I HAD EXPECTED Lower Montford to be less forbidding but it was not. While I had only imagined what lurked in the shadows, I could not avoid the sullen and menacing stares of the inhabitants in the daylight.
Luckily our destination was close to the outskirts of town and I had both my servants with me – Gerrund for protection and Agnust to affect an introduction. The three of us could not possibly have fitted in a hansom, even if I had sat on one of their knees – which I had no intention of doing – and so we took a growler. It rumbled, squeaked and jolted over every bump and divot, but I was a great deal more comfortable than when I had been packed on the luggage shelf.
‘Waste of time,’ Gerrund grumbled.
He had been looking forward to trying a new recipe for stuffed lambs’ hearts, though I was less enthusiastic about ingesting them.
I had to eat their eyeballs in Morocco, Ruby reminded me.
They could not have been worse than the tripe sandwich I was given in Accrington, Hefty countered and, while they bickered about that, I tried to pay attention to Agnust.
‘She need to speak to her herself,’ she countered. ‘There’s things int decent for me to repeat.’ And I only hoped that whatever was to be revealed would be worth the trouble.
The Convent of Saint Ethel of Ickworth was not an impressive building. Standing opposite the Stoat’s Head public house, it had been a small factory for producing Salty Spud Slivers – thinly sliced fried potatoes in greaseproof paper bags sold as snacks. Unsurprisingly, the idea never caught on.
In response to Gerrund’s hammering, the door was opened by an elderly nun, her tawny face shrunken inside her dark grey veil like a two-year-old windfall accidentally fitted with teeth.
‘Marnin’, Mother Mory,’ my maid greeted her.
‘Marnin’ is as marnin’ do,’ the sister superior declaimed, her grey eyes searching the sky as if expecting their patron saint to drift over in a shining cloud.
Any kind of cloud would have been welcome that summer.
‘Amen to tha’,’ Agnust endorsed the somewhat gnomic assertion. ‘We come…’
‘Come not to a place unless thou come from another place,’ the nun advised wisely.
‘We come from another place,’ Agnust confirmed, ‘seekin’…’
‘Seek and thou shalt search,’ Mother Mory declared, adding sagaciously, ‘for he who searches shalt also seek.’
Poke a finger in her eye, Boson Briggs – who I had thought was lost at sea – advised, any finger in either eye will do.
Don’t talk to me about eyes, Ruby protested, the memory fresher than the oculi had been.
‘Amen.’ Agnust glowed in the light of these revelations, but there was no stopping this marvellous old woman.
‘Yea and I say unto you…’
‘Millie Bull,’ Gerrund barked, destroying my no-stopping theory before it had taken root and I sniffed peevishly for he had not entrusted me with the ex-kitchen maid’s surname. ‘We want to speak to her.’
‘Then want shall be thy mistress and thy master,’ that loveable old lady of the cloth continued, ‘and he who…’
Shut up, Ruby snapped though, from the way they all looked at me, she had snapped aloud.
‘Being shut up in a convent must give many wonderful opportunities for contemplation,’ I bluffed, unconvincingly to me but not to the wizened anchorite.
‘In contemplation do we ruminate,’ she concurred, ‘and in rumination do we ponder for…’
‘Never mind any of that,’ Gerrund interrupted rudely, but at least he had not said claptrap. ‘Claptrap,’ he ended and Mother Mory smiled beatifically.
‘Do you wish to see your baubles hanging on a tree?’ she enquired. ‘Because, believe me, I can arrange it.’ And, for reasons that were not at all clear, my man fell silent.
‘May we come in please?’ I asked.
‘You may,’ she said so simply that it took me a while to work out what she meant. ‘But no man may enter this building.’
‘That’s a pity.’ Gerrund puffed his cheeks in disappointment. ‘Looks like I’ll have to go for a pint instead.’
Think I’ll join you, Ruby said.
‘Good man,’ the nun approved, ‘for does not Saint Ethel teach us it is a sin to be sober?’
This was news to me and I began to develop a new respect for the Pre-Markians.
‘But you do not drink alcohol,’ I observed to Agnust.
‘Before you condemn her, Agnust has a dispensation,’ the nun told me, ‘for she do have a wicked and troublesome mistress to attend to.’
‘Is that so?’ I asked sternly but my maid was unabashed.
‘Since the day she’s born,’ she assured me, and we stepped inside.
The building was little more than a shell, with windows high enough in the flint walls for the workers to see but not see out of. All around the stone-slabbed floor were towers of Holy Bibles – hefty leather-bound volumes of family editions in one pile, smaller portable editions in another. Four even more elderly nuns were seated behind a bench, studiously turning to the offending pages to erase the next word on each. Two novices – to judge from their youth and simpler robes – trudged about, replacing each bible when the task had been completed.
‘We do cross out defiles this marnin’,’ the young nun informed me.
‘Congratulations,’ I murmured.
‘I already do mine,’ Agnust announced proudly.
‘You have not introduced me,’ I reminded her but Mother Mory raised a hand.
‘Those who have not foresworn the so-called gospel of the accursed Mark shall go anonymous in this wholly holy place,’ she informed me.
‘Can we speak to Millie?’ I asked wearily.
‘Sister Robinth has cast away her worldly name,’ she told me and pointed to a solitary woman in black but no veil, sitting at a pine table in the corner, industriously chalking short lines in columns on a slate tile. ‘She is practising the sacred task of striking out.’
‘I do beseech the Lord every night that he summon me here to tha’ work,’ Agnust said fervently and I made a mental note to pray that her dream would come true.
‘Can…’ I began again, only to be interrupted by a piercing scream.
‘Lord forgive me!’ a young nun bawled, ‘for I have blotted out fornication.’
I rather thought the Christian churches had been trying to do that for nigh on two thousand years, but from the general uproar it was clear that the premature erasure was almost as sinful as the deed itself.
Mother Mory rushed over to check, with Agnust close behind.
‘Good day, Sister Robinth,’ I said, squatting on a three-legged stool to face her.
‘Millie,’ she whispered. ‘They do turn me as buffle-headed as themself with their muggled names.’
‘You do not share their beliefs?’ I checked quietly and she rolled her eyes.
‘Int crackled yet,’ she asserted – crackled being mad, I remembered. ‘But they give me food and a bed. Bran my brain this do but it beat starvin’ – just ’bout.’
‘You used to work for Mrs Poynder,’ I began.
‘I know tha’,’ she told me.
‘Why did you leave her employment?’
‘Dint have no choice,’ she said pushing the stick of chalk into her ear. ‘Well I do but it int a choice I like.’
‘What happened?’
I watched in concern as the chalk slid in. Surely her earhole could not be that deep?
‘Poynder want his way and he do take it.’ She tipped her head back, mouth agape like people do when trying to catch a grape.
‘Is that why you drank carbolic?’ I asked and she shuddered.
‘My young man Habakkuk dint want spoiled goods,’ she said bitterly. ‘Like any good man he do want to spoil me hisself.’
‘I believe that Mrs Poynder tended you.’
‘She dint know what happen.’
‘And then you left?’ I checked.
‘Dant no choice,’ Millie told me. ‘When I wint let the doctor spoil me more, he tell Mrs Poynder I do try frivollin’ with him and she do dismiss me.’ I had not heard of frivolling before but I could guess that it involved flirtation at the very least. She screwed the chalk further in. ‘She dint want to but he say she must for it int the first time I do it and…’ She puggled the stick about. ‘He tell her dint goo and give me no character.’
To be sacked without a written character sounded the death knell to any servant’s employment prospects for, in such a small town, it was a simple thing to contact her previous employer.
‘Did she attack you?’
I might have asked if Dolores had performed a cartwheel in church for the incredulity that greeted my question.
‘Wha’ her?’ Millie tugged at the chalk. ‘If she hurt a spider she do ’pologise, put it to bed and call for the veterervin— animal doctor.’
‘When did you leave?’ I asked while she pulled harder.
‘Year ’fore this after Christmas and ’fore the next,’ she informed me not quite as unhelpfully as it sounded for it meant around the middle of last year and I was about to thank her when she said, ‘maid ’fore me goo same way.’
‘You mean…’
‘I do.’
‘Do you know her name?’
‘I do,’ she nodded vigorously, ‘not.’ There was a loud crack. ‘Break off in my head,’ she observed, eyeing the stump critically. ‘Prob’ly melt,’ she forecast with an optimism that I was unable to share.
Mother Mory rejoined us.
‘Back to work, Sister Robinth,’ she commanded, shooing me away.
I did not care for her, nor being shooed by anyone, but I had had enough of the Pre-Markians before I had even met them.
Agnust had her mouth full and was chewing vigorously.
‘We are leaving,’ I told her and she spat a wad of soggy paper at my feet.
‘I ’member now,’ Millie called after me, much to the mother superior’s displeasure. ‘Edwina Derisible.’ She tapped her ear. ‘Prob’ly best I push it right in.’
It probably would be, Ruby agreed mischievously as I opened the door.
The growler was parked by a shallow puddle of sewage, but that was small parsnips compared to the streams that I had waded through on my previous visit and so I tiptoed daintily into it and sank up to my knees.