They nodded.
‘Beauty hoarded,’ said de Marinetti, ‘is beauty wasted.’
‘Without restraint,’ countered the Prioress, ‘beauty is guzzled and debauched. The senses must be tamed and fed moderately – like a lion in a pleasure garden.’
The Admiral signalled his wholehearted agreement and cast his own mind cheerily back to when he himself was a mere slave of feeling: before tragedy and experience, before Marcus Aurelius and Stoicism.
Only Cromwell seemed to remain resentful of the Prioress prevailing, ‘I have heard it said that the Hebrew scriptures say that before the throne of judgement, every soul must one day account for every pleasure missed.’
‘Every legitimate pleasure,’ said the Prioress. ‘You really must quote accurately, mercenary.’
‘Whatever,’ replied Cromwell blithely. ‘Legitimacy varies from sect to sect.’
A gulf of years and sadness separated the Prioress from the dangerous energies of the Englishman and she could not find it in herself to blame him for his zest. Christ, she recalled, is in every man – but sometimes in heavy disguise. ‘I am pleased,’ she said, ‘to hear your familiarity with any scripture. Why, to think my previous impression was that the Almighty did not play an overlarge part in your life …’
‘Whilst not, of course,’ Cromwell replied, ‘denying God’ (and all the others nodded, observing the formalities of the age) ‘it is at least arguable to consider him remote. One can regard him as the foundation of proper social order but still not require the sight of his hand at work amongst men. I suspect we are effectively orphans and alone in the world – that being so, we must surely make our own way.’
The Prioress was merely amused and this only infuriated Cromwell the more.
‘If I did not know,’ she replied, ‘that my Redeemer liveth and will one day walk the Earth, life would be … insupportable. It would have no point.’
‘And why should it have?’ cried Cromwell, warming to his subject. ‘From our puny perspective, why should we perceive any meaning? I see no need for heaven or hell or meaning. It is a mighty universe we inhabit, Prioress, and more than enough to get on with, in fact.’
Admiral Slovo had long ago ceased to care, and the Prioress held her peace. Meanwhile, way above (or below) all this philosophy, Callypia de Marinetti winked at Numa Droz and shifted her endless legs. Ignoring visions of red-hot pincers and the executioner’s knife, and like all tiny creatures seizing at the fleeting moments life offered before the final dark, Droz winked back.
‘So they are all gone?’ asked Admiral Slovo calmly.
‘Every one, sir,’ replied the nervous novice. ‘And she has not risen at her customary time. We are all most concerned.’
De Marinetti placed a (possibly) consoling arm around the young nun’s shoulders and stroked her hand. ‘No one is holding you responsible, my lovely,’ she said. ‘Our suspicions are drifting elsewhere.’
‘Not I!’ protested Cromwell. ‘I am capable of many things—’
‘Of anything, surely,’ corrected Numa Droz, expressing his professional opinion.
‘—but not pettiness,’ Cromwell pressed on.
Admiral Slovo looked at the mercenary, pinning him with his grey eyes. A tense moment elapsed until, his mental trespass complete, Slovo was satisfied.
‘I believe you,’ he said. ‘However, given your continual debate with the Prioress these last two weeks, and your obvious ill-will upon being worsted, our initial surmise is surely forgivable.’
‘I would not harm the Prioress,’ Master Cromwell maintained stoutly, just the lightest sheen adorning his brow by virtue of Slovo’s scrutiny, ‘or any other old lady.’
‘Unless it was necessary or business,’ expanded Numa Droz again.
‘Naturally,’ conceded Cromwell.
‘Very well then,’ said Slovo. ‘The noose remains untenanted – for the time being. Let us go and examine the evidence first-hand.’
‘There may be no case to answer,’ commented Numa Droz reasonably. ‘Old ladies do sleep late sometimes. My great-grandmother …’
‘No,’ said the Admiral confidently. ‘This place is diminished: I can sense it. She has gone on.’
That was enough to decide things and the little party roused themselves from the breakfast table.
‘You stay here,’ said Slovo to the novice – and then noticed de Marinetti’s flare of predatory interest. ‘On second thoughts, come with us; you’ve had enough novelty for one day.’
The garden was bare, a green graveyard of beheaded stems.
‘What hours of patient work,’ marvelled Callypia, ‘to sever and collect every bloom. Surely this is either a labour of love or hate …’
‘Two closely related emotions,’ commented Slovo, permitting just a modicum of contempt on the final word. ‘And the Prioress’s bed-chamber is …?’ he enquired.
The novice indicated a solid-looking barrier at one end of the ravaged field.
‘Brute force, if you please,’ said Slovo to Numa Droz.
The great Swiss casually applied his metal-shod boot to the door, which splintered away from the violence offered it. With contrasting gentleness, he then disengaged the wounded lock. The door swung open.
Admiral Slovo walked in like Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror entering Constantinople. The others, more like the disciples at the Easter Tomb, followed nervously.
In this case the tomb was not empty. The Prioress, having left the world behind, sat peacefully composed in her bedside chair, surrounded by her transplanted earthly joys. Every surface bore bowls and vases packed with the cut flowers, even the bed and floor were thickly strewn with them so that the otherwise bare and sombre cell was today positively aglow with colour.
Whilst his charges and followers looked on in wonder, saving the image for their old age, Slovo made a search and discovered the unsealed letter propped up before a wash-bowl of roses.
‘I have heard my call,’ he read dispassionately to the assembled witnesses, ‘and dutifully answer, being nothing loath to leave. I know my redeemer liveth.’
Thomas Cromwell sighed.
‘She always had to have the last word,’ he said bitterly.
‘She may just have felt Time’s heavy hand upon her,’ said Cromwell, ‘and made a lucky guess.’
Admiral Slovo made his move and doomed, three turns on, Cromwell’s rook to inevitable death.
‘One does not bid farewell to one’s oldest friends, as the Prioress did, on the basis of a guess. Imagine the embarrassment of waking the next morning!’
‘Perhaps she took poison to avoid that shame,’ hazarded Cromwell, grimacing at the chessboard in his unwillingness to admit defeat.
‘No,’ said Slovo, looking around the cleared garden. ‘I have a passing familiarity with the poisoner’s art. The Prioress departed at the call of Nature alone.’
‘And she’s been seen again!’ piped the Lady de Marinetti. ‘This morning! One of the novices told me.’
‘I have also heard these stories,’ said Admiral Slovo. ‘If true, she seems to have retained a custodial interest in her former garden.’
Former was the correct word. Plagued by boredom and lust, Numa Droz had pressed the sturdier nuns into service, turning the garden into the citadel he had proposed earlier. Already, in one short week, the plants were gone, replaced by rough rubble ramparts.
‘The dead,’ Cromwell spat, ‘are gone and spent and do not return to trouble us. That is their great merit. It has to be so for the proper ordering of things.’