The Whispering by Rayne Sarah

Author:Rayne, Sarah [Rayne, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Horror, Fiction
ISBN: 9780727883636
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2014-01-30T06:00:00+00:00

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.

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