The Whispering: A Haunted House Mystery (12 page)

They say you often get more than you planned for in life and that was certainly the case in that chapel. Not only did the statue fall, it took the plinth with it. They both went crashing down, hitting the ground with an explosion of sound, painful and deafening. Lumps of stone and fragments of shattered marble flew out in every direction, and the sound of the crash reverberated through the small chapel, causing the glass to shiver and dislodging several of the Mass vessels from the altar. Huge eruptions of dust billowed out, snuffing the candles, plunging the chapel into an eerie, grey-tinged gloaming. But worst of all, the organ pipes, jarred by the crash, thrummed with angry discordance, sending out ugly confused sounds as if the organ itself were wounded and moaning in agony.

The soldiers were running everywhere, gasping and coughing from the dust that was clogging their lungs and causing their eyes to stream, trying to regroup. They could not see me – I could barely see them, in fact, but I had been behind the dust explosion and I was probably in better shape than anyone. Sister Jeanne half fell from her organ stool, looked about her in fearful confusion, then turned to where I stood, as if in appeal.

I pointed to the rood screens. ‘Get them all out at once. Get everyone into the convent then barricade yourselves in,' I said. ‘If I can dodge the soldiers, I'll get out and try to send help to you.'

It was a jumble of French and heaven-knows what other languages, but she understood well enough, and nodded, turning to the screens. One had fallen and was leaning drunken and splintered against a column. The other was still in place, and it was around this second screen that I stepped.

And saw what was behind it.

I
ought not to have been surprised. I certainly ought not to have recoiled in pity. But, sadly, it's an instinct most of us have – faced with the abnormal, the grotesque, with those poor specimens of humanity that nature has mistreated, we flinch and want to run away.

The scene that lay behind those screens was like something from one of the famous disturbing paintings or engravings by people such as William Hogarth or Bruegel or Goya. Scenes from asylums, from pauper hospitals. At first the canvas appears to contain normal, ordinary faces with normal, ordinary bodies. But as you go on looking, you begin to see something subtly wrong with every one of the figures. Deformities of body – perhaps even worse, deformities of mind that look out through the eyes.

Those cruel tweaks of Nature confronted me as I stepped around the screens. Twenty, perhaps twenty-five, young women, some barely fourteen years old, others probably nineteen or twenty, huddled together in a terrified cluster, their eyes wide, their faces streaked with tears and stone-dust. Every one bearing the vicious pawmark of deformity. Hunchbacked, crippled, malformed, some of the faces even bearing the unmistakable stamp of idiocy – it's pitifully obvious, that last one. As if a malicious hand smeared the raw material before it had quite set. I've heard them called the sweet and holy fools of the world, but I don't know if I subscribe to that.

But in one thing they were alike in that moment. They were all terrified, and as soon as they saw me they shrank back. God knows what terrors they must have gone through herded together here, hearing what was happening, perhaps glimpsing some of it. Many of them would not entirely have understood, but all of them would have known they were in danger.

All around us, the organ pipes were still thrumming with discordance, and through it I could hear the soldiers crashing everywhere and swearing. But the dust was already clearing, and it would only take minutes for them to recover and regroup. I had minutes to get these girls across the chapel and into the main part of the convent behind locked doors. The alternative – to get them out to the gardens and out into the countryside – was impossible.

The pitiful thing – the thing that still twists painfully at the root of my soul when I think about it – is that they began to sing again. It was as if they were offering the only defence they had, and despite the danger and the chaos, tears stung my eyes.

But mercifully Sister Jeanne was there as well, and they trusted her. She clapped her hands briskly, and I think she said, ‘Into the convent, girls, and quickly, please.' They fell obediently into line, and Sister Jeanne nodded to me in a gesture that might have been a thanks or a blessing, and led them through the clouds of dust and the shuddering music from the disturbed organ pipes. I stayed where I was, seeing that despite the awkward gait of most of them they skirted the edges of the chapel nimbly enough, avoiding the soldiers, picking their way through the dust. They went through the far door, and Sister Jeanne turned and sketched the outline of the Sign of the Cross on the air. I put up a hand in acknowledgement, then they were gone, and I caught, very faintly, the sound of a key turning in a lock. I thought: they'll barricade themselves in there, and if I can get away I'll somehow get help to them.

If I could get away … One level of my mind – the professional burglar's level – had continued to work at its usual pace. Almost without realizing it, I had worked out that I could get through a narrow window partly hidden by the remaining rood screen. It was just about accessible from the ground, and the glass would have to be knocked out, but thankfully it was plain glass. Even in that desperate situation I would have hesitated to destroy the beautiful stained glass panels in the other windows.

The soldiers were at the far door, trying to force the lock, and the officer was saying something about finding other ways in.

Praying that Sister Clothilde and the others had had the wit to make sure all doors and windows were secured, I reached up for the stone sill, grateful for the cover afforded by the screen. But before I could lever myself up on to it, there was a movement on my right and I looked round sharply, thinking one of the soldiers had found his way here, tensing all my muscles to fight him or dodge bullets, or both.

It was not a soldier. It was one of the girls from the choir – she was cowering in the deep shadow of a buttress, and she was a thin, pale little thing with dark hair. Unlike a number of the other girls, her features were regular, although slightly pointed in the way a cat's features are or a pixie's. Her eyes were clear and intelligent, but filled with terror and bewilderment. How she had been missed by Sister Jeanne I have no idea, but here she was. On the wrong side of the locked door.

I defy anyone, in that situation, to know the best course of action. We were in a dust-swept chapel with a thrumming discordance echoing all round us, the rest of the community was barricaded behind locked doors, the Kaiser's soldiers were brandishing rifles at everything in sight, and two murdered nuns were lying in their own blood. I don't think I was ever in a more awkward or bizarre situation.

There was no time to wonder whether I could get the girl into the locked section of the convent, because clearly I could not. So, in my unreliable French, I said, ‘Don't be afraid. I'm here to help. We'll climb through the window.'

I didn't really expect her to acquiesce. I didn't even expect her to understand. But she nodded and clambered out from her tiny hiding-place – I remember thinking: oh God, please don't let her be as badly deformed as some of those other poor souls. Please let her be capable of walking normally, because if she's severely crippled, we might as well surrender to the German army here and now.

As she walked to the narrow window, I saw that she limped quite badly, as if she might have one leg slightly shorter than the other, or possessed what I think is called a club foot. But somehow I got her through the window, pushing her on to the sill, and indicating to her to drop down on the grass on the other side.

‘Can you manage that?' I said.

‘Oh, yes,' she said at once, which was one mercy in the midst of the chaos.

I turned back to survey the chapel. And now my burglar's mind was undoubtedly in the ascendant. I thought: I've got to travel through Belgium and find help for those nuns, and I've got to do it fast. I might have to take that girl with me for a few miles.

I'm not particularly proud of what I did, but the soldiers would have looted the chapel, and to travel anywhere, it's necessary to have money – or something that can be turned into money. I went for the icons, of course. I pocketed four of them – beautiful jewel-painted things in polished frames. Then I scrambled on to the stone window sill and down on to the grass. The pixie-faced girl was waiting for me.

‘What's your name?'

She hesitated, as if unsure whether to trust me that far, so I said, ‘I'm Iskander. I'm a Russian newspaper reporter.'

I'm not even sure if she knew what a reporter was, but she nodded, as if absorbing these new words. Then she said, ‘Leonora.'

‘I wish I could say I was happy to meet you, Leonora. But it will be all right. Take hold of my hand and don't let go. We're going to run away together.'

She only hesitated briefly. She said, ‘Run away? Away from here, do you mean? From Sacré-Coeur?'

‘Yes. Is that all right with you?'

‘Oh, yes,' she said, with a fervency I had not anticipated. ‘As far as possible.'

Her hand came into mine, and together we went through the scented gardens, and into the vast waiting night of the doomed land.

The journal ended there, but Iskander's vivid word-pictures remained.

So, thought Michael, that grisly little legend about the Palestrina Choir had been true. The Choir really had sung the accompaniment to its own death throes. It had been a heart-rending attempt by the girls to placate the intruders, because it had been the only thing they had known – the only defence weapon they could offer. Like Iskander, the pity of it bit painfully into him.

At times, translating the narrative, Michael had had to guess at Iskander's meaning, and there had been whole paragraphs – in one case almost an entire page – where the writing had been too cramped – or perhaps written too hastily – to decipher it with any certainty. But as he worked, understanding the journal had become progressively easier, like running down a flight of stairs – you moved so fast that your feet did not actually touch the stairs, and yet your own momentum and confidence propelled you safely to the bottom. Michael had been able to skim Iskander's words so surely that he had reached an understanding.

The chimes of a small mantel clock broke into his concentration, and he realized with vague surprise that it was two o'clock and that he was hungry. He had told Luisa that he would happily sort out his own lunch, and he closed his notebook and went along to the kitchen. After he had eaten he would ask if there had been any word about the fallen tree. In the meantime, he put together a sandwich which he ate at the kitchen table, his mind still filled with a kaleidoscopic blur of poetry and music and brutality – and of that haunting image of the Palestrina Choir humbly offering its music to the Kaiser's soldiers.

He washed up his plate and knife, and made a cup of instant coffee, which he took back to the library. There was still no sign of Luisa, and as he drank his coffee, he reread the letter to Sister Clothilde which referred to the Choir being always hidden behind screens. This was an intriguing byway for research, and Michael began to scan the shelves to see what other sources might be on hand. After a prolonged search during which he dispossessed several indignant spiders of their homes, he eventually found a battered volume on baroque choral music. It had been printed in 1910, the cover was dry and split, and the pages were badly foxed and infused with a dry musty scent of age. But halfway through he found a section that read:

In Vivaldi's day, many young girls were secluded from the world in conventual setting, not because they had a vocation, but so they could be trained to sing. Some embraced this training willingly, but there are many recorded instances of girls being taken from their homes by subterfuge or even force if it was thought they would be valuable additions to religious music. It was also common for wealthy families to pay religious institutions to house girls who were disfigured or mentally flawed, so that their existence need never be known.

Others came from poor backgrounds, where disfiguring diseases were rife – often due to syphilis. For those unfortunates, the convents would have been a sanctuary where they were housed and fed.

For most of their lives, these girls were hidden away. During performances and choral mass they remained behind screens – ostensibly in accordance with the Catholic tenets of preserving virginity and purity, but in reality to hide the disfigurements and, in some cases, the identities.

This practice gradually died out as medical science advanced and attitudes towards cripples and the mentally deficient became more tolerant. However, traces of the tradition lingered in remote districts – in Spain, in France, in Belgium, and also in Italy, although the suggestion of ‘hidden-away choirs' inside the Vatican cannot be substantiated. There is, however, strong evidence to suggest the practice continued in Europe until as recently as the late 1850s.

Michael read this twice and found it distressing and infuriating in equal measures.

It ought not to be a particular surprise to hear that girls had been hidden away like that – not shamefully or squalidly in asylums or workhouses, but in religious houses which people would have seen as respectable and even admirable.

Had Leonora gone willingly into Sacré-Coeur? The journal gave no clue; it ended with Iskander and Leonora leaving the convent. Michael considered this. How had Iskander's journal – or what appeared to be part of his journal – reached this house? If Iskander had been here – or if someone had acquired his belongings and brought them here – might there be other pages still to be found? This was a seductive possibility, but Michael was here to research war poets and the influence of music on their poetry, not to chase the lively outpourings of a disreputable Russian war journalist and burglar.