Chapter Thirteen

Rosa did not believe that God was in the convent chapel. It was much too plain for Him. It had no marble statues of the saints with sad faces, no gilded crosses, and it smelled of empty stomachs.

Why would He bother to come here?

All it could offer Him was one measly Madonna of painted plaster. The whitewashed walls were as bare as a shroud, and the heavy wooden altar looked no better than someone’s dining table. God wouldn’t like it here any more than she did. He would be in Rome, only an hour away by train. Right now, if Rosa had to guess, He was probably in the basilica of St. Mary of the Angels and the Martyrs in Rome’s Piazza della Repubblica listening to the huge pipe organ. That was where Rosa would be. If she had any choice.

So that was why she didn’t think it was a sin to release the mouse in the chapel. God wouldn’t even notice. She slid the lid off the small bonbon tin she had stolen from behind the refectory curtain where Sister Agatha kept her secret stash of peppermints. Rosa had hidden it under the bib of her gray pinafore dress, aware all through Father Benedict’s sermon of the scratching of tiny claws against the metal. She felt sorry for the poor mouse, imprisoned in a dark place, but it wouldn’t be for long. She’d caught it yesterday in the outside lavatory with the help of her friend Carmela who, Rosa discovered with surprise, was immensely brave when it came to mice.

She placed the tiny animal on the top of the backrest of the pew in front of her, watching as its black eyes bulged with shock at its sudden freedom and its naked pink feet set off at full speed toward the far end.

Rosa screamed. Jumped to her feet and shouted, “Mouse!”

Screams are catching. Panic is like fire: it leaps from one head to another, its flames igniting fear even when the person doesn’t know what they are afraid of. She had seen it before, how easy it is to stampede a herd of empty-headed girls. The pupils bolted out of the pews into the aisles in a jumble of squeals and shrieks, and it could easily have been an accident that Rosa bumped against the wooden box on an iron stand by the wall. It could have been an accident that her elbow nudged open the lid as it fell.

It could have been.

Sister Agatha and Sister Pietra came flapping their black wings down the aisles, voices raised even in the house of God as they ordered the girls back into their seats. But by then Rosa was picking up all the small votive candles that had fallen on to the flagstone floor and was replacing them in the box.

A hand slapped her ear. “Hurry up, girl. Get to your seat.”

She hurried. It was only after she’d taken her place on the pew once more, heart thumping hard, that she looked up toward the altar and saw the priest’s gaze fixed on her. She didn’t look away. She sat there and stared back. But the four slender candles tucked behind her pinafore bib were burning a hole in her chest.

“Don’t, Rosa.”

“I have to.”

“You’ll get caught.”

“No, I won’t.”

But Carmela didn’t look convinced. They were whispering at the far end of the dormitory, crouched down under the casement window in the dark. There were metal bars over the panes of glass, too close together to squeeze between, and the door was locked on the outside, so all sixteen girls inside were secured until morning. But several times a night the door would swing open and a flashlight beam in the hand of whichever nun was on night duty would swoop onto each bed.

Rosa wrapped an arm around Carmela and drew her closer. Partly to bring her ear nearer so that the other girls wouldn’t wake, but mainly because Carmela might be brave with mice but she was terrified that Mother Domenica would cut her hair. It had been threatened. To shave off her long auburn curls. She kept them covered in a white scarf for much of the time to lessen the provocation they caused. She was shivering and Rosa rubbed her long back vigorously. Her friend was absurdly tall for a nine-year-old, and the nuns found her white-skinned face and fiery hair an irresistible magnet for their slaps and smacks.

“Go to bed, Carmela. I can do it on my own.”

“No, I’ll stay.”

Rosa kissed her cheek. “The match?”

Carmela held up a single match that she had sneaked from the priest’s coat in the cloakroom while he was closeted in the Mother Superior’s office. Rosa had noticed several times that he drew matches from his pocket when he wanted to smoke his stinking black cheroots.

“Candle,” she announced.

She drew a short thin candle from the thick knot of hair at the back of her head and held it out to be lit. Carmela struck the match on the rough floorboards, and it flared into life with a hiss. Both girls glanced nervously at the beds but could see no movement among the blankets. Rosa melted the bottom end of the candle first and stood it on a flat stone she had picked up in the yard, and then Carmela lit the wick before the match burned out.

The darkness leapt backward. Wisps of yellow light flickered on their faces and scampered up the wall. The candle was the kind worshippers lit in church as a prayer for someone, so Rosa knew it wouldn’t last long, any more than people’s prayers did, so she stood quickly on bare feet and lifted the flame to the window. Slowly, carefully, she moved it from side to side.

“Can you see anyone?” Carmela whispered.

“No.”

“He may not come.”

“He’ll come.”

“Tonight?”

“Or tomorrow night. Or some other night. But he’ll come.”

“How can you be sure, Rosa?”

Rosa smiled softly as her eyes scoured the blackness in the convent garden beneath them. “I’m sure.”

“But there’s a high wall down there.”

“That won’t stop him. Nothing will stop him.”

“Oh, Rosa.”

“Go to sleep. I can do this.”

But Carmela curled up at Rosa’s feet, unwilling to leave her, and it took a whole hour for the candle to burn to nothing. Rosa was ice cold by the end, hearing her father’s deep voice in her ear and feeling his hand warm on her shoulder, until she no longer knew what was real and what wasn’t. The darkness outside seemed to drift closer, to rap on the glass, to seep into her mind and seize her thoughts, twisting them into knots that she couldn’t undo. She believed she saw the architect. Sitting on the windowsill and offering her hand. But when Rosa reached for it, the architect vanished and all she clutched was cold brittle emptiness.

When the answering light flashed, she almost missed it. She blinked. She waited for it to come again out of the darkness, but the garden remained stubbornly mute, no sound, no light. Did she imagine it? Had the night played a trick?

She waited another hour. No more lights flashed. The darkness and the cold swallowed everything out there and her chest hurt so badly that it squeezed tears from her eyes. She dashed them away and knelt down to wake Carmela, who was still curled like a long-limbed cat at her feet. Gently she patted her shoulder and placed a hand over her mouth, so that she would make no noise.

That was when she heard the sound of a key in the lock and the yellow beam of a flashlight sprang into the room.