Leonora Read Online Free Page A

corridors, stories are related of a nun whom the bishop himself visits. She bears the stigmata and every year during Holy Week the wounds made by the nails piercing her hands and feet open, and her side flows with black and viscous blood.
    Leonora spends many hours in the chapel, inflamed by her devotion to the saints. She closes her eyes before the altar. She acquires the absolute conviction that her feet no longer touch the floor and she is levitating.
    With her eyes tight shut, she informs the Mother Superior: ‘Mother I have just levitated.’ She also tells her that she can hear the plants grow at night and that she has seen a tiny tiger rowing his raft across the holy water stoup.
    â€˜If I enter the convent and make my vows, shall I become a saint?’
    â€˜It’s out of the question that a disobedient child and a fantasist such as you could make a saint!’
    â€˜Joan of Arc is my source of inspiration, and I burn as fervently as she ever did!’
    â€˜It is your pride that tells you this.’
    The girl terrifies the Mother Superior, her behaviour ruffles the smooth surface of her certainties. She is different to the other girls in that she is slow to obey, as if she were leading a life apart. She suddenly breaks into prayer in a sonorous voice, finishing well after the others, her final Amen echoing back from the stained glass windows. What world is she living in? She unexpectedly punctuates the silent periods with incomprehensible pronouncements. ‘Ninety-nine horses in sheep’s clothing have just entered the chapel,’ she informs everyone. ‘Let’s go and play at being shepherdesses.’
    The Reverend Mother is never pleased to cross her path. Impossible to catch hold of, furtive, light as a spirit, you never hear her approach. Mother Teresa watches her run in the garden or kneel in the chapel, and wishes she could make her disappear. In the refectory, while a nun reads aloud the life of Jesus, Leonora keeps her eyes glued to her and forgets to eat, or else interrupts inappropriately. ‘Was Christ a man or a crucifix?’, or ‘What is the purpose of the mortification of the flesh?’
    â€˜May she depart from here rapidly! Her parents sent her to us to be turned into someone else. How can someone so far down the road into eccentricity become someone different?’
    Her classmates don’t like her any better, she is a pariah who does not know what it means to belong to the upper classes, nor to be educated in this British convent school for the daughters of the privileged.
    Leonora turns down shared daily duties and refuses to play with the others during break times. One girl vows she has seen her talking to herself. It is hard to engage with her inflammatory personality. Her eyes resemble two black billy goats – or black cats – or black bulls about to charge. She talks about the strangest things, and hides herself away in order to draw pictures of animals with human faces in her exercise book. She reddens the eyes of her horses and wild boars with blood-vermilion ink she makes herself, and she announces she’s not afraid of them, or witches, or ghosts. ‘Leonora has made a pact with the devil!’ In the convent there is always more talk of the devil than of Jesus Christ.
    Long ago, witches were burned at the stake in Lancaster’s main square. The enclosed order of nuns are the brides of God or Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, or at least of St. Joseph. They undertake life in their cloister as if possessed, and awaken each morning with dark shadows under their eyes. They eat the same food as the girls. Leonora knows as much because she has seen the Reverend Mother at the porter’s lodge with a spinach leaf caught between her teeth. Occasionally, a lock of curly hair escapes from beneath their coifs. So they do have hair? They smell of sweat when the hour of the Angelus sounds. Their work-worn hands are tipped with blackened