The Sisterhood

Chapter 1


Pacific Coast of South America, Spring 1983





The first signs appeared in December. By Navidad the warm seas yielded dying fish to the fishermen’s nets. Anxious women crowded into the churches, to light candles and beseech God, the Virgin, and all the saints to stay the hand of El Niño. The peasants clung to their superstition that naming the capricious atmospheric phenomenon after the Christ Child might appease it. But this time El Niño came in the guise of the Devil, El Diablo, to turn the noon sky a strange color. People looked skyward uneasily and crossed themselves, muttering prayers as midday turned black as night, the wind rose, and a hard rain began to fall. The sky sank lower and lower and the wind gained strength, and people called on older, darker gods before abandoning prayers altogether to shout for their children and run for shelter.

The hurricane, the worst in a hundred years, was known afterward as the Mano del Diablo—Hand of the Devil. It struck with terrible ferocity. A screaming wind set shutters banging, then tore them away and sent them flying, followed by anything it could reach—doors, roofs, trees, bicycles, cars, and trucks, tossed and smashed like toys. Rain lashed like a hail of bullets, hard enough to kill chickens and goats and babies. Peasants on the road or in their fields were swept away in the storm’s merciless grip. And as for the poor in the shanty towns, where could they go? Mudslides swallowed flimsy shacks with their inhabitants, and the sea came rolling in towering waves to seize boats and fishermen from shore. Roof tiles and trees and people were tossed, sucked up, hurled down, buried alive, crushed, swept out to sea.

After two days of roaring winds and thudding debris, collapsing buildings and landslides, the aftermath was eerily quiet, broken by the feeble cries and muffled shrieks of survivors, the muttering of the dazed and bereft, the wails of children, the shrill yelping of dogs in pain. People struggled to understand what had happened. The living scrabbled with bare hands to reach the trapped and injured, their families and neighbors, while cries for help from under the rubble grew fainter. The emergency services were pitifully useless, with no heavy-moving equipment, no sniffer dogs. Injured survivors screamed invisibly, and many of those who were found died nonetheless for want of medical supplies, food, and blankets.

It took a week to reopen the airport, and by that time the air was fetid with death. The world’s press arrived with the international rescue teams who had been delayed by red tape and chaos. When aid eventually trickled in, reporters had no shortage of horror stories to back up an international appeal to help victims of the crisis, though hardened correspondents familiar with the region knew the greater part of disaster funds would be siphoned off to private accounts in Switzerland.

On the ninth day amid the carnage and destruction, a single item of good news emerged. A little girl had been found alive and uninjured by a navy ship making a final sweep along the coast. The sailors onboard had nearly abandoned the search at nightfall when they heard crying. Throughout the night the crying continued as they swept searchlights back and forth over the sea, bumping bloated human and animal carcasses aside.

Finally, at dawn, they located the source of the sound in a fishing boat caught between a logjam of smashed timber and a dead mule. It looked empty, but two young sailors climbed aboard to look. Then they gave a shout. The girl, perhaps two or three years old, naked except for a chain looped round her neck several times with a medal strung on it, was found trapped under a nest of fishing nets too heavy for her to escape. It seemed unbelievable that she had not perished from exposure or been drowned by a wave, but she was crying and sucking her fist.

The story of the little survivor appeared briefly in the press, with pictures of the child, the boat, the medal, and the two grinning sailors. But news has a short shelf life and by then the foreign press had moved on. There were wars and celebrity divorces to cover elsewhere. The little girl disappeared into a local orphanage, the only record of her existence a sheaf of yellowing press clippings.





In the Shadow of the Andes, Spring 1984


A year after the Mano del Diablo, a battered car with “Taxi” painted on its side wound its way into the oldest part of the old provincial capital, which was still scarred by the disaster. Finally the potholed streets narrowed too much for the car to continue. The driver stopped and pointed. A middle-aged American couple got out of the backseat, shading their eyes against the sun to look around. “They said it was in the old part of the city,” the woman said, looking at her map, “and this part looks old, alright. It’s practically falling down.” She was a plump lady in a neat Liz Claiborne skirt, matching cardigan, and low-heeled pumps, and she patted her coiffed hair nervously.

Her husband, a large man perspiring in a button-down shirt, bow tie, and plaid sports jacket, adjusted a camera around his neck—a cheap one, because he had been warned to leave his expensive one at home. He clutched a guidebook and, incongruously, a large teddy bear sporting a pink bow under his arm. He took his wife’s elbow protectively. “Come on, Sarah-Lynn. Hang on to your pocketbook,” the man muttered, glancing at the driver who was slumped back in his seat rolling a cigarette.

The Norte Americanos were conspicuous in that neighborhood. Men in vests and women in cheap print dresses watched from balconies that sagged on peeling houses and peered from lean-tos beneath crumbling arches. Ragged children with big bellies crowded to peek through iron gates. The couple pushed past old cars and donkeys and beggars, and rattling cars whose brakes screeched and whose drivers spat and shouted insults at each other, banging the sides of their vehicles for emphasis. The couple skirted makeshift stalls selling fried fish and arepas. A prostitute on a broken chair in a doorway called to them in mocking Spanish, raising a cackle of laughter from her companions. Women shouted, babies cried, children were scolded or slapped. The streets stank of frying oil, urine, tobacco, sweat, exhaust fumes, rotting garbage, animal dung, and fear. In the distance the snow-capped Andes rose clean and remote against a hard blue sky.

The Americans turned their map this way and that, looking around, ignoring the people around them. “There! I recognize it from the posters!” exclaimed Sarah-Lynn suddenly, pointing ahead to a whitewashed bell tower, one that was featured on a famous travel poster of the 1970s when trains still ran to this remote corner of South America. Then, souvenir sellers had done a brisk turnover in clay swallows, cheap silver bracelets, and gourds decorated in the native style.

Now the tourists were long gone, but a few old men still waited hopefully under the convent walls, shabby old merchandise spread on dirty blankets. “Hello! Nice souvenir?” they wheedled.

“That’s definitely the bell tower, Virgil. I guess we found it…Oh, what a smell!” Her nose wrinkled as a gust of open sewers engulfed her.

The man calmly opened his guidebook. “Oldest convent in Latin America, El Convento de las Golondrinas, home of Las Sors Santas de Jesus de Los Andes,” he read, testing out his newly acquired Spanish. He sensed an undercurrent of violence in the air, ready to be ignited, and instinct told him on no account to show fear, or to hurry, or these people would be on them like vultures. So he stood his ground, acting casual and interested in the sights, a tourist. “Lotta birds, listen to that racket! No wonder they call it Convent of the Swallows. Las Golon…Golondrinas.”

Feeling the eyes boring into his back, he planted his feet firmly and stopped to turn a guidebook page, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. “Says here, there’s an old superstition about swallows, because of how they migrate back and forth to the same places every year. In the olden days sailors got swallow tattoos for luck so’s they’d make it home after going off, same way as the birds. And if they died at sea, they believed swallows would fly down and carry the souls of the tattooed ones straight to heaven. Ain’t that something? Big, isn’t it?” he remarked, refusing to be hurried. He took a pocket-size Kodak from his pocket and fiddled with the distance setting. “Must be the size of a city block. Wonder where the entrance is?”

Sarah-Lynn was folding up the map and looking around for the gate. Virgil was going on and on like a travelogue because he was nervous. She understood; she was edgy as a cat herself. She jumped as a tray of shabby merchandise was thrust under her nose by an old man with no teeth, muttering “Cheap! Cheap!”

“Virgil, tell that man we don’t want any souvenirs!”

Her husband shook his head at the souvenir seller and, taking Sarah-Lynn’s arm, pulled her away to have her photo taken in front of the gate. He kept talking. “Before the Spanish came, the Incas had some kind of women’s building in this same site, the Virgins of the Sun or some such heathen thing. Had a garden inside, made all out of silver with gold flowers.”

He kept talking, loud and conversational, while he snapped pictures. “Yep, the Spanish tore it down, reused the stones to build a convent for missionary nuns who came here from Spain. They had them a school and a hospital for native girls and an orphanage. Lotta illegitimate babies, the Spanish men and the Indian women—the nuns would take the children in and see they got baptized and saved. There was even a women’s jail in there…”

“I don’t want to hear about jails, Virgil! We’re about to go in and get our child and we have to decide once and for all what her name’s going to be!”

“I thought we planned we’d name a girl after your mama, like you wanted. And if it was a boy, Virgil Walker Jr.” Sarah-Lynn patted her husband on the arm. He had wanted a son.

“God’s sent us to this little girl. I know she’s special. Where on earth is the gate?”

“That’s it behind you. I’ll take a couple of pictures for that scrapbook the adoption worker told us to make for her. Then we better hurry. We don’t want them thinking we’ve changed our minds about the adoption.”


Inside the convent, Mother Superior was waiting behind her desk with its ancient black telephone. Light slanted through barred windows set high in the wall, and the room was crammed with solid old-fashioned furniture in dark carved wood. The walls held the convent’s collection of portraits. Dark-eyed girls with heavy eyebrows dressed in fine clothes and jewels, holding flowers, stared down at Mother. They were long-dead monjas coronadas, crowned nuns, girls about to enter a convent. Portraits of a daughter betrothed to Christ had been a status symbol among the Spanish colonial families of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In their salas grandes, where visitors were entertained, they were hung conspicuously higher on the walls than the betrothal portraits of daughters engaged to mere men. It had been customary to eventually donate the portraits to the girls’ convents. Mother found the silent company of the portraits restful, and often sought their imaginary advice in convent matters.

As the parlor clock ticked, Mother began to wonder if the American couple had changed their minds and were not coming for Isabelita after all. She sighed and looked up to argue the case for the adoption once more with her serene companions. She reminded them there was another civil war brewing—stories of atrocities and foreign-trained paramilitaries with plentiful supplies of weapons had reached the convent. And she reminded them of Sor Rosario’s claim of having a vision last year, shortly before the hurricane.


Sor Rosario, the youngest nun and somewhat giddy at the best of times, had been hurrying across the cloister, late as usual for compline, when a “vision” had halted her in her tracks. Mother had been skeptical and questioned her closely, fully expecting the vision would resemble a Renaissance statue of the Madonna to which Sor Rosario was particularly devoted. The statue had its own small chapel in the convent church, built by a conquistador’s widow to house her husband’s tomb. The daylight poured through a window above, as if from heaven, on a Madonna who was slender and blonde with gold stars on her blue gown, a red cloak trimmed with ermine, a filigree crown, and pointed golden slippers peeking from the hem of her gown.

Sor Rosario said, “She was tall, with dark hair down her back. It had bits of gray. She had dark eyes that looked directly into mine. Black eyes. Heavy eyebrows that met over her nose. The evening wind was just beginning to blow and her dress and cloak billowed behind her—she looked like she had wings! She spoke of a warning, a promise, and a reminder. Her voice was not soft or gentle—she spoke loudly, as women do when they intend to make men listen whether men want to or not.”

“Indeed!” It didn’t sound like any vision of the Madonna Mother knew of.

Sor Rosario nodded. “Naturally I knelt and began saying the Ave, but she stamped her foot and held up her hand for silence, saying there was no time for all that and to pay attention. A terrible storm was coming. The sky would be ripped apart and the angel of death would spread its wings above us. But a blessing or a gift would come from the sea, something would be found…we must save something…but her voice began to fade and I couldn’t hear her every word, and she stamped her foot again, looking angry, but I think that was because she had not finished what she had to say and—”

“Stamped her foot, Sister? Perhaps you were dreaming.” Mother sighed, closed her eyes and tried to massage away the beginnings of a headache. The more emotional nuns often claimed to see visions, particularly when there wasn’t enough to eat. Usually they were of Santa Teresa and roses.

“Oh no! She was real as anything, Mother. Her cloak was brown.” Sor Rosario’s voice was tinged with disappointment. She had loved pretty frocks once. “Plain brown. You would think, blue, perhaps a nice rose pink, but no…a kind of grayish brown. Rough fabric, stained white around the hem, as if it had been dragged through something and dried. She began fading away, still talking, shouting almost, but the sound was fainter—something about…fools of men…the Sors Santas de Jesus must protect…something—the Chronicle. That was it—protect the Chronicle! Because it explains something to do with the gift, the one from the sea.”

“The Chronicle? We haven’t seen that in over half a century; how are we supposed to ‘protect’ it?” Mother was exasperated. The order’s Chronicle was an ancient volume that had supposedly come from their mother house in Spain, wherever that might be, like the medal that had supposedly come from the same place but disappeared during the 1932 civil war. It had been hidden as a precautionary measure by an elderly and forgetful nun, Sor Agnes, when the convent was attacked by a revolutionary mob, inflamed by legends of Inca treasure supposedly buried in the convent’s chapel crypt. The convent’s stout gates had held against the mob then, though the stories about hidden Inca treasure had survived and resurfaced periodically. Mother suspected it was only a matter of time until the gates failed.

When the army crushed the revolt in 1933, the nuns of the day searched for the Chronicle in vain, and the then–Mother Superior beseeched God for patience with Sor Agnes, who died unable to recall where she had hidden it, whispering only that it was in a secret place.

With the Chronicle missing, the nuns passed their traditions on to younger nuns by word of mouth, but as time passed they recalled less and less. When Mother herself was a young novice, only the very oldest nuns remembered actually seeing the Chronicle before it disappeared. They told the novices that they would know it at once; it was an old leather-bound volume with vellum pages and a faint gilt imprint of a bird on its cover.

Mother asked crossly if Sor Rosario’s “vision” might have revealed where the Chronicle was hidden, if it was so important. Sor Rosario shook her head. Mother had sighed and asked if the vision explained whether she meant a political storm or a weather storm was coming. What kind of blessing was coming from the sea? And what were the nuns supposed to do about it? But Sor Rosario only shrugged apologetically. Mother despaired of getting any sense out of her and sent Sor Rosario back to her chores.

In a matter of days the Mano del Diablo answered the first question.

In the convent’s orphanage, nuns and lay sisters made up extra pallets and readied their meager collection of medical supplies, their stocks of patched nightdresses and underwear and threadbare pullovers for the traumatized and injured children that began arriving—brought by the makeshift rescue services, the police, the army, neighbors, and strangers.

The arrivals stretched the convent’s resources to the limit. Once, patrician nuns’ dowries—land, gold and silver and emerald mines, and vast sums of money—had enriched the convent, but as centuries passed the convent’s wealth diminished with vocations. When Sor Rosario, their last novice, came begging to be admitted, her dowry was two squawking chickens—all she had in the world. So the burden of the orphanage fell on the shoulders of a dwindling population of aging nuns and equally elderly lay sisters. And the children orphaned by the disaster cried all night, from pain and for their lost families. They wet their beds and had nightmares. Those who could not cry desperately needed specialist help, but there was no one to give it. Sor Rosario hitched up her habit and scrubbed pots and floors, boiled sheets, set older children to look after the younger ones, and watered the maize gruel and the dwindling contents of the last bottles of iodine, until the tincture was no longer red but barely pink.

Soon both nuns and lay sisters were tottering with exhaustion, but with so much extra work the afternoon siesta was abandoned until Mother finally insisted that everyone—children, nuns, lay sisters, even the elderly odd-job man—was not to stir for an hour after lunch, regardless.

That brief interlude of tranquillity was broken one afternoon by the sound of running footsteps coming down the corridor. “Mother!” shouted Sor Rosario, racing round the corner, skirts still hitched from her morning’s work and beads swinging at her waist as she hurried round the cloister toward Mother Superior’s office. “Mother!” echoed the old nun hurrying behind her. Her high-pitched voice, wobbling with excitement and breathlessness, was shrill. “The key! You must come at once!”

At her desk Mother had sat up with a start and straightened her wimple, realizing she had fallen asleep again over the orphanage accounts. The convent was desperately short of money, the roof over the crowded dormitory was sagging, and food was in short supply and more expensive by the day. The intake of children orphaned by the hurricane had strained resources to the breaking point. The children often went to bed hungry. There were not enough blankets, and though the children bundled three and four to a bed for warmth, they shivered at night. As for clothing and sandals…Anxiety and despair always made Mother sleepy. Her glasses had slid down as she dozed, and now she pushed them back up and scolded, “Sor Rosario! Sor Maria Gracia! The siesta! No need for running! Most unseemly!” Mother tried to sound stern, but really, how did they have the energy? “What key?”

Sor Maria Gracia was wheezing too badly to speak, but Sor Rosario gasped, “Sailors, two…sailors…visitors’ parlor…the key…open the locutio gate!”

Mother was shocked. “The key? Open the locutio gate? Sor Rosario! We never open that gate! The locutio symbolizes our separation from the world, and—”

“Mother,” Sor Maria Gracia piped up, “the world has sent us a gift!”

Sor Rosario nodded earnestly, big eyes wide. “I told Sor Maria Gracia it is just as the vision promised…” she began, ecstatically.

“Vision indeed!” snapped Mother, thinking Sor Rosario was an impressionable peasant and Sor Maria Gracia was wandering in her wits. Then Sor Maria Gracia leaned forward and murmured in Mother’s ear.

Mother started back and stared at her. “Two sailors with another child, who was wearing our medal? And the portress thinks I must deal with it?” Mother reconsidered Sor Rosario’s vision, whose warning, she had to admit, had been accurate so far as the hurricane was concerned.

“The portress is surely mistaken!” The portress was old but sharp-eyed. “After three hundred years, the likelihood this is our medal is small. Nevertheless…”

Mother set off with a surprisingly quick step for the visitors’ parlor, fingering the heavy key ring she wore on her girdle. The two nuns hurried after her. By the time they reached the parlor, Mother had extracted a large, rusty cast-iron key decorated with a cross and a symbol of a bird with a forked tail, and she struggled to fit it into the lock.

On the other side, two young sailors shifted from foot to foot while the nuns gathered behind the locutio. The gate in the middle shook as if someone was growing impatient and rattling it. A woman’s voice muttered something that sounded like a profane oath. One sailor, holding a small malnourished girl sucking her thumb, raised his eyebrows at the other, who shrugged and shook his head. The sisters seemed to be behaving strangely.

The two sailors knew they had done what they should. They had taken the child to a side door of the convent, where for hundreds of years there had been a latticed hatch where abandoned babies and children were passed to the portress on the other side.

They had knocked on the hatch; the portress had come. “Take off the medal first so it doesn’t get caught in the hatch and choke her,” said the sailor holding the child to his companion. The companion unwound the chain and pushed it and the medal through the hatch and was about to set the child down when inside the portress shrieked, pushed the medal back, and said they must take the child and the medal to Mother Superior, before slamming the hatch closed.

Now they could hear a breathless voice behind the locutio—“Oil from the kitchen, Mother”—and a pale hand wearing a thin gold ring was visible through the ironwork, rubbing a cloth feverishly on the lock. Creaking loudly on its hinges, the iron gate was prized open.

“Well?” demanded Mother imperiously. She was a tall woman, and more formidable than ever because she was gaunt from the general shortage of food in the convent. She barely tasted what there was on the pretext of fasting, in order to leave as much as possible for the children.

The two sailors stepped back nervously. “We’ve brought her to the orphanage; we found her at sea a week ago,” began the one holding the child. “And she was wearing…show them, Juan.” The other nodded and held up a greenish disc on a length of tarnished gold chain. Mother peered, picked it up to examine it more closely, and turned it over. “Where…did…you…get…this?”

The other sailor said, “She was wearing it when we found her. She was all alone in a fishing boat, the only thing alive for miles. The chain was looped round her neck many times, Mother, as if someone hoped the medal would save her. And it must have—it’s a miracle she survived.”

Mother gazed at the medal, not quite believing her eyes. The old stories about the convent’s medal, its description, and where it had come from had been kept alive in the order for centuries even though the medal itself had disappeared. But now she was holding a medal that fit the description—a swallow on one side and a female figure on the other. Could it really be? “Deo gratias,” she finally managed. “You have done well.” She took the little girl and told Sor Maria Gracia to find the child some clothes at once and to take some money from the poor box and send a lay sister for milk.

Sor Maria Gracia tottered off in the direction of the poor box and Sor Rosario made cooing noises and held out her arms. Mother gave her the child and examined the medal closely. One of the sailors finally cleared his throat to get her attention. Mother looked up. Instinct told her it was essential that the bishop hear nothing of this. “Please say nothing about medals and miracles to anyone! It would only bring curiosity seekers to the convent and we have our hands full just now. It’s only one child more for the orphanage.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“God bless you,” she said in a perfunctory way, and pulled the creaking gate shut and relocked it.

Inside Mother leaned against the wall for support. Responsibility settled heavily on her shoulders. What next? “Send for Father. The child may have been baptized, but we cannot be certain. We will give her the name Isabella Salome. But say nothing about the medal to him.”

Then Mother did the only thing a nun could: pray. She went back to her parlor, closed the door behind her, and sank to her knees on her prie-dieu, presented to an early Mother Superior by a Spanish vice-regent’s wife. It was a heavy wooden piece, solid and immobile as a throne, elaborately carved in the style of the early seventeenth century with angels and human skulls. She prayed as she never had before for inspiration about where the lost Chronicle might be hidden. It was essential they find it—it had the whole story, it must be somewhere…She closed her eyes, gripped the lectern hard in her fervor, praying to all the saints in turn, “Please, please guide us to the Chronicle…”

She was startled when a panel on the side of the lectern suddenly loosened under her grip. Mother stopped midprayer. She bent sideways and looked at the section of wood beneath her hand. She pressed harder and there was a click as the panel sprang open, like a door. A secret compartment? Mother tentatively put her hand into what should have been a cavity, but behind the panel it was solid. Then she realized that was because something was wedged tightly inside, bulky, wrapped in coarse material.

It took both hands to maneuver it through the opening. Mother hardly dared breathe as she removed a cover of oiled wool and another of desiccated silk. Then, there it was—an old leather-bound book, rather large, like a ledger, with a blackened gilt clasp and the barely discernible outline of a bird with a long forked tail in faded gilt. Inside were pages of vellum, thin as tissue paper, filled with neat and clear writing, in ink that had faded to dark brown but was surprisingly legible. Mother saw the book was mostly in Spanish, but in the middle, the section in Latin! The Gospel! “Deo gratias,” she whispered. “Sor Agnes’s hiding place! I have found the Chronicle!”

She thought again about Sor Rosario’s vision and its warning about the hurricane and a “gift,” and now in the space of a few hours the medal and the Chronicle had been restored to the order. The child must have been connected to them somehow, but God moved in mysterious ways and they needed to wait to see how. Meanwhile they had to keep this news within the convent. There would be no end of trouble if it attracted the attention of the church authorities.


Unfortunately, the two young sailors disobeyed Mother’s injunction to say nothing. A bored American journalist overheard them talking in a bar about the child and her miracle medal and thought it was a good story. He loosened their tongues with cachaca and a little cash that was a fortune to boys on naval pay. They told him everything while he made notes, and his story about the Mano del Diablo “miracle medal” was rehashed by a number of wire services months after the event.

As Mother had feared, the bishop got wind of it. He wrote a stern letter to the convent, reminding the order that for centuries suspicions of heresy had hovered around the Sors Santas de Jesus like a noxious cloud, and he intended to investigate this matter of the miraculous medal and report to Rome. The Catholic Church had enough of priests accused of abusing children to deal with; it could do without more trouble or controversy just now. He ordered Mother to turn the medal over to him at once. He would interrogate the child Isabella personally, then send her to Rome with his report and the medal.

Mother temporized. She replied in vague terms that ever since the Mano del Diablo the convent was overwhelmed, everything in disorder, and finding one small medal would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Disingenuously, she asked the bishop to describe the medal in question, so that she would recognize it if it were found. Finally she protested that Isabella was only three years old and therefore unlikely to provide much assistance to a formal inquiry.

Mother had no intention of relinquishing the medal, nor did she intend to send Isabella to the Vatican. But the nuns could not fend off the bishop forever, and she had no idea what to do next.

The answer came via a phone call from an American missionary organization. She was telephoned by the regional chief of Christian Outreach—Southern Baptists, the man on the telephone emphasized. That didn’t tell her much. Mother had no idea what distinguished one Protestant sect from another, just that their missionaries were said to hand out pocket Bibles and chewing gum and make a show of baptizing converts en masse in rivers. The man from Christian Outreach went on to say their churches had launched a fund-raising appeal in the US for the victims of the Mano del Diablo disaster. Would Mother allow a photographer into the convent to take pictures of orphans for the appeal? Christian Outreach would donate some of the appeal funds to the convent.

Mother agreed—the convent was now so desperate for money that two nuns were being sent to beg in the town square each day. And the missionaries’ photographer spotted Isabelita at once, pretty and photogenic, with big wistful eyes. She became the face of the appeal.

The Southern Baptists donated generously, and two months later Mother almost fainted when she opened a money order large enough to replenish the dispensary; buy a year’s food for the entire convent, and blankets, shoes, and clothes for each child; repair the dormitory roof; and buy equipment for the schoolroom. Even toys. And there was a promise of more money to come. She reasoned that if God chose to work wonders through the Baptists, it was not for her to demur. If anything, it confirmed Mother’s secret conviction that the world had enough trouble without insisting all worship God the same way. There was room before the Throne for everyone who served Him—Baptists and the Hindus, Seventh Day Adventists, Muslims and Jews, as well as Catholics. That this was a wide departure from the Church’s teaching meant Mother had often struggled to fit her conviction into some recognized doctrinal framework. Though it did not fit, and the bishop would have been appalled, it remained a conviction.

Then the regional chief of Christian Outreach rang again, this time with the news that an American couple had seen Isabella’s photo at a church fundraiser and been so taken with it that they wanted to adopt her. He explained that on the heels of the Mano del Diablo appeal, the church had lobbied Washington in support of its “adopt an orphan” project, and the US government had temporarily relaxed immigration rules to allow these fast-track adoptions for a short period. Mother asked to think it over.

The nuns held a convent meeting to decide and Mother urged, “Neither Isabelita, nor the medal, nor the Chronicle are safe here. The Marxists are whipping the peasants up with the old stories about churches hoarding Spanish gold while the people starve, and on top of that, the bishop is determined to get the Vatican involved with the medal. The Vatican has appointed an official investigator and if they learn that we have found the Chronicle as well…”

“They will send the Inquisition,” muttered Sor Rosario rebelliously.

Mother ignored her and continued. “What better place to hide our medal and Chronicle than with Isabelita in an ordinary small town in America, where she will grow up quietly among the Protestants? I can lay a false trail with the adoption papers so it will be hard to trace her. Besides, adoption in America is a rare opportunity for one of our orphans.”

The nuns couldn’t disagree with that. Unless an orphan discovered a vocation—it had not happened in many years—the best the nuns could do when she turned sixteen was to turn her out into the world armed with a new set of clothes and a glowing letter of recommendation to enable her to be hired as a servant.

The nuns had many questions—whether the couple was trustworthy, and how would Mother ensure the medal and Chronicle were not lost once they left the convent. Mother promised she would insist on meeting the couple before she signed the papers. As for the medal and Chronicle, Mother explained her idea, and the nuns murmured their cautious approval—but everything depended on the adoptive parents.


Waiting for the Americans, Mother had nearly decided that their nonappearance meant it was God’s will that Isabelita, the Chronicle, and the medal remain in the convent, when Sor Rosario appeared to say Señor and Señora Walker had arrived and ushered the couple in.

The Walkers said “gracias” nervously one after the other and Virgil Walker pulled his phrase book out of his pocket and began trying to make a sentence in labored Spanish. Mother managed a stiff smile and said, “Please be seated. We can speak in English.” She had learned English as a girl, and though hers was rusty, recently she had practiced on the telephone with the people from Christian Outreach.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, relieved. “We tried to learn some Spanish, took one of those crash courses, but right this minute, just when we need it, I can hardly remember a word.” Mother smiled again, less stiffly. The couple were as nervous as she was. It reassured her, that and the teddy bear.

She glanced down at the couple’s file open on her desk, even though she knew its contents by heart. Sarah-Lynn and Virgil Walker, thirty-seven and forty years old, married for eighteen years, during which time they tried but failed to have children. There was a letter of recommendation from the pastor of their church that said they were a fine upstanding couple and good Christians, that Mrs. Walker was a housewife and homemaker, member of the garden club, and active in her church Bible study group. There was another from their congressman saying they were pillars of their community. There was one from the Chamber of Commerce of Laurel Run, Georgia, confirming Virgil Walker owned a successful plumbing business there and was an active member of the Rotary Club. Mother had looked up Laurel Run in the convent’s atlas, one that had been printed in 1930 and showed the state of Georgia divided up into counties. She found Laurel Run at last, a tiny dot in Bonner County, east of Fulton County where a much bigger dot said Atlanta. Mother was sure that she had heard of Atlanta. “I hope you found us without too much difficulty.”

“Yes, ma’am, thank you. Sorry we’re late. We were taking pictures outside. Children adopted under the new program are supposed to have a scrapbook for later, with photos and mementoes of where they came from. And speaking of pictures, Sarah-Lynn here has brought some to show you of our house, and the bedroom we’ve fixed up for our little girl.”

Sarah-Lynn Walker opened a big leather handbag that matched her shoes, took out a manila envelope, and removed a sheaf of photos. “This is our home,” she said, putting the first one on Mother’s desk. “It’s what they call a colonial ranch style, brand new when we bought it eight years ago,” said Sarah-Lynn. The white brick and clapboard house with a pillared porch and surrounded by a lawn and flower beds was a small palace, all clean and new. “I do all the housework myself,” said Sarah-Lynn, the hand with the pictures shaking slightly with nerves. “And the gardening. We put a swing and a sandbox there in the back so the neighbor children can come over to play. And here’s her room.” The bedroom was painted in pink and white, with a small four-poster bed and other child’s furniture painted with flowers. It looked as if an entire toy shop had been emptied into the room, filled with stuffed animals and dolls and a large dollhouse that took up one corner. “I hope it’s alright,” Sarah-Lynn said nervously. “We did it real quick, as soon’s we got the go-ahead. I forgot to get a picture of her bathroom, but it’s decorated to match.”

“Very nice,” Mother said. Her own bathroom?

“Here’s our town.” There were more photos: tree-lined streets where every pristine house was surrounded by a similar neat lawn, bushes, flower beds, and trees. There was a photo of the brand-new Baptist church they attended, the town square, and the old-fashioned courthouse. It looked quiet and safe. There were pictures of the local elementary school and the high school, and both Walkers were emphatic their daughter would go to college. “We got us a real good junior college in Laurel Run, kind of old-fashioned and ladylike, and the state university is thirty miles away. Then there are more colleges than you can shake a stick at around Atlanta. I’m what you might call a self-made man, but our little girl will have every opportunity!”

“My husband’s a hard worker. He built his business from nothing,” Sarah-Lynn interrupted proudly. “He started off as a plumber when we got married and now he owns a plumbing business with five branches, doing work all over the place, clear to Atlanta where there’s lots of new homes going up. Got eighteen people working for him now.”

“Here, this is one of my trucks,” said Virgil, pulling out his wallet and extracting a business card that showed a sleek dark-green van with classical script on the side: GET A QUOTE FROM VIRGIL. “Latin teacher at the high school’s an old army buddy—this was his idea.”

“Virgil, honey!” Sarah-Lynn nudged her husband. “Tell about our church.”

“Well, ma’am, we belong to the First Baptist Church, we go every Sunday, and on Wednesday night for a prayer meeting and a potluck supper.” Virgil talked on about vacation Bible school, and the Little League baseball team he coached, and the Brownies—things that Mother had never heard of but were evidently children’s activities.

Gunfire in the distance, then an explosion, interrupted them. Both sounded closer than usual. The Walkers jumped.

Mother gathered up Isabelita’s file, with the newspaper clippings. “Here is all we know about Isabelita. We can only speculate who her parents might have been—almost certainly local people and certainly dead. They may have been from one of the fishing communities on the coast, or trying to escape.”

The Walkers both nodded and Virgil took the file. “Our adoption worker has stressed that adopted children need to know where they came from. Especially when it’s a foreign adoption. It can turn into a big issue when they grow up. So we’ll make sure she knows.”

Mother took a large parcel from her desk. “I understand. And since Isabelita will have so little to go on, here are two keepsakes from the convent. One is a medal she was wearing when she was rescued. You will see a photo of it in the newspaper stories in the file. We were extremely surprised to see it as our convent had one like it once. We felt she should have it.

“And this book is for her, too. It is very old, some old records of our convent. Our nuns were always educated, and the convent always had a scribe to keep the records. Perhaps Isabelita will want to read it someday if she remembers her Spanish. There is a section in the middle in Latin, too, but I know children do not learn Latin in school as they did in my day. Still, it is all we have to give her. Before I consent to the adoption I require your solemn promise to give her both these things on her sixteenth birthday.” Mother felt an acute pang of regret that they had been unable to read the Chronicle properly before sending it away. Various nuns had made a start during the past year, but God alone knew where the convent’s old Latin dictionary was. No one’s Latin was up to much, and in any case there was so much work to do in the convent there hadn’t been enough time, even to read the Spanish.

Sarah-Lynn Walker leaned forward earnestly. “That’s lovely! Of course we promise, don’t we Virgil?”

Her husband nodded. “Yes, ma’am, I give you my word. We’ll see she gets these things. And our local high school still teaches Latin in the honors program; it helps kids get college scholarships so the PTA won’t let them drop it. So we’ll do our best to see she takes Latin, too. Virgil Walker doesn’t go back on his word,” he added and instinctively stuck out his hand to shake on the bargain. Startled but quick on the uptake, Mother reached out her own frail hand for his firm handshake. She believed him.

“Very well. I approve the adoption.” Mother nodded at the Walkers and pushed the parcel over to Sarah-Lynn, who whispered, “Thank you.” Mother rang a little silver bell and Sor Rosario appeared so quickly Mother knew she had been listening outside the door. “Please bring Isabelita.”

Sor Rosario took her time. Mother made polite conversation while they waited, proudly pointing out the portraits of the crowned nuns, saying she thought they were quite special and certainly old, explaining that on feast days the orphanage children were allowed into her study to see them as a special treat. Convent life was rather spartan for the children, and a visit to Mother’s parlor to hear a story about the crowned nuns was one of their few luxuries. Mother explained to the Walkers how she would give a little talk about these extraordinary girls, who were dressed in beautiful clothes with flowers and jewels and elaborate crowns as they prepared to become nuns. “Isabelita loves these paintings. When I asked why, she said they smiled at her.” Mother smiled herself. “Perhaps they do. But mainly the children look forward to these occasions because afterward they have hot chocolate and almond pastries, like the ones offered to girls entering the convent, as a symbol of the sweetness of a cloistered life dedicated to God.”

The Protestant Walkers looked dazed by this information, so Mother politely changed the subject.

“Let’s see, what can I tell you about Isabelita to help you know her a little? She is a very good girl, very obedient, says her prayers and tidies her clothes. Her health is good. She’s never been ill or at all naughty, although when Christian Outreach was so generous we were able to buy toys for the children—we’ve never been able to afford toys here.” Mother shrugged apologetically. “Isabelita was so excited by the crayons and coloring books that she decorated the walls of the dormitory and some of the missals in the chapel before we could stop her.”

“Bless her heart, the child was just happy to have something to play with!” exclaimed Sarah-Lynn.

Virgil grinned. “We got a new refrigerator, plain white, could do with some decorating,” he said. “I’ll get her the biggest box of crayons they make and she can draw on that all she likes.”

Then there was a knock at the study door and the three of them turned as the door opened. Sor Rosario was holding the hand of a beautiful little girl, her dark hair neatly braided, wearing a spotlessly clean, carefully darned white pinafore, white socks, and new white sandals. Mother repressed thoughts of sacrificial lambs. After saying “Buenas tardes, Mother,” the child smiled shyly from under her long eyelashes and wished the Walkers “Buenas tardes.”

“Well hey there.” Virgil smiled.

Sarah-Lynn whispered, “My precious baby!”

Mother beckoned the child to her side and took her face in her hands. Speaking in slow Spanish so the Walkers could follow she said, “These good people were lonely without a little girl of their own and have chosen you to be their daughter. Your parents in heaven are watching over you and are happy that God has sent them to be your new mother and father. You will leave the convent and go with them now. But wherever you go, our prayers will follow you every day.” She spoke earnestly, looking deep into the child’s eyes, which were neither brown nor black but a dark, inky blue. Mother’s word was law. The child nodded obediently. “Good girl,” whispered Mother.

Mother unscrewed an old-fashioned fountain pen. “Now the paperwork must be completed. The full name on her baptismal certificate is Maria Salome Isabella Luz de los Angeles—the ‘light of the angels’ surname we give to all our orphans whose surnames are unknown, but what of her first names? Do you wish to give her another?” Mother strove to sound casual.

Virgil looked at his wife. Adoption counseling stressed the need to respect ethnic origins. Would it seem disrespectful to change this rather exotic name? He said tentatively, “That’s a real nice name, just a little unusual—not many girls named Salome, what with John the Baptist and that business with his head—”

“A more American name, perhaps? Brenda or Marjorie or…Nancy?” Mother suggested, racking her brains for American names. “Susan?”

Virgil breathed more easily. “Those are nice but, we always had a name picked out for a daughter if we had one. Menina Ann Walker.”

Mother looked up in surprise. In old Castilian “Menina” meant a young lady-in-waiting to the queen.

“Where we come from, it’s a custom to call children by names in the family. Sarah-Lynn’s mother was Menina. She passed shortly after our wedding. Ann was my mom’s name. How does that sound to you?”

“Menina Ann Walker—sounds very American. Very nice.” Mother took her time laboriously signing the official adoption papers in handwriting she had practiced over and over, until it was so embellished with curlicues as to be almost but not quite indecipherable. “Just one more form, for the convent records.” Now Mother filled in the names of the adoptive parents as Mary and John Smith, place of residence, Chicago. She wrote Isabelita’s old and new names illegibly. She shook a large blot of ink onto the new one for good measure and replaced the pen in the inkwell with a smile of satisfaction. Then the Walkers signed everything—too nervous to bother reading the papers, let alone translating them. Anyone looking for Isabelita would find themselves on a wild goose chase.

“Isabelita, from today you have a new name, Menina Ann Walker. It is God’s will,” said Mother in Spanish. She sat up very straight, pushed her spectacles back up her nose and frowned at Sor Rosario, who was dabbing her eyes suspiciously. Sor Rosario gave a little sob and bent and hugged Isabelita hard, then Mother came round her desk and bent down stiffly and hugged her, too. “Remember, always be good.” She said again in the child’s ear, “Be a good girl. A very good girl. God bless and keep you. Adios.”

“Don’t y’all worry,” Virgil told the nuns. “We’ll bring her up right. And keep our promise,” he added. He bent down and held out the teddy bear to the child. She looked at Mother for permission. When Mother nodded, her face broke into a huge smile as she walked to him and took it. He scooped her up and said, “Hey, whose little girl we got here?” The child giggled and buried her face in the bear. “Menina honey, Mama and Daddy are going to take you for some ice cream, helado. You like helado?” The child nodded. She had no idea what helado was, but that seemed to be the right response. “And after that, we’re going to get on a big airplane and fly away. This family’s going home!”

Sor Rosario opened the door and followed them out, sniffing loudly. Mother listened as their footsteps faded down the corridor. Alone again, she looked up at the monjas coronadas. “May God guide and protect her, but I am convinced we have done the right thing. Deo gratias, for the Walkers, sisters. Deo gratias.”