by Sarah Rayne
Later, when they were at the back of the jolting bus, winding its way up a steep mountain path, she talked about what had happened at the Black House.
‘I’m as sure as I can be that you didn’t kill Annaleise Simonescu with deliberate intent,’ she said and Mara looked at her gratefully. ‘But I can’t be completely sure because no one can see inside another person’s mind. You were responsible for her death, but if you remember your catechism, for a sin to be mortal there has to be full knowledge, free will and grave matter. I don’t think you had any of those. But that woman – Zoia – thinks you meant to kill and she wants you punished very severely.’
‘Am I going to be?’
Sister Teresa hesitated. ‘It won’t be a life of luxury,’ she said. ‘The Debreczen House is a poor one. But it isn’t a punishment place and they’ll be kind to you. What I said about you helping with the cleaning and cooking was true, though.’
‘I don’t mind cleaning and cooking. Would I be allowed to go home sometimes?’
‘I don’t know. I wish you could simply have gone home to your grandmother and Mikhail – if I could have taken you, I would. But it was too dangerous. I made a kind of bargain with Miss Calciu, you see. I have to honour that.’
‘Why couldn’t I say goodbye to them?’ Mara had cried all over again at discovering she was not allowed to do this. Sister Teresa had brought a hastily packed bag from the convent, with a nightdress and a clean jumper and skirt and underthings. Mara had no idea who they belonged to.
‘I couldn’t risk it,’ said Sister Teresa. ‘If either of us had gone to your grandmother’s house, Zoia would have known about it. Her people would have been ordered to watch us, and she would have seen it as a trick. She might have taken you back into the Black House, and I’m not sure if I could have got you out a second time.’
‘She’d have shut me inside the well-house again,’ said Mara in a scared whisper. ‘She hated me because of what happened. Sister, I told them a lie.’ There it was, admitted to at last. ‘I said I heard some of the sisters talking about Matthew’s father, and how he was trying to find Matthew’s mother and rescue her. But really it was my grandmother who told me about it.’
She waited for Sister Teresa to be angry, but Sister Teresa said, ‘Lies are very bad things indeed, Mara, but I understand you told that lie to protect your family.’
‘Yes,’ said Mara in a very small voice. ‘Um, Sister, did anything happen because of it?’
‘To the nuns, you mean? There are always consequences from a lie, and there were consequences this time. Two of the sisters are with the Securitate at the moment. We think they will be allowed home, though.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Mara again. ‘I’ll confess the lie. But I’m glad my grandmother and Mikhail are all right.’ This seemed to go down well, so feeling a bit braver she said, ‘Sister Teresa, why did Zoia hate me so very much? I didn’t understand that. I know what happened to Annaleise – Miss Simonescu – was bad, but it wasn’t as if she was Zoia’s family or anything like that.’
Sister Teresa took a moment to reply, and when she did her voice sounded awkward, as if she was not sure if she was using the right words. She said, ‘God makes people differently, Mara. Sometimes people – ladies – form very deep attachments to one another. Sometimes men do so, as well. Zoia had a deep attachment for Miss Simonescu. That’s all we need to know.’
‘Oh. Yes, I see. Sister – do you know about the children in the Black House?’
‘I know there are children there.’
Mara saw Sister Teresa’s lips tighten. ‘They’re in cages!’ It came out in an angry explosion, and Mara bit her lip. ‘I saw them by mistake,’ she said. ‘I think that’s part of why they put me in the well-house. Sister, they were crying – they were only little babies…’
Sister Teresa turned her head to look down at Mara. ‘I did know about them,’ she said. ‘That was why I made the bargain.’
Debreczen, when they finally reached it, was small and old and felt somehow secretive. The streets were shadowy because the buildings were of thick old stone – Mara pressed against the windows of the trundly little bus to see better. The convent was a few kilometres outside the town: it was much nearer to the mountains than Mara had expected, and it almost seemed to be built into them.
Once inside, it was cool and dim; there were stone corridors and small cell-like rooms. Mara was shown a dormitory where she would sleep with four other girls who were living there. They were all older than Mara and she felt a bit scared of them.
‘They will be your friends,’ said Sister Teresa, when she left Debreczen two days later. ‘You will come to know and love them.’
But Mara knew she would never love anyone as much as she loved her grandmother and brother. She would not let herself believe she would never see them again. She could not bear that. She could not bear, either, to think she would never see Matthew again.
Even though Matthew did not know where Mara was, every time he thought about her being taken away, he had a dreadful picture of her locked in a stone cell with iron bars at the windows, beating her hands on those bars to get out.
Two days after Mara vanished a jeep came snarling down the lane. Matthew had been getting ready for bed, but he ran to the window when he heard it. His father opened the door as the men walked up to the house and Matthew’s heart began to race. He tried to think it would be one of the men’s ordinary visits, that they would come into the house and talk to his father, then go away again, that it would be all right.
But it was not. The men did not come inside; they grabbed his father there on the doorstep and half dragged him to the waiting jeep. He protested and struggled, but the men had him in a tight hold. The one who had talked to Matthew about art school, said, ‘No use in struggling, Andrei. We’ve finally got the evidence we need. One of the local children heard talk and repeated it to us – no, not your precious son,’ he said, in a sneery voice. ‘And we’ve got all the pieces of the jigsaw at last.’
Matthew’s father hardly seemed to hear. He was fighting the men for all he was worth. Matthew was astonished to see him like that, fighting and hitting out, his hair tumbling over his forehead, his collar loosened. They would overcome him, because there were too many of them. Matthew ran downstairs, skidding on the last few and almost falling over, then pelted across the hall to the open door. He snatched up the ash walking-stick in the coatstand to beat off the men. But when he got to the door he saw it would make no difference if he had all the weapons of an army, because the jeep was already driving off and it was too late.
His father was seated in the back, one of the men keeping firm hold of his arm. He turned round and shouted above the growl of the engine, ‘Matthew – everything will be all right. I’ll be back very soon. Almost certainly tomorrow. So stay here – and whatever happens, remember I love you very much…’
Matthew watched the jeep drive away, then went back up to his room, curled into a miserable huddle on the bed and cried into the pillow until it was soaked through.
His father did not come back the next day. Nor the next day nor the day after that. A whole lot of days went by, and Matthew ran home from school every afternoon, imagining that his father would be there and the men would somehow have been dealt with, and how Matthew himself would be able to feel safe again. But each time there was the sick stab of disappointment at finding only Wilma in the house. Each evening, he ate his supper – he did not want it but Wilma said he had to keep up his strength – and then did his homework.
He concentrated fiercely on this, because it stopped him thinking about what might be happening to his father, but when there was arithmetic homework, the memory of his father saying how he used to write stories about the troublesome figures was too much to bear. Matthew would walk about the bedroom very fast, hoping to fool the memories into going away, but they would not be fooled. He could not stop thinking about the comic story they had planned to write, with Matthew drawing the figures
and his father making up the story. It would have been a good story because his father always had good ideas about these things. He had said they might try selling it to a newspaper – comic strips they called them. You could make quite a lot of money from comic strips, he had said, with the sudden narrow-eyed thoughtful look he wore when he was thinking up plots. Matthew loved that look. He could not bear to think he might never see it again.
Each night he sat in the window-seat of his bedroom, watching the lane, so he could see his father’s thin figure the minute it appeared. When it got dark he placed the little lamp by the window where it would shine out into the lane, so that when his father did come he would see the light like travellers in stories.
He wanted to find out where his father had been taken, but he had no idea where to start. Those typed words in the article he had found went through and through his mind. ‘They vanish as abruptly and as completely as if by sorcery,’ his father had written.
Had his father been taken to one of the nameless prisons described in the article? Was he shut away in one of those stone cells Matthew still sometimes dreamed about?
‘He’ll come back,’ said Wilma, wrapping her fat arms round Matthew and hugging him. Matthew found this comforting because Wilma always smelt of clean hair and soap and occasionally of baking. ‘It’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘You’ll see. We’ll keep a watch and he’ll come home very soon.’
But although Matthew watched faithfully every night from his bedroom window, his father did not come home.
And Mara did not come home either.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The present
The shrilling of the phone sliced violently across Theo’s consciousness, splintering Mara’s world, and causing the images of the well-house and the feeling of Zoia’s bitter grief to vanish. He reached for the phone, hoping it would be Lesley.
But it was not Lesley, it was DS Leigh. ‘Just checking you’re all right.’
‘I’m fine,’ said Theo, forcing himself to climb out of 1970s Romania. ‘No more disturbances.’
‘Good. Has your cousin Lesley called?’
‘No.’ Theo did not say he was starting to feel slightly worried about this.
‘Well, let us know when she does. I’d like to be sure that other key is where we think,’ said Leigh. ‘I spoke to the nuns. They haven’t seen or heard anything out of the way, but they were very sorry to hear about your attack. The Bursar said you could have a room in the hospital wing if you don’t want to stay at Fenn on your own tonight.’
‘That’s kind of her,’ said Theo, ‘but I’ll be perfectly all right.’
‘Call if you need us,’ said Leigh.
Theo put the phone down, suddenly aware the room was cold. He switched off the computer, thinking he had had enough of that strange other-world for the night. It was half past ten, and he supposed at some stage he should go to bed, but he was reluctant. He knew he would keep seeing that dark crouching figure on the stair and lie awake listening for the creak of footsteps treading stealthily across the landing towards him… Because whoever he is, he’s got a key.
To counteract the deep unease this thought churned up, Theo made himself go round the house to check the bolts were still firmly in place, then made a mug of tea and returned to the warmth of the sitting room. He scanned the bookshelves, hoping to find something fairly undemanding to read, and saw the glossy booklet about St Luke’s hundred years, which the Bursar had given him. Just right. He took it to the sofa, pulled the rug back over him, and opened the pages.
The Bursar’s style of writing turned out to be pleasantly readable: light and informative without being dull or teachy. Theo found himself drawn into the little tale of how a pioneer group of six nuns had come to Norfolk in the opening years of the twentieth century to found an English convent for their Order, and how they had struggled on slender funds and against considerable distrust from the local people. They had been shunted from pillar to post for several years – living in old schoolrooms, virtually camping out, sharing one set of plates and cups between all six of them. After about eight years they had somehow managed to acquire their present house which had belonged to a local wool merchant, and had built it up until it was a small but busy orthopaedic clinic and convalescent home.
Old photographs were reproduced, depicting various stages in the convent’s life. There were group photos of WWI soldiers who had been wounded and come to St Luke’s to recuperate, and of Belgian nuns who had fled the siege of Antwerp and been given sanctuary in Melbray. There were descriptions of how the nuns had later coped with WWII, helping with coastal defences, raising money for the Spitfire Fund and again taking in wounded men, mostly fighter pilots this time. The photographs were clear and well displayed and the whole book was professionally presented. The cover was particularly good: a really lovely colour shot of the convent against its grounds in spring. Theo wondered if the nuns had done their own photography and whether the printer who’d had to decipher the Bursar’s typewritten text was a local man.
The last section in the book gave a brief history of the Order of St Luke itself. It was primarily a teaching and nursing order apparently, with a number of other houses around the world – Theo remembered the recent visit of nuns from Poland. The founder of the entire Order, it seemed, had been an indomitable-sounding lady from Central Europe.
Central Europe. The words jumped up off the page, and Theo sat up, all sleepiness vanished. He began to read with more attention. And there it was, halfway along:
The Founder’s House still exists in south-western Romania – a troubled land – and our sisters there have encountered many hardships over the years. Two of them suffered incarceration during the dictatorship of President Ceauşescu. That was a harsh and difficult period for that country and we did all we could to help.
But times are happier now, and the sisters still work and teach there, as they have always done. (See picture of the Founder House in Romania, with the pupils of the junior school, teacher-nuns and four friends.)
Romania. And two of the Romanian sisters had been imprisoned. Theo read on.
The links with our Founder House remain strong and there have been many happy connections over the years. In particular, we were delighted when, in the 1970s, Sister Teresa brought to England twelve Romanian children who lived at St Luke’s for a while before going out into the world to be educated.
Sister Teresa. Theo could hardly believe what he was seeing. So Sister Teresa, too, was real. Not only was she real, she had brought twelve children to England exactly as he had written. He turned to look at the photograph. It was a large black and white shot of a big stone building standing against a backdrop of pine trees, with distant, smudgy mountains beyond. There was no caption and no date, but the nuns stood in what was clearly a school playground, smiling self-consciously. The children were grouped in three rows, the smaller ones cross-legged at the front, the older ones standing behind.
There were three ladies and one man who must be the friends referred to in the text. All were dressed in ordinary modern clothes. The man was the youngest but his face was slightly turned away so his features were not very clear. Of the three ladies, two looked to be in their fifties; they had conservative hairstyles and rather dowdy, tweedy-looking suits. The third was much younger. She had slightly untidy dark hair, worn loose and shoulder-length, and had on a light jacket with a gauzy scarf wound round her neck. The photo was a bit grainy and did not look very recent, although it was difficult to tell its age. It might have been blown up from a smaller snapshot. But grainy or not, the details were clear enough for Theo to see the features of the young woman with the gauzy scarf.
It was Charmery.
Theo stared at the photo, his thoughts in turmoil. What on earth had Charmery been doing in a Romanian convent? When had she been there? The words of Mara’s grandmother re-played in his head. ‘Some people know,’ she had said, whispering her stories to the listening Mara. ‘Trust nuns to know
secrets…’ But what were the secrets? How did they tie up with Charmery? He leaned his head against the cushions, and tried to slot the pieces of the jigsaw into a logical pattern, because this could not be coincidence.
The room had warmed up and the gas popped softly to itself; it was a soothing sound in the quiet room. Theo closed his eyes, and after a while drifted into a shallow, uneasy sleep, in which the jigsaw pieces whirled maddeningly around, refusing to slot into place. He had the vague impression that someone was standing outside the French window looking in at him, but he was not sure if it was Charmery’s murderer or whether it was Charmery herself. Because Charmery’s still here, he thought, she might have died four months ago, but she’s still here. ‘The murdered always walk, remember?’ said a soft voice inside his dream, and for a moment he saw Charmery. She was smiling at him, and standing at her side, his hand in hers, was a small boy with Theo’s eyes.
Theo was trying to see the boy’s face, when a sound jerked him back to full consciousness, and he sat up, his heart pounding. Someone was in the house. He slid his feet to the floor, pushing aside the cushions. The phone was on the table, just three paces away, and the note with Leigh’s number was next to it. He stood up and began to edge towards it, trying not to make any noise.
The sounds he had half heard came again, and this time he identified them. It was not someone inside the house after all – it was someone outside. Someone was walking along the gravel path towards the French windows. Theo looked towards them, knowing they were firmly locked and bolted, but knowing, as well, that all it would take was a stone smashed against the glass pane, and a hand reached through to the bolt.
He picked up the phone and began to move back towards the hall, his eyes on the windows. A shape, man-sized, appeared and a hand came up to rap hard on the glass. Theo was halfway across the room, but at this he froze. He had no idea if the man could see into the dimly lit room, and he had no idea if he would be heard if he made a run for the hall and the front door.
