St. Peter's Finger

chapter 2

inmates

“Hopeless immortals, how they scream and shiver,

While devils push them to the pit wide-yawning

Hideous and gloomy, to receive them headlong

Down to the centre!”

isaac watts: The Day of Judgment.

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The convent, behind its defences, slept uneasily, and some of the inmates, nuns and lay-sisters, orphans and private-school boarders, did not sleep at all. The disturbances to which they had been subjected (beginning with the dreadful fact of the death of Ursula Doyle on the Monday, and ending with the hooligan attack on the building which had made the following Saturday night a time of anxiety and fear) were all too recent to make peaceful sleep a possibility.

There were twenty boarders, among them two cousins of the dead girl. The dormitories, presided over by the nuns in turn, were divided into cubicles, and, each in her narrow bed, Ulrica Doyle and Mary Maslin lay still, and feared and brooded.

The course of events had been bewildering, strange and terrible. On the Monday evening had come the news, broken to them separately by the Mother Superior, of their cousin’s dreadful death. They were not supposed to know—Reverend Mother had not told them, and neither did she tell them at any time subsequently—that Ursula was believed to have killed herself, but of course it had come out, for although newspapers were forbidden to the boarders, the nuns could hardly keep the day-girls from them, and the tidings were all round the school on the Wednesday morning.

The two girls had not seen their cousin before she was taken away. Ghoulish accounts of bodies eviscerated by doctors doing a post-mortem examination had been passed in thrilled whispers round the school, and although they had not come directly to Ulrica’s ears her nights had been waking nightmares ever since she had gathered, from overhearing them, the purport of all the rumours. Mary suffered less in this particular way. For one thing she was younger, for another less imaginative. Then, too, she was accustomed, and her mind acclimatised, to horrors, for her form was entertained by Mother Bartholomew once a week to the more revolting stories of the martyrdom of saints. These ancient contes et légendes were given by the old ex-actress with a lack of reticence which amounted to the Rabelaisian, and had stiffened the hair of many generations of girls, who, with the sadistic tendency of extreme youth, on the whole enjoyed them very much, but were not always edified by them in exactly the way that their mentors and preceptors might have wished.

Still, even Mary, when night fell and the buildings were hushed and dark; when the restless sea on the grim shore broke in a far-off thunder, cuddled her knees to her chin, and lay and watched the curtains of her cubicle to see when horror entered; to be ready to fight for her life and, if necessary (so, in anti-climax, do the thoughts of children run), to scream and scream with fear.

It was all particularly upsetting; to young Mother Mary-Joseph, whose week on duty it was in the senior dormitory, as much as to anybody except, perhaps, the cousins. Four times since Wednesday she had guided Ulrica back to bed, for, like a sleep-walking Lady Macbeth, Ulrica, nervous and clever, strode and muttered, waking the lighter sleepers and causing Mother Mary-Joseph the most acute uneasiness, for the dormitory was right at the top of the stairs, and to the stairhead Ulrica’s steps each time had been directed, except once, when she went to an open window instead.

In the junior dormitory Mother Patrick, blessed, in spite of an apparently domineering personality, with the kindly spirit of laisser-faire which is one of the glories of the Irish, made silent rounds every night and paused beside Mary Maslin and did not rebuke her for her unorthodox, pre-natal, curled-up attitude in bed. Instead, she bent over her, murmured a benediction, and tucked in the warm, protective bedclothes to a reassuring tightness.

She knew nothing of Mother Mary-Joseph’s anxious vigils, for the young nun did not mention them except in confession to the Reverend Mother Superior, for on the Friday she had fallen asleep and had only just wakened in time to get to the girl at the stair-head before she pitched headlong down.

Mother Patrick herself did not sleep. There was evil abroad, and all the Community, not only the Irish, knew it. The horror of the child’s death, the dismay at the verdict of suicide, the realisation that things went on in the convent of which, with all their perspicacity and careful supervision of the children placed in their charge, the nuns knew, it seemed, less than nothing, darkened the solemn season, gave dreadful, intimate meaning to the customary Lenten fast, and made voluntary penance this time acutely personal.

In her lodging over the Sacristy the seventy-five-year-old Reverend Mother Superior watched and prayed with her daughters. The blow had fallen sharply in its suddenness, inevitability and weight, and it had brought with it lesser shocks—newspaper comments, notoriety for the convent, serious allegations brought against the Community by an hysterically overwrought woman, Mary Maslin’s stepmother, the dead child’s aunt by marriage. Then there had been the local ill-will and rumours, and the terrifying attack, on the previous night, by a gang of village hooligans.

Worse than all, to the Mother Superior’s mind, was a nagging feeling of doubt. She was an intelligent and widely experienced woman; had lived a brilliant, worldly life before her acceptance of the veil; and had prayed, when Father Thomas first told her of Mrs. Bradley, for Mrs. Bradley to come and solve their problem. But what if Mrs. Bradley’s researches could not alter the coroner’s verdict? Or what if things were made worse instead of better? For, although she had mentioned it to no one, and although she prayed daily that it might not be the truth, the horrid thought of murder lay in her breast like lead.

There was everything to suggest it, and the Mother Superior, daughter of a royal house, was not the woman to shirk an unpalatable situation. The character of the dead child, the fact that she was heiress to a fortune, some peculiar features of time, place, opportunity, all put together, made a formidable array. She had thought and she had prayed, and, in the end, she had decided that, whatever the result of it, a further investigation must be made. But it had been a difficult decision, and she had made it heavily.