The Rosary Garden by Nicola White (best books to read now TXT) 📕

‘Talking business,’ said Joe, taking off his coat and cap in the scullery, ‘like a pair of Nelson Rockefellers.’

Ali sat at the kitchen table, and Una put a big plate of stew in front of her, yellow domes of boiled potatoes rising from a brown pool of gravy that had lost its shine. Una said that she and Joe were going through to watch Tenko and Ali could come and sit with them when she had finished.

‘You don’t mind, do you?’

‘Not at all,’ said Ali.

‘We’ll talk properly tomorrow, eh?’

‘Sure.’

If discussion could be put off once, it was more likely to be put off again. Ali mashed her potatoes into the stew and started to bolt it down, but by the time she was halfway through she felt stuffed.

She didn’t want to seem ungrateful, so she took her plate through the scullery to the back door and surrendered it to the yard cats. Five creatures ran to her – skinny black-and-white cats, some with splodges of tabby brown. They hissed and swiped at each other as they fought for position around the plate.

She remembered a kitten she fell in love with that December, a little black one with a white front paw. She smuggled it upstairs to sleep in her bed, but woke in the dark to find the kitten curled tightly around her neck, making it hard to breathe. She moved the kitten away, but it kept trying to be at her neck. Every time she removed it, the kitten would mew, showing its tiny needle-teeth. She grew scared of those teeth next to her neck. She couldn’t make it understand. Finally, in exhausted tears, she snuck downstairs and put it out the back door into the freezing night.

There wasn’t a speck of stew left on the plate, but two cats still worried away at the glazed surface with rasping tongues. Ali lifted the plate and stepped back into the kitchen. As she closed the door, she remembered something else. That long-ago night, taking this very same route from yard to kitchen, a groggy voice had called to her from the sofa in the corner. She had nearly jumped out of her skin with fright. But it was only Joan, sleeping under a pile of blankets. Telling her to go back to bed.

Only Joan. Joan’s face filled her mind, the paleness under the freckles, the wary look she often wore as if she was hiding inside herself. The cloud of hated curls. Ali remembered taking the chance to pat those curls one morning, when Joan was crying over a lamb that hadn’t made it through the night. Joan seemed so much older than her then, a woman like Aunt Una, but was probably only the age that Ali was now, only a grown girl.

The old sofa was still here, dressed in a flowered slipcover now. It was strange to realise how many scenes from her past this house contained, ready to spring into life. She had hardly given the place a thought in years. But the farm and her family were here all that time, waiting for her.

12

When Sister O’Dwyer appeared in the doorway of the convent parlour, her frailty made Swan and Barrett jump automatically to their feet. The old nun might have been all of five foot if she was able to stand up straight, but gravity or curvature of the spine had bent her towards the ground so that she now cleared no more than four. Barrett rushed forward to support her arm during the last leg of her journey across the room. Her other hand clutched the knob of a varnished blackthorn stick that she poked into the carpet in little hops. But Sister O’Dwyer’s frailty was only physical, Swan noted. As she took her seat she tipped her face up to look at him eagerly, berry-eyed, apparently delighted to engage with a couple of policemen.

Swan smiled warmly at her.

‘I’ll assume you know why we’re here – what happened in the Rosary Garden – but I’ve been hearing that some girls call it Sister O’Dwyer’s Garden.’

‘Well, I’ve been nominally in charge of the place for thirty years now, so the girls associate it with me. It’s only called the Rosary Garden because of the Rosary Walk beside it. It has no religious use of its own. In fact some would say it’s quite a pagan place.’

‘Why would they say that?’

‘You mustn’t take me too seriously. All I mean is that the girls who use it don’t necessarily have God on their minds. Gossip, sweets and the odd cigarette are their main devotions. Oh, and the occasional bit of forced labour with a rake.’ She gave him a dry smile.

‘It’s a credit to you.’

‘I wouldn’t go that far. Even if I had the knowledge, I don’t think you could make a decent kind of garden in that spot. Too shady, too dry. But gardening’s not really the point.’

‘It isn’t?’

The nun leaned forward, her face aglow, light through parchment. Swan sensed Barrett shift beside him, impatient at this circuitous talk.

‘Are you familiar with the term sanctuary?’ said the nun.

‘Of course.’

‘It has religious connotations: the sepulchre, the place of something precious. But I’m an admirer of St Francis, Detective, and when I think of the word “sanctuary”, I think of a bird sanctuary. That is what my garden is – in a literal sense because of all the nests in those hedges – but, really, it’s a girl sanctuary!’ And she clapped her hands together and wheezed a laugh.

Barrett was doodling on the page in front of him, drawing a man’s face, bland, square-jawed. You wish, thought Swan and gave Barrett’s leg a little kick. She had something about her, this old bird, and Barrett should do her the courtesy of looking like he was listening.

‘That seems a wonderfully liberal approach, Sister. Can I ask, when were you last in the garden?’

Her face clouded. ‘On Monday, after they found the mite.’

‘And before that?’

The nun looked down at