Vow of Sanctity Read Free

the enclosure. Are you sure you can cope with a bag? I can bring over the both if not.’
    ‘I’ll manage just fine,’ Sister Joan assured him.
    ‘Right then – see you later, Sister. Take care now.’
    He had relinquished the lighter of her bags and now strode off along the fringed shoreline, still carrying the heavier one. Under the hem of his brown habit his sandalled feet trod rapidly. It was obvious that punctuality was considered important. She turned back towards the cliff path and began to mount it, pleased to find that it was easily negotiable.
    It twisted back and forth between the trees, doubling back on itself at times, the gradient becoming almost imperceptibly steeper so that with a little shock she paused to catch her breath, suddenly aware that her feet were slipping on the sharp pine needles that littered the ground and that the shores of the loch were a long way below her. She set down her carpetbag on a bit of level ground and looked down through the trees to where the cliffs seemed to converge, the loch itself narrowing to a ribbon of glinting silver. From this height it was possible to see the spur of land that jutted out from the opposite shore to form what amounted to a virtualisland where the loch widened again, as it emerged from the outcroppings of rock and pine-clad slope below the scree and jagged peaks above the tree-line. She could see trees on the spur and the straight lines of stone walls and what could have been low stone buildings, but it was all too distant to make out in any detail. And it had nothing to do with her anyway save that it was pleasant to know that in an emergency she wouldn’t be completely alone.
    ‘And there is not,’ said Sister Joan aloud, ‘going to be any emergency, so let’s get on.’
    She bent, picked up her bag, and toiled on up the steepening path. If any elderly Daughter of Compassion wished to make a spiritual retreat, she reflected wryly, she’d do well to have a medical checkup first.
    The path had ended abruptly in what looked like a solid face of rock. She stared upward in dismay for a moment. Then she saw the steps – broad, shallow steps cut in the stone and rising upwards with an iron handrail on the side furthest from the rock.
    The steps twisted as they neared the top and ended at what reminded her of an illustration that had been in her childhood copy of The Piper of Hamelin. A door fixed in the mountainside would doubtless open to reveal the enchanted land beyond. Putting down her bag on the top step, Sister Joan lifted the huge iron latch with the same stir of excitement as the child Joan had once looked at the picture in her book, and stepped into a narrow passage – no more than a cleft in the rock.
    Within a couple of yards it widened into a cave, fairly spacious and with a reasonably level floor. She held her bag in front of her and manoeuvred it and her own slight frame into the larger space. Even with the door open it was dim after the sunlit landscape below but not uncomfortably dark. More light filtered through a slit in the rock. Again it was impossible to tell if it were man-made or natural, but it clearly served as a window. Stepping to it, Sister Joan looked out, first seeing only sky, and then as she shifted her head, watching the sweep of the loch as it wended its way, the open sea came into view. A look-out post for Vikings, she reminded herself, and felt a curious kinship with the long dead monkswho had taken their turn as look-out scouts, anxiously straining their gaze towards the sea, dreading the sight of a carved dragon prow breasting the waves.
    The cave was simply furnished. An iron bedstead with mattress and blankets – how, she wondered, had they managed to get it up the steps? – a primus stove, a shelf with some dishes and cups and cutlery ranged along it, a few hooks hammered into the wall, and at the back of the cave a shallow stone trough which formed a natural washbasin. There were also half a dozen large