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do? Could He give her some sort of sign?
    She must now get on, however. There were only a dozen of them living here at Nuestra Señora del Carmen – the patron saint of fishermen – and this week Sister Julia’s duties included picking vegetables and herbs from the garden plot outside. They grew wormwood, aloe and echinacea as well asthe more common mint, camomile, and rosemary. Every plant had its uses.
Si.
That was the way God had planned it. And He had given them the strength of mankind to make use of His gifts. But mankind was weak. Hadn’t she seen that? Mankind could fall into temptation. Mankind had free will but so often made the wrong decisions. And those decisions could have consequences so far reaching that it was almost unimaginable. Sister Julia did not want to make the wrong decision – not after all that had gone on. There had been so much sorrow, a sorrow that seemed still buried in her very soul.
    Sister Julia walked through the cloistered arches of pale crumbling stone and stepped outside the back door. This place was not so different from the Santa Ana convent in Barcelona where she had lived when she was little more than a girl. It was not a closed order – the sisters were free to come and go and they could sell their sweetmeats in the foyer just as the sisters had done in Santa Ana. She smiled, remembering their
suspiros de monja
 – nun’s sighs – made with a thick batter and candied fruit; golden and crispy on the outside, rich and creamy on the inside.
Ah.
But at Santa Ana things had changed. Something else had been asked of her … Sister Julia looked up at their small bell tower which was attached to the chapel on a buttress of stone. Steadied herself.
    *
    Outside, the light had changed from gold to a pinkish hue. Towards the south the mountains rested as if in slumber; as if wounded, with their deep scars and furrowed wrinkles;above them the darkening sky held daggers of red, orange, white. Another day gone. Another day nearer death …
    Sister Julia had experienced a long life, a life that had held challenges very different from the ones she had been expecting when she was a girl; different too from what she had foreseen when she had been forced to take her first simple vows. It had not been easy – perhaps God’s work was never easy – and many times she had questioned what had occurred. She still did. She had lived through such uneasy and turbulent times. But now.
Please God
 … All she wished for now, was for the burden she held to be eased from her shoulders. For the gentle blanket of peace to put her mind and her heart at rest.
    She fetched the roughly woven basket and sharp knife from the outside storeroom and began to collect the salad leaves for tonight’s meal from the allotment surrounded by low dry-stone walls. They had fig and almond trees; hens for eggs; three goats for milk and cheese. They ate simply but well. As at Santa Ana, they grew most of their own vegetables and fruit, including potatoes, onions and the small Canarian bananas, although the land here on the Island of Fuerteventura was arid and dry. They still ate
gofio
too – once eaten by workers in the fields, mixed with water and sugar into a dough in a goatskin bag. These days they added it to milk to make their breakfast cereal or used it to thicken their soups and stews. Like many things, it had lived on, adapted to new times. And yet it symbolised, for Sister Julia, the simplicity of the life here.
    Sister Julia did not fear death. She never had. Over the years, she had seen many die – sisters in the convent, people in the hospital where she worked as a young novice, her own family too. They were all gone now. And then there was the Civil War. No one could live through the Civil War and its aftermath and not see death, not stare it in the face, not smell it – bloody and rancid in your nostrils – around every street corner. Politics. War. Sister Julia shivered. There had been so much