The blizzard descended without warning on the seventh evening, swallowing the road in a single ragged gulp.
Cordelia Ashworth pressed her face to the carriage window and saw nothing but white. The horses had gone silent an hour before, their hoofbeats muffled beneath the drifts, and the driver had not spoken since the last village. That village lay behind them now, its name already a memory. She tried to recall if there had been a signpost. There had not.
"Stop the carriage," she had said an hour past, when the snow first began to slant across the path. The driver had not stopped. He had hunched lower over his seat, muttering something she could not hear through the oak paneling.
Now she understood. He had known what was coming.
The horses stopped of their own accord. The carriage tilted, sank, righted itself, and the iron-rimmed wheels bit into something beneath the snow that groaned. Cordelia braced herself against the door as the vehicle shuddered. Through the small slot where the canvas met wood, she glimpsed a shape: bars, vast and black against the snowfall, standing upright in the white void like ribs torn from some buried giant.
The iron gate of the Convent of Saint Ursula.
She pulled her fur mantle tighter across her chest and stepped down into the drifts. The cold seized her immediately, a cruel hand around the throat. Her boots sank to the ankle. She had not stood in such weather since she was a child in the north country, and even then the wind had carried the salt of the sea, not this thin, feral mountain air that tasted of iron and pine resin.
"Here," she called toward the driver's box. "Driver. We are arrived."
No reply. The seat above was empty. A single leather strap dangled, snapping lightly in the gusts. The horses stood with their heads low, their flanks lathered white with frozen sweat. Between them, something lay in the snow: a small canvas bag, the kind the driver carried his bread and flask in. It had been dropped, not set down. Beside it, two parallel depressions in the white marked where boots had run toward the black wall of fir trees no more than fifty yards downhill.
The man had abandoned her.
Cordelia's first thought, strangely, was not fear. It was annoyance, and a sharper thing beneath it: the recognition that she had brought this upon herself. She had insisted on the Carpathian route. She had paid the man double, then double again, to push through to the convent without resting at the inns. Six days she had spent in that rattling box, listening to the wheels sing over gravel and stone, watching the passes climb and climb until the trees grew small and then grew nothing, and on the seventh she had demanded he drive until they reached the gate.
He had driven. He had driven them straight to the gate, and then he had run.
She could not blame him for it. She could only blame herself, and the letter, and the summons that had brought her so far from anything sensible.
The gate rose before her higher than she had imagined. Two stone pillars, each one taller than the carriage. Between them, the ironwork twisted into patterns that might have been flowers or might have been hands reaching upward, the metal thick with a century of frost and neglect. A bell hung from the right-hand pillar on a chain so heavy it should have swung freely but did not. It was perfectly still. The snow had built up against its lip like a white mouth.
She reached for the bell chain and hesitated.
The cold was an extraordinary thing here. It did not feel like weather. It felt the way a room feels when every door has been flung open in midwinter, every surface giving up its heat at once. Something with weight. Something with intention. It gathered at the back of her neck and pressed her forward, toward the gate, toward whatever waited on the other side. Her fingers had gone white inside her gloves. Her ears burned.
She rang.
The sound was nothing like a bell should sound. It did not ring out. It was swallowed, absorbed into the ironwork and the snow and the black trunks of the pines, as if the gate had drunk it the way the blizzard had drunk the road. Cordelia rang again, harder, and again nothing answered her.
Then a slat moved in the left-hand pillar.
She had not seen the slat before. It was narrow as a letterbox and deep as a man's arm, set at about the height of her shoulder. It slid sideways with a grinding whisper, and from the darkness within, a face emerged into the falling snow.
Old. The face was the first thing: old. Not elderly. Old, in the way that stone is old, or that certain trees bent by wind are old. The skin was drawn tight across the cheekbones, almost translucent, and the eyes beneath the wimple were the pale grey of the sky before snow. They studied Cordelia without blinking, without warmth, without any of the small human accommodations a stranger might expect upon arriving at a refuge in a storm.
"Well," the voice said. It was a female voice, cold and clipped, shaped by an accent Cordelia did not recognize. "You stand at the gate of the Convent of Saint Ursula. You have not come for the view."
"My name is Cordelia Ashworth," she said. "I received a letter from your Mother Superior. I was expected."
The pale eyes did not change. The snow settled on the wimple and did not melt.
"Expected," the woman repeated, as if the word were something she were tasting for poison. "Six days you have been on the road. You arrive without luggage. You arrive without your driver. You arrive in a storm that has already buried three passes to the south. And you say you were expected."
"I was summoned. The letter said"
"I know what the letter said." The voice cut her off with a neatness that was almost surgical. "I have read every letter that has left this convent for thirty years. I have signed for every one at this gate. There was no letter to an Ashworth. There was no Cordelia Ashworth."
Cordelia's fingers tightened on the bell chain. The metal bit into her palm even through the glove.
Cordelia opened her mouth to protest, but the words turned to frost on her tongue. The wind had found the gap between the stones, and it moved through the gate like something living, something with teeth. Her skirts snapped against her legs. The bell chain rattled once, sharply, then stilled.
"I have the letter," she said. "I can show you"
"There is nothing to show." The porter nun had not moved. Snow had begun to gather on her shoulders, on the wimple, on the long pale hands that hung at her sides like instruments laid down after use. "I would know. I would have signed for it. I sign for everything. Even the milk."
A small, terrible silence.
"Even the bread," the nun added, as though this were the clinching proof of anything.
Cordelia's hand moved to the inner pocket of her coat. The letter was there, folded twice, the paper gone soft from being read and reread across six days of bad roads and worse weather. She had touched it so often the corner was beginning to separate. But the porter nun was already turning her head, not away from Cordelia, but toward the dark beyond the gate, as though something out there had caught her ear.
"Hold," the nun said. Not to Cordelia. To the night itself.
Cordelia heard it then. Footsteps, but wrong. Not the crunch of snow under a country boot. Not the shuffle of a pensioner in felt slippers. These were the footsteps of someone who had learned to walk on stone without sound and was choosing now, for some reason of her own, to allow herself to be heard. A measured tread, deliberate, slow as a heartbeat counted out loud.
Out of the deeper dark behind the gate, a shape separated itself from the rest.
The figure was slight. Narrow shoulders, narrow hands, a habit the colour of tallow or old bone, drawn tight at the waist by a cord whose knots Cordelia could not see. The face beneath the coif was the same milk-pale that the porter nun's had been, but where the porter's features were sharp, these were smooth, almost effaced, as though wear or time or some private discipline had been used to pare them down to their essentials. The lips were colourless. The eyes were large and very dark and gave nothing back to the lamplight.
In one hand the figure carried a lantern.
The flame inside it was steady. There was no draft in that small glass house. And yet the light it cast was the colour of brass left too long in a drawer, tarnished, sour, giving off no warmth at all. Cordelia could not feel it on her face even when the figure drew near enough that their breath might have mingled.
The porter nun inclined her head. It was the smallest possible bow. Cordelia had seen chambermaids acknowledge dukes with more ceremony.
"Sister Magdalena," the porter said. "You are abroad."
The pale figure, Sister Magdalena, did not answer. Her eyes had found Cordelia and stayed there. They moved over her face, her coat, her boots, the hand still pressed to the pocket where the letter lay, with a thoroughness that was not unkind but was utterly without ceremony. Cordelia felt, absurdly, as though she were being assessed by a horse breeder at a country fair. Only the teeth were missing from the inspection.
"She says she is Ashworth," the porter nun said. "She says she has a letter. There is no letter. I would know."
Sister Magdalena's gaze did not waver. She lifted the lantern slightly. The sour light moved across Cordelia's cheekbones, her jaw, the hollows beneath her eyes where six days of poor sleep had dug their trenches. She looked, she thought, like a woman on a wanted poster. She looked like a woman who had come too far to turn back.
"Sister Ilona is at chapel," Sister Magdalena said. Her voice was low and even, with the same accent as the porter nun's, but where the porter's words came out clipped and bright as coins dropped on a counter, these came out smooth, almost murmured, as though they had been thought over before being released. "Mother Superior will want to see her before the office."
"There was no letter," the porter nun repeated.
"Yes." A pause. "There was no letter."
The porter nun's mouth thinned to a line. She considered this for what felt to Cordelia like a very long time. The snow had stopped falling around her. It had begun, instead, to accumulate, so that by the end of the silence she looked like a small pale cairn at the centre of the gate. Then she made a sound in her throat that was neither word nor grunt, and she stepped aside.
The gate's hinges gave a single, sour complaint as Sister Magdalena reached past Cordelia and worked the bolt. The iron was black with cold. The nun's fingers were bare. She did not flinch.
"Come," Sister Magdalena said. Not to Cordelia this time, or not only to her. To the porter nun. To the night. To whatever it was that had brought a young woman without luggage to a convent in the Carpathians on the eve of a storm that had already buried three passes to the south.
The porter nun said nothing more. She took up her place again on her stool, or on whatever it was she stood on, and folded her hands. She did not watch them go. She did not need to. In thirty years, Cordelia suspected, she had heard every pair of footsteps that had ever crossed that threshold, and she had the measure of each.
The cloister opened ahead of them like the inside of a hand laid flat.
At first Cordelia could make out nothing but the geometry of it. A square of pale stone underfoot, worn to a shallow bowl by centuries of sandalled feet. Arcades running along all four sides, the arches low and round and set close together as teeth in a jaw. Above them, a second storey, blank-faced, its windows black and unreflective as the eyeholes of a skull. The snow came down here too, but it came straight, undisturbed by any wind, and settled on the stone ledges in even white rims, as though laid there by a careful hand.
Then her eyes adjusted, and she saw the statues.
They stood between the arches. One to each bay. White stone, or what had once been white stone. Cordelia could not at first tell what they represented, because the faces had been weathered or worn or deliberately worked until they were almost featureless, only the suggestion of a brow, the curve of a lip, the line of a folded hand. They were all in attitudes of suffering. Some knelt. Some stood with arms crossed on the breast. Some had bowed their heads so low that their chins rested against the stone of their own chests. They were arranged with a precision that was not quite military and not quite liturgical. They were watching her. Cordelia was sure of it. Not with eyes, because they had none, but with the weight of their attention, which she could feel across the arcade as a slight pressure at her temples.
Sister Magdalena walked ahead of her without looking back. The lantern swung at her side on its short chain, and the sour light it cast moved across the statues in turn, picking out the white stone, the bowed heads, the fingers interlaced across invisible hearts. The nun's habit made no sound. Her feet made no sound. Cordelia's own boots, by contrast, rang on the flagstones with a country clarity that made her wince.
The silence of the place was not an empty silence. It was a full one, the silence of a room in which many people are breathing and none of them are speaking. Cordelia could almost hear it. A faint, high, continuous note, like a wire strung tight across the four walls of the square.
She caught up with Sister Magdalena at the corner of the cloister, where the arcade turned toward a darker passage. The nun did not slow for her. She did not speed up either. The lantern passed, and the passage opened before them, and Cordelia saw that the windows here were not merely dark. They had been painted over, or filled in with plaster, or blocked with boards, so that what light reached the corridor came only from the lantern and from a single lamp set high in a niche at the far end, its flame almost extinguished by its own small glass chimney.
"The office is at dawn," Sister Magdalena said, without turning. Her voice was the same low murmur. Cordelia had to tilt her head slightly to catch it. "Matins, then Lauds. You will be shown to a cell. You will not be required to attend."
"I would like to attend," Cordelia said. She was not sure, as she said it, that it was true. The words had come out of a politeness drilled into her at her grandmother's knee, the reflex of an Englishwoman in a strange country who has been offered something and does not know how to refuse it. But once she had said them, she found she did not want to take them back.
Sister Magdalena stopped. For the first time since she had appeared at the gate, she turned and looked at Cordelia directly.
The eyes were not unkind. That was the strange thing. They were large and very dark, and they gave back nothing, but they were not unkind. They looked at Cordelia the way one looks at a child who has offered to carry something too heavy, or at a guest who has accepted a cup of tea in a house where there is no tea.
"You will attend," Sister Magdalena said. It was not a question. It was not a command. It was a correction, gentle as the turn of a key in a lock that had already been turned. "Mother Superior will wish to see you after."
The lantern swung. The sour light crossed Cordelia's face and was gone.
They walked on. The statues watched them pass.
Sister Magdalena resumed walking without waiting for Cordelia to answer. The lantern swung, and Cordelia followed, the stone floor cold through the thin soles of her shoes. The corridor narrowed, then opened into another, then narrowed again. Cordelia lost count of the turns after the seventh. She kept her eyes on the hem of Sister Magdalena's habit and tried not to think about how the walls seemed to breathe in places, the plaster bulging slightly inward as if pressed from the other side.
The cell was at the end of a passage so narrow her shoulders brushed both walls. A door, plain wood, no lock. Sister Magdalena pushed it open with one hand and stepped aside.
"Rest," she said. "I will come for you before the office."
She did not enter. She set the lantern on a hook by the door, turned, and her habit whispered against the stones as she went.
Cordelia stood in the doorway and looked at the cell.
It was smaller than she had imagined. The ceiling was low enough that she could have touched it with her hand raised. A narrow bed of straw and wool, a wooden stool, a washstand with a chipped basin, a small crucifix on the wall above the bed. The crucifix was older than anything she had seen in the church at home. The wood had gone the color of dark honey, and the figure carved upon it had the elongated, sorrowful face she had begun to associate with this place. Its eyes were closed. Its hands were open.
She set her case on the floor. She unhooked the lantern from the door and hung it on the hook inside. The flame steadied, and the room came into focus, and she saw that the walls were not white but the faintest cream, like old paper, and that they had been whitewashed so many times the plaster beneath had begun to show through in patches the shape of countries on a map. She thought, absurdly, that if she were to trace them all, they would spell out the names of places she had never been.
She sat on the stool. The wood creaked under her. She had not realized, until she sat, how tired she was. The journey had been longer than she had been told it would be. The carriage driver had been silent for most of it, and she had watched the landscape flatten and darken, and at one point she had dozed, and when she woke the horse had stopped and the driver was sitting very still with the reins loose in his hands, looking at something in the trees that she could not see. She had asked him what was the matter. He had said nothing. After a long moment he had clucked the horse forward, and they had gone on, and he had not spoken again until the convent gates.
She had thanked him at the gate. He had nodded once. Then he had looked at her with a face she did not know how to read, and he had said, in the rough burr she had by then grown accustomed to, "Mind you do not go out after dark." And she had said she would not. And he had turned the carriage, and the wheels had crunched on the gravel, and he had gone, and she had watched him go until he was only a shape at the end of the avenue, and then the shape had rounded the curve of the limes and was gone.
She thought of him now, in the cell, and wished she had asked him what he had seen in the trees. She thought she would not have understood the answer even if he had given it. There are things one only learns to understand after one has been in a place long enough to have the language for it. She had not yet been given the language.
She rose from the stool and walked to the small window set high in the wall above the bed. She had to stand on tiptoe to see out of it. The glass was old and warped, and through it the courtyard below was a shimmer of stone and shadow. She could see a corner of the well, and the far edge of a wall, and beyond the wall the tops of trees moving in a wind she could not feel from where she stood. The sky was the last color of evening, a deep bruised violet that would soon be black.
She sat on the bed. The straw rustled under her. The wool smelled faintly of lavender, and beneath that of something older and less pleasant, the sour sweet smell of wool that has been stored too long in a place that is not quite dry. She took off her shoes. She unbuttoned the bodice of her travelling dress and loosened the laces. She did not take the dress off. She had not been told she might.
The silence of the cell was not a silence. She had expected silence, the silence of a room with thick walls in a building where women kept long hours of quiet. What she had not expected was the way the silence seemed to have texture, the way it seemed to press gently against her ears, the way it seemed to move. She sat very still on the bed and listened to it, and after a long moment she realized that what she was hearing was not silence at all but the lowest possible sound, a sound below sound, the hum a person sometimes hears in the blood when one has been holding one's breath too long.
She lay back on the bed. The wool was rough against her arms. She closed her eyes.
She must have slept, because when she opened her eyes again the lantern had gone out, and the room was full of a darkness she had not thought rooms could hold. She lay still and let her eyes adjust. Slowly the shapes came back. The crucifix. The stool. The washstand. The basin.
The singing began.
She did not, at first, recognize it as singing. It came from below her, or beside her, or above her, she could not tell which. It came through the walls as if the walls themselves were thin, as if the stone were only a suggestion. It was a single voice at first, then two, then three, then more, layering one upon another in a way that should have been discordant but was not. The voices were women's voices. They were singing in a language she did not recognize, something older than Latin, something that moved in the throat the way water moves over stones. The melody climbed and fell and climbed again.
She sat up. She put her feet on the cold floor. She listened.
The voices almost aligned with human breath. That was the thing she could not name, the thing that made her press her hand flat against the plaster of the wall as if to feel for a pulse. The voices drew breath, and released breath, in a rhythm that was almost, almost, the rhythm of a chest rising and falling. But it was not quite. The breath came a half-beat too late, or a half-beat too soon, so that the voices seemed always to be slightly out of step with themselves. The sound was almost singing and almost speech and almost weeping, and it was none of these, and the not-quite-ness of it was what made her skin prickle and the small hairs on her arms rise.
She sat in the dark cell and listened to the voices for a long time. She did not count the time. She did not know how long it went on. The voices did not pause. They did not seem to tire. They rose and fell and rose, and the breath behind them rose and fell a half-beat out of step, and she understood, without knowing how she understood it, that this was how the office was sung here, that this was what Matins sounded like in this place, that what she was hearing was the prayer of women who had been singing in this way for a very long time.
At some point the singing stopped. It did not fade. It stopped, the way a held note stops when the hand falls from the string. The silence that came after was heavier than the silence before. Cordelia sat in the dark and felt her own breath in her throat, and she made herself breathe in and out, slowly, slowly, until she could feel the edges of her own body again.
A draft moved through the cell. The flame of the lantern, which had gone out, did not relight, but she saw, for a moment, in the corner of her eye, the shape of the crucifix on the wall, and the figure upon it seemed to have opened its eyes. Then the draft moved on, and the shape was only wood, and the figure was only a figure, and the eyes were closed.
She lay down again. She pulled the wool up to her chin. She closed her eyes. She did not sleep, but she rested, in the way one rests when one is being watched by something one cannot see and has decided, for the moment, not to acknowledge it.
Some time later, a sound at the door. A tap, soft, with the knuckle of a hand that did not wish to be heard.
Cordelia opened her eyes.
"Sister," said the voice of Sister Magdalena, from the other side of the wood. "The office is at dawn."
Cordelia sat up. The dark was thinner now, the color of old ink, and through the window above the bed she could see that the sky had begun to turn at its eastern edge.
"I am awake," Cordelia said.
A pause. Then, very quietly, so quietly she might have imagined it:
"That is not what I asked."
The footsteps went away down the corridor. Cordelia sat on the edge of the straw bed in the thin dawn light and pressed her hands together in her lap. Her fingers were cold. She could still hear, in the walls, the faintest echo of the singing, as if the stone itself were still ringing with it.
She rose. She smoothed her dress. She went to the washstand and poured a little water from the pitcher into the basin, and washed her face and her hands, and dried them on the rough linen towel that had been left folded on the stool. The water was cold. The linen smelled of nothing at all.
She went to the door. She took the latch in her hand. She stood for a moment, listening, and the convent was quiet now in a different way, the way a room is quiet after the last musician has put the instrument down and the audience has gone. Quiet, but not silent. Not silent. Not quite.
She lifted the latch and stepped out into the corridor, and the stones were cold under her thin shoes, and somewhere below her a bell began to ring.