Sister Mary Clare, the youngest and kindest nun, came in to check on us. She was lenient enough not to chastise us for talking. The room filled with her humming, a haunting Gaelic tune that trailed her like a mist wherever she went. Unlike some of the other nuns, she didn’t have a strap attached to her habit. Also unlike the other nuns, she was not Irish but English. The sound of her voice was a comfort to me. On one of my first days at the convent I had asked her how she had come to Ireland.
‘My father was Irish,’ she’d told me. ‘When I was a girl he sent me here to work for relatives.’
My heart jumped with recognition.
The nun said, in a sad and dreamy voice, ‘It didn’t go as I’d thought.’ It was the only time I ever saw her look anything but jolly.
Since that day I’d thought of her less as a nun and more like one of the girls. Sister Mary Clare, I was sure, had arrived at the convent by means of hardship. When she came into the laundry room I didn’t hurry back to work but stood exactly as I had been, hands out of the sink, fingers spread wide over my belly.
‘Did the baby move?’ Sister Mary Clare asked. She stepped close, putting one arm around me, and one soft hand on my stomach.
‘Yes.’
‘Good work, Mother,’ she said, then took out her own handkerchief and wiped my brow. She was only about ten years older than me, with a clear, unlined face, plain but made bright by smiling. None of the other nuns would ever call us ‘mother’. They only called us ‘girls’.
I set straight back to work. My baby rustled again, and all of a sudden I was not, as I’d thought, alone. There was someone else here with me, a member of my family, the closest person to me there had ever been in the world. Bess turned her eyes back to her washing, but I could see a little smile at the edges of her lips. The two of us, keeping each other company in the love we had for our babies.
Another nun, Sister Mary Declan, poked her head into the room and said, ‘Father Joseph’s asking for you, Bess.’ Unlike her younger colleague, Sister Mary Declan did wear a strap tied to her habit and seldom hesitated to use it, no matter how young or pregnant the girl. We cast our eyes downwards. Bess’s smile disappeared, but she wiped her hands on her apron and dutifully followed the nun. Sister Mary Clare went along with them.
‘Poor dear,’ said Fiona, watching Bess leave. ‘But I suppose the Father knows what’s best for us, doesn’t he?’
I couldn’t glean from this whether Fiona knew why Father Joseph had summoned Bess. Fiona had grown up in an orphanage, then been released at the age of thirteen to work for distant relatives. A few months later their parish priest brought her here. I never heard Fiona say a word about the boy responsible, The convent burgeoned with girls who’d welcomed young men back from the war. Now the same men were dead from the flu, or fighting the Irish War of Independence, or simply had got on with their lives without a backwards glance.
And, of course, some of us – like Susanna and Fiona, I expected – had not been disappointed by boys we loved, but subjected to something far worse. Fiona’s child was a year old now. He had just been moved from the nursery to the other side of the convent. She took comfort in the large raspberry birthmark on his forehead, which she thought would prevent him being adopted. She never seemed able to think past their time here, and what would come afterwards.
Fiona never questioned the nuns or the priest. They know best, she continually muttered to herself. They know best.
‘Bess will be just fine,’ she sang now, stirring her cauldron like a very young, harmless and hopeful witch. ‘Her beau will come to get her and they’ll be married. I know it, Nan.’ Even though I didn’t argue, or ask how she knew, she added pointedly, ‘I just do.’
The joy of my baby’s movement faded. Fiona had red hair and freckles, her fair skin was flush and sweaty from the steam.
‘Bess’s beau is American,’ Fiona told Susanna. ‘She met him when she was nursing wounded soldiers at a field hospital.’
‘Her mother should never have let her near the soldiers,’ Susanna said through clenched teeth. ‘And I do wish you two would stop talking.’
‘I think her man will come for her,’ Fiona said, ignoring the plea for silence. ‘I’m praying for it. From what she says he sounds like a good lad.’ She let go of her stick. ‘Let’s take just a moment,’ she said, ‘and pray for Bess. The Sisters can’t get mad if they see that, can they? A little prayer break? For Bess and her child and their happy ever after?’
‘The Sisters can get mad at anything they like,’ Susanna said, not budging from her station. ‘If you don’t know that by now, you’ll never know anything.’
Susanna was right, but still Fiona and I clasped our hands and pressed our foreheads together. I didn’t pray so much as worry. That Father Joseph would turn his attentions from Bess to me. I tried to pretend not to know what happened when he called her to him, but today, thinking of Bess’s baby moving inside her the same as mine, I couldn’t move my mind away from the horror of it. I worried Finbarr had died, which I knew was all that would ever prevent him from coming to get me.
Magical Finbarr. If anyone could get me out of here, it was him. I closed my eyes, leaning into Fiona, and pictured him, tennis ball high in his hand.
Make a wish.
The two of us – no, the three of us – leaving this place safely and together.
Granted.
Sister Mary Frances blustered in and cracked Fiona across the back with her cane.
‘None of that,’ the old nun said, as if prayer were something that didn’t belong to us anymore, except at the nuns’ discretion. ‘It’s only hard work that will wash your sins away.’
Fiona straightened, smiling instead of wincing. ‘You’re right, Sister,’ she said, her voice sounding sweet and pure. ‘I know you’re right.’
I returned to my cauldron. Fiona rolled a cart of soaking sheets up to dry on the rooftop. This time of day she might catch a glimpse of her little boy in the yard. She worried because he wasn’t walking yet. Shouldn’t he be walking?, she was sure to ask me, when she returned.
I tried to think of Bess, off with Father Joseph, as if prayers had done any good. As if I had it in me, despite all my sympathies and fondness, to pray for anyone except my baby and myself.
The Disappearance
Day Four
Tuesday, 7 December 1926
AGATHA REMOVED HER hand from Chilton’s the moment he said her name. What a fool she’d been to open the door. Finbarr had told her to keep her head low. He hadn’t said not to answer the door because likely it hadn’t occurred to him that anyone would come knocking, or that she’d be silly enough to answer if somebody did. But that’s what she’d done, instinctively, obedient as ever. Somebody knocks and in the absence of your butler, a polite lady is obliged to answer. What power these customs do have over us, Agatha thought, and steeled her spine ramrod straight, as if that could undo the mess into which good manners had propelled her.
‘I’m afraid you’re mistaken,’ she told him. ‘I don’t know anyone by that name.’
‘I have a photograph of you,’ he said. ‘It’s there in the automobile. Shall I show it to you?’