Vainglory by Geraldine McCaughrean

Author:Geraldine McCaughrean [McCaughrean, Geraldine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Can Anything Stop The Gloriole Family Achieving Power?
Publisher: Memoirs Publishing
Published: 2017-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-EIGHT

Rachel and Bilhah

A new century. It approached as slowly and as implacably as a glacier and yet would arrive within a single second. For Vérité it lay like an impenetrable wilderness of briars, toiling and coiling across her path. It would snag her skin and leave lines there. It would snag her hair and bleed it of its colour. It would overgrow her bed and drain it of what last fertility survived there. With the old century, her youth would peter out. With the new one, middle age would start like a narrowing corridor – unlit, sloping and slipping down to a blind end. Unless she took a stand against it.

With the latest recruitment of girls to the convent in the loft, the departure of older Sisters was dramatic that year. The last faces to have peopled her childhood decamped to the mother -house at Rocheblanche. Those who came to replace them would never touch her as close. The human heart gives more readily to first acquaintances than to later ones. Later friendships are looser, shallower unions. These new nuns did not remember her father, were not associated with that sweet, naïve regime irretrievably lost.

The cartful of newcomers – all under the age of sixteen – gaped around them like fledgling birds cramped into a windblown nest, as they bowled over the causeway and in among the branching miracles of the chateau towards the meal laid ready in the refectory. Vérité came to welcome them, her keys bright in the folds of her skirts, her hands clasped at her waist, her lips reddened a little in retaliation at their youth, and her authority over them written in ornate ciphers of rich embroidery on her hood. Timid and excitable, they gazed at her, willing her to be the benign benefactor of which they had heard tell, willing her to speak simply to them in French they could understand.

What do they know? she thought, and the twenty years’ difference in their ages penned them round like the fence that kept her mastiffs safe inside their kennels.

‘Please remember,’ she told them, as she told each new intake of Little Sisters, ‘that I am your friend and will remember you in my prayers in the hope that you will remember me in yours. If there are any among you uncertain of your vocation, you must not think that the promises of your parents have bound you past remedy. There’s no sin or disgrace in a change of heart, and I won’t let ruin fall on any of you who’d rather serve God in the Outer World.’ She always said (though she was never believed). After all, no one’s life should be blighted by a vow. They wondered at her charity.

Within a week, an incident occurred, so unseemly that the Convent of Little Sisters of Pity shook with fright at it. A novitiate with the given name of Cecille stole a small silver gilt cream jug in the shape of a cow.

It had somehow become one of the secular duties of the nuns to clean the small, portable valuables of the house.

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