Vow of Sanctity (12 page)

Sister Joan had reached the place below the steps to the cave. She turned and climbed softly as a cat up the steep path that wound between the gleaming pines, not wanting – not daring – to look down and see anything more.

When she reached the cave she stumbled within, switching on the torch again, her heart beating fast. What was happening had about it the unreal quality of someone else’s bad dream into which she, unwittingly, had strayed by mistake.

‘And what,’ said Sister Joan, sitting back on her heels and looking up vaguely in the direction where most people envisage God as sitting, ‘am I supposed to do? This is a spiritual retreat, Lord, designed to enhance my inner strength and here I am being dragged into someone else’s problem again. What am I to do?’

The Creator appeared to be silent this morning. If He had had as fitful a sleep as herself she thought it very likely that He was having a lie-in.

During the night she had tossed and turned on the hard, narrow bed, the bitter words of Dolly McKensie echoing in her mind, the things she herself had seen replaying themselves like an old film over and over again in her mind. Sundry unconnected events had, she was certain, some common linkage. The cowled figure who rowed across the loch late in the evening, the body that had vanished from the crypt, the torn-off portion of what was clearly a love letter caught in the tree, Morag’s belief that Dolly had killed her husband, Dolly’s belief that the said husband had been having an affair with Catherine Sinclair – somewhere they were all joined in what Sister Joan feared was an unholy union.

She had been on her knees since before five and not a whisper of advice or comfort had come from anywhere.

‘When it seems that we receive nothing in answer to our prayers,’ her novice mistress had said once, ‘then we can be sure we are being tested. The soul must rise to sanctity without constant mollycoddling from heaven.’

‘A bit of heavenly mollycoddling wouldn’t come amiss just now,’ she muttered, rising and leaning to extinguish the last feeble flame of the burnt-out candle.

Since there evidently wasn’t going to be any then she was
thrown back on her own sadly inadequate resources. And that, she thought, deciding that any action was better than none, meant a visit to the manse. Morag had made her accusation surely in the knowledge that she would be expected to explain it; she too felt the need to confide in a stranger.

The rain still hung heavily on the air like a curtain of tiny droplets. The waters of the loch were ruffling up indignantly under the onslaught of the rising wind. Above the curtain of waiting rain the sky was a strange gun-metal grey, brooding, powerful. Sister Joan looked at it uneasily. She could feel the threat of storm running along her nerves. Sister Andrew would call this migraine weather. A good brisk walk would make her feel better, she decided, and warm her chilled hands and feet. She put on her coat, wrapped the heavy grey scarf over her veil and picked up her bag. Descending the slippery steps and the pine clad slope she turned to the right. It would take, she reckoned, a couple of hours to walk right round the loch to the manse. That ought to give the Creator time to decide if He wanted her to talk to Morag or not. If not then Morag wouldn’t be in.

Having placed the final responsibility firmly back in heaven she felt more cheerful. Walking was a splendid antidote to depression – not, she told herself hastily, that she was depressed. It was only that the demands of the outer world sometimes weighed a little heavily.

She crossed the bridge and continued walking, skirting the hill over which the village sprawled and taking the track that curved back towards the water. There were no fishing boats out this morning but she could see nets strung out over the low walls behind which a row of small, whitewashed cottages were set. A woman whom she recalled having seen at mass waved from her doorway and raised Sister Joan’s spirits even higher. Not everybody here had a rooted prejudice against nuns or a secret to conceal. She waved back and went on, the row of cottages diminishing as she left them behind. She felt warmer now but an ominous growling in her stomach reminded her that she had forgotten to eat any breakfast. She hoped that Morag would be in a hospitable mood but with the minister’s daughter there was never any telling what particular mood that young woman would be in.

She had rounded the top of the loch where it narrowed into rocks and a profusion of small waterfalls. She stood for a few moments, looking up at the fine spray which mingled with the mist and then flowed into the boulder strewn bed. There was a narrow railed path which avoided the downpour and took her on to the facing shoreline. The beach was narrower at this side, sloping up abruptly to a gravelled road bordered by massive trees whose exposed roots clung to the thin soil. The road was deserted and only a few dilapidated looking buildings were to be seen strung out along the shore. Further on she could see the wharf and the tangle of masonry and barbed wire that blocked access to the island.

She had reached the terraces below the grey house. Her legs were aching; when she went to teach at the moorland school she rode Lilith, the amiable pony of whom she had grown extremely fond. Riding Lilith struck her now as a most desirable alternative to plodding along.

‘For heaven’s sake, you never walked all the way round!’ The exclamation came from Morag who had just emerged from the front door and was staring down at her.

‘And I wasn’t even sponsored,’ Sister Joan quipped, tilting her head to bring into focus the tall girl in the thick sweater and ethnic styled skirt with its wide bands of embroidery.

‘A sense of humour, no less,’ Morag called down. ‘You’d better come in.’

Sister Joan mounted the terraces gratefully.

‘If you wanted to see my father he’s out for the day,’ Morag said. ‘I’m joining him this afternoon – monthly trip to Aberdeen. He has a committee meeting this morning so I begged off. I’ll drive in later. Father went on the early train.’

‘Do you go shopping in Aberdeen?’ Sister Joan asked, passing into the cold shadowed hall.

‘Sometimes. They have marvellous woven garments there, and sometimes I go to the cinema and sometimes I wander round the art galleries. It makes a change. In here.’

She had opened the sitting-room door and was ushering Sister Joan within. To the latter’s pleasure a fire blazed in the hearth and a pot of coffee stood at the side with an array of mugs.

‘I’m just having a snack. I never bother with breakfast,’
Morag said. ‘Will you have something?’

Side dishes held toast, scrambled eggs and mushrooms. Sister Joan nodded her thanks, blushing as her stomach rumbled again.

‘Help yourself. I generally eat here when Father’s away,’ Morag said. ‘It’s cosier than the dining-room. Don’t you eat breakfast either?’

‘I forgot.’

Morag glanced at her and uttered a short laugh. ‘You forgot to eat breakfast before you set out on a six-mile walk? You must have been very anxious to get here.’

‘I wasn’t very anxious to get here at all,’ Sister Joan said
frankly
, sitting down with her food. ‘I don’t mean that quite the way it sounds – I am pleased to find you in. At least I think I am. Oh dear, I’m not expressing myself very well. Look, I’d be happy to be here if I didn’t feel obliged to ask you what you meant when you said that Dolly McKensie had killed her husband.’

‘Did I really say that?’ Morag raised innocent eyes.

‘And for a reason.’ Sister Joan felt impatience bubble in her. ‘Miss Sinclair– Morag, you can’t toss a remark like that into the air and not expect to be asked about it. If you haven’t any
evidence
to back up your statement then it’s slander, and if you do have good reason then you ought to go to the police or the Sheriff.’

‘It isn’t slander if it’s true,’ Morag said, ‘and one day I might be in a position to prove it. Of course Dolly McKensie killed him.’

‘How do you know?’ Sister Joan enquired.

‘Because –’ Morag hesitated, then laid down her knife and fork, crossed to the door and closed it firmly. ‘Jeannie’s in the kitchen,’ she said, returning, ‘but I don’t want her to overhear anything. She might say something to Father and he’s the one person who mustn’t know.’

‘Oh dear,’ Sister Joan said softly.

‘My mother,’ Morag said tensely, ‘was having an affair with Alasdair McKensie. Six years ago when I was away at school – doing A Levels and looking forward to the jolly old hols she was – with Dolly McKensie’s husband.’

‘You knew that for certain?’

‘No, of course I didn’t – not then. Not until a couple of
years ago,’ Morag said impatiently.

‘Your mother died – a tragic accident.’

‘My mother killed herself,’ Morag said grimly. ‘Oh, nobody even suspected it at the time. She didn’t leave a note the way people usually do, and if she hadn’t been run down after a dose of flu the tablets she took wouldn’t have hurt her at all. The Coroner reckoned she’d taken the prescribed number of tablets to help her sleep, woke up later, forgotten she’d already taken them and swallowed more. And she’d had a hot toddy to soothe her throat just before she went to bed.’

‘Didn’t your father…?’ Sister Joan stopped, feeling acutely uncomfortable.

‘He was sleeping in one of the spare bedrooms because of the flu infection. He sometimes did that when he had a long sermon to prepare or a meeting to attend. He left her to sleep in but when she hadn’t rung her bell by ten o’clock he went up to make sure she was all right – and found her. He brought me home after the inquest for the funeral and I simply refused to go back. He couldn’t get his act together without Mother.’

‘Then surely it happened as the Coroner found,’ Sister Joan said. ‘The whisky in the hot toddy will have increased the effect of the tablets and it is very unwise to keep sleeping tablets by the bed. You have no reason to suppose that she took her own life, have you?’

‘I’m trying to tell you,’ Morag said angrily, her face flushing. ‘She had a lover – I didn’t realize it at the time but much later on I began to remember how different she was during that last holiday. I came home from school and she was – she was always pretty, but that last summer she was beautiful. She glowed. She was sometimes sharp in her manner but that summer she was gentler, dreamy. I was still friendly with Rory then and I used to feel a bit guilty sometimes because we’d go off together all day fishing and rock climbing and riding – we planned to start a stud farm when we’d finished school. Mother didn’t say one word about my neglecting her to run off with my friend and that wasn’t like her; she enjoyed having everybody’s attention focused on her. But she never even seemed to notice that I wasn’t there half the time.’

‘She realized you were growing up.’

‘She didn’t empathize with other people as a rule,’ Morag
said. ‘She was – self-centred. Father never saw it, of course, because he loved her so much that everything she did was perfect in his eyes.’

‘But they were happy together, surely?’ Sister Joan said.

‘They were happy but she was never radiant when Father was with her. It was different that last summer. I sensed the difference but I was so busy with my own affairs that I didn’t analyse the reason for it. And then I went back to school and just before the next vacation the headmistress sent for me and told me there’d been an accident – I took it as such. I really did. And then a couple of years ago …’ She stopped abruptly, leaning to pour more coffee for them both.

Sister Joan sat very still. It was too late to dam up the flood of confidences – confidences which she had invited by coming here, but at the same time she was ashamed to find in herself a dreadful curiosity that needed to be satisfied.

‘Father asked me if I’d go through Mother’s things,’ Morag said, resuming her seat. ‘Her clothes had been given to Oxfam – she was smaller and more rounded than I am so I could never wear anything of hers, but there were books and letters from old friends and her diaries – she always wrote up her diary.’

‘You read them, I suppose?’

‘She was dead,’ Morag said defensively, ‘but in any case there might have been an address she had scribbled down – some old friend who might not have been told she was dead. Anyway I skimmed through everything, and then I found the diary entries for the summer just before she – died. Very brief entries. Meeting A. Ten o’clock. Memo, leave back door on latch. That kind of thing.’

‘But surely your father’s name is Alexander – A.’

‘Why on earth would she need to remind herself in a diary that she was going to meet her own husband?’ Morag demanded sensibly.

‘I – suppose not,’ Sister Joan said unhappily.

‘Anyway I checked my father’s appointment book when he was out,’ Morag said, ‘and on every occasion she’d written “Meeting A” then he had a meeting or a service elsewhere. And on the day of the night she died that same entry was scrawled, “Meeting A. Ten o’clock”. Father was out that evening, sitting with an old lady who’d been very sick. He got
home at about eleven and he and Mother had a hot toddy together before she went up to bed.’

‘You didn’t tell him – ask him about the entries in the diary?’

Morag shook her dark head.

‘“A” could have been anyone, not necessarily a lover,’ Sister Joan said.

‘I asked Jeannie if my mother had gone out at all during that last evening,’ Morag said jerkily. ‘She told me that she’d gone for a stroll around nine o’clock, and come in again just before eleven, saying it was cold.’

‘And you think she went to meet this person she refers to in her diary?’

‘It figures, doesn’t it?’ Morag said. ‘And then I remembered that Dolly McKensie’s husband had gone missing though she thought he was working away and didn’t get round to reporting it for a week or two. He was always swanning off and leaving her and Rory by themselves.’

‘And your mother planned to go with him but changed her mind? That is another possible explanation,’ Sister Joan said. ‘If she really loved your father and you, why she very probably thought better of her impulse.’

‘And he went off by himself?’

‘They both thought better of it.’

‘If my mother had ever got to the point of deciding to run off with another man she wouldn’t have changed her mind because of what it might do to me or my father,’ Morag said. ‘She was self-centred, I told you. No, I think that she went to meet Alasdair McKensie and found him dead – or while they were together his wife came along and killed him. I don’t know. I do know that they were both connected – and don’t think I haven’t tried to think of some other explanation. But there isn’t any, Sister. One day some little piece of information will slot into place and show that Dolly McKensie killed her husband and my mother killed herself because of what she’d caused to happen.’