When she re-entered the chapel she glanced at the Lady Altar and saw that the vase already held daffodils again, their golden heads drooping forlornly as if they knew that Sister Margaret’s chapped and unskilful hands had pushed them in.
Saturday meant no school, no ride across the moor on Lilith’s broad back. Saturday meant helping Sister David to catalogue the library which was extensive and would take several more years to get into perfect order. It meant preparing her lessons for the following week, making lists of school supplies to be obtained. It meant the general confession at the end of the day — an ordeal at the best of times but doubly to be dreaded when she had so much on her conscience.
The day went too quickly. Time always sped past when she was in the library under any circumstances and the sorting and cataloguing of the volumes bequeathed by the Tarquin family was an absorbing task.
‘Anything of an equivocal nature is to be set aside for my consideration,’ the Prioress had said.
‘Out with Jackie Collins and in with Barbara Cartland,’ Sister Joan had murmured to Sister Teresa who had looked suitably shocked and then giggled, earning herself an icy look from Mother Dorothy.
At 12.30 was the first real meal of the day — soup in winter, salad with cheese or fish in summer, two thick slices of bread and nice cold water with a spoonful of honey since Sister Perpetua believed in its youth-giving qualities.
In the afternoon she took herself back to the library armed with a pile of exercise books and a red pencil. The little local school where she taught had been endowed originally for the Tarquin family’s tenants whose children found it difficult in the era before buses to get to the school in Bodmin. It still remained, attended by the younger children of local farmers and intermittently by the Romany children when they weren’t off playing truant and poaching. Sister Joan enjoyed the work though she often wondered if anything she tried to drum into the heads of her pupils would ever be of the slightest use to them in after years.
For homework during the week she had set them a short composition on their favourite flowers. The task had been completed and handed in by six out of her ten pupils, which wasn’t too bad when she remembered the groan the boys had sent skywards. Two of the entries could scarcely be classified as homework, however. One was smudged with so much ink that it was impossible to read; the other contained a statement of rebellion.
I cant make up stuff about flewers becaus I am NOT QUEER,
Yurs respectful,
Conrad Smith.
Conrad was thirteen and should have been sent regularly to school years before. He came from the less law-abiding branch of the large Romany family camped out on the moor, and only sat in her classroom now because of the threats of his mother who was sick of being chased by the school inspector. Conrad, thought Sister Joan, showed a pleasing spirit of independence, and turned with less enjoyment to Madelyn Penglow’s book in which she had carefully copied the over familiar lines by Wordsworth, apparently under the serene misapprehension that her teacher would regard them as her own invention.
Two of the others had drawn pictures of rather stylized-looking birds — or perhaps they were meant to be flowers? The remaining piece of work was also about daffodils, which at this season was hardly surprising. What was surprising was its content.
They say daffodils are trumpets.
I say daffodils are strumpets,
And lads are bad and girls black pearl,
And little roses full of worms
Neatly written, properly spelled, and not from any poetry collection that Sister Joan had ever seen. Samantha Olive’s book. She was new to the district, her parents having just moved here. A slim child of eleven or twelve with bright green eyes in an otherwise ordinary little face. Sister Joan hadn’t paid much heed to her, deeming it better to let the child settle in before she started assessing her. The doggerel rhyme was not what she would have expected.
She put the books aside, drew the copy of the timetable towards her and began to jot down ideas for the coming week — a nature ramble, a spelling bee, a talk about Philip Sidney to get across the idea that not all poets were effeminate — the bell for private study rang. Time to get out the journal that every Sister kept and note down her sins, her meditation thoughts, her private heart — all useful evidence in the unlikely event of the cause for canonisation being introduced for any of them in the future.
I accuse myself, Sister Joan wrote neatly in the thick, black-covered notebook, of having dreamed erotically — was a dream a sin? Had it ever been erotic? More frightening and embarrassing, she considered. Not erotically then. She inked out the work, apple-pied the offending letters as the Prioress was sometimes constrained to do, writing the words ‘apple pie’ over parts of letters and books that might prove disturbing or unsuitable for more susceptible nuns to read.
I accuse myself of not taking sufficient time to consider my sins and thus of being forced to cross out words, wasting space and defacing the book. I accuse myself of dwelling overmuch on a nightmare concerned with things quite irrelevant to my present situation —
‘I never thought I’d end up as an irrelevancy,’ Jacob said inside her head, his eyes tenderly mocking.
She rubbed him out of her head and wrote on.
I accuse myself of having left my sleeping quarters, gone down to the kitchen, and drunk a mug of milk without permission and of
