Jennifer looked at her. ‘Yes. Very strange. That is, if she was not too ill to tell you, Celeste.’
The girl shook her head. ‘There were times – several times – when she was quite herself, when she could have told us anything. Indeed, we asked her ourselves if there was anyone we should get in touch with.’
‘Did you indeed?’ said Jennifer softly.
‘It’s usual,’ said Celeste, and turned back to the bowl of gentians. ‘And now, madame, I must go. I’m a bit late already.’ She pushed the last flowers into place, and got to her feet, but Jennifer put out a hand. ‘Just one more thing … I should have thanked you, too, for bringing these flowers for my cousin.’
‘It was nothing.’
‘It was a great deal, that you should have nursed her and – and comforted her.’ Jennifer hesitated, wondering how to go on.
The girl flushed and looked at her feet. ‘It was nothing,’ she said again. ‘I – I liked her.’ She looked up at Jennifer, and the lovely eyes were swimming with tears. ‘I am sorry, madame, indeed I am. And that you should have found it out – in this way—’ She made a little gesture, and bit her lip.
In the face of what was, patently, quite genuine distress, Jennifer hesitated again. And in that moment someone spoke from behind her.
‘Celeste!’
It was Doña Francisca’s voice, and at the sound the girl started and spun round, and the red ebbed from her cheeks as the foam blows from the wave. Jennifer was conscious of a slight constriction in her own breathing as she turned her head to watch the tall black figure of the bursar approaching across the grass. Annoyed at herself, she shook her uneasiness from her, and said, calmly: ‘I hope I haven’t made Celeste late for chapel, Doña Francisca. Sister Louisa told me how she helped you nurse my cousin, and I was thanking her.’
The hooded eyes met hers briefly. The Spaniard bent her head, then turned her gaze on the girl. ‘You should have been in your room half an hour ago, Celeste. Where have you been?’
The girl’s voice was low. ‘Gathering flowers for our sister Lamartine’s grave.’ She did not look at Doña Francisca. Her hands were nervously pleating the front of her dress.
There was a flash of something that might have been irritation in the woman’s eyes, but she spoke smoothly enough. ‘A kind thought, Celeste, but it should not have made you late. You must not let even a good impulse tempt you into neglect of what is your duty.’
‘No, señora.’ Celeste’s face was quite pale now, and she stared miserably at the ground.
‘Go at once and get ready for chapel.’ Doña Francisca looked blandly at Jennifer across the girl’s bent head. ‘And come and see me immediately after your meal, Celeste.’
‘Yes, señora.’
‘There’s just one thing—’ began Jennifer. Her voice was tight and a shade over-loud, but Doña Francisca’s clipped patrician command cut easily across it.
‘At once, Celeste.’
Jennifer’s cheeks flamed, but her voice held no hint of anger as she said calmly: ‘If you please, señora … Wait, Celeste!’ The bursar looked considerably taken aback, and the girl hesitated even as she turned to go. It could not be very often that Doña Francisca was answered back, thought Jennifer with a certain relish. She said quickly, almost humbly: ‘I should like to come back tomorrow, señora, if I may, to visit my cousin’s grave again, and say good-bye. I thought I might bring her some flowers.’
Doña Francisca was watching her steadily. ‘Of course. When you have got over the shock you have had today, you will perhaps think of more that you wish to know from us. Ask for me when you come.’
Royal permission and royal command … yes, I’m likely to, thought Jennifer. Aloud, she said: ‘Thank you, señora,’ and then, swiftly, to Celeste: ‘Why did you go out just now to get these gentians? I’d have thought the rambler-roses were just as—’
But the girl stepped back a pace with a small, shrinking movement. Her face, still pale, went blank, almost stupid, and in the lovely eyes flickered the unmistakable shadow of fear. She said hurriedly: ‘I – I’m allowed to go. Doña Francisca knows. She said I could.’
The bursar had not glanced at her. She was watching Jennifer, the dark eyes unreadable and unwavering in her still face.
She said, almost under her breath, ‘Go, Celeste.’
The girl turned and ran into the shadow of the chapel door just as, overhead, the bell in the tower began to ring for service. Jennifer turned to meet Doña Francisca’s dark intent gaze.
‘I’d better go too,’ she said. ‘Au revoir, señora.’
‘Au revoir, mademoiselle. And you will come tomorrow?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Jennifer. ‘I’ll come tomorrow.’
‘C’est bien,’ said Doña Francisca expressionlessly, as she turned to make her noiseless way across the grass after the girl. She vanished into the blackness of the chapel door.
Jennifer let herself quickly out through the wrought-iron gate into the spicy air of the garden. It shut behind her with a clang. The narrow shade of the archway dropped a band of coolness across the hot afternoon, and she paused inside it, leaning back against the bars of the gate. She found she was shaking all over; wave after wave of excitement, anger, and apprehension beat upon her mind, breaking with bewildering force across the emptiness left by the first numbing shock of grief. That had been a deadening blow; this, the reaction back towards a fearful and fantastic hope was, oddly enough, more terrible. Her whole body trembled uncontrollably; her hands clung to the bars behind her, pulling her back against the gate until the iron seemed to grow into her flesh; her heart, beating high and fast, seemed to tumble and thump anyhow through her body, now choking in her throat, now knocking against her ribs, now twisting with sickening little driving motions of pain deep in her stomach. And still she clung, her hands icy on the bruising bars. Her knees felt loose. She bit her lips to stop them from shaking, and she shut her eyes and held them shut.
And presently the tumult of mind and body began to subside. She leaned more naturally against the gate, muscle by muscle relaxing under the caress of the fragrant air. She opened her eyes and immediately, in a healing wash of warmth, the colour and scent of the garden swept up to her and engulfed her – catmint and crushed thyme, and the sharp sweet smell of apricots globed among glossy leaves; the homely friendliness of lavender and sage over whose silver leaves poppies dangled their sleep-drugged scarlet heads. A cicada, hidden in a peach-tree, purred softly. Jennifer let go of the gate, straightened up slowly, rubbing her hands together, and began, reasonably enough, to think.
And her first thought was the sufficiently overwhelming one that she had been right. What had started as premonition, grown through uneasiness into downright suspicion, had flowered now, unmistakably, as fact. There was something wrong. Whether or not her wild hope-driven guess had been right, whether or not the business of the gentians could be explained away, the demeanour of Doña Francisca at the second interview, no less than Celeste’s patent fear, showed that there was, indeed, something wrong. And she must find out what it was. That the bursar had no intention of letting her interview Celeste alone was certain: what was equally certain was Jennifer’s determination to do that very thing.
The chapel bell had stopped. She glanced towards the archway that gave on to the tunnel to the courtyard. The bell-rope was looped up, and still swung slightly. The tunnel was empty. Everyone would be in chapel, and, afterwards, Doña Francisca would talk to Celeste and warn her to answer no questions. It was also possible that, forewarned as she was, the Spaniard might be able to prevent Jennifer from seeing the Reverend Mother at all tomorrow.
Jennifer bit her lips again, this time in thought. Then she made her decision. For her own peace of mind, as much as for any other reason, she must make what inquiries she could today. She would stay here, hidden in the garden, until the service was over, and then, if it were possible, she would seek out the Mother Superior straight away, and question her frankly. Quite
frankly – because, said Jennifer firmly to herself, I refuse flatly to believe that the whole convent can be implicated in these lies. Sister Louisa is as honest as a daisy and as simple as God, and even Celeste seemed genuine up to a point; until, in fact, I asked her about the gentians. No, the Reverend Mother can’t be in it whatever it is – that would be pure Mrs. Radcliffe … I’ll see her after service, and find out what she has to say. At least she can let me see the ‘papers’ and whatever else Gillian is said to have brought with her …
The chanting from the chapel had stopped now, and the organ was weaving its way through something massive and slow, which reached the garden only in a series of vibrations surging through the ranked richnesses of herb and vine. Jennifer flattened herself once more against the gate as a shuffle of footsteps in the tunnel told of the worshippers going quietly across from the chapel to the refectory. She bent her head forward to peer through a masking vine. There were the blue-clad orphans; there were the white novices and the sombre nuns, filing across the tunnel in an orderly silence. The refectory door shut on the last nun. The watcher in the garden heard the children’s voices singing grace, and then the scrape of chairs or benches as the company sat down to table.
She slipped quietly back through the gate into the graveyard, and made her way over the grass to the chapel door. If she went through the chapel she had every chance of gaining the upper corridor without being seen, and she was sure that the big door she had noticed at the end of that corridor must be that of the Superior’s room. It seemed likely that the Reverend Mother would come out of the refectory first, and once Jennifer had approached her even the ubiquitous and apparently powerful bursar could hardly prevent an interview.
What exactly she hoped to gain by that interview was by no means certain, but, in her present state of bewilderment and suspicion, any sort of plan was better than none. It was with a lifting feeling of excitement that Jennifer softly opened the chapel door and passed in out of the sunlight.
7
The Jewels of the Madonna
As she plunged from the heat of the close into the dark-censed air of the chapel, she found time to wonder, half-idly, what sort of a shrine for worship the convent’s characteristic austerity would have made. The door, swinging shut behind her, lopped off its shaft of light abruptly, and for a few seconds she was blinded by the dimness. Then to her dazzled gaze the nave took shape … a side-aisle, with its little altar … the tiny transepts … the raised chancel … the high altar….
She stood rooted, staring.
Basically, the chapel was the same as the rest of the convent buildings; the walls were whitewashed, the arches of doors and windows simple, the stonework plain. The pillars stood sturdy and unadorned, and the Stations of the Cross lurked, dim and inoffensive, between the windows. The only statue was a small one of Our Lady on the single side-altar. But there austerity ended. Up the length of the nave, cutting the white simplicity in two with one arrogant crimson slash, a deep-red carpet ran like a river of blood, drawing the eye swiftly on towards the chancel as the stroke on a flower’s petal guides the bee straight into the gold. Past the sturdy pillars, between the plain benches, up the chancel steps, into the shadowy cave of the apse where the sanctuary-lamp glimmered above the high altar …
Jennifer went quickly up the aisle and mounted the chancel steps. She paused at the low rail, beautifully carved of some dark wood, and stood, again to gaze.
It was gold, sure enough, that the crimson arrow led to; the seven-branched sanctuary-lamp was of gold, and so were the heavy twin arms of the candlesticks, but it was not these that caught and held the eye. Behind and above the high altar, away from the wall, but acting as reredos and east-window at once, was a great triptych, its three paintings heavily framed in grey and blue. And here, in the towering rush of flames and wings and the ecstasies of saints even Jennifer’s half-educated eye could trace the hand of a master whose work was not commonly shrined in such places as this. Those soaring visionary gestures, the angular robes, the slashing diagonals of silver and purple and acid yellow … who on earth, she thought confusedly, had hidden one of the world’s El Grecos in this comparative oblivion? Was there not someone – here her thoughts became, if possible, vaguer yet – were there no museums, galleries, the great churches of his own Toledo, who might stop this burying of masterpieces alive?
She pressed the palms of her hands to her eyes, and then blinked up at the picture again. Masterpiece? El Greco? It was absurd, of course. This couldn’t possibly be an El Greco. Not here. It was some trick of memory, no more. But the impression persisted. Surely she could not be wrong? Of all painters, El Greco was the least mistakable. And could a copy or an imitation rouse in the onlooker that queer breathless mixture of exaltation and humility with which we find ourselves studying the best things men have made with their hands? Even as she stared at the picture, Jennifer recognized this as a fallacy; to an inexperienced eye like hers a good copy would doubtless speak as loudly of beauty as the master’s own handiwork. No, she had no means of telling. But whether this was a first-rate copy, or the thing itself; it was surely sufficiently surprising to find it here in a community that elsewhere seemed to underline its poverty?
She peered at the corners of the darkening paint, in the slender hope of some closer identification, but could see no name. Then with some confused memory of painters who marked their canvases on the back, she stepped past the altar, and peered at the back of the left-hand panel, where the side of the triptych stood clear of the wall. The frame was solidly backed, and the reverse of the canvas, in consequence, hidden. Jennifer, peering in the dim light, ran a disappointed finger down the joint of the frame. It encountered something, a paper or fragment of soft wood, sticking out between frame and backing. Pressing her head closer to the wall, and exerting her eyes in the gloom, she could just see what looked like the fraying edge of a paper whose corner was escaping from its hiding-place. She plucked at it carefully with her nails, and presently, with some excitement, drew it out.
Just what she expected to see she had no idea; if she had stopped to think she would have known how remote were the chances of finding an identifying paper tucked into a frame at least three centuries younger than the canvas. But she carried the paper to the chancel steps, where the light was better, and smoothed it out with slightly unsteady fingers. It was yellowed and dirty, and tore a little along the crease as she unfolded it. It appeared to be a letter, or part of a letter, written in French:
‘– C’est alors après avoir reçu l’assurance de notre ami mutuel que j’ai osé vous approcher …’
With rapidly dwindling interest she read on:
‘– So it was with the assurance of this mutual friend that I approached you. I am relieved to hear that you are willing, and suppose it inevitable in the circumstances that you should set your terms so high. This, then, finally: – I shall come as arranged on the night of the sixth September, and I will pay you three million francs, this being the sum agreed upon previously.
‘I note your instructions about baggage. In the circumstances they are not exactly necessary.
ISAAC LENORMAND.’
That was all; a modern idiom, an unmistakably modern hand, a signature that meant nothing. Jennifer knitted her brows over it for a moment; should she attempt to restore it to its hiding-place? Probably in any case, she thought, not strictly a ‘hiding-place’ – the letter had undoubtedly been pushed in merely to wedge the frame, which gaped a little at that point. It could hardly matter. But perhaps …
A movement, a slight sound from the dim aisle of the Lady-chapel, set her heart unaccountably scudding. She thrust the already-forgotten scrap of paper into her pocket, and descended the chancel steps, annoyed that the hush and mystery of the chapel should, apparently, have brought back all the tremors she had been trying to put aside. She glanced into the Lady-chapel and saw that what had alarmed her was only a girl in a blue cotton dress, who was kneeling at the edge of the little pool of li
ght that bathed the Virgin’s statue; it was one of the orphans, who had crept in quietly to pray while Jennifer had been in the chancel.
She glanced curiously at the smaller altar, to see that here too the lavish hand had been at work, for the little statue was finely made of bronze and ivory, and tiny jewels winked on the hilt of the sword that pierced the Virgin’s heart. Notre-Dame-de-Douleur … an odd choice, surely, for a children’s chapel? Jennifer turned to hurry down the nave, chiding herself for having wasted so much time, but as she moved away the kneeling girl crossed herself and stood up. It was Celeste.
Jennifer, elated at the luck which had sent the girl across her path before the bursar had had a chance to see her, stopped at the back of the chapel and waited. Celeste genuflected deeply in front of the statue, then came swiftly down the aisle and turned towards the north door.
She checked when she saw the other waiting there.
‘Ah, Celeste,’ said Jennifer, gently, ‘I was hoping to see you again.’
‘But – but mademoiselle, I thought you had gone!’
‘No doubt. But I am still here, as you see. If you will be so good as to answer one or two questions—’
The uneasiness was flickering again, unmistakable, in the lovely eyes. ‘I don’t think – I must not—’ began the girl nervously.
Jennifer said, roundly: ‘Were you telling me the truth this afternoon, Celeste, when you said that Madame Lamartine had never once mentioned her English relatives, even when you asked her?’
The girls eyes widened. ‘But yes, mademoiselle! Of course! If she had told us—’
‘Quite. But it seems to me quite impossible that she should not have done so, if, as you say, she was conscious and lucid at all. But if she did not – it did occur to me that there might be an explanation for this.’
‘Mademoiselle?’