“We still have the bishop to contend with,” Angwin said. “Our sudden bravado does not make him vanish away.”
“He could ban the statues all over again,” Miss Dempsey said. “Our night’s work could be wasted.”
“Not wasted,” Judd said. “At least you have not been bystanders. Father Angwin will value that in you.”
Agnes touched the priest’s arm. “What if he tells us to get rid of them all over again? Will we defy him?”
“You could have a schism,” Father Fludd said.
“I thought of it before.” Father Angwin also brushed earth from himself. “But I lacked heart.”
“You say ‘you,’ Father Fludd,” observed McEvoy. “You do not say ‘we.’ May I take it that you will not be amongst us for very long?”
Fludd did not answer. He put his spade over his shoulder. “I have done all I am going to do,” he said. “Miss Dempsey, I think you should make a warming drink. Perhaps you could light the oven and warm Mr. McEvoy’s peas for him. He has been kept from their enjoyment.”
Faces looked up from the ground; bone-coloured, blank-eyed, staring at the snow-charged sky. Miss Dempsey gathered her dressing-gown more closely about her. Wordlessly, she put her arm through Father Angwin’s, and they turned towards the presbytery. The priest shone his torch before them to pick out the path. The tobacconist followed.
“I must go back,” Philly whispered. The clock struck. “We get up at five.”
“That was half-past two. I do not suppose they are in bed in Netherhoughton.” Fludd put out his hand. She hesitated for a moment, then placed hers in it.
“There’s plenty of tonight left,” Fludd said.
They turned downhill, towards the convent. Before them the hard ground gleamed silver with frost. Behind them the abandoned candles flickered. Around them was an argentine brightness, solar and lunar, unearthly and mercurial, sparkling from the dead branches, flickering in the ditch, glinting on the cobbles before the church door. The convent windows were washed with brightness, the grimy stonework glowed; high on the terraces, fireflies seemed to dart.
All my life till now, she thought, has been a journey in the dark. But now another kind of travelling begins: a long vagrancy under the sun, in its sacred and vivifying light.
When three o’clock struck, Fludd placed on her forehead—just below the place where the white band bit into it—a chaste, dry kiss. A sacramental kiss, she thought. At the thought, she closed her eyes. Fludd bent his head. She felt the tip of his tongue flick across her eyelids. “Philly,” he said, “you know, don’t you, what you have to do?”
“Yes, I know I have to get out.”
“You know that you must do it soon.”
“It will take years,” she said. “My sister, they just threw her out on her ear. But she was a novice. I’m professed. It’ll have to go to the bishop. It’ll have to go to Rome.”
Fludd left her for a moment, moved away. As soon as his body ceased to touch hers, she felt the creeping cold, and felt her courage ebb. There was no moon now; only a single Mass candle, placed where she had left it, lit again with Fludd’s cigarette lighter. And there were the pans, up- ended on their rack, the pans that she had so often scrubbed for Sister Anthony; and there were the tea jugs, waiting for the morning.
Fludd walked about the kitchen. His feet made no sound on the stone floor. She craved real sunlight, a July day; to see him clearly, know what he looked like.
“You don’t have to go to Rome.”
“I wish it were summer,” she whispered.
“Did you hear what I said? You don’t have to go to Rome.”
“But I do. I have to be dispensed from my vows. There are papers to be forwarded. Only the Vatican can do it.”
Summer will come, she thought. And I will be here still, waiting; for who will expedite the matter, I have no friends. And another winter will come, and a summer, and another winter. By that time, where will he be?
“You’re not taking in what I say,” Fludd told her. “You say you have to be dispensed, I say you don’t have to be dispensed. You say you are bound, I say you are not bound. What law do you think keeps you here?”
“The law of the Church,” she said, startled. “Oh, no, I suppose that’s not a law. Not like the law of the land. But Father Fludd—”
“Don’t call me that,” he said. “You know the truth of the matter.”
“—but Father Fludd, I would be excommunicated.”
Fludd moved towards her again. The candle flared upward, as if the flame had breathed. He touched her face, the back of her neck; began to draw the pins out of her veil.
She jumped back. “You mustn’t,” she said. “Oh no. No, you mustn’t.”
He desisted for a moment. Fell back. His expression was dubious. He did not seem tired. His stamina was wonderful. Philomena turned her head suddenly, attracted by a movement at the window. The snow had begun to fall; big flakes, fleecy, brushing the glass without a sound. She watched it. “It must be warmer outside. It’ll never stick, will it? It won’t last the night.”
For she knew that nothing as good as that could ever happen for her; God would not arrange it that when she jerked at five o’clock from her edgy doze she would creep to the window and see a new landscape, its features obliterated, its ground untrodden, its black trees hung with bridal veils. No: the snow would be the night’s hallucination, a phantasm of the small hours. Tomorrow at five there would be no sun or snow, she would look from the window and see nothing but her own face dimly reflected in the pane; but if dawn by some freak of nature broke
