“Wash!” Yet another nun had demanded, standing in the door.
Melody had followed her down two corridors afraid she was going to be subjected to another ice bath treatment and was pleasantly surprised, not to say, relieved, to be ushered into what was obviously a communal washroom with two real latrines in open brick cubicles at one end. There was tepid water in a bowl, and some kind of carbolic soap.
It was all she could do not to yelp: “Hallelujah!”
It seemed that cleanliness was definitely adjacent to godliness and it was the custom of the sisters to discard most or all of their garments so as to ensure this much to be desired state was achieved on a whole-body basis at least once a day.
Running her fingers through her raggedly massacred now very short hair was an experience, as was eying the bumps and bruises on her legs and knees acquired hiking over the mountains. The bruises were coming out nicely…
She felt positively scrawny, beaten up and was glad that there were no mirrors to hand.
She had asked her companion about that in halting Catalan.
‘Pride goeth before a fall,’ the other woman had replied stoically.
Sometime later that morning she was handed a broom.
‘Sweep the corridors and the courtyard. A sister will bring you food later.’
So, she had swept the floors and ventured out into a claustrophobic yard, got a little distracted by the faded, cracked possibly formerly magically coloured tiles underfoot. She wearied very quickly, tried to carry on, eventually slumped in a corner and started to cry.
That was the low point.
Not that the days since had been exactly a barrel of laughs.
She hated feeling like a victim, being helpless and after a while, as she had always done in the past she began to fight back. However bad things get a woman can always get angry!
Fighting back, even in small ways was not tolerated.
They had marched her off to see the Mother Superior that evening.
“You must work,” Sister Isabella informed her tersely, waving for her to be taken away again. Then the old woman had had a second thought. “No, take her to Sister Elvira. She looks feverish.”
Sister Elvira was even older than La Superiora.
Mercifully, it transpired that she was cut from a different cloth.
She had put her hand to Melody’s forehead.
Looked placidly into her eyes.
Taken her left hand between her hands.
“We are an order that welcomes any who will contribute to the common good under the sight of Our Lord,” Sister Elvira decided, her voice maternal. “We will keep you, and your friend, another day from fully joining our community. That is our way. You are both exhausted still. You both have much to get used to.”
Since the old woman had made no attempt to communicate in any language other than Castilian, Melody assumed that she too had been let into the secret about the monastery’s two new guests.
Melody had obediently drunk the potion◦– some kind of cold herbal tea, she guessed◦– from the cup that Sister Elvira had pressed into her hands. Later she had slept a deep, dreamless sleep.
Okay, so they drugged me…
A few of the other nuns had given her curious looks when she was escorted through the building to the refectory the next morning, others had watched her as she choked down more of the foul gruel and slaked her thirst. Apparently, all the other sisters had completed their toilet hours ago and she had missed her turn. Breakfast concluded, it had been straight to a larger chapel than before where she glimpsed Henrietta, like her, with her hood drawn half over her face several rock-hard cold pews away. Both women had minders, or perhaps, ‘watchers’ would be a better word, assigned to them for the first couple of days they were allowed out of their cells. In between periods of kneeling supplication wherever one was at a given hour, or attendances at, initially, meaningless religious observances in the chapel, Melody’s days rotated between the kitchen, sweeping floors and working in the walled garden on the southern side of the castle-like complex.
She began to yearn to look over and beyond the walls, to chaff at commandments restricting ‘noviciates’ such as her to the ground floor and the ‘under croft’ spaces of the Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción.
The morning gruel and hard bread was a thing to be endured; in the evening the bread was fresher and some nights the warm, steaming broth, tasted like manna from heaven to stomachs cramped with hunger.
Everybody was hungry practically all the time; in that the communion was united and despite herself, Melody quickly started to find common cause with other sisters, many of whom began to quirk smiles, or occasionally giggled at her deliberately butchered Catalan. Several of the nuns spoke passable French, although it took a while to get used to the fact that nobody was remotely interested in her life prior to the day she had ‘entered’ the monastery.
That had confused Melody.
It was as if when a woman arrived in this other little world within a world locked away in the seclusion of the high Mountains of Madrid that the slate was wiped clean, that one began anew.
Melody worried about Henrietta.
If the adjustment to life here was hard for her then what must it be like for her younger friend, lover…
Three times they had exchanged inscrutable, unreadable brief looks in the gloom of the chapel, or across tables at opposite ends of the refectory, once they had passed each other in a corridor almost without knowing it.
Melody would have given anything just to know that Henrietta was… okay.
There was rain in the air that morning as Melody hoed and weeded the ‘sunny corner’ of the kitchen garden. The sisters grew root vegetables elsewhere because this bright spot was reserved for bean stalks which climbed wooden frames and chives, and mint and rosemary struggled to gain a foothold in the tilled dun-coloured earth. She was a total ignoramus when it came to gardening, horticulture or agriculture. Back home she would have rued her broken finger nails, the soreness of her pale, previously soft hands and the stink of the manure in the earth beneath her feet. Such things had swiftly ceased to matter as she went about her work with a mind oddly emptied of clutter and distractions.
I had had no idea how one behaved in a place like this…
Already, she had picked up the basic do’s and don’ts of the sisterhood, accepted that she was an inconsequential junior member of the community whom the others viewed as a clumsy child in their midst.
Today was Good Friday but the chores still had to be done.
There were dishes to be scrubbed and washed, the laundry pummelled in the kitchen’s big tubs and the garden tended, God’s work to be accomplished in the intervals between abasement and worship, and devotions to be lived and to be celebrated.
In a funny sort of way, she half-suspected that she could be happy here…
“Come inside!”
That was when Melody became aware of the distant drone of an approaching aircraft.
Chapter 21
Easter Saturday Friday 24th March
HMS Achilles, approaching Bermuda
Surgeon Lieutenant Abraham Lincoln of the Royal Naval Air Service had assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that the ship would cruise straight down to the Gulf of Spain before transiting the Windward Passage to make port at Kingston, Jamaica within the week. However, it transpired that this had never been the plan.