The first bell struck at three in the morning, and Cordelia counted.
She stood in the narrow lavatorium off the dormitory corridor, her hands plunged into water so cold the tin basin frosted at the edges. The sound came through the stone walls as a single deep bronze note, followed by silence, followed by another. She counted without meaning to. One. Two. Three. Her breath made small clouds in the unheated room. Four. Five. The water numbed her wrists to the bone. Six. Seven. By the tenth toll, the skin of her fingers had gone the color of tallow.
Eleven.
Twelve.
Thirteen.
She forgot the basin. She forgot the cloth Sister Magdalena had given her for her face. She stood with wet hands suspended over the water and listened, her lips parted, her pulse visible in her throat. Fourteen. Fifteen. Each peal rolled down the corridor and through the chapel beyond, so heavy the plaster above the door hairline-cracked in a pattern she would later trace with her fingertip. Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two.
Twenty-three.
The last note lingered, then snapped off. The silence it left behind was the loudest thing Cordelia had ever heard.
She had been at the convent three days. Three days of thin soup, of rules spoken in undertones, of doors that opened only one way. Three days of watching the nuns move through their offices with the smooth, head-down efficiency of women who had memorized every stone. And in all that time, no one had mentioned that the bell rang wrong.
She dried her hands on the cloth and made her way to the chapel by the light of a single tallow candle set in an iron sconce. The corridor stones wore a polish from centuries of feet, and her soft-soled shoes made no sound at all. She passed the door to the chapter house, the door to the refectory, the long blank wall where a fresco had been whitewashed in some forgotten century. Somewhere ahead, a choir had already begun.
The chapel at matins was smaller than she had expected. She had imagined vaulted ceilings, flying buttresses, the great cold dignity of the cathedrals she had read about in her father's library. Instead, the room was low and close, the ceiling blackened by centuries of candle smoke, the walls hung with a single row of painted panels depicting saints whose names she did not recognize. The altar stood at the far end beneath a window of thick green glass that admitted no view of the sky, only a sourceless jade light that fell across the floor in a single oblong.
The nuns were already in their stalls. Twenty-three of them, Cordelia counted, though the stalls held more. They wore the same habit: heavy black wool, white wimple, a veil that fell to the small of the back. Their faces were pale and uniform in the green light. Their mouths moved together.
The chant came to Cordelia as she slipped into the last empty stall, a sound so low it seemed to rise from the floor rather than from human throats. A drone without melody. A vibration in the kneeler beneath her. She closed her eyes and let it pass over her, and for a moment she could not tell whether the singing came from the nuns in front of her or from the stones themselves, or from some deep place beneath the stones where the chapel foundations met the mountain.
She did not know the office. She knew only that she had been told to attend, and that attendance was not optional. She bowed her head when the others bowed, rose when they rose, kept her hands folded and her eyes on the worn wood of the prie-dieu before her. The drone continued. A reading began, low and rapid, in a language she did not recognize. She listened for the words but they slid past her, syllables without anchor, until one phrase surfaced: matutinae laudis. Morning praise.
Then the bell tolled again. A single stroke, heavy, final, and the office ended. The nuns filed out in silence, their habits brushing the stone floor with a sound like slow water.
Cordelia remained in her stall.
She did not know yet that the bell had tolled twenty-three times. She had counted to twelve and lost the thread when the cold of the water reached her chest. She thought she had miscounted, or that the bell had rung twice for some reason. She decided she would ask.
The opportunity came at breakfast, which was taken in silence. The nuns ate standing at a long stone shelf set beneath a row of high windows. The bread was dark and dense. The soup was the same thin broth she had been served since her arrival, with a film of grease that caught the weak morning light. Cordelia stood at the end of the shelf and broke her bread into the soup and waited.
A nun stood beside her. She was old, this one, with a face that had been weathered into a map of fine lines, her hands swollen at the knuckles. She did not look at Cordelia. She did not speak. She chewed with the slow deliberation of a woman who had learned to make a single crust last a morning.
Cordelia waited until the nun had finished, until the tray was cleared, until the other nuns had filed out and the long room held only the two of them and the smell of cold broth and stone.
"Forgive me," Cordelia said. Her voice sounded wrong in the empty refectory, too clear, too English. "The bell this morning. It rang very many times."
The old nun turned her head. Her eyes were pale and small, set deep in their sockets, and they held Cordelia's gaze with a steadiness that felt less like attention than like measurement.
"It rang for matins," Cordelia said. "I thought I had counted twelve. But there were more."
The nun did not answer. She set her hands flat on the stone shelf, one over the other, and her mouth moved briefly as if she were tasting a word she would not speak. Then she turned and walked from the room, her veil swaying behind her, and the door closed without sound.
Cordelia stood alone in the refectory. The high windows admitted a grey light that fell on the empty shelf and made the stone look like ice. She waited for someone else to come, but no one did. After a long while she went to find Sister Magdalena.
Sister Magdalena was in the cloister garden, sweeping the flagstones with a birch broom. She was a tall woman, broad through the shoulders, with a habit that strained at the seams. She swept with the same unhurried rhythm the nuns brought to every task, her broom whispering across the stones in a long oval. Cordelia watched her from the arched entrance for a moment before speaking.
"Sister Magdalena."
The broom paused. The sister did not look up.
"The bell this morning rang more than twelve times."
The broom resumed its oval.
"Sister."
"It rang as it has always rung." The voice was low, accented in a way Cordelia could not place. Romanian, perhaps, or something near it. "You will learn the bell."
"How many times does it ring for matins?"
Sister Magdalena swept. The bristles whispered. A crow passed overhead, its shadow crossing the flagstones.
"You will learn," the sister said again, and her tone closed the question like a door.
Cordelia stayed at the cloister entrance for some minutes after the sister had gone, listening to the absence of the broom's sound. The garden was small and walled on all four sides, with a single pear tree in the centre that had not yet begun to leaf. The grass beneath it was yellowed and trampled. Around the walls, in narrow beds bordered with broken brick, a few brave flowers had forced their heads through the cold soil: snowdrops, white and bowed, and something darker that Cordelia did not recognize. She knelt and looked at the darker flowers. Their petals were the color of old bruises, and they gave off a faint sweet smell that reminded her of the inside of a wardrobe where her grandmother had hung dried lavender.
She stood and went to find another nun to ask.
The next nun was younger, perhaps thirty, with a round face and eyes that flickered when Cordelia spoke. Cordelia found her in the corridor outside the novitiate, carrying a stack of folded linen. The nun stopped and listened, and her mouth opened, and Cordelia saw in the movement a beginning of speech.
Then the nun closed her mouth. She looked past Cordelia, down the corridor, and her face went still.
"It rang as it has always rung," she said, in a voice so similar to Sister Magdalena's that Cordelia might have thought it was the same woman.
She walked on. Cordelia watched her go and saw, at the far end of the corridor, a figure standing in shadow. The figure was tall and motionless, dressed in black, with hands folded at the waist. Cordelia could not see the face beneath the veil. She could not tell if the figure had been watching her the entire time or had only just arrived.
She did not go down the corridor.
Instead she went to the chapel.
It was empty now, the office ended, the candles burned down to short stubs in their iron holders. She walked the length of the nave slowly, trailing her fingers along the backs of the stalls. The wood was worn to a polish that felt almost oily beneath her fingertips. She stopped at the altar and looked up at the green window. The jade light had faded with the morning, and the glass now showed only its own thickness, the imperfections and bubbles trapped inside it, and her own small reflection looking back.
She turned and looked at the bell rope.
It hung from a hole in the ceiling near the chapel's eastern wall, a long coil of hemp rope so dark with age it looked almost black. The end was frayed into a soft brush. She had seen such ropes before, in the village church of her childhood, and she knew what they did. She stood beneath the rope and looked up at the hole.
The bell was above her, in a tower she had never entered. She did not know its size. She did not know its weight. She only knew that when it rang, the plaster cracked.
She left the chapel and climbed the narrow staircase at its rear, the one the nuns used, that wound upward through the thickness of the wall. The stairs were unlit. She felt her way with her right hand against the stone, the air growing colder as she climbed. The walls narrowed around her. By the time she reached the top, her shoulders brushed both sides of the passage.
The bell tower was a small square room with a single window that looked out over the convent roof and the mountain beyond. The bell hung in the centre of the room, suspended from a heavy timber that crossed the ceiling. It was larger than she had expected. Almost as tall as she was. Its surface was the green-black of old bronze, pitted and scarred, and around its lip a ring of Latin lettering had been cast, though much of it was worn smooth. She could make out only fragments: ... MATUT... and ... NO... .
She reached out and touched it. The metal was so cold it burned. She drew her hand back and stood for a moment, flexing her fingers, waiting for the sting to fade. The tower smelled of dust and old iron and, faintly, of something else. Something sweet and dark that she could not name.
She did not pull the rope. She did not know what would happen if she did.
She went back down the stairs and out into the cloister and waited.
The bells at noon were the thing she remembered most.
She was in the refectory when she heard the first stroke. Twelve o'clock, the sun briefly visible through a gap in the clouds, the soup steaming faintly in its bowls. The nuns had stopped eating. They stood with their hands folded and their heads bowed, and the bell sounded, once, and the silence after it was so complete that Cordelia could hear her own blood.
Then the bell sounded again.
A second stroke, as heavy as the first, and the nuns around her stiffened in a way she had not seen before. Not a flinch. Something deeper. A settling. Their eyes, where she could see them beneath the veils, did not close. They remained open and fixed on a point in the middle distance, and their lips moved briefly, the same word repeated, though Cordelia could not hear it.
No one explained the second toll.
She asked Sister Magdalena, in the cloister, after the dinner had been cleared and the long afternoon had begun. The sister was kneeling at the stone edging of the pear tree bed, pulling winter-dead stalks from the soil with her bare hands. The dirt blackened her fingers. She did not look up.
"It rang twice," Cordelia said. "At noon. Why did it ring twice?"
Sister Magdalena pulled a stalk. The root came with it, pale and fibrous. She laid the stalk on the pile beside her and reached for another.
"It is the bell," she said.
"Yes, but why twice?"
The sister paused with her hand in the soil. Cordelia saw her shoulders rise and fall, a single breath taken and released.
"You must not ask about the bell."
"I have asked."
"Then you must not ask again."
Cordelia waited. The afternoon light fell across the pear tree and made the bare branches look like cracks in a pale sky. Somewhere in the convent a door closed. Somewhere, far away, a crow called and was not answered.
"What happens," Cordelia said, very quietly, "if I ask again?"
Sister Magdalena stood. Her hands hung at her sides, dark with soil, and she looked at Cordelia for the first time. Her face was broad and pale, her eyes the grey of melted snow, and in them Cordelia saw something that was not anger and was not fear. It was the look of a woman who had once asked a question of her own and learned the price of it.
"You will learn," the sister said, "the bell."
The chapel of St. Catherine's was colder than the rest of the convent. Cordelia learned this on the third afternoon, when she slipped through the low door during vespers and stood against the back wall among the shadows of the pillars. The air inside tasted of stone and old wax and something faintly sweet beneath both, like apples left too long in a cellar. She pressed her shoulder blades against the limestone and tried to take up as little space as possible.
The nuns had been at prayer when she came in. They had not stopped. They had not looked up. They had not, so far as Cordelia could tell, drawn breath.
There were eleven of them arranged in two rows on either side of the choir stall, their habits the deep blue-black of a sky before it has decided whether to storm. Their heads were bowed, their hands folded on the lap in identical attitudes, the fingers laced at the third knuckle. Their lips moved. The sound they made was not quite the plainchant Cordelia had heard in books and read about in the catechism. It was lower, with a hum beneath it like the resonance of a struck bell that has long since ceased to ring but still wishes to. The sound filled the chapel the way water fills a jar, finding every hollow and corner, settling against the bones.
Cordelia watched their hands.
The left hand of the nun nearest her tapped once against the folded right. The same finger, the same pressure, at the same moment that the nun three places down shifted her weight on the kneeler. Cordelia's eye traveled along the row. Every nun tilted her head to the right at the same angle, by the same degree, at the same breath. Their veils fell forward together. Their shoulders rose and fell together. Even the small tremor of the candle flames against the drafts from the high window moved in sympathy with their murmuring, as though the air itself obeyed whatever rhythm the sisters kept.
It could not have been practiced. Cordelia had not lived long, but she had lived enough to know the difference between rehearsal and something else. Rehearsal was effort, was a striving toward a shape. This had no striving. It had only the shape.
Their faces, when at last one nun raised her head to cough, were the colour of the inside of an apple. Not the red of a cheek touched by wind, not the brown of a country face, but the white-pink of something grown in the dark, like a mushroom or a hand that has never seen daylight. The nun's eyes, when they passed across Cordelia, did not pause. They passed the way a bird's shadow passes over a field. Cordelia felt the look on her skin like a change in temperature, and then it was gone.
She did not move. She did not, for some time, breathe.
The hymn changed. A single voice began, low and level, in the middle of the choir. It was an older voice, slightly cracked, and the words were in a language Cordelia did not recognize. The other voices fell in, one by one, until all eleven were singing together, but the older voice still carried the thread, the way a thin black root carries through pale soil. The sound rose and did not fall. It climbed the chapel walls, gathered in the vault above, and hung there like fog.
Cordelia's teeth had begun to ache. She could not have said when she first noticed it. She set her jaw and waited for the ache to pass. It did not pass. It deepened, settled into the hinge of her jaw, and began to throb in time with the singing.
A hand touched her elbow.
Cordelia turned. Sister Ilona stood beside her, half in the shadow of the pillar, her face almost the same pale colour as the nuns in the choir. She was looking not at Cordelia but at the singers.
"Come out," she said, very softly. "You should not be here."
"I wanted to see."
"You have seen."
Sister Ilona's fingers tightened on Cordelia's elbow. The grip was not unkind, but it was not gentle either. It was the grip of a woman who had been given a task and intended to complete it.
"The bell rang twice today," Cordelia said.
Sister Ilona did not answer.
"I asked Sister Magdalena."
"I know what you asked."
"Then tell me why."
Sister Ilona's thumb pressed once against the inside of Cordelia's elbow. Cordelia felt it in her wrist, in the place where the pulse runs close to the skin.
"There is no why," Sister Ilona said. "There is only the bell."
Cordelia opened her mouth to speak, and Sister Ilona shook her head, once, very slightly, the way one shakes the head at a child who has reached for the kettle. Cordelia closed her mouth. The singing went on.
Sister Ilona drew her out of the chapel. The door closed behind them with the soft weight of old oak. The corridor was colder than the chapel, which Cordelia would not have thought possible. The candle on the wall guttered and spat.
Sister Ilona stood with her hand still on Cordelia's arm and looked at her in the half-light. Her face had the same unfinished look that the nuns in the choir had, as if the features had been carved but the carver had been called away before he could put in the details.
"You are to come to the chapel no more without being summoned," Sister Ilona said. "You understand."
"It was vespers."
"It was ours."
"Then where am I to pray?"
Sister Ilona did not answer this either. She released Cordelia's arm, smoothed the sleeve where her fingers had been, and walked away down the corridor without looking back. The sound of her footsteps was the only sound in the corridor. It was enough.
Cordelia stood alone under the candle and listened to the silence that followed the singing. It was not an empty silence. It had weight and texture, like a folded cloth, and when at last it lifted, the chapel bell began to strike.
It struck once.
Cordelia counted. The second stroke did not come.
She stood until the echo died against the stones, then turned and went back to her room. The sky through the corridor window was the colour of iron. Somewhere a rook called twice, and was answered once, and was not answered again.
---
She could not sleep that night, though she had not yet learned that not sleeping was the work of this place.
The convent at midnight was a different country. The candles in the corridor had been snuffed, save for one at the far turn, and the light it gave was the colour of weak tea. The stones gave back the cold of the day and multiplied it. Cordelia lay in her narrow bed with the blanket pulled up to her chin and watched the moon move across the ceiling. It came in through the small window and laid a pale trapezoid on the plaster, and the trapezoid travelled slowly eastward as the hours passed, like the hand of a clock with a face she did not recognize.
She had been awake perhaps an hour, perhaps two, when the dog began to bark.
It was not the barking of a dog that has heard a stranger. It was the barking of a dog that has seen one. There was a difference, and Cordelia had grown up in a house with hounds, and she knew the difference.
She got up. She wrapped the blanket around her shoulders and went to the window on bare feet, and the stone of the floor was so cold that her toes drew up of their own accord.
The courtyard below was empty. The pear tree stood in its circle of pale gravel, and the gravel was silver under the moon, and the branches of the pear were the colour of ink. The east tower rose at the far side of the courtyard, square and tall, its stones darker than the stones of the other buildings, as though it had been built of a different quarry or a different century. Its windows were black, all of them, save one.
The highest window of the east tower showed a figure.
The figure stood behind the glass, and the glass was too dirty and the moon too uncertain for Cordelia to see the face. She saw only the shape, the suggestion of a woman in white, the outline of a head and shoulders and folded hands, and the hands were held at the level of the sternum as though they clasped something there, a book or a small dark object, something that Cordelia could not make out.
The figure was watching the courtyard. Cordelia was sure of it. The angle of the head, the stillness of the body, the way the pale shape seemed to be leaning almost imperceptibly forward, all of it was the posture of someone who had been standing there for a long time and intended to stand there longer. Watching.
Cordelia did not move. She did not blink. She held her hands against the cold sill and felt the stone bite into her palms and did not look away.
The figure did not move.
The moon moved. A cloud crossed it and the courtyard went dark, and the figure vanished, and when the cloud passed the figure was gone.
The window stood empty. The glass reflected only the sky and the pale branches of the pear and, far down below, the small pale shape of a girl in a blanket who stood at her window with her mouth open and her breath coming in small white plumes that the wind took and scattered.
Cordelia closed her eyes. She opened them. The window was still empty. She counted to twenty. She counted to a hundred. She did not count higher because her teeth had begun to chatter and she had to clamp her jaw to keep them still.
She waited until the moon had moved the length of three hands across the sill, and the figure did not return. Then she went back to the bed and lay down and pulled the blanket over her head and lay there listening to the bark of the dog, which had not stopped, which barked and barked and barked at something in the courtyard that she could not see from her window, something low and quick that moved along the base of the east tower and was gone.
In the morning the convent was as it had always been. The bell rang once at six. The bell rang once at noon. The bell rang once at six in the evening. The nuns walked in pairs down the cloister with their hands folded and their eyes on the gravel. Sister Magdalena knelt at the pear tree bed and pulled dead stalks from the soil. Sister Ilona passed Cordelia in the corridor and looked through her and went on.
Cordelia went to the east tower after matins. She climbed the spiral stair with her hand on the wall, and the stones of the stair were warmer than the stones of the chapel, which surprised her, and she did not know why. The stair wound upward through small landings and past small doors that were locked, every one of them, with iron keys that did not hang from any ring at her waist.
She climbed until she could climb no farther. The highest door was at the top of the last flight, set into the wall beneath the roof beams. It was not locked. It was open, a hand's breadth ajar, and through the gap she could see a room.
The room was empty. There was a chair by the window, an old chair with a wooden seat, and the seat was worn smooth by use. There was a small table beside it. On the table lay a pair of white gloves, folded, and a small leather-bound book, and a sprig of dried rosemary.
Cordelia stood in the doorway. The wind came in through the broken pane of the window and moved the curtain, which was the colour of old snow, and the curtain lifted and fell and lifted and fell.
She did not enter.
She stood for a long time in the doorway with her hand on the frame, looking at the chair, the gloves, the book, the rosemary. The smell of the rosemary reached her even from where she stood, dry and sharp and faintly bitter, like the memory of a garden that had been somewhere far away and a long time ago.
She went down the stairs again. She went out into the courtyard. She stood at the foot of the east tower and looked up, and the highest window was open, and the curtain lifted and fell and lifted and fell in the wind.
Cordelia looked at the curtain for a long time. Then she turned and walked back across the courtyard, past the pear tree, past Sister Magdalena on her knees, past the chapel where the bell hung silent and would not ring until noon.
At noon the bell rang once.
Cordelia stood in the cloister and listened to the echo die against the stones. She did not close her eyes. She did not look at Sister Magdalena. She did not ask.
She waited.
The bell did not ring again.