Leonora Read Online Free Page B

fingernails. What must their toenails look like? Leonora suspiciously avoids them as she does her classmates. She prefers the company of the sidhes . Mischievous and miniature, their accomplice Leonora instructs them to play with the nuns’ rosary beads, tug at their veils, or untie their shoelaces. Tomorrow they are bound to put salt in the jam at breakfast time.
    â€˜Mother Superior smells like a goat.’
    â€˜The devil too is a black goat.’
    Leonora would like to befriend another restless soul but she can’t find a single one.
    Her secret is to be different.
    â€˜Silence!’
    Silence engenders introspection. Or sleepiness.
    Several of them fall asleep like cows during meditation hour.
    Anything that breaks the everyday rhythm is unsettling. Leonora is capable of writing ambidextrously, even of writing backwards with her left hand. In earliest childhood her governess attempted to tie one hand behind her. But she takes up her pencil with her right hand and draws, then does so with her left, only better, using both hemispheres of her brain. The nuns consider her a queer fish. From the start Nanny had told her: ‘Only very few people can do what you do, it’s a gift, and when you write left-handed you do so without wobbles or scribbles or a single mistake.’ The nuns consider that, along with being a rebel, Leonora has some kind of a mental defect, since nobody can write and draw with both hands.
    In the seventeenth century, Lancashire was a notorious centre of witchcraft. It lay under a layer of soot and its Neolithic boulders bore witness to its pagan past. Betrothed to Beelzebub, the witches in their towers transformed men into pigs or wolves. On the ground lie ancient stone wheels with strange hieroglyphs carved into them, and it is an historical fact that twelve persons accused of sorcery were hung one dawn on Pendle Hill. Even today, a tall dark tower rises over Lancaster and they say that cries and lamentations can be heard coming from its dungeons, where the prisoners were held until their death.
    The Mother Superior becomes convinced that Leonora must be rusticated: this belief is further corroborated when one day the Mother Superior falls ill with flu, and Leonora relays a message informing her that a wagtail had landed upon her windowsill from Ireland to proclaim her imminent death.
    â€˜Reverend Mother, you have but a few days to live.’
    â€˜Child, the Mother Superior awaits you in her office.’
    â€˜Did she not die?’
    The father confessor and all the nuns of the Convent of the Holy Sepulchre determine to expel her. When she hears her sentence, Leonora holds her head up as high as would Winkie, her mare.
    â€˜In addition to her extremely unusual conduct, your daughter has not managed to make a single friend, thus showing herself incapable of integrating into our community.’ So the Mother Superior informs Harold Wilde-Carrington.
    He becomes enraged with Leonora and tells her: ‘You are a truly impossible child.’
    Leonora is a floating leaf of paper that will combust itself, without anyone being able to do anything about it. Neither her mother nor her father can do a thing to avert a conflagration.
    Thanks to the intervention of the Roman Catholic Bishop of Lancaster, who takes tea with the Carrington family, Leonora is admitted to a second convent school, that of St. Mary’s, Ascot. There, too, the nuns prove to be addicted to the crown of thorns.
    After the black veils, blood stains.
    Maurie insists upon a single room for her daughter and in so doing unwittingly separates her from the other girls.
    The teacher points at a desk at the back of the classroom and interrogates the new pupil from her podium:
    â€˜What are you doing, Carrington?’
    â€˜Drawing horses.’
    She is immediately moved to the front row, where a strict eye is kept on her.
    â€˜Why do you insist upon being different?’ the Mother Superior reprimands