CHAPTER 1
“There was a sound at the gate last night.” The novice spoke without moving her lips, a trick Rose had seen perfected in places like this. “After Compline. Something small. Didn’t you hear it?”
“I heard it,” Rose said. “And I didn’t go to the window.”
The other girl looked at her sidelong. “Wise.”
Neither of them said anything else. Sister Agnes had turned in their direction with a birch rod tapping a slow rhythm against her palm.
Rose watched the movement from the corner of her eye, the way she’d learned to watch all dangerous things—steadily, without appearing to look at it at all.
Two years in this place. Two years of feeling imprisoned for reasons beyond her control. Two years of trying to understandwhy her parents had banished her here because she hadn’t secured a husband according to their arbitrary timeline. She was a spinster, sent away in shame to the only place where they felt she would be welcome.
She returned her attention to the flagstones and let the question of the sound at the gate dissolve into the ordinary misery of morning. She bent her head low to avoid eye contact and swept the ground, as if she could gather every shadow and tuck the weight of them into the abbey’s heart.
A damp shroud of mist coated the stone courtyard, swallowing the first rays of morning sun. Beneath the steeple of St. Clement’s, every convent wall breathed the cold, clean air with the even discipline of a sleeping giant. Only the scrape of bristles against flagstone disturbed the silence.
She worked in slow passes, though her back throbbed from the hours she had put in earlier scrubbing kitchen floors. The broom’s worn handle pressed a raw groove into Rose’s palm, which she avoided picking while a trio of other novices floated down the far side of the walk. Their heads were bent to their own work, each shrouded in the same pale habit, making any distinction between them flatten to one long blur. No one spoke.
Senior nuns patrolled the yard’s periphery in shapeless black habits, the long folds of fabric waving with each authoritative step. From their sashes hung birch rods. No one was more than an arm’s length away from that particular, menacing discipline.
Rose noted the way Sister Francis, the morning’s head overseer, paused to tap her birch rod against her palm when a novice on the edges stalled. The last time Rose had heard the birch whistle through the air and towards her, it was for an infraction she could not recall, perhaps a misplaced spoon or a snuffed candle during Vespers.
They were never told what rules, precisely, had been broken. The suffering was the lesson.
A clatter broke Rose’s focus. A small girl no older than twelve trembled near the water pump, staring down at an upturned bucket. As water seeped into the uneven stones, the novice stood, petrified, hands wrung together at her waist. All the girls around her paused, brooms poised mid-air, wary of drawing attention to themselves.
Sister Agnes strode forward. Her eyes were knifelike, cold, but almost gleeful. “Tabitha,” she called, voice slicing the yard in half. “Clumsiness is the child of inattention. You will fetch the bucket, refill it, and scrub this place until it shines.”
The young girl nodded. Her mouth pressed into a line as tears began to stream down her cheeks.
Rose felt a hot flush of sympathy and frustration. While the urge to intervene picked at her, she had had stark caution drilled into her after her years at the Whiteridge House. Every hour at St. Clement’s reinforced it.
She glanced down at her own broom, then at the slow, spreading puddle.
Before she could think better of it, the decision was made. Rose laid her own broom aside and stepped towards Tabitha, then knelt.
“Let me help,” she said, her voice soft, taking care not to meet Sister Agnes’s eye.
She righted the bucket, pressed a clean handkerchief from her pocket to the girl’s trembling fingers, and began to sop up the water with gentle movements.
“Each novice is responsible for her own misfortune,” Sister Agnes crowed, looming above, her birch rod tapping the flagstone. “You are not to assume the burdens of others.”
Rose kept her head bowed. “I thought… Perhaps it would be faster if I helped Tabitha, Sister. Morning prayers are nearly upon us.”
There was a long, taut pause, which snapped in a moment when Agnes sighed.
“You may assist,” she said. “But you will both return to the courtyard after Lauds and repeat the task until the stones are dry enough to satisfy even our Lord’s perfection.”
Rose and Tabitha answered in chorus, their voices muted, near-whispering, “Yes, Sister.”
As she worked, Rose murmured barely audible encouragement. The touch of her hand on Tabitha’s was gentle. Rose remembered, though dimly, how her closest childhood friend, Julia, used to comfort her this way when they were young. They were only tiny moments, but they had meant the world to her.
Julia Pembers had not found fortune on the marriage mart either, but she had found work as a lady’s maid shortly before Rose had been sent to the abbey.
Rose was happy for her, but she had not heard from Julia since her arrival at the abbey. The last letter had arrived water-stained and weeks late, forwarded through three different hands before it reached St. Clement’s. Even then, the Mother Superior held it for a fortnight before surrendering it.
Rose had read it so many times that the paper had gone soft at the folds. After that, there was nothing. She even wrote back twice, but no answer came. Rose told herself there were a hundred explanations, but nothing could make enough sense.
