August

by Bernard Beckett

  ‘I have nothing to confess,’ Grace replied, surprised by the stubborn lie.

  ‘Very well. Follow me.’

  Sister Monica carried out the inspections, spreading Grace’s shit over a white cloth and examining it minutely. On the fourth day her face rose from its task in triumph. She advanced on Grace, tweezers held before her in accusation.

  ‘A seed, Grace. I have found a seed!’

  ‘But there are many seeds in the garden, Sister,’ Grace tried. In four days of thinking it was all she had managed. ‘I might have breathed it in, from the compost.’

  ‘Pray for forgiveness, Grace. And for the strength to endure your punishment.’

  The whip was made of seven thick strands of black leather, each knotted at one end and plaited into a handle at the other. Grace had seen it used; they all had. Whippings were public affairs.

  Grace felt her skin come apart on the first lash and screamed with pain on the second. On the third she fainted. Later, she was told, her limp body was tied to the pole at her wrists and subjected to another five.

  She awoke the next day in agony. It took her a moment to realise the screaming voice floating above her was her own. She tried to roll but her back had scabbed to the bed. She felt cracked hands on her brow. Sister Angela was standing over her, muttering prayers through her ageless toothless mouth and wiping Grace’s face with a cool wet cloth. Grace looked away in shame.

  ‘Are you ready to make a good confession, Grace?’ the sister asked. Grace was surprised by the kindness in her voice.

  ‘Yes, Sister.’

  ‘Then with the grace of God, you might start again. Hold my hand, dear. Squeeze it tight. We need to turn you now.’

  The wounds ripped open. Grace screamed and felt the old nun’s head pressed close against her own.

  ‘Hush, child. Hush. You will get through this.’

  ‘Why are you being so nice to me, Sister?’ Grace asked. The kindness confused her. ‘After what I have done?’

  ‘God will judge you, not us.’ Sister Angela smiled.

  ‘But…but you did judge me. I was whipped.’

  ‘We must oppose the devil, Grace,’ the old woman said. ‘If we made it easy for you to give in to temptation we would be doing his work for him. Come now, pray with me before the priest comes.’

  ‘And I prayed harder than I’d ever—’

  Grace was cut short by shuddering, a reverberation so deep Tristan could sense the centre of it, a knot in her tight frightened stomach. He could smell her fear, or perhaps it was his own. He wriggled, painfully finding her shoulder with his hand. He counted the beats of her heart against the ticking of an imagined clock, willing the pace to slow, and praying it would not end this way. Too late now to understand that prayer was not supplication but desperation.

  Whatever had brought the shock was passing. He felt her lips against his cheek as he pressed forward to hear her breathing. Even, no longer panicked.

  ‘I’m all right now. It’s passed…’ Her voice dropped, as if in apology.

  ‘Did you hate them?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The nuns who whipped you.’

  ‘No, I didn’t hate them. I was young. I believed what they told me.’

  ‘What changed?’

  ‘I saw you.’

  ‘You’re laughing at me.’

  ‘I wish I was. It would be easier.’

  While the St Augustine’s boys were being trained in the skills of logic and oratory, the convent girls were being taught that cleverness was the devil’s doing. They grew closer to God not through contemplation but through hard work and humility. They didn’t question the point because the nuns were careful to emphasise that questions too were the work of the devil. Whatever Satan’s vices, sloth was not amongst them.

  Sister Angela, though, was good to her word, and Grace was given the chance to make a new start working in the laundry. The convent earned money taking in washing from the stately homes on the hill. The laundry rooms were thick with steam and Grace ended each shift dizzy with exhaustion. She had no energy for signing with Josephine, even if that were still possible. Grace slept alone now, on a small stretcher at the far end of the dormitory, where she could not infect the other girls with her brush with the devil.

  Grace could not define the soul—the contortions of theology left her bored—but she knew what it felt like to lose one. Each day without talking to Josephine her insides withered a little more. Grace spent every moment looking forward to the next time she and Josephine might share a secret smile. But the nuns kept special watch on her, and opportunities were few.

  As Grace grew hollow with loss, her friend suffered even more. Grace watched Josephine’s walk become a shuffle, and her once proud head bow with the weight of sorrow. Each night Grace prayed to be forgiven for the sin of bringing her friend so low. But she kept one secret even from God: the small pleasure she gained from the knowledge that her absence from another’s life mattered that much. Selfish pride. Her guilt tightened inside her, but she couldn’t admit it, not to God or to herself.

  The beginning of the end announced itself with a cough during silent prayers. Grace saw Josephine’s narrow shoulders heaving in her attempts to conceal her distress. The next day the coughing was harsher; it played angrily in the throat and reached deep into the lungs. A nun rushed forward and assisted a doubled-over Josephine from the room. It was the last time Grace saw her.

  Two days passed without news and Grace’s fear turned to desperation. After the evening meal she approached Sister Monica, who had stayed to supervise the cleaning of the plates. The nun looked at her the way you might look down at a dog that has soiled the path before you, calculating whether to make the effort to kick it. Sister Monica waited for the girl to think again and move on but Grace was determined.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be joining the others at prayers?’

  ‘Can I see her, Sister?’ Grace asked.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My friend, Sister, Josephine. She was taken sick.’

  Sister Monica smiled then, the coldest smile Grace would ever feel.

  ‘The Good Lord took her this morning, Grace. She is fortunate to have been called so soon.’

  Grace fell to the ground, screaming and kicking at the air. It took five nuns and a broken nose to calm her.

  The exorcism lasted four days and Grace was barely conscious for most of it. Afterwards she remembered flashes, the smell of incense, the sound of chanting, the cold dripping of holy water on her forehead.

  When she recovered, Grace knew only one thing: her friend’s death was her punishment. She prayed harder than she had ever prayed, begging God for forgiveness, and for mercy on the soul of Josephine. She imagined her dead friend as an angel with wings and a flowing white gown, her sharp nose always wrinkled in delight and her pale hair, weak and welcome as winter sun, forever glowing.

  Grace thought she saw Josephine flitting across the darkened halls. At night, as she fell close to sleep, she believed Josephine sat beside her, signing cold messages on her palm. The holy books left Grace unmoved, with all their death and suffering, but she grew to love the angels.

  Grace was only ten years old then, a child capable of believing in the simplest plans. She would work hard and pray even harder, and God would come to love her again and forgive her for her wickedness. When she was older she would be invited to join the convent and she would dedicate her life to the saving of Josephine’s wretched soul.

  Her good intentions lasted two devout years. During that time she came to know the approval the powerful reserve for the submissive. It might have gone on longer if not for the problem of the people of the night.

  Each year on Good Friday the people of the night were permitted to knock at the convent door, a concession made in the name of the prophet’s sacrifice. They came to hawk trinkets fashioned from the City’s waste. The girls were each given a small amount of money and allowed to purchase one item.

  Grace looked for
ward to that night for months. Everybody did. There was no problem ignoring the rags and stench of the visitors; they’d had plenty of contact with the broken through their charity work and understood such hardship to be part of God’s mysterious plan. The girls were used to the quick darting eyes of the children and hardly noticed the sores they suffered. They closed their ears to the pleading whispers that reached up to them, creepers intent on strangling their host.

  Good Friday came and Grace handed over her small coins in a spirit of generosity and holiness. This was the one day a year the girls were allowed to feel special and they weren’t about to ruin it with a show of misplaced sympathy. She bought a small wire butterfly from a woman with a furrowed face and small, suspicious eyes. It was perfectly formed and Grace imagined the long careful hours spent bending it into shape. Like all the girls, Grace had a special box where she kept her trinkets, but this year she wasn’t adding to the pile. Instead she took the tiny sculpture and left it outside Sister Angela’s door. The nun had kept special watch over her since the whipping, and it felt good to be able to repay her kindness. Grace decided not to leave a note with the gift. It was enough to imagine the old woman’s smile.

  The following night Grace was on duty at the front gate. It was a promotion from the laundry, engineered, she suspected, by the same old nun. The work was easier. She simply had to sit beside the locked gate in case someone came knocking. Most nights nobody did and she was left with her dreaming. If anybody did knock the procedure was clear. She was to ask them their name and if the voice that came back was female Grace was permitted to look down on her from the small slit above the viewing platform. She would ask her business, take her name and then tell her to return in daylight hours. Male voices were to be ignored, although after three months of working the gate Grace was still to hear one.

  The knock came and Grace stirred from her almost-slumber.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘I need your help.’

  It was a young woman. Grace climbed the ladder to the platform which ran at height a little above her own head and from there peered down through the slot. Grace could see she was holding something up for inspection. It appeared to be a bundle of rags.

  ‘Please,’ the young woman said. Thick strands of hair framed her sunken face and her eyes were deep with pleading. ‘My child is very sick. There is no hope for him out on the plains. You must help me.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ Grace replied, repeating carefully the words she had been taught, ‘you must come back tomorrow, during the hours of daylight.’

  ‘We are not allowed in the City in daylight,’ the mother replied.

  She was one of them, the people of the night. They had no right to knock here. They knew that. Everybody knew that. Grace didn’t know where to look, or how to dismiss the woman. Worse than that, she wasn’t sure she wanted to. Normally following instructions made Grace feel holy, but there was something about that face—its desperate darkness—and the dreadful shape of her package.

  ‘Please,’ Grace asked, although she didn’t know what it was she was asking. For the mother and her baby to vanish perhaps, for neither of them to have ever existed.

  ‘Please,’ the mother echoed, but with an intensity Grace couldn’t match. ‘His name is Ronan. If you do not take him, he will die.’

  Give me strength, God, Grace recited silently as she had been taught to do in times of trial. God, give me strength.

  ‘I cannot take him,’ Grace told the woman. ‘I am just a girl.’

  ‘Then get someone who can,’ the young mother implored.

  ‘It is not permitted.’ Grace felt the words’ coldness freeze her throat.

  The woman moved back a step, and the light fell on her face. Grace recognised the look in her eyes. She had felt it herself. She understood loss.

  ‘He is a baby, just a baby. He has done nothing wrong. He deserves to live.’

  Grace made the mistake of looking at the child. He was only a few weeks in the world and she saw in his wizened features the old man he would never become. The little boy’s eyes opened momentarily and in his exhausted half blink Grace glimpsed the vastness of the human tragedy. She was no more able to understand the world’s cruelty than he was, and, like him, she would never recover.

  ‘I am not permitted to open the gate.’

  The mother did not cry. She did not beg. She knew there was nothing left to be gained. She had one choice remaining; she must have known that all along. The woman blanched with the shock of what would come next, even as she succumbed to its necessity.

  ‘I cannot,’ she whispered at Grace. ‘I cannot take my child away to die.’

  The women knelt and deposited her baby on the step and then, surely terrified her resolve would crumble if she lingered, turned and stumbled into the darkness.

  Grace clambered down from her post, her body moving to commands her mind couldn’t hear. She had the gate’s heavy bolt halfway across when her hand was slapped down.

  Grace turned to see Sister Angela, the nun’s bottom lip trembling, whether in sadness or fury it was impossible to say. The sister moved to the gate and her face, silhouetted now by the orange glow of the security light, turned to blackness. Grace shielded her eyes with her hand, attempting to block out the dirty halo and read the old woman’s expression. But there was only age to see, and a mouth tightening around its words.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Sister Angela hissed.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Grace said, relieved that of all the nuns God had sent her Sister Angela. ‘There is a baby. He is dying.’

  Sister Angela swayed for a moment, as if uncertain, and the light behind her flashed a warning. Her ancient hands drew the bolt fully back and she opened the gate just a crack, bending down to look closely at the package.

  ‘He is a child of the night,’ she pronounced. ‘He cannot be saved.’

  Grace’s head turned clumsy with shock. She shook it, vaguely aware that soon her mouth would open and the trouble would grow deeper. But not as deep as the baby’s trouble. This was her one clear thought: Do not be cowed; he needs you.

  ‘Are you going to help him, Sister?’

  The old woman placed a bony hand on Grace’s shoulder and her voice became gentle.

  ‘Your shift is finished. Hurry back to bed.’

  ‘But you won’t let him die?’ Grace pressed.

  Sister Angela turned from her and the light caught the old woman’s glistening eyes.

  ‘Go to bed,’ she repeated. ‘We cannot always guess at His mysteries. I am sorry.’

  Grace wanted to scream, to struggle, and to rage. She wanted to force them to drag her spitting from the scene, shouting their murder to the sky. The church was wrong and no amount of praying and scrubbing the steps of the sacred places could cleanse it. But instinct kept her quiet. There was another way. She lowered her head in what she hoped would appear to be submission and walked back to her lonely bed. She counted time: she waited.

  Although few knew it, all of the holy buildings were riddled with hidden passages, a legacy of the time of war. Grace had discovered a tunnel when she was first recovering from the exorcism. During those days she had drifted uneasily between wakefulness and sleep, prone to the smallest suggestion. Twice she was sure Josephine visited her, and another time she was certain she saw an angel.

  It was a dark figure, possessing a male’s posture and dressed in the robes of an Augustinian priest. But Grace understood no priest would ever visit the convent at night and in her feverish, childish mind decided she was seeing a vision. The vision flitted past the open door at the end of the dormitory.

  She understood immediately that she was meant to follow it. Angels were not seen unless they intended it. She tracked him to the chapel and from there along a hidden passage that ended beyond the convent’s wall. The angel did not wait for her, or even acknowledge that he had seen her, but for two years she had remained certain the purpose of his visit would one day be revealed.


  And now it was. He meant for her to be able to reach the baby. God wished her to save him.

  Grace lay on her bed and listened to the night, as all the girls had learnt to do. In the patterns of breathing and the breeze-scattered tinklings she found her opportunity. She slipped from her bed and made for the passage, so confident in her calling that she felt no fear. Once outside the convent’s walls Grace lowered her head and hurried to the front gate, her young breast swelling with pride that an angel should have considered her worthy of this task.

  But, as Grace would later find, there are no angels. There is only birth and death and the screaming in between. The small body, lying where it had been left, was already cold.

  Grace took the lifeless bundle in her arms. The baby’s eyes were closed, as if in sleep. She was struck by detail: the long curling lashes, the small rounded nostrils, the resigned pout of the lips. Like a doll that a master craftsman had laboured over all his life, but more delicate, more perfect than anything man could conjure. And yet discarded. Empty, pointless, dead. Grace felt her breathing falter as the shock came on. She stumbled into the street, tears flowing down her face, no longer caring who saw her or what they made of it. She walked the streets like a lunatic, circling back on herself, the small tragic bundle held close.

  Time went by unnoticed until she became aware of an old crone beside her. The woman did not speak. She took hold of Grace’s elbow and guided her gently forward. Grace was too weak with confusion to resist and continued as if in a dream until her head filled with the most beautiful music. It was the sweet voices of a children’s choir. Grace moved towards it. Then, in what she was sure was some sort of vision, she realised she was not alone. Three others, all some years older, stood beside her, with grief on their faces and death in their arms.

  ‘That was my first passing,’ Grace said, her voice now little more than a breath across his face. Her story had brought her to exhaustion. ‘I thought it was a dream. I…They must have thought I was the mother; they must have. I returned. One night and then another, to give them the same help I was given. It became my calling. I thought the angel had led me there. It’s stupid, I was stupid, but I was young, and the convent, it shrinks your thinking.’