St. Peter's Finger

the only person in the guest-house, except for the girls in the kitchen, when the child entered the bathroom. Is she usually left by herself?”

“Oh, no!” said both the nuns immediately. Mrs. Bradley looked mildly surprised.

“We never leave Sister Bridget entirely alone anywhere, except in her bedroom,” Mother Jude explained, “and even then there is a lay-sister or one of the other orphans within call, and often I am here, too, with Sister Saint Cyprian, who teaches needlework to both orphans and private-school children. On the afternoon in question Kitty and Bessie were on duty together here, Mother Saint Ambrose was supervising laundry work in the laundry (a separate building with its drying-ground just behind this guest-house). I was in the kitchen—the Community kitchen, that is, which adjoins the frater on the south side of the cloister— and Sister Saint Cyprian was taking a needlework class at the school. But you must not think of Sister Bridget as usually being alone and left to her own devices.”

“That is quite clear. Is it likely or unlikely that Kitty and Bessie would have seen the child when she came to the guest-house for the bath?”

“It is quite likely they would be unaware that anybody had come in. Generally we use only one door, and that is in the front of the house, and the wall along the end of the guest-house garden is far too high to climb. If Kitty and Bessie were sitting in the kitchen doing some mending or getting on with their compulsory reading, they might not know that the house had been entered from the front. We do not lock the front door until sunset or after.”

“Is the entrance to the convent grounds also kept open during the daytime, then? I mean, would the child have experienced any difficulty in getting past Sister Magdalene at the gate?”

“It depends upon the time. The gate is left unlocked from about eight o’clock in the morning until the late afternoon, and the portress is nominally in charge of it. But, of course, she has other duties, and it would not be difficult for a child to slip through the unlocked gate without being seen. If she went through while the portress was at Vespers, she certainly would not be seen.”

“I see. Thank you.” She made another note. “And now about Miss Bonnet. What was she doing, Mother Saint Ambrose, when first you saw her that day?”

“Taking off her trousers,” was Mother Ambrose’s startling reply.

“Taking—?” Mrs. Bradley looked nonplussed.

“Miss Bonnet described to me once how essential it is, if one wishes to succeed in sports or games, to keep the limbs warm,” said Mother Jude.

“She was going to play netball with the orphans—”

“She always played games in shorts—”

“And over the shorts she wore trousers.”

“These she took off at the moment that play commenced.”

“She is quite a modern young woman.”

“I understand, I think,” said Mrs. Bradley, not knowing whether to admire most the quick comedy-patter of the duologue, or the self-control with which, having said their say, the nuns switched off, as it were, an electric current, and lapsed into immobile silence. “Pardon me for having put my question so ambiguously. I meant, what was she doing when you came into the bathroom that day?”

“She was on the landing, just outside the door.”

“Doing nothing?”

“Nothing at all, so far as I remember. She looked very pale, as though she might be going to faint or turn bilious,” said Mother Ambrose.

“What was she wearing then?”

“She was wearing her drill tunic and a jersey.”

“Not her trousers?”

“She had her trousers with her, but for going about the school she always, at the special request of Reverend Mother Superior, put something over her shorts for modesty.”

“Were the trousers actually in her hand when you saw her first?”

“No, on the bathroom floor, as though she had dropped them and forgotten them in the shock of seeing the dead child.”

“And the window, you say, was wide open.”

“Quite wide open.”

“Miss Bonnet, Annie thinks, had opened it.”

“And had dropped what she was carrying to do so?”

“That would be my inference.”

“Very sensible of her, I should say. I suppose she wanted to let out the smell of gas.”

“Did you smell gas, Mother Saint Ambrose?”

“Certainly. Not strongly, because, of course, the open window must have dispersed the fumes, but strongly enough to be noticeable, and to make obvious the cause of death.”

“Yet Annie declares that she could smell no gas.”

“Then her sense of smell must be defective.”

“Did you smell gas, Mother Saint Jude?”