The Deadly Weed by Cora Harrison

Author:Cora Harrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448310227
Publisher: Severn House
Published: 2022-11-16T00:00:00+00:00

TEN

In the meantime, the Reverend Mother had been entertaining her unexpected visitor. She had lived in the neighbourhood since she was eighteen years old, and had never, herself, felt unsafe, but one glance at the shining ostentatiousness of her visitor’s red Cadillac car made her hastily open the convent gate. This street was not a safe environment for a car that was probably worth as much as the convent building itself.

Her cousin, Nell, steered the car into the playground just as, to the Reverend Mother’s delight, a group of her infant class children who had been lingering outside in the street, unsure of what to do with themselves during the holidays and wanting to escape their chaotic, busy homes, stood gaping by the gates of the school. They stood aghast, staring wide-eyed at the shining perfection of the splendid car and the Reverend Mother wondered how she would keep them away from it. Her cousin Nell also cast rather a dubious glance at them as she dismounted from her seat, but then straightened her spine.

‘Great! Super! Just what I wanted,’ she said in the ‘posh’ accent expensively acquired during ten years at a distinguished boarding school in England – an accent which set her apart from the ordinary Cork inhabitants. ‘I need some messengers to bring these boxes into the hallway,’ she continued. ‘And I brought some sweets for people who can do it without dropping anything.’

The Reverend Mother warmed towards her. That was unusually sensitive to arrive bearing sweets – a big jar of them, too, which her cousin hastily handed over to her. ‘Won’t do them any harm, Reverend Mother, just toffees, spend my life eating toffees and have still got most of my teeth. Ah, good, someone is organizing them. I’m no good with children, never manage to press the right button.’

‘Sweets are a good first step, aren’t they, Sister?’ asked the Reverend Mother with a smile at the children’s teacher. Nevertheless, she kept a hold on the jar until everyone was standing politely in a neat row and then she handed the sweets to Sister Mary Angela with a loudly spoken injunction to only give the sweets to boys and girls who had been very good and had not touched their visitor’s car. Despite the injunction there would be, she guessed, several dozens of sticky finger-marks on the shining paint before her visitor removed the car. It can be washed, she told herself, and judging by the shining perfection of the paint, it was often washed in this city where the damp air and the rain were laden with smuts, decomposed lumps of decay and particles of grime. The scrapes, bumps and scratches that she had seen down in Youghal had been expertly removed and the car was a piece of shining perfection.

‘Your car is looking lovely,’ she said admiringly.

‘You’re the second person to admire it today,’ said Nell. ‘I met the Lord Mayor himself on the quays and he stopped to admire it, too. Not a bad fellow, old Jimmy.

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