Another Day Gone by Eliza Graham

Author:Eliza Graham [Graham, Eliza]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781503940031
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Published: 2016-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

MARTYRS

BRIDIE

Oxford, May 1974

Church of England martyrs. Burnt for witnessing sacred truths against the Church of Rome. Protestant martyrs? Bridie read the inscription on the stone memorial in St Giles carefully to be sure. She’d heard of Mary Tudor, known that the Protestants had called her Bloody Mary, but had somehow not thought before about the cleric-burning aspect of her reign. Somehow she’d imagined all saints and martyrs as Catholic. If only Mary Margaret had been here to explain this aspect of English history to her.

Still only nine o’clock. She could probably afford a cup of tea if she could find somewhere quiet. The Jenkinsons didn’t need her back until six. Bridie’s plan was to buy supplies for a picnic lunch and eat them in Christ Church Meadow or Port Meadow, perhaps with a book borrowed from the central lending library. If the expedition felt too much, she could skip the picnic bit and just hide herself away in the depths of the library. Nobody would stare at a drably dressed woman reading a book there.

But she had promised herself that she would make an effort, not let her fear overcome her. She had thought of Mary Margaret, almost heard her voice telling her to have courage. She’d thought, too, of Reverend Mother, who’d written a letter to her just this week full of encouragement.

One of the department stores had a cafeteria, she remembered – more anonymous somehow than choosing somewhere on the street, but stuffy and windowless and possibly not as cheap as the workmen’s cafes in the Covered Market. On she walked, turning left into Broad Street and pausing to admire the outline of the Sheldonian, before she turned right into Turl Street. Another world. Oxford, with its honey-stoned colleges, might have belonged to another century. The convent had been old, too, she reminded herself, but in another sense that she couldn’t explain.

Students pushed bicycles and chatted, laughing and greeting one another with arms thrust around shoulders, kisses on cheeks. Boys and girls seemed at ease in each other’s company. Bridie tried to remember herself just before she’d entered the convent: a tall, awkward girl of eighteen, already favouring dark clothes; a girl sitting by herself in her room in the boarding house every night, reading the same paragraph of her book again and again. She had not been designed for living alone, that had been the problem.

‘Nature intended you to be the eldest daughter in a big Irish family,’ the kindly nun in The Beeches had told her shortly before she’d left. ‘You should be helping your mammy with the little ones or chatting to her while the two of you do the laundry. Find a nice young Catholic man, Bridget. Marry early. Create that large family for yourself.’

But instead she’d panicked and turned to the convent, too lonely and shy to manage any longer by herself, even though she’d had her job typing up invoices for a furrier and the boarding house.

In a cheap and warm cafe in the Covered Market she sat with a milky cup of tea that reminded her of convent brew.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.