A Bewitching Bride (29 page)
Read A Bewitching Bride Online
Authors: Elizabeth Thornton
A lump formed in her throat. The bare stone walls were as austere as she remembered them, but she might have been in a different world, a softer, kinder world. There was no Matron here to terrify both nuns and inmates into submission.
If only . . .
She shook herself free of regrets. She wasn’t finished yet. She moved on. She was clutching her mother’s hand, half dragging her to the door at the end of the corridor.
“Run, Catherine, run, and don’t look back.”
Her mother struggling with Matron. The door closing. A blanket thrown over her. Her heart beating like a deer’s with the hunters closing in for the kill.
“Run, Catherine, run, and don’t look back.”
Her mother struggling with Matron. The door closing. A blanket thrown over her. Her heart beating like a deer’s with the hunters closing in for the kill.
She remembered now. She was carried to a waiting carriage, the blanket was removed, and she looked into the face of her rescuer. It was Sister Dolores, the sweetest nun in that house of torture.
Sister Dolores. She was expecting her. Sister Dolores was still here at the convent? Kate picked up her skirts and did an about-turn. Moving swiftly, she made for the staircase that Sister Anne had taken. On the first floor up, a light from one of the rooms spilled into the corridor. She heard someone laughing, a woman’s voice. She pushed the door open and froze. Gavin and an elderly nun were seated in chairs flanking the fire, enjoying a quiet tête-à-tête. Of her cousins, Hamish and Rory, there was nary a sign.
The nun looked up. “Ah, Catherine,” she said, “you probably don’t remember me. I’m Sister—”
Kate ran to the startled nun and went down on her knees in front of her. “Of course I remember you, Sister Dolly. It was you who saved me from Matron all those years . . .” She tried to say more but could not go on. Lowering her head to the sister’s lap, she wept all the tears she had stored up since that night she had lost her mother.
“I haven’t heard that name in a long time—Sister Dolly. My, how the years fly! Dry your eyes, child, and come and sit by me. Help yourself to the brandy, Mr. Hepburn.”
“I’m fine, thank you,” Gavin said.
He produced his own voluminous handkerchief and handed it to Kate. He then proceeded to sip from the glass of brandy Sister Dolores had offered him when he’d first introduced himself as Kate’s husband. The good sister, at that point, could not place Kate. She’d heard Dr. Rankin mention the name Hepburn a time or two, so she was not surprised by his visit. At that point, he’d told Kate’s cousins that their presence was redundant, and he would see his wife safely back to the hotel. Rory would have objected, but Hamish seemed to have a better grasp of the inner workings of the husband-wife relationship.
“I don’t know why she didn’t go to you in the first place,” Hamish had said gruffly. “Come along, Rory. From now on, Kate’s husband can fight her battles for her.”
There was something about these brothers that appealed to Gavin. They were rough and always ready for a fight, but their devotion to Kate was, in his eyes, their saving grace.
Kate had finished drying her eyes and was now twisting his handkerchief into knots. He wanted to scoop her up in his arms and rock her like a baby. So much for giving her the shaking of her life when he caught up to her!
Kate’s voice was rough with emotion. “Sister Dolly, you helped me get away from this place, didn’t you? I remember a little, and I want to know how it was done and how you became involved.”
Sister Dolores clasped her gnarled hands together and stared at them for a long moment, then looked up with a self-deprecating smile. “I’m afraid that I wasn’t a very good nun in those days. I broke my vow of obedience, you see, and I did it with a glad heart. I helped your mother plan your escape, Catherine. She knew that she couldn’t go with you. She was prostrate with pneumonia. It took all her strength to get out of her bed and take you from the orphans’ wing. She knew you wouldn’t leave her if you knew she would stay behind. So she and I both lied to you by omission. You were only an infant. We couldn’t tell you that your mother was dying.”
Kate swallowed. “When did she die?”
“A few days but no longer than a week after you left. I can tell you this. She was at peace. Her last prayer was for you.”
“She was at peace?” Kate repeated. “I thought she was guarded day and night because”—she flicked a glance at Gavin; it seemed pointless now to conceal the truth from him, and she no longer cared what he thought—“because,” she went on starkly, “she was insane. Matron said so over and over. My mother was wicked. There was a demon inside her.”
“You remember her saying that?”
“It’s one of the few things I do remember.”
“May God forgive her. Your mother was not insane, Catherine. Believe it! She saw things others did not. Yes, it’s a little strange but not godless. I’m afraid Matron was the wicked one. Our convent was never set up to house the insane. We have children here. The civic authorities would never have allowed such a thing to happen.”
In the silence that followed, Gavin reached out and clasped Kate’s hand. She looked stunned, as though her world had been turned upside down, and he wondered if this lie about her mother was the obstacle that prevented her from trying to read his thoughts or allowing him to read hers.
“I swear to God,” said Sister Dolores, “that your mother was not insane. She came to us, broken in spirit. She would never speak of her misfortunes and accepted Matron’s abuse without complaint. As for Matron, she came by her Godly deserts.”
“How so?” asked Gavin, trying to give Kate time to come to herself.
Sister Dolores chuckled. “In all innocence, I was the means of bringing about Matron’s downfall. You’ll notice I find it impossible to call her Mother Superior. Here’s how it happened.”
Color was coming back to Kate’s cheeks, and she was listening intently to what the nun had to say.
“I was prepared to take my punishment for helping you escape this place,” said the sister. “You see, I knew I had broken my vow of obedience, but no one suspected me. I had been blessed with an innocent face, you see. Or should I say it was a curse?”
She still had an innocent look about her, though her skin was lined with wrinkles. Gavin couldn’t even hazard a guess at how old Sister Dolores might be.
She had slipped into a reflective silence. Heaving a sigh, she looked up at Gavin. “This was a sad, sad place in those days. The mother superior, Matron as we nuns called her, was not fit to have charge of a cat, let alone the sick, the dying, and the orphans who sought refuge with our order. The Sisters of Nazareth are supposed to serve, not rule like temporal despots who love power for the sake of power.” She stopped, chuckled again, and went on, “The grace of God never ceases to amaze me. My sin of disobedience weighed heavily on my conscience, so when the priest came to hear the nuns’ confessions, I confessed my wrongdoing. Of course, I had to do penance, but the next thing I knew was that Matron was made to answer for how she ruled our hospice and was sent home to Belgium in disgrace.”
Belgium,
thought Gavin. That would explain the brandy instead of whiskey and the musical lilt to the nun’s voice.
thought Gavin. That would explain the brandy instead of whiskey and the musical lilt to the nun’s voice.
“And,” said Sister Dolores, “we have been blessed with successors who uphold the principles on which our order was founded: service to the poor and needy.”
“Sister,” said Kate, “I remember you put me in a carriage. Who was waiting for me in that carriage?”
Sister Dolores shook her head. “All I know is that she was your mother’s friend. She never visited, because visitors were not allowed—another of Matron’s edicts—but she and your mother passed notes to each other through me. Another sin I had to confess. The priest, Father Francis I believe his name was, absolved me without penance because, he said, it was an act of kindness.”
They heard steps coming up the stairs, but no laughter, only voices whispering.
“Ah,” said Sister Dolores, “Compline is over. We have a discipline here, Mr. Hepburn: silence from Compline to Matins. You have a few minutes to ask your questions before the bell rings.”
Gavin did not waste time. “How did you come to know Dr. Rankin?”
Sister Dolores took a moment to reflect. “You must understand that he knew nothing of Matron. She ruled twenty years ago. Dr. Rankin would not have been allowed to set foot in our convent then. I’m happy to say that things are very different now. He was a man of science, and when he asked if he could visit what we call ‘our lost souls,’ we were happy to oblige.”
“Lost souls?” said Gavin.
“They were deeply troubled patients, but not dangerous. Dr. Rankin could get them to talk, and we were happy to use his gifts, though he was not a Catholic.”
Aware of time passing, Gavin moved on. “He made an appointment to see you before he died?”
Sister Dolores shook her head. “No appointment was necessary. He dropped by from time to time, and we were always happy to see him. You should speak to our parish priest at St. Peter’s, on Justice Street. Dr. Rankin and Father Paul were good friends.”
“What about parish records?” Gavin asked.
“They are kept at St. Peter’s. You cannot take them away, but you can examine them if there is a priest in attendance and if you receive permission.”
“Thank you, Sister Dolores,” Gavin said. He got up. “You have been most helpful.”
Kate offered her thanks, too, but at the door, she ran back and kissed the nun on the cheek. “I shall never forget you,” she said.
Once outside, Gavin hailed a cab. Kate was surprised. “It’s only a short walk from here to the hotel,” she said.
“We’re not going back to the hotel.”
“Then where—”
“We’re going where there is a telephone; in short, we’re going back to the gatehouse, to Mrs. Hunter’s guesthouse.”
Twenty
She lay there, tossing and turning, a million threads tangled hopelessly in her mind. She couldn’t focus, not when she could hear the muted sound of Gavin’s voice next door. He’d finally been connected to his brother at the Home Office and had dropped his voice to a murmur in an effort, she supposed, to keep his conversation private.
She wished that he would close the door, because the snatches of conversation she overheard kept interrupting the flow of what mattered most to her—the questions she had not put to Sister Dolores earlier that night—questions about her father. She wasn’t sure that she wanted to hear the answers. What kind of man would desert his wife and child and leave them to fend for themselves? Had she ever known him? Surely, if she had, she would have remembered something.
Sister Dolores’s voice seemed to be whispering in her ear.
“Your mother was not insane
.
She came to us broken in spirit.”
“Your mother was not insane
.
She came to us broken in spirit.”
Who broke her mother’s spirit? The father she had never known? Was her mother his legal wife, or was she a simple country girl whom he had seduced and discarded? She’d asked herself these very questions ever since she’d become an adolescent. Her parents claimed not to know. Had they told her the truth?
It didn’t matter. She was a grown woman now and was mistress of her own fate. She had a family, a father, mother, and sister; an extended family counting all her cousins, aunts, and uncles. And Sister Dolores had given her something precious—an assurance that her mother wasn’t insane.
Too tired to think, she turned on her side and drifted into an exhausted sleep. She wasn’t aware when Gavin hung up the telephone and wandered into her room. After his telephone call with Alex, he wasn’t going to let her out of his sight. Alex had reached the same conclusion as he, that their villain knew where they would be almost before they knew it themselves. Someone either deliberately or in all innocence had passed the information on to someone else.
Mrs. Cardno came to mind, and he wondered how he could make use of her loose tongue to his advantage. He wasn’t willing to accept his brother’s next piece of advice, that he should use Kate as bait to lure the killer into the open, but what choice did they have?
Alex’s last words drummed inside his head. “She’s a Macbeth. She must be. Nothing else makes sense. Don’t forget Granny’s prophecy. You know what happened to Macbeth.”
“Macduff hunted him down.”
“Where is your dog now?”
“I sent him back to Feughside.”
“If I were you, I’d make sure that he stayed close to your wife.”
Macduff, whom he had found as a stray. Or had Macduff found him? As he remembered, in Shakespeare’s play, Macduff slew Macbeth and cut off his head. What insane flight of fancy had made him name his dog Macduff?
She was his wife, Alex said. Damn right she was! It gave him some rights, not to take advantage of her, but at least to keep her close to protect her if some miscreant with murder on his mind were to come through the door.
On that inflexible decision, he placed his revolver on the floor between the bed and a small table and began to shrug out of his outer clothes. He had already closed the shutters, but he left a lamp burning low, just in case he had to rise in a hurry to defend home and hearth. The thought made him grimace. He’d left the lamp on because he didn’t want Kate to mistake him for an intruder and maim him with her pocket revolver before he could get a word out of his mouth. And where had she hidden the damned thing?
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