But if I were … If I were, I could open my mind without being fearful. I would be able to see the images and the memories properly, instead of these maddening glimpses, as if a flickering candle is being held up to fragments of a dim old manuscript …
Dare I open my mind? Just once? What would I see and feel? I would like to feel and understand Leonora’s emotions – the sheer exuberance and delight and gratitude she would have felt on that extraordinary day when she walked out of the convent with the dark-haired, dark-eyed young man …
Fourteen
The nuns must have thought it scandalous that Leonora, no more than seventeen, should flee with a complete stranger. But the Kaiser’s armies were overrunning the town of Liège, they were actually inside the convent buildings, and Leonora had seen a means of escape – just as, years earlier, she had seen the Convent of Sacré-Coeur itself as an escape from her own chill, unloving home …
My parents often abandon me to go in search of my father’s obsessive quest. Leonora’s abandoned her on the steps of Sacré-Coeur, so we have something in common, she and I. Is that what has forged this curious link between us?
I think her parents’ world was a tidy, orderly place, with no place for a daughter who was flawed – who had been born with a deformity of one leg so that she walked awkwardly. Unwanted is probably too strong a word, but Leonora was certainly not the daughter those two people had hoped for.
Sacré-Coeur, so respectable and respected, provided them with an answer to the problem of their imperfect, unmarriageable child. For the first few years, friends and business connections could be told how dearest Leonora was in a convent school, and very happy there. Later they would have adjusted this to how Leonora had been granted a place in the Choir School, and how wonderful that was. The concerts for Church dignitaries – the bishop – a recital in a cathedral with the archbishop present … ‘We are so proud of her …’
They were so proud of their daughter that they did not trouble to attend any of those concerts, so that they might hear for themselves the pure, clear beauty of the Palestrina Choir, or meet the other girls with whom Leonora shared her life and her studies and her music. There were nights when she wept into her pillow over that.
It must have been beautiful, the music of that Choir. I have found references to it in books in Father’s study: accounts of its soft, sweet music, even one or two letters which Father must have found, in his quest for his cousin Stephen, and brought back to Fosse House.
I don’t know how the nuns of Sacré-Coeur explained away to Leonora’s parents the fact that she ran away with a completely unknown man in the middle of an invasion and a siege. I don’t think Leonora ever knew that. I don’t think she cared, though.
The invasion of the convent is one of the things I can see quite clearly. I can almost smell the fear, and I hear the shots, and my eyes sting from the clouds of plaster dust when the statue of the Sacred Heart was overturned …
The entire convent had been at Vespers, wrapped in the music, enrapt in the intricate beauty of the singing. Leonora had been concentrating on the glowing tapestry threads of the Deus, careful to come in on the correct bars because Sister Jeanne had arranged a new setting, and once or twice looking forward to supper after the service.
The soldiers’ entrance shredded the music into ugly, jagged fragments. Leonora and the other girls in the Choir, not realizing or seeing what was happening, had tried to continue singing, and Sister Jeanne had determinedly begun the Magnificat. But the sounds beyond the rood screens were too horrific, and their voices trembled into discord. They exchanged terrified glances, instinctively moving closer to one another for comfort, most of them not understanding what was happening, or why the two nuns were crying out while the men cheered.
When the Sacred Heart statue crashed to the ground, sending great reverberations of sound through the chapel, two of the rood screens fell with it, and the girls pressed back against the stone columns, plaster dust, dry and thick, billowing suffocatingly into their faces. They could see into the chapel now, and even through the clouds of dust and flying debris, they could see the soldiers tramping through the ruins, rifles in their hands, murder in their eyes. They could see two novices lying on the ground, their robes torn away, their hands over their eyes as if in shame, and they could see two of the other nuns lying prone and still, deep, dark wounds in their heads, and blood pooling around them.
Next it will be us … The fear crackled through them like a fire.
It was Leonora who seized on the only weapon they knew – an appeasement – an offering to the men. Raggedly, she began to chant the cadences of the Magnificat again, picking up the splintered threads of the music, desperately trying to weave them into the familiar patterns, praying to God – to anyone who might be listening – that the others would join in. And that the soldiers would fall back in the face of God’s own music.
But although several of the girls joined in, the soldiers did not fall back. It was only when the dark-eyed man bounded through the rubble and barked out commands in bad French to Sister Jeanne to get the girls to safety that the soldiers seemed momentarily disconcerted. There was a confused interval – people scrambling across the fallen masonry, sounds of sobs and fearful cries – angry shouts from the soldiers, and running footsteps. It was only when the dust began to settle that Leonora heard the clanging of the inner door and the turning of the key in its lock, and she realized she was still in the chapel. And that the nuns and the other girls were on the other side of the locked door.