“Yes, but I’m only in the second form,” Mary replied, “and Ulrica thinks I’m much too stupid to be helped with my work the way she’d begun to help Ursula.”
Mrs. Bradley nodded, and asked, again with some suddenness, whether Mary would like to go to tea with her in the guest-house.
“I’d love to,” the child replied with considerable eagerness. “Mother asks us once a week, while she’s staying here, one of us at a time because we’re not supposed to go to the guest-house in pairs. But mother’s gone to Kelsorrow. If you asked permission, I could come. They’d let me. They always let us if anyone asks. Oh—but—” She paused, and looked slightly embarrassed. “You’ll have to write me down on the slate, you know.”
Mrs. Bradley nodded.
“You mean that the cost of your tea will be added to my bill. Of course. Come along. Do we have cake in Lent?”
They walked over to the school refectory and Mrs. Bradley obtained the required permission. Tea in the guest- house was over by half-past five, and as Mary had to get back in her classroom by six to do her preparation, they parted immediately, and Mrs. Bradley strolled over to the nuns’ Common Room, to which she had been bidden, earlier in the day, by Mother Simon-Zelotes, who wanted to discuss Mendel’s theory of heredity.
Mrs. Bradley had not forgotten that from five o’clock until half-past six the nuns sang Compline and went on to Matins and Lauds, and the Common Room, she thought at first, was deserted. In the corner by the fire, however, was the old lay-sister Catherine, her gnarled hands, brown as the fruit trees which Mother Patrick had re-vitalised that afternoon, lying folded together in her lap, her lips moving easily in prayer, the facile, comforting prayers of habit, her rheumed eyes focused vacantly on heaven—or purgatory, perhaps—Mrs, Bradley could not guess. Her broad feet—not essentially nun-like, just the broad and easy-shod feet of any very old woman—were planted upon the fender for warmth, and to help support in an upright position the soldierly, hard, old body.
Mrs. Bradley seated herself without a word, and watched how the rosary passed through the brown old hands. So they sat for a long time, until the old woman looked up from her beads, nodded and mumbled a bit, and then said, in the abrupt manner of the aged, who always speak the middle and not the beginning of their thoughts, “I told them it would not do. I always said so.”
“The hot water system?” Mrs. Bradley intelligently enquired. The lay-sister nodded.
“When I was a girl, we boiled every drop in the copper, and carried it up in pails. There was none of the danger then.”
“I suppose not, sister. Didn’t the people scald themselves sometimes, though?”
“I never heard of it. Things ought to be done in God’s way, and if water is going to be heated it ought to be boiled on a fire. Brother Fire. Good Brother Fire.” Her voice mumbled on. She had forgotten Mrs. Bradley, and her thoughts were lost in the wide and echoing halls of dim-lit memory. Content to be left to her own thoughts, Mrs. Bradley sat motionless. The darkness gathered. Soon the old lay-sister slept.
The first of the Community to join them was Mother Cyprian, who, under special dispensation, was to get on with some embroidered bookbindings. She lit the lamp —there was no gas laid on in the buildings which abutted on the cloister—exchanged smiles and bows with Mrs. Bradley, seated herself beneath the light and began to mount the embroidery she had done on a square of fine, strong linen. Mrs. Bradley asked permission to look at the work. It was exquisitely done on satin, and Mother Cyprian explained that after the backing had been put on she would be able to do the heavier work in braid, which the satin, without its backing, could not support.
“Then, too,” she said, delighted to show her work, “the paste which I shall use to connect the embroidery with the book which I wish to bind would damage the delicate satin if I applied it directly. The backing is useful. It comes between. It is like—” She paused for a simile which should be at once intelligible to her hearer and satisfying to herself—“it is like—”
Invention failed her, but old Sister Catherine, awakened by the light and the sound of talking, piped out, in a voice like a badly-played viola:
“It is like the blessed saints who intercede for us. Holy Saint Joseph, protector of the Blessed Virgin Mary…” Her mumbling voice droned on.
“She is Irish,” Mother Cyprian observed, as though this was both an explanation and an excuse, but of what oddity the explanation, and for what impropriety the excuse, Mrs. Bradley did not understand. Sister Catherine went to sleep again, and made small moaning noises in the corner. Mrs. Bradley woke her very gently, and led her to the door and down the steps. Docile, the old woman said good night to her and went away to her bed. When Mrs. Bradley came back to the Common Room, Mother Cyprian had finished her work, and was pressing it out to lie smooth.
“Did you teach Ursula Doyle?” Mrs. Bradley enquired.
“Yes. I teach needlework,” the nun replied, looking up. “All the children come to me at some time during the week, both the private-school children and the orphans.”
“And what did you make of Ursula?”
“She was a good child, very quiet. Very happy at the end—I mean, the last time I saw her.”
“That would have been—” Mrs. Bradley now knew the school time-table off by heart—“on the Thursday morning, Mother Saint Cyprian, I think?”
She had not known the nun’s name until Mother Cyprian mentioned the subject she taught, although she had guessed it from seeing her with her embroidery.
“On the Thursday, yes, madame,” said the nun. She leaned forward, and, contrary to the habit of the religious, who either looked directly in front of them or else kept their eyes cast down, she looked Mrs. Bradley in the eye. “We cannot believe that that poor child took her own life. She was so happy at the end. She was quite beautiful with happiness. Her cousins will tell you the same.”
Her cousins, Mrs. Bradley reflected, ought to be able to tell her a very great deal, but she shrank from questioning either of them too closely regarding the death of the child. It would do no harm, though, she felt, to interview Ulrica again. She enquired of Mother Cyprian how long the children spent over preparation.
“Until seven o’clock when they are aged ten to twelve; from twelve to fourteen until half-past seven, and the others until eight o’clock,” Mother Cyprian answered. “But if you wish to speak to Ulrica, or to any of the children, during the Preparation time, no doubt it could be arranged.”
