Vow of Chastity Read Free Page A

spilled the water and disposed of the flowers,’ Sister Margaret said, looking slightly uncertain. ‘While I’m about it I’d better jot down a note to buy more candles. Sometimes I think we must eat candles – they vanish so fast.’
    ‘Do they?’ Sister Joan cast a frowning look towards the box where the candles were kept and followed the lay sister into the corridor.
    ‘I do beg your pardon, Sister,’ the other said, pausing suddenly, ‘but I caused you to break the grand silence by talking to you. Happily there’s general confession this evening so I won’t have it on my conscience for too long. Just one other thing. I’d take it very kindly if you didn’t mention the little chats – I’d not want anyone to think that I was setting myself up to be singular or anything like that. So, now for the new day.’
    She clumped ahead, lifting the large bell from its hook by the door, beginning to ring it as she mounted the main staircase, her cheerful voice booming, ‘Christ is risen.’
    ‘Thanks be to God,’ Sister Joan responded automatically , following, closing the door of her cell behind her just as the scattered voices began to chorus their sleepy replies.
    She felt sleepy herself now but two hours’ prayer lay ahead before the night’s fast was broken with a cup ofcoffee, a slice of bread and a piece of fruit, eaten standing according to the rule. She sloshed cold water over her face, dried it on the small towel, cleaned her teeth, wriggled out of nightgown and dressing-gown and into the ankle length grey habit and exchanged the cotton nightcap for coif and short veil, marvelling as she always did that she could achieve perfect neatness without the aid of a mirror. During her postulence the art of doing that as efficiently as the professed nuns had seemed as impossible an ambition as learning how to levitate.
    When she re-entered the chapel she glanced at the Lady Altar and saw that the vase already held daffodils again, their golden heads drooping forlornly as if they knew that Sister Margaret’s chapped and unskilful hands had pushed them in.
    Saturday meant no school, no ride across the moor on Lilith’s broad back. Saturday meant helping Sister David to catalogue the library which was extensive and would take several more years to get into perfect order. It meant preparing her lessons for the following week, making lists of school supplies to be obtained. It meant the general confession at the end of the day – an ordeal at the best of times but doubly to be dreaded when she had so much on her conscience.
    The day went too quickly. Time always sped past when she was in the library under any circumstances and the sorting and cataloguing of the volumes bequeathed by the Tarquin family was an absorbing task.
    ‘Anything of an equivocal nature is to be set aside for my consideration,’ the prioress had said.
    ‘Out with Jackie Collins and in with Barbara Cartland,’ Sister Joan had murmured to Sister Teresa who had looked suitably shocked and then giggled, earning herself an icy look from Mother Dorothy.
    At 12.30 was the first real meal of the day – soup in winter, salad with cheese or fish in summer, two thick slices of bread and nice cold water with a spoonful of honey since Sister Perpetua believed in its youth giving qualities.
    In the afternoon she took herself back to the libraryarmed with a pile of exercise books and a red pencil. The little local school where she taught had been endowed originally for the Tarquin family’s tenants whose children found it difficult in the era before buses to get to the school in Bodmin. It still remained, attended by the younger children of local farmers and intermittently by the Romany children when they weren’t off playing truant and poaching. Sister Joan enjoyed the work though she often wondered if anything she tried to drum into the heads of her pupils would ever be of the slightest use to them in after years.
    For homework during the week she