The Abbess of Crewe Read Online Free PDF

many times have we told
     you?’
    ‘Ah,’ breathes Winifrede, aghast at her mistake. ‘I forgot you’ve
     just bugged the hall.’
    So swiftly to her forehead in despair goes the hand of Mildred, so swivelled to heaven
     are Walburga’s eyes in the exasperation of the swifter mind with the slow. But
     Alexandra is calm. ‘Order will come out of chaos,’ she says, ‘as it
     always has done. Sisters, be still, be sober.’
    Walburga the Prioress turns to her: ‘Alexandra, you are calm, so calm …
     ’
    ‘There is a proverb: Beware the ire of the calm,’ says Alexandra.
    Quietly the congregation of nuns descends the great staircase and is assembled. Walburga
     the Prioress now leads, Alexandra follows, and all the community after them, to sing the
     Hour.
    It is the Hour of None, three in the afternoon,
     when Sister Felicity slips sleepily into the chapel. She is a tiny nun, small as a
     schoolgirl, not at all like what one would have imagined from all the talk about her.
     Her complexion looks as if her hair, sprouting under her veil, would be reddish. Nobody
     knows where Felicity has been all day and half the night, for she was not present at
     Matins at midnight nor Lauds at three in the morning, nor at breakfast at five, Prime at
     six, Terce at nine; nor was she present in the refectory at eleven for lunch, which
     comprised barley broth and a perfectly nourishing and tasty, although uncommon, dish of
     something unnamed on toast, that something being in fact a cat-food by the name of Mew,
     bought cheaply and in bulk. Felicity was not there to partake of it, nor was she in the
     chapel singing the Hour of Sext at noon. Nor between these occasions was she anywhere in
     the convent, not in her cell nor in the sewing-room embroidering the purses, the
     vestments and the altar-cloths; nor was she in the electronics laboratory which was set
     up by the great nuns Alexandra, Walburga and Mildred under the late Abbess
     Hildegarde’s very nose and carefully unregarding eyes. Felicity has been absent
     since after Vespers the previous day, and now she slips into her stall in the chapel at
     None, yawning at three in the afternoon.
    Walburga, the Prioress, temporarily head of the convent, turns her head very slightly as
     Felicity takes her place, and turns away again. The community vibrates like an
     evanescent shadow that quickly fades out of sight, and continues fervently to sing. Puny
     Felicity, who knows the psalter by heart, takes up the chant but not her Office
     book:
    They have spoken to me with a lying tongue and have compassed
     me about with words of hatred:
    And have fought against me without cause.
    Instead of making me a return of love, they slandered me:
    but I gave myself to prayer.
    And they repaid evil for good:
    and hatred for my love.
    The high throne of the Abbess is empty. Felicity’s eyes,
     pink-rimmed with sleeplessness, turn towards it as she chants, thinking, maybe, of the
     dead, aloof Abbess Hildegarde who lately sat propped in that place, or maybe how well
     she could occupy it herself, little as she is, a life-force of new ideas, a quivering
     streak of light set in that gloomy chair. The late Hildegarde tolerated Felicity only
     because she considered her to be a common little thing, and it befitted a Christian to
     tolerate.
    ‘She constitutes a reliable something for us to practise benevolence upon,’
     the late Hildegarde formerly said of Felicity, confiding this to Alexandra, Walburga and
     Mildred one summer afternoon between the Hours of Sext and None.
    Felicity now looks away from the vacant throne and, intoning her responses, peers at
     Alexandra where she stands mightily in her stall. Alexandra’s lips move with the
     incantation:
    As I went down the water side,
    None but my foe to be my guide,
    None but my foe…
    Felicity, putting the finishing touches on an altar-cloth, is
     sewing a phrase into the inside corner. She is doing it in the tiniest and neatest
     possible