A Vow Of Sanctity by VERONICA BLACK

Author:VERONICA BLACK [Black, Veronica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Joffe Books Crime thriller and mystery
Published: 2021-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

Nine

‘And what,’ said Sister Joan, sitting back on her heels and looking up vaguely in the direction where most people envisage God as sitting, ‘am I supposed to do? This is a spiritual retreat, Lord, designed to enhance my inner strength and here I am being dragged into someone else’s problem again. What am I to do?’

The Creator appeared to be silent this morning. If He had had as fitful a sleep as herself she thought it very likely that He was having a lie-in.

During the night she had tossed and turned on the hard, narrow bed, the bitter words of Dolly McKensie echoing in her mind, the things she herself had seen replaying themselves like an old film over and over again in her mind. Sundry unconnected events had, she was certain, some common linkage. The cowled figure who rowed across the loch late in the evening, the body that had vanished from the crypt, the torn-off portion of what was clearly a love letter caught in the tree, Morag’s belief that Dolly had killed her husband, Dolly’s belief that the said husband had been having an affair with Catherine Sinclair — somewhere they were all joined in what Sister Joan feared was an unholy union.

She had been on her knees since before five and not a whisper of advice or comfort had come from anywhere.

‘When it seems that we receive nothing in answer to our prayers,’ her novice mistress had said once, ‘then we can be sure we are being tested. The soul must rise to sanctity without constant mollycoddling from heaven.’

‘A bit of heavenly mollycoddling wouldn’t come amiss just now,’ she muttered, rising and leaning to extinguish the last feeble flame of the burnt-out candle.

Since there evidently wasn’t going to be any then she was thrown back on her own sadly inadequate resources. And that, she thought, deciding that any action was better than none, meant a visit to the manse. Morag had made her accusation surely in the knowledge that she would be expected to explain it; she too felt the need to confide in a stranger.

The rain still hung heavily on the air like a curtain of tiny droplets. The waters of the loch were ruffling up indignantly under the onslaught of the rising wind. Above the curtain of waiting rain the sky was a strange gun-metal grey, brooding, powerful. Sister Joan looked at it uneasily. She could feel the threat of storm running along her nerves. Sister Andrew would call this migraine weather. A good brisk walk would make her feel better, she decided, and warm her chilled hands and feet. She put on her coat, wrapped the heavy grey scarf over her veil and picked up her bag. Descending the slippery steps and the pine-clad slope she turned to the right. It would take, she reckoned, a couple of hours to walk right round the loch to the manse. That ought to give the Creator time to decide if He wanted her to talk to Morag or not.

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