The Abbess of Crewe Read Online Free Page B

bustling in, as
     she does, late for Mass, bleary-eyed for Prime, straggling vaguely through the Divine
     Office. One who has never observed a strict ordering of the heart can never exercise
     freedom.’
    ‘She keeps her work-box tidy,’ Mildred says. ‘She’s very
     particular about her work-box.’
    ‘Felicity’s sewing-box is the precise measure of her love and her
     freedom,’ says Alexandra, so soon to be Abbess of Crewe. ‘Her sewing-box is
     her alpha and her omega, not to mention her tiny epsilon, her iota and her omicron. For
     all her talk, and her mooney Jesuit and her pious eyelashes, it all adds up to
     Felicity’s little sewing-box, the norm she departs from, the north of her compass.
     She would ruin the Abbey if she were elected. How strong is her following?’
    ‘About as strong as she is weak. When it comes to the vote she’ll
     lose,’ Mildred says.
    Walburga says sharply, ‘This morning the polls put her at forty-two per cent
     according to my intelligence reports.’
    ‘It’s quite alarming,’ says Alexandra, ‘seeing that to be the
     Abbess of Crewe is my destiny.’ She has stopped walking and the two nuns have
     stopped with her. She stands facing them, drawing their careful attention to herself,
     lighthouse that she is. ‘Unless I fulfil my destiny my mother’s labour pains
     were pointless and what am I doing here?’
    ‘This morning the novices were talking about Felicity,’ Mildred says. She was
     seen from their window wandering in the park between Lauds and Prime. They think she had
     a rendezvous.’
    ‘Oh, well, the novices have no vote.’
    ‘They reflect the opinions of the younger nuns.’
    ‘Have you got a record of all this talk?’
    ‘It’s on tape,’ says Mildred.
    Walburga says, ‘We must do something about it.’ Walburga’s face has a
     grey-green tinge; it is long and smooth. An Abbess needs must be over forty years, but
     Walburga, who has just turned forty, has no ambition but that Alexandra shall be elected
     and she remain the Prioress.
    Walburga is strong; on taking her final vows she brought to the community an endowment of
     a piece of London, this being a section of Park Lane with its view of Rotten Row,
     besides an adjoining mews of great value. Her strength resides in her virginity of heart
     combined with the long education of her youth that took her across many an English quad
     by night, across many a campus of Europe and so to bed. A wealthy woman, more than most,
     she has always maintained, is likely to remain virgin at heart. Her past lovers had been
     the most learned available; however ungainly, it was invariably the professors, the more
     profound scholars, who attracted her. And she always felt learned herself, thereafter,
     by a kind of osmosis.
    Mildred, too, has brought a fortune to the Abbey. Her portion includes a sizeable block
     of Chicago slums in addition to the four big flats in the Boulevard St Germain. Mildred
     is thirty-six and would be too young to be a candidate for election, even if she were
     disposed to be Abbess. But her hopes, like Walburga’s, rest on Alexandra. This
     Mildred has been in the convent since her late schooldays; it may be she is a nourisher
     of dreams so unrealizable in their magnitude that she prefers to keep them in mind and
     remain physically an inferior rather than take on any real fact of ambition that would
     defeat her. She has meekly served and risen to be Novice Mistress, so exemplary a nun
     with her blue eyes, her pretty face and nervous flutter of timidity that Thomas the
     Jesuit would at first have preferred to take her rather than Felicity. He had tried,
     following her from confession, waiting for her under the poplars.
    ‘What did you confess?’ he asked Mildred. ‘What did you say to that
     young priest? What are your sins?’
    ‘It’s between myself and God. It is a secret.’
    ‘And the priest? What did you tell that young confessor of your secrets?’
    ‘All my