A NUN PEERED ROUND THE RIBBED OAK DOOR.
She opened it a little, and I stepped in.
She didn’t ask me anything. She just laid her calm hands on my aching shoulders and gazed at me. Then, without moving her head at all, she raised her eyes to heaven and very slightly smiled. I thought she looked like Mary.
She led me to a little fountain, its water plashing into a stone basin. Oh! I sank my face into it. My whole head. I tried to wash away everything.
“Thank you,” I said. “God go with you!”
The nun looked puzzled. “Govorite li engleski?”
“What? Is that…”
“Slavonic, yes. You speak English?”
“I am English,” I said eagerly.
She gazed at me, eyes shining; then she raised her eyes to heaven again, and smiled blissfully.
“I never meet English,” she said. “I study English. You know Oxford.”
“Well, I know about Oxford,” I replied. “Schoolmen.”
The nun clapped her hands, then took my right arm, and we walked through the cloister into a little garden protected by high walls.
“In the name of the gardener,” she said, “greetings! You know? The Gospel of John.”
Her voice was quite light, and reminded me of Lady Alice’s, but the way she talked was spare and rather hesitant.
“This is the garden of spiritual love,” she told me. She shook her head. “Not in bloom yet. Not in December. Look!” she said, stooping to a plant with white-spotted leaves. “Jerusalem Cowslips. Or you say Mary’s Milkdrops?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Lady Alice would. She’s my stepmother. In England.”
“Here is a passion dock,” the nun said. “Yellow Archangel. Ladder to Heaven.”
“This is Saint John’s Wort,” I said. “We pick it on Saint John’s Eve and put it outside each door. And under our pillows.…”
The nun laughed. “Nuns no!” she said. “This is Aaron’s Rod. And here spikenard: Steps of Christ.”
“Where do they all come from, these holy flowers?”
“I grow them. I send for them.”
“Send?”
“From other samostan.” She screwed up her eyes and smiled. “Slavonic!” she said. “Monastery! I send for them from other monastery and nunnery. Other country.”
“How can you send plants? They’d arrive more dead than alive.”
“Like you,” said the nun.
I groaned. “It’s so peaceful here. My head!”
The nun smiled like the sun in the earliest spring.
“I could stay here forever,” I said.
“You wrap them in waxed cloth, and sew the cloth and smear it with honey,” the nun said in her light, bright voice. “Then powder it with flour. You can send plants wherever you like.”
We sat side by side on a little bench. The December sun winked and warmed my back. How much time seeped away, I do not know.
Then the monastery bell began to toll, and the nun stood up and smoothed down her habit and straightened her white wimple. Her skin was unblemished as a baby’s.
I began to shiver again.
“You stay until you are ready,” she said. “Da?”
“Yes,” I replied. “But…”
“Sshh!”
For just a moment one of her hands alighted on my head, light as a butterfly’s wing. “I am Sister Cika,” she said. “You?”
“Arthur.”
“Arthur?”
“Well, Sir Arthur de Gortanore.”
“Let Jesus be born in the cradle of your heart,” she said gently. “We expect you.”
And then, like a summer stream, she glided away.
I walked for hours and hours before I came to that ribbed oak door, I’m sure I did. I don’t know why I knocked on it. I didn’t know it was a nunnery.
But when, later, I let myself out, I saw I was only a very little way from our tower-house. I must have gone round in circles.