening of her arrival, the girl about whom she had asked Rory. And Rory, instead of saying, ‘She’s Morag Sinclair, daughter of the local minister’, had launched out into a romantic legend and a possible ghost. All of which told Sister Joan, whose female intuition was quivering like the whiskers of a cat stalking a bird, that there was some connection between Rory McKensie and the rude young woman on the splendid horse. Sister Joan, who had always enjoyed a bit of genuine romance albeit vicariously, wondered if an association between them was forbidden by their families and at the same moment imagined only too clearly Mother Dorothy’s probable comment.
‘Capulets and Montagues, no doubt! Two teenage tearaways if you ask me.’ Except that her prioress was unlikely to use the word ‘tearaway’ which would have smacked too much of modern, slipshod slang.
It was as she began to walk up the slope between the clustering pines that she heard herself hailed from behind.
‘Sister Joan? Good afternoon.’
‘Good afternoon, Mrs McKensie.’
Sister Joan paused and turned to enable the older woman to catch her up.
Dolly McKensie, out of her shop, looked curiously rootless, the sunshine inexorably deepening the lines on what had been a pretty face, the grey in her hair more pronounced. She had taken off her flowered overall but her print dress and cardigan looked limp and depressed.
‘I’m not interrupting you?’ she asked, catching up.
‘I’m glad to have the opportunity of thanking you for the extra groceries,’ Sister Joan said cordially. ‘I was hoping you’d allow me to pay you for them.’
‘It was a gift.’ Dolly spoke almost sullenly.
‘Then I thank you for it,’ Sister Joan repeated.
‘Been over to the monastery?’ Dolly glanced out towards the island. ‘I’ve never been there myself. Seems a funny way to live, shutting yourself away from everybody like that – begging your pardon.’
‘It takes a particular kind of vocation. Like marriage.’ She stopped abruptly, feeling like kicking herself for her tactlessness.
‘Which my husband never had,’ Dolly said, the dark residue of an old bitterness in her voice. ‘Funny when you look back to see how clear everything is, isn’t it? Alistair married a non-Catholic from out of the district. I used to think that he’d chosen me because he loved me too much to let rules and regulations matter, but the truth is that he married me because he intended to carry on with his bachelor pleasures afterwards and he’d not insult a girl of his own faith by doing that. Not
that he was any great shakes as a Catholic for all that. Never went to mass from one year’s end to the next. It was me who saw to it that our Rory got to go to First Communion and all the rest of it. His dad took no interest in any of it, but I’ve a couple of aunts over in Aberdeen – not Catholics themselves but High Church. They got the local Catholic priest to see to Rory’s First Communion and his Confirmation later on. We went over to stay with them while it was all being done. Alistair never came near.’
‘I’m sorry. It was very good of you to take such trouble,’ Sister Joan said gently.
‘Not that it did any good in the end,’ Dolly McKensie said. ‘After his dad went off Rory took right against religion of any kind and I never did much to try to argue him out of it. Anyway that’s a long time ago. Are you enjoying your stay here?’
‘My period of retreat – yes, very much. I teach in a small school most of the year, so it’s wonderful to get a breathing space.’
‘Oh, you do work then?’ Dolly sounded unflatteringly surprised.
‘Yes indeed,’ Sister Joan said. ‘Ours is not a completely enclosed order. Those sisters who are constrained to earn a living outside the convent have leave to do so. Our earnings go into the general kitty. At the moment I’m the only one with an outside job, but one of the other sisters grows and sells vegetables and some of the others make illuminated cards and calendars. So we aren’t as idle as many people suppose.’
‘So a retreat makes a bit of a holiday for you,’ Dolly said. ‘Well, there’s many a time I’ve thought of doing the same thing myself – just shutting up shop and heading for the Costa Brava or somewhere.’
Sister Joan, privately disagreeing as to the similarity between the Costa Brava and a cave high up a Scottish cliff, murmured something indeterminate.
‘Mind you, when things get a bit much I can always put the Closed sign up for an hour and come for a walk,’ Dolly said.
‘Doesn’t Rory mind the shop while you take a break?’
‘Rory has his own life to lead,’ Dolly said shortly. ‘You haven’t seen him this afternoon, by any chance? Sometimes he – he does a bit of fishing.’
Vow of Sanctity Page 6
