enterprises.
The girl did not recognize a quotation. “Have you no hope?” She looked up at him for a second. Her eyes were extraordinary, he thought: a smoky fawn flecked here and there with yellow, a colour more suitable in a cat than a nun. The question seemed to have struck her. Rather than give an answer, Fludd walked on.
“Are you not afraid to be seen?” he asked. “I doubt you should be here. I may walk where I please, but not you. This is a strange place for a spiritual conference.”
“I came to confession. Netherhoughton night. I thought you would be there. It was the old fellow. I had to hold his attention with some questions about Lent.”
“I have heard a thing about you.”
She turned. Because of her headdress a full turn of her head was necessary, if she were to meet his eyes, and he saw how this fact laid a veneer of import over every exchange. “The stigmata?”
They had reached the shed of which she had spoken. Its broken door flapped. On the floor were wood-shavings and the chalky droppings of long-dead fowl.
“Yes,” Fludd said. He ducked his head under the lintel. Inside he had just room to stand upright. A draught, blowing straight from Yorkshire, was unimpeded by the broken window.
Philomena followed him in, ducking her head in turn. “’Twasn’t true,” she said.
“But you pretended it was?”
Philomena looked at her surroundings without contempt. “I don’t care where I come,” she said, “to get an hour out of that place. People think a convent’s quiet, don’t they? They should hear Perpetua, going on all day.” She cast around, and leant against a kind of rough workbench, folding her arms. “I had no choice, you see. They gave me none. Father Kinsella got my mother in on it. You’d have thought they’d got all their birthdays at once.”
“What was it really, if it was not the stigmata?”
“Nerves.”
“What had you to be nervous about?”
“It’s a long story. It’s about my sister.”
Fludd leant against the wall. He wished he might have a cigarette; it would have been a natural thing. “Tell it then. Since we are here.”
“Well, she—my sister—came in the convent just after me. Kathleen was her name at home but Finbar was her name in religion. She never said she had a vocation, you know, but my mother’s burning ambition was to have us all in the convent, she didn’t somehow take to the idea of sons-in-law, and being a grandma and all. At least, that’s what we used to say, we girls, and that she wanted to get in with the priest, and have people pointing at her after Mass on a Sunday, saying, ‘Oh, could you credit that woman’s sacrifice, all her daughters given to religion.’”
“You had no brother?”
“No. Or he could have been a priest, and perhaps she might not have been so hot on us. One priest in a family equals three or four nuns. That’s the way they count in Ireland.”
“So your sister Kathleen entered without a vocation. And it went wrong.”
“She disgraced herself.” Sister Philomena picked up a fold of her habit and ran it between her fingers. She too wished she had, not a cigarette, but something to occupy her, something to distract her from the moment, the place, the person. “And after she disgraced herself, we got a bad name in the neighbourhood. When I came out in the rash, my mother thought we were going to recoup our fortunes. She was a cleaner, you know, up at the convent, did their shopping for them. I was never away from her a day until I came here. As soon as she noticed it, this thing on my hands, she hauled me off to Father Kinsella, my feet didn’t touch the ground.” She imitated her mother’s ingratiating mode, her semi-genuflection. “‘Look at this, Father, appeared last Friday on Sister Philomena, the very spit and image of the nail marks in the palms of Our Blessed Lord.’”
Fludd folded his arms, in a judicious way. “But what did your sister Kathleen do, to disgrace herself in the first place?”
“She was only just the victim of a muddle. She wasn’t a bad-hearted girl at all. Only a novice when the whole thing occurred. In some Orders the novices are kept shut up and taught theology, but in our Order they are set the dirty jobs. When I was a novice I didn’t learn much about the spiritual life. I spent the time peeling potatoes. It was more like the army.”
“Was Kathleen—Sister Finbar—was she a rebel?”
“Oh, nothing of that sort. But you know, Father, how nuns can’t travel alone? Well, there was a Sister Josephine, a cross old creature with short sight and bad legs, and she got sent to another of the Order’s houses, a few miles away. The Order does that, especially when you’ve been settled about fifty years, they like to put you on general post before you die. Well, our Kathleen—Sister Finbar—was to go with her. Kathleen delivered her safe and sound, but then she had to get back to where she came from. So another sister, Sister Gertrude, she had to escort her, didn’t she?”
“Yes, I see a difficulty looming,” said Fludd.
“But when Kathleen got back to her own convent, there was Sister Gertrude, wasn’t she? Now, who was to take Gertrude back where she belonged?”
Fludd thought about it. “Kathleen.”
“I see you’ve a quick grasp of these matters. I suppose some other mind, like Mother Provincial say, might have cut through the difficulty. But Kathleen’s superior wasn’t any great thinker.”
“What happened then?”
“Our Kathleen took Gertrude back to Gertrude’s convent. She asked if she could stay a day or two while she thought it out, but they couldn’t have that, they didn’t have a permission for it, so they turned her round and sent her straight back again, and another nun with her—Sister Mary Bernard, I think it was.”
