Cordelia set her reticule on the chair beside her because Mother Agnes had not offered one.
The gesture was small. Mother Agnes noticed it anyway. Her gaze lingered on the worn leather, the tarnished clasp, the small scuff at the corner where it had been dropped once, hard, against a stone floor. Cordelia's hands, the Mother Superior observed, were the hands of a woman who had learned to keep them still.
"Sit, please," Mother Agnes said, though Cordelia was already seated. The words were a formality, a small choreography performed for both their benefit. "Tea? It is not very good. The herbs come from the lower garden."
"No, thank you, Mother Superior."
"Just Mother Agnes will do. We are not so formal here." She did not smile. The room smelled of beeswax and old paper and something faintly mineral, like wet stone drawn up from a deep well. Sunlight came in through tall windows and laid itself across the desk between them, catching dust motes that drifted with the patience of years. The study was long and narrow, paneled in oak that had gone the color of weak tea, and on every wall hung the portraits.
Cordelia had been trying not to look at them. Now she looked.
There were forty-three of them. She had counted on the way in. Forty-three gilt frames, tarnished to the color of old honey, hung from floor to ceiling in no particular order. Every face belonged to a nun. Every face was pale. They had been painted in the old style, with the smooth, bloodless pallor of religious icons, eyes downcast or half-turned toward heaven. Some were young and plump, the bloom still in their cheeks. Some were gaunt, the skin drawn tight across the cheekbones. All of them watched the room with that particular serenity that survived both the painter and the painted.
"You knew her," Mother Agnes said.
It was not a question.
"I knew her," Cordelia said. "She was my daughter."
The words landed in the room and lay there. One of the portraits, a particularly severe-looking nun in the far corner, seemed to listen harder than the rest. Mother Agnes folded her hands on the desk. Her fingers were long, the knuckles a little swollen, the nails cut very short.
"Tell me about her final days."
Cordelia opened her mouth. Closed it. The reticule sat on the empty chair, its brass clasp catching the light and throwing a small bright coin onto the floorboards.
"She was not ill for very long," Cordelia began. "Three weeks, perhaps. The doctor said it was the lungs. He said there was nothing to be done. He said she should be kept comfortable. He said, "
She stopped. Her throat had closed around the next word.
Mother Agnes waited. The silence of the convent was not the silence of the world outside. It was thicker. Cordelia could feel it pressing against her ears, the way water presses against the eardrums when one dives too deep. Somewhere far below, perhaps in the cellars she had glimpsed through a window, a pipe ticked. The sound came up through the stone like a slow, patient heartbeat.
"Did she pray?" Mother Agnes asked.
The question was soft. The question was very strange.
"Pray?" Cordelia repeated.
"In her final days. Or weeks. Did Annalise pray?"
Cordelia studied the woman's face. Mother Agnes was perhaps fifty, perhaps older. Her habit was immaculate, the wool so dark it seemed to drink the light. Her veil was pure white, which Cordelia understood marked her as superior. There were fine lines at the corners of her mouth and at the corners of her eyes, and her eyes themselves were the color of strong tea held up to the sun.
"I am not sure I understand the question," Cordelia said carefully.
"Then I shall make myself clearer." Mother Agnes unfolded her hands and pressed her palms flat to the desk, as if steadying the wood itself. "Did Annalise, in the time before her death, speak to God? Did she ask for absolution? Did she clutch a rosary, or call upon a saint, or whisper the name of anyone she had loved and lost?"
Cordelia felt something cold move through her chest. She had not expected the words to land the way they did. She had come here expecting condolences. She had come expecting paperwork.
"She called for me," she said. "At the end. She called for me, and I was there. There was nothing else."
"Nothing else?"
"No."
Mother Agnes studied her. The look was not unkind. It was the look of a scholar examining a particularly important footnote.
"Annalise never spoke of this house," Mother Agnes said. "Not once. Not in any letter we received."
Cordelia's hands, which had been folded in her lap, tightened against each other.
"My daughter was not a woman who spoke of houses," Cordelia said. "She was not a woman who spoke much at all."
"But she wrote." Mother Agnes opened a drawer and withdrew a small bundle of letters, bound with a black ribbon. The paper was thick, faintly yellowed. "She wrote to us. For six years she wrote to us. Every fortnight, without fail. And yet you say she never mentioned us."
Cordelia stared at the letters. She had not known about the letters. She had not known there were letters. Annalise had not been a secretive child, but she had been a private one, and there had always been rooms in her that Cordelia could not enter, no matter how gently she knocked.
"That cannot be right," Cordelia said.
"It is what the record shows."
"There must be some confusion. Annalise had no connection to any religious house. She was raised Church of England, loosely. Her father had no use for Rome. I have no use for Rome. There is no connection. There has never been a connection."
Mother Agnes's expression did not change. She set the letters on the desk between them, the way a card player sets down a hand.
"Perhaps," she said, "you would like to read them."
Cordelia reached for the bundle. Her fingers brushed the black ribbon. The ribbon felt older than it looked. The paper felt older still.
"You may take them with you," Mother Agnes said. "You may read them at your leisure. But I must ask you a few more questions first. And I must ask you to answer them honestly. Whatever else we may be, Mrs. Ashworth, we are not confessors. We cannot forgive what is not confessed."
The room felt smaller. The portraits pressed closer. The nun in the corner, the severe one, had a small mole beneath her left eye, and her gaze, Cordelia noticed, was not turned to heaven at all. It was turned to the desk. It was turned to the letters. It was turned, perhaps, to Cordelia herself.
"I will answer what I can," Cordelia said.
"You will answer what you know," Mother Agnes corrected gently. "What you can is a matter for your conscience."
Cordelia swallowed. The cold in her chest had spread down into her stomach.
"Did Annalise ever dream of sisters?"
The question was so specific that Cordelia almost laughed. "I beg your pardon?"
"Sisters. In dreams. Did she ever speak of women she had never met? Women who seemed to know her? Women who watched her?"
Cordelia shook her head. "No. She did not."
"Did she keep a journal?"
"She kept a commonplace book. Notes on plants. Sketches of leaves. She was interested in botany."
"Did she ever use the word 'pale'?"
"To describe what?"
"Anything. A person. A place. A feeling."
Cordelia thought. The sunlight had moved a little across the desk. The dust motes had begun to settle onto the wood like a very fine, very patient snow.
"I cannot recall," she said.
Mother Agnes inclined her head. The gesture was small, almost ecclesiastical.
"And in her final days," Mother Agnes said, "when the doctor had given up and the curate had come and gone, when she lay in the bed in your house and the light was going out of her. Was there anyone else there?"
"There was me," Cordelia said. "There was the nurse. There was a woman from the village who brought soup."
"Anyone else?"
"No."
"Did you hear her speak to anyone who was not there?"
The cold in Cordelia's chest became something tighter. She thought of Annalise in the bed, the way her daughter's lips had moved in the last hour when no sound had come out, the way her fingers had twitched against the sheet as if counting beads that were not there. She had told herself it was the medicine. She had told herself it was the morphine.
"Sometimes," Cordelia said. "I thought I heard her say something. But I could not make it out. I thought it was the medicine."
Mother Agnes said nothing for a long moment. Outside, somewhere in the convent, a bell rang once. The sound was low and iron, and it moved through the stone of the building the way water moves through cloth. It came up through the floor. It came up through the soles of Cordelia's boots. It settled somewhere behind her ribs.
"Annalise was one of ours," Mother Agnes said at last.
The words were simple. The room did not change. The portraits did not stir. Cordelia, however, felt the floor tilt a little beneath her chair, the way the deck of a ship tilts when a wave passes under it.
"I do not understand," she said.
"She was one of ours," Mother Agnes repeated. "Not by birth. Not by baptism. By something older. She was called to this house when she was nine years old. She spent three summers here. She took no vows. She made no profession. But she was, in the eyes of the order, a daughter of this convent. And when she died without confession, without prayer, without the rites, her soul came back to us."
Cordelia stared.
There was a small sound at the door, a soft knock, and Sister Magdalena entered without waiting for an answer. She carried a tray with a single cup of water on it. Her veil was slightly askew. Her eyes, when she glanced at Cordelia, were wide and very young, and there was something in them that looked like apology, or fear, or both.
"Forgive me, Mother," she said, in a voice as soft as cloth folded over cloth. "The bell has rung for None. I thought Mrs. Ashworth might wish for water."
"Set it down," Mother Agnes said. "And close the door."
Sister Magdalena set the cup at the edge of the desk, well away from the letters, and withdrew. The door closed behind her with a whisper.
Cordelia had not touched the water. She had not moved. She was watching Mother Agnes the way one watches a fire in a house one has not yet decided to leave.
"What do you mean," Cordelia said, very quietly, "her soul came back to you?"
Mother Agnes met her gaze. There was no evasion in the woman's face. There was, Cordelia thought, a kind of exhausted honesty, the honesty of someone who has carried a weight so long that she has forgotten what it felt like to set it down.
"I mean," Mother Agnes said, "exactly what I said. She is here. She has been here since the night of her death. We have heard her. We have seen her. And until we understand what she wants, and what was left undone, she will not rest. And neither, Mrs. Ashworth, will we."
The bell in the convent rang a second time. Mother Agnes rose. She did not offer her hand. She did not smile.
"You may read the letters in your room," she said. "Sister Magdalena will show you to it. Dinner is at six. Vespers at seven. You will attend both. Tomorrow we will speak again."
She turned toward the door. The portraits watched her go.
"Mother Agnes," Cordelia said.
The Mother Superior paused.
"You said her soul came back to you. You said you have heard her. You said you have seen her."
"I did."
"Where? In this house?"
Mother Agnes did not turn around. Her hand rested on the back of the chair she had just left, and the knuckles were white, and the sunlight caught the silver at her temple.
Mother Agnes did not turn.
"In this house," she said. "And outside it. And in the spaces between."
Then she left. Her footsteps did not echo. The door closed without sound. The portraits resumed their vigil.
Annalise stood a moment longer. The parlor smelled of beeswax and old wood and something fainter beneath it, mineral and cold, the way deep cellars smell, the way tombstones smell in winter rain. She catalogued the room without deciding to. The habit of a particular kind of woman, the kind who has learned that the small observations are the ones that save you.
She touched the back of the chair where Mother Agnes had sat. The wood was warm.
Then she went.
Sister Magdalena was waiting in the corridor as if she had been placed there. Young, soft-faced, dressed in the same severe black as the Mother Superior but without the architecture of authority in her bearing. Her hands were folded at her waist. Her fingers moved against each other in slow repetition, the way a person counts under her breath.
"Annalise Ashworth," she said, and the name in her mouth became gentler than Annalise had heard it in years. "Please. I will show you."
The corridor stretched ahead of them, stone flagged, lit at intervals by iron sconces whose candles had not yet been lit for evening. The light through the windows lay in long slabs of gold across the floor, and the dust turned in them like motes in a struck bell. Sister Magdalena's slippers made no sound. Annalise's did. Annalise was aware, with the sudden clarity of the displaced, of every particle of her own foreignness in this place.
"How long have you been here," Annalise said, "Sister Magdalena?"
"Four years, madam." The breath caught softly on the second word. "Since I was eighteen."
"And before?"
Sister Magdalena glanced at her. There was no reproach in the glance, only a kind of startled openness, as if Annalise had asked a question that no one in the convent ever asked.
"There were my younger brothers and sisters," Sister Magdalena said. "There was the fever. There was the convent school where they had sent me, because there was nothing else. There was the bishop who said I had a vocation. There was the veil."
She said it simply. She did not arrange it for sorrow. Annalise, who had not expected to feel anything in this corridor, felt something move in her chest and push it aside.
"I am sorry," Annalise said.
"They are with God," Sister Magdalena said, with the same simplicity. "This way, please."
She turned a corner. Annalise followed. The stone here was older, the mortar between the blocks darker, and the air carried the faint mineral smell of the parlor thickened, as if they were descending without descending. The ceiling lowered by a hand's breadth. Then it lifted again.
"Your room is the one your sister occupied," Sister Magdalena said, and stopped herself. The quick color rose in her cheeks. "I beg your pardon. I mean the room that had been readied for you, in the guest wing. Mother Agnes prepared it herself."
"Mother Agnes prepared the room?"
"She is the Mother Superior. She prepares every room that receives a guest." A pause. "She prepares every room that receives a stranger."
Sister Magdalena stopped before a heavy oak door. The iron handle was shaped like a closed fist. She produced a key from her sleeve and turned it with a soft click, and then stood aside.
Annalise entered.
The room was small and exactly clean. White walls. A narrow bed with a wool blanket folded across its foot. A writing desk of pale wood. A single window, unshuttered, the glass old enough to throw a slight waver over the late light. A wooden crucifix on the wall, plain, its Christ unmoved. A tin basin on a three-legged stand, its water clear and cold. A straight chair. A prie-dieu in the corner, its cushion recently indented.
And on the writing desk, three letters tied with a black ribbon, and beside them, folded once across, a single sheet of paper bearing a seal in dark wax.
"Your sister's letters," Sister Magdalena said. "And a communication from the Mother Superior. I will leave you to read them. The bell for dinner will ring at six. You will hear it from here."
"Sister Magdalena."
The young woman paused at the threshold.
"The letters," Annalise said. "May I ask how they came to you?"
"They were sent to her, madam. From before."
"From before her death."
"Yes, madam."
"May I ask who sent them?"
Sister Magdalena's fingers went still at her waist.
"They were stamped from the post office at Eger," she said. "The postmarks read different months. We do not know who wrote them. We have tried to find out. We have been unable."
She inclined her head. "Dinner is at six, madam. Vespers at seven. I will be in the chapel if you require me."
She was gone. The door did not close. Annalise listened to her footsteps recede, and then there was only the slight settling of old stone, the faint hum of bees in the eaves, the distant murmur of a convent going about its evening.
Annalise did not touch the letters. She crossed to the desk and broke the seal on the folded sheet.
Mother Agnes's handwriting. Small, severe, the strokes of a woman who has taught herself to use as little of the page as possible.
Mrs. Ashworth:
For the duration of your stay in this house, the following conditions are not requests but are conditions of refuge, and are binding upon you as upon every soul beneath this roof. They have been drawn up by my predecessor and have been observed by this community without exception for thirty-six years. You will read them. You will observe them. You will not petition me for exceptions, as none will be granted.
1. No letter shall be sent from within these walls. No letter shall be entrusted to any post, courier, or private hand for delivery beyond them. The telephones of the convent are reserved for medical and ecclesiastical necessity. Telegrams are forbidden.
2. No member of this house shall leave the walls after Compline, which falls at the ringing of the bell a half hour after sunset. She shall not pass the outer gate between the hours of dark and dawn. The outer gate shall be locked, and the key shall remain in my possession.
3. Between the ringing of the bell for Vespers and the ringing of the bell for Lauds on the following morning, no word shall be spoken above a whisper, and no word shall be spoken at all in the corridors, the refectory, the dormitory, the chapel, or the gardens. The Rule of Silence is absolute. It is observed for your safety. It is observed for the safety of every woman here.
4. The east tower of this house is condemned. The lower chapel beneath the high altar is sealed. Neither shall be approached, on any pretence, by any person, at any hour. The doors to each are kept locked, and the keys are kept by me alone. You are warned that the seals upon them are the seals which must not be broken.
5. No mirror shall be looked into after nightfall. This includes the small hand mirror which has been laid upon your writing desk, the silvered glass upon the washstand in your room, the tall mirror in the corridor outside your chamber, and any other surface of reflective glass or still water within these walls. The hour of darkness is the hour of reflection. What reflects in it is not always yourself.
You will observe these conditions, Mrs. Ashworth, because the women of this house have observed them and have done so at a cost which I will not enumerate to you now. The cost is in the air you are breathing. The cost is in the reason your sister came to us. The cost is in the reason you are here.
You will not be thanked for your obedience, as obedience in this matter is the lowest expectation we place upon any guest. You will not be forgiven your disobedience, as there is no provision for forgiveness in the matter of these conditions.
I remain,
Mother Agnes, O.S.B.
Mother Superior
P.S. The letters on your desk are not to be sent to any third party while you are within these walls. They are to be read by you alone. They are to be returned to me unread or read, at your discretion, at the hour of your departure.
Annalise read the letter twice. The second time she read it more slowly, as one reads a contract in a foreign language, listening for the trap, for the small clause that will undo the whole.
There was no small clause. The letter was plain. The letter was as bare as the room.
She set it down.
The letters lay beside it, three of them, tied in their black ribbon. Their paper was a pale cream, the kind of paper Annalise's sister had always chosen, a small vanity she had carried from girlhood. Their ink was black. Their edges were not yet yellowed.
The light from the window was going orange. The bell for Vespers would sound in an hour. The bell for dinner would sound in forty minutes. The bell for Lauds would sound tomorrow in the dark, before the world had any right to call itself awake.
Annalise sat down at the desk. She did not open the letters. She turned instead to the small hand mirror the letter had warned her of, the one laid upon her writing desk as if to test her. It lay face down. Its back was mother-of-pearl, and the luster of it was the color of the inside of a seashell, and she could feel without turning it over that the glass beneath was very clean.
She left it face down.
Outside, the first star showed in the window. The convent fell quieter. Somewhere a woman began to chant, low and far away, the words not yet distinguishable, the melody the only one Annalise had heard in this place that was not silence.
The chanting grew nearer, then stopped, and Annalise sat listening to the quiet that replaced it. The quiet had a texture in this place. It was not empty. It was pressed full of small sounds: the settling of old wood, the wind moving along a high corridor, the soft footfall of a sister she could not see crossing a courtyard below her window. She had not yet learned to hear what lay beneath those sounds. She suspected there was much beneath.
She opened the first letter.
Her sister's handwriting had not changed. The slope of the letters was the same, the way the g's curled back upon themselves, the way the t's were crossed with a single quick stroke as though each one were being dismissed. Annalise read slowly. The letter was dated the third of October, a Tuesday. It spoke of small things: a broken teapot, a neighbor's dog, a letter received from a cousin in Lyon. Near the end, in the same unemphatic hand, her sister wrote: I have been thinking of the convent at Saint Cecilia. I have been thinking of it more than I ought.
Annalise set the letter down.
She did not open the second.
A knock came at the door, soft as a knuckle held back.
Annalise closed her eyes. She did not say enter. She did not need to. The door opened anyway, the way doors opened in this place, with the slow courtesy of one who had already waited on the other side and judged the waiting long enough.
Sister Magdalena stood in the doorway. Her habit was the same black as the others, but the cloth of it sat differently upon her, as though it had been put on in haste and smoothed only in the places a visitor might notice. Her face was round and young and slightly flushed, as though she had climbed stairs. Her hands were folded at her waist, the left thumb tucked over the right. She smelled, faintly, of candle wax and of something green and bruised, rosemary perhaps, or sage.
"Forgive me," Sister Magdalena said. "Mother Agnes wished me to come. I am to show you to your cell. If it is not a good time."
"It is a good time," Annalise said. She had not decided whether it was. The words came out before she could stop them.
Sister Magdalena glanced, briefly, at the letters on the desk. She did not ask. Her gaze came back to Annalise's face, and there was in it something that Annalise could not at first place, a small unguarded thing, the look of a person who sees another person and for a moment forgets the words she was told to say.
"I will wait in the corridor," Sister Magdalena said. "When you are ready."
Annalise gathered the three letters and tied them again in their black ribbon. She did not put them in the drawer. She put them in the inner pocket of her coat, against her ribs, where the paper sat flat and cool. She left the letter from Mother Agnes on the desk. She left the mirror face down. She put on her coat and followed Sister Magdalena into the corridor.
The corridor was longer than she remembered. The candles were lit at long intervals, and between them the shadows lay in pools that were almost solid. Sister Magdalena walked slightly ahead, her hand trailing along the wall as though she liked the touch of the plaster. Her rosary hung at her belt. It was wooden, dark, and the beads were uneven, as though it had been strung by someone who was not in a hurry.
"It is on the third floor," Sister Magdalena said, without turning. "The stairs are old. They complain, but they hold."
Annalise had not known stairs could complain. She listened now, and she heard them.
The cell was at the end of a passage that smelled of lamp oil and cold stone. Sister Magdalena opened the door and stood aside. The cell was small. There was a cot, a prie-dieu, a basin on a stand, a wooden chair, and a window no wider than Annalise's two hands held together. The window was unshuttered, and through it she could see a sliver of the chapel roof and, beyond it, the black mass of the pines on the far hill. The glass in the window was old and slightly buckled, so that the view beyond it trembled faintly as though it were seen through water.
Sister Magdalena waited until Annalise had stepped inside. Then she came in too, closing the door softly behind her, and stood with her back against it.
"You have everything?" she said. "There is a blanket in the chest. There is a candle and a tinder. There is water in the basin, but it is cold. If you want warm, I can bring."
"It is fine," Annalise said.
Sister Magdalena nodded. She did not move from the door.
For a while neither of them spoke. Annalise set her bag on the chair. She unpinned her hat and set it on the prie-dieu. The cell was very quiet. Below the window a moth was batting itself against the pane in soft, futile arcs. The moth made a sound like a small hand tapping a table.
Sister Magdalena reached, with both hands, into the folds of her habit at her breast, and drew something out.
It was a rosary. It was smaller than the one at her belt. Its beads were wood, very dark, the color of dried blood. The crucifix at its end was also wood, plain, and the figure upon it had been carved by someone who had not been afraid of suffering. The wood was smooth. It had been held by many hands.
Sister Magdalena held it out.
"Take this," she said. Her voice had changed. It was no longer the soft, slightly breathless voice of the corridor. It was lower. It was also, Annalise thought, older. "Keep it close. Do not let it leave your skin."
Annalise did not move.
"Why," she said.
Sister Magdalena looked at her then, and her eyes, which had been the polite downcast eyes of a young nun who had been told to deliver a guest to her room, were for a moment entirely her own. They were brown, and in them there was the look Annalise had seen downstairs, the look of one person seeing another.
"Because the house is old," Sister Magdalena said. "Because the house has been here longer than any of us. Because there are nights when the corridors are not as empty as they ought to be, and a thing in the hand is sometimes the only thing between."
She stopped. She seemed to hear her own words. A small color came into her face.
"Forgive me," she said. "I speak too much. It is a fault of mine. Mother Agnes says so often."
"It is not a fault," Annalise said, and did not know why she said it.
Sister Magdalena pressed the rosary into her hand. The wood was warm from the sister's breast. Annalise closed her fingers around it. The crucifix lay against the meat of her thumb. It was heavier than she had expected.
"I will bring warm water before Compline," Sister Magdalena said. "I will leave it outside the door. You will not hear me. You will hear it when you wake."
She opened the door. She stepped into the corridor. She turned, and for a moment she stood framed in the doorway as though she were a figure in one of the small painted panels Annalise had passed on her way up, the ones that ran along the stairs and depicted the stations of a life she did not know.
"Pray," Sister Magdalena said, "if you pray. If you do not, keep the rosary anyway. It is not only for prayer."
Then she was gone. Her habit made no sound against the stones.
Annalise stood in the middle of her cell with the rosary in her hand. She looked down at it. The beads were uneven, as she had noticed, and between two of them there was a knot that had been tied not by the original maker but by some later hand, a knot that was tighter than the others, a knot that had been pulled with the teeth.
She sat on the cot. The cot was harder than she had expected. The blanket smelled faintly of lavender, but beneath the lavender there was another smell, older, the smell of wool that has been folded away for a long time and has not been aired. She put the rosary on the pillow beside her. She did not, in the end, let it leave her skin. She took it back up and laid it across her breast, and the wood of the crucifix pressed lightly through the cloth of her blouse.
The bell for Vespers sounded, far away, in the tower. Its note was low and it did not end cleanly. It hung in the air of the cell like a thing uncertain whether to be heard.
Annalise lay back on the cot. She did not close her eyes. Through the buckled glass of the window the stars were coming out one by one over the pines, and the chapel roof below her was a darker line against the dark. She thought of her sister's letter. She thought of the cousin in Lyon. She thought of the broken teapot and of the dog whose name she had forgotten. She thought of the second letter, still unopened, against her ribs.
She thought of the word between.
Outside, below her window, two sisters crossed the courtyard, their habits swinging, their feet making no sound on the flagstones. They did not speak. The moth at the pane had gone. There was only the bell, still not finished, still hanging in the air.
She set her hand on the rosary. The wood was warming under her palm. The crucifix was still. The knot between the two beads pressed against the heel of her hand, the tighter knot, the one that had been pulled with the teeth.
The bell ended. The quiet that came after it was not empty. It was, as she had suspected, pressed full of small sounds. She lay in the middle of them. She did not sleep. She did not, for a long time, move. The stars above the pines went on coming out, and the convent of Saint Cecilia settled around her, and her sister's letters lay unopened against her heart, and the rosary lay warm across her breast, and the night, which had only just begun, was already very long.