Within the abbey, the hush that normally lay over everything was greater, heavier. When the bells tolled, it seemed the sounds tore through the silence. There were no readers during the meals, and even during Recreation, any conversations were held in hushed whispers.
“Do you think she’ll recover?” asked one of the postulants tearfully from the shadows of the cloistered walk.
“Of course she will,” answered Sister Danielle, the current postulant mistress.
But Pip walked by them to the garden accompanied by Sister Mary David, eight years her junior, who was shaking her head.
“I don’t think so,” Sister Mary David said once they were out of earshot. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I overheard Sister Angelica talking to the doctor. He said Mother Felicita’s heart attack was massive.” She steered them into a quiet corner of the garden. “When I was a nurse, I often had these patients. If they don’t have a second heart attack, they’re usually so weakened that they die of something like pneumonia.”
Pip couldn’t help thinking of her father, wondering if that’s what it had been like for him. “She’s been abbess so long, I think half the community entered under her leadership. Some of us have never known another abbess or been through the vote.”
Sister Mary David nodded. “This kind of change can shake a community for sure.”
“Why do these things always seem to happen in clusters?” Pip asked. “With Watergate and Nixon, the outside world already is tilting toward something the country has never dealt with, and now it feels as though we’re doing the same internally.”
Sister Mary David shrugged. “Why would what’s happening out in the world affect us?”
“You weren’t here during the turmoil of the sixties,” Pip said darkly. “Remember when the Pope died in the middle of Vatican II? It shook things up, but then when King and Kennedy were shot, it felt as if the walls might crumble.”
“You take too much on,” Sister Mary David said. “There’s only so much we can control. This monastery has been through this many times, and it probably felt this scary every time. Right now, what we can do is pray for Mother Felicita’s recovery.”
Pip sighed. “You’re right. You always make so much sense when I get carried away with things.”
“Life is easier when you focus on what’s right in front of you.”
Pip turned around.
“Where are you going?”
“To the Chapel. To focus.”
In her stall, Pip did pray for Mother Felicita. She had a sinking feeling that, in the awful event that anything happened, Sister Beatrice had already been covertly building support for her own rise to the office of abbess.
In the three years that Pip had served as cellarer, she had become much closer to Mother Felicita, had seen first-hand the worry and the stress as the abbess fretted over how to keep the monastery solvent—“and relevant,” Mother had often said—in an era of declining vocations and more civic unrest. Mother Felicita had come to rely on Pip, not just for accurate bookkeeping, but for advice on the abbey’s finances.
“You have a good head for numbers,” Mother Felicita had observed. “You would have done well in business.”
“I did do well in business,” Pip had admitted, the first time she’d opened up to Mother about her family’s business ventures. “The bakery was becoming very successful when I decided to enter.”
She didn’t mention her brother’s resentment.
“I was truly sorry about your father, Sister Theodora.” It had been the first time the topic had come up since that horrible day.
Pip had kept her eyes lowered. “I understand, Mother. You have the entire community to consider.”
“Exactly.” Mother Felicita’s voice had been earnest. “I think you will know, one day, what it means to have to balance the good of the community over individual concerns.”
But “three years as cellarer is more than long enough,” Sister Beatrice had declared as the next assignment of duties drew near. “It is unseemly for one person to be given preferential treatment, no matter the reasons.”
Mother Felicita had had no choice, not without looking as if she were choosing a favorite, and so Pip had been reassigned to the kitchen where Sister Wilhelmina was happy to put her back in charge of baking.
“The others have been following your recipe, but they don’t have your touch with the dough.”
To be honest, it was a welcome respite to Pip, too. She hadn’t realized how heavy the weight of being cellarer had been until it was gone. She’d found herself worrying sometimes about whether Sister Amelia, the new cellarer, was keeping everything in order for Mother, but gradually, as the abbey chugged along without collapsing into financial ruin, she’d been able to let the worry go. She lost herself in happy memories as she mixed and kneaded the dough and rolls for the community, letting her mind wander to Maggie and Felicia, wondering where they were and how they were doing.
It was July, during the peach harvest, when she was helping to put up preserves and make peach butter, that she’d had a thought.
“Sister,” she said to Sister Wilhelmina, “we sell these and our apple butter seasonally, along with the cheese we make, but what if we made extra bread and rolls. Do you think we could sell those as well?”
“Now there’s a thought.” Sister Wilhelmina’s sleeves were rolled up, her ruddy cheeks glistening with sweat as she stirred a large pot of peaches while Pip slowly added the pre-measured mixture of sugar and spices. “Why don’t you bring it to Mother?”
“Oh,” Pip faltered. “I think it would be better, if you really do think we could do it, for you to make the suggestion.”
Sister Wilhelmina fixed her with a knowing gaze. “Don’t let her push you, gal.”
Startled, Pip almost tipped the entire bowl of sugar into the pot. “What do you mean?”
“I entered with her, didn’t I? Sister Beatrice. She’s been the same ever since our first day. Got to make a target out of someone.” She laughed and stirred. “Have to say, she zeroed in on you from the start and never moved on.”
She paused and straightened, stretching her back with a groan. “She backs down when you stand up to her. I know.”
“But she always reminds me I’m supposed to obey my superiors.”
“Sup—” Sister Wilhelmina mopped her face. “We take a vow of obedience, not subservience. And,” she jabbed a finger at Pip, “we’re to obey those who have the authority to ask us to do something. You’re fully professed, same as her.”
She grabbed the paddle and resumed stirring. “You had the stuffing knocked out of you when your father died. Don’t you think it’s time you found your spine again?”
When Pip just stared at her, she shook her head. “More sugar.” Pip complied. “Just because I’m here in the kitchen most of the time doesn’t mean I don’t see things. You’ve been like a ghost around here the last few years. Floating about, doing what you’re told, hoping no one sees you. But they do, and that’s what she can’t stand. You go to Mother with your idea. If she gives the go-ahead, we’ll make it happen.”
But before Pip could do just that, word spread through the community the next morning that Mother Felicita hadn’t come to the Chapel for Lauds. Pip and the others working in the kitchen got the news as the community filed in for breakfast that Mother had been found in her room, collapsed on the floor.
In the days since, everything felt unsettled for the nuns. On the eighth day after the abbess’s collapse, Sister Ann Francis summoned the community to the common room.
“Sisters,” she began, her eyes reddened, her voice tremulous, “I know you’ve all been praying for our dear Mother, as I have, but it seems that her health is becoming more precarious. The doctors have urged her to go the hospital, but she says she wishes to be here, among her sisters when the Lord calls her home. Father William has already administered Last Rites and heard her confession, so she is at peace. I ask you all to pray that her passing is peaceful.”
At those words, her composure broke. She pressed a handkerchief to her eyes for a moment. When she could speak again, she said, “I know you have already been keeping a prayer vigil round the clock, but the work of the abbey—the Office and our manual work—must all continue. Please keep our dearest Mother in your prayers at all times.”
When she dismissed them, Pip returned to the kitchen, but it wasn’t only Mother Felicita she prayed for.
“Subvenite Sancti Dei,
occurrite Angeli Domini:
Suscipientes animam ejus:
Offerentes eam in conspectu Altissimi.”
The community sang as Mother Felicita’s plain wooden coffin was carried into the Chapel by eight of the nuns and placed on a bier near the altar. A simple, unadorned covering of white linen, newly woven in the vestment room, was draped over the casket. The bishop had come to co-celebrate the Requiem Mass with Father William, and the public chapel was overflowing with people.
“An abbess’s reach is always farther than most realize,” the old nuns, those who recalled monastic life under prior abbesses, counseled the younger.
The nuns’ voices, though there were a few sniffles, echoed to the vaulted roof, augmented by glorious harmonies from a small choir chosen by Sister Thérèse, the precentrix.
“Remember,” she’d said to them, “this is for Mother.”
Pip was one of the eight to bear Mother Felicita into the Chapel for the last time. Upon hearing the news, she’d gone straight to the abbess’s office, only to hesitate outside the door. There was no abbess, and she had no idea if the prioress, Sister Ann Francis, had an office. She’d knocked anyway, and found herself face to face with Sister Beatrice.
“What are you doing here?” Sister Beatrice demanded.
Pip had stared at her for a moment and had nearly retreated, but she heard Sister Wilhelmina’s words, “You’re fully professed, same as her.”
She’d drawn herself up. “I was about to ask you the same thing.”
Sister Beatrice’s eyes flashed, but Pip shifted to the side and saw Sister Ann Francis at Mother Felicita’s desk. Pushing past Sister Beatrice, Pip strode to the desk and bowed.
“I’m sorry to bother you at such a time, Sister,” Pip had begun, ignoring the hovering presence of Sister Beatrice behind her, “but I wanted to ask if I could be one of Mother’s pallbearers.”
“How dare you come to bother us at this time with such an impertinent request!” Sister Beatrice had stepped up to the desk and opened her mouth to continue her protests.
“I’m not speaking to you,” Pip had cut in. “I’m speaking to our prioress, who stands in place of the abbess.” Turning back to Sister Ann Francis, she continued, “If you’ve already chosen others, I understand, but I would be honored to be among those who will carry her to her final Mass and to the cemetery.”
Sister Ann Francis, looking slightly overwhelmed, judging from her wide eyes as she stared helplessly at the heaps of papers spread all over the desk, had only nodded and started to jot on a paper Pip recognized as the abbey’s oil bill.
“May I?” She reached into a tray on the desk and tugged out a fresh sheet of paper. Titling it, Pallbearers, she wrote her own name. “Would you like for me to arrange the others?”
“Thank you, Sister.” Sister Ann Francis looked relieved to have that task taken off her hands.
“I’ll take care of it.”
During the Mass, Pip couldn’t help but pity Sister Ann Francis, in the abbess’s stall, her thin voice warbling as she led the community through the chant.
When the Mass was finished, the eight once again picked up the wooden casket and carried it out, through the enclosure garden, and up the hill to the monastery’s cemetery with the rest of the community following. Pip had processed up this hill several times for other burials in the years she’d been at St. Bridget’s, but those had all been for the old nuns, the ones whose passing had most often been a blessing, a welcome passing into God’s hands. None she’d experienced thus far had shaken the community as this one was.
The abbey’s caretaker had already dug a grave, and the skies overhead were dark, heavy with clouds ready to loose a deluge. They set the coffin down beside the grave for a final blessing before lowering it into the ground. There were audible sobs from many as the nuns walked back down the hill, leaving it to the caretaker to fill in the grave.
“What now?” asked one of the novices, her eyes red with crying.
“Now,” said a voice Pip didn’t immediately recognize, “we will have a week of mourning and preparation, and then we’ll vote on a new abbess.”
She turned to see who had spoken and saw it was Sister Scholastica, a nun a few years ahead of her. It was funny, she realized, that even in a community of just over a hundred women, she could have been here all this time and still not have had any more than passing contact with some of the nuns.
“So pray,” said Sister Alban, who’d come up beside Pip.
“Pray for what?” asked the novice.
“That we make a good choice.”
Whispered conversations, small groups of nuns congregated in isolated corners, the atmosphere of nerves and uncertainty—by the time the week ended, the entire community was more than ready to vote and to regain some semblance of stability.
The following Saturday, the nuns gathered in the common room immediately following Mass, with all work suspended for the day.
“As has been our tradition,” Sister Ann Francis said, “only the professed sisters may vote, both those under simple and solemn vows. The ballots will be cast secretly, the names read aloud for the entire community to hear, and voting will continue until one candidate has the support of two-thirds of the community, or seventy-three votes.”
A couple of the nuns began passing out ballots.
“You will note,” Sister Ann Francis continued, “that only the names of those nuns who are twenty years or more fully professed are on the ballot. This is also according to our rule.” She folded her hands. “Before we begin, let us pray.”
Thus began a very long day. As Pip had expected, Sister Beatrice had built up a cohort of support, but Pip was very glad to see Sister Xavier and Sister Ann Francis each with more votes than Sister Beatrice. A handful of other nuns also received votes in the first two ballots. She had thought, perhaps, they would slowly begin to eliminate those who hadn’t received as many votes, but it proved not to be necessary. The votes quickly coalesced between Sister Xavier and Sister Ann Francis, and Pip couldn’t deny she was glad to see Sister Beatrice cheeks turning a strange puce as she saw her chances of becoming abbess vaporize.
At last, Sister Benedicta and Sister Isadore tallied up the fifth round of ballots and conferred with each other while the community watched anxiously. Sister Isadore nodded, and Sister Benedicta stood.
“Benedicite sorore nostra, Domine. Ann Francis abbatissa est.”
Sister Ann Francis sat stock-still, looking as if she were in shock. The following day, the bishop returned to St. Bridget’s to certify the vote and to bestow the abbatial blessing on the new abbess. Sister Ann Francis sat in the abbess’s chair, holding the crosier—normally placed in a small side alcove off the main Chapel dedicated to Our Lady—that the bishop had newly blessed, while the community sang, “Te Deum laudamus: te Dominum confitemur. Te æternum Patrem omnis terra veneratur.”
Following Mass, each nun knelt to place her hands between Mother Ann Francis’s, pledging obedience to the new abbess.
When it came Pip’s turn, she knelt and immediately felt the tremor in the older nun’s hands. “Reverend Mother Ann Francis, you have my pledge of obedience. God bless you.”
Mother Ann Francis gave her a tremulous smile and squeezed her hands for a moment before Pip rose.