The Visionist: A Novel (22 page)

Still, I cling to Sister Polly. Our friendship bears no carnal stain. Indeed it is pure as the love between children. For the third and final time, the bell called us in, and as I broke into a trot along the path to the dining hall, I felt overcome by a sudden dizziness. My Polly was so certain in her opinion. Why could I not allow myself the same freedom? I reached up to loosen my bonnet strings. I needed to breathe. But I found that I could not, for when I chanced to glance over at my friend, I felt she was a stranger to me.

“I cannot agree,” I managed to whisper. “The lovers deserved the wrath they brought upon themselves, for it was Mother who spoke just now, no one else. She was in Sister Eliza’s testimony and She was in every curse hurled across that cold, barren field. You of all believers should have been able to hear Her.”

She regarded me with tenderness. “Of course,” she said. “You are perfectly correct to think the way you do, my dear sister.” She looped her arm through mine and squeezed it in close to her. I could not help noticing how thin she had become. “You are ever true and I did not mean to shake you in your faith. Forgive me my weakness. It was a difficult life I lived before coming here, and I used to dream that someday I might find a love that would steal me away. In the books I read, lovers—do not faint, my sweet friend—found one another despite travail upon travail. And I, silly girl, felt cheered by their union. For their happiness led to a blooming within me.” She was still a moment, then I felt her body droop.

A wistful smile tugged at her lips. Had my elder sister been right when she warned that I should not give my heart so freely? That Sister Polly was too fresh from a World of sin to be chosen as a sacred vessel? I almost stumbled at the thought. But, no. Mother Ann would not judge us by our pasts if at our core She knew us to be deeply good. I reminded myself that my sister had not grown tall within the walled garden where I was nurtured and taught. Indeed, I knew little of her life before she came to us. Perhaps it had held such deprivation and despair that she had been
forced
to cling to the raft of idle fantasy—just as I have, at times, needed to hold fast to the roots of my faith.

I calmed myself, remembering that to feel empathy was to experience a kind of grace. But as I turned to smile upon her and mend the rift between us, she cried out, pressing her hands to her stomach. So great was her suffering, I could not help wondering if she was being punished for her rash beliefs.

I dropped to my knees and threw my arms about her. “Dear Sister!” I cried. “What pains you?”

She could not speak as I helped her to her feet and half carried her back to our room. I would make excuses for her in the remaining hours of the day and brew her a tea of peppermint and feverfew to soothe her stomach. No one needed to know that she was sick. I had learned well in recent months that jealousy and suspicion prey upon the weak and unguarded, and I knew them to be voracious enemies indeed. No, it would not be prudent for her to be seen as anything but Mother’s strongest and most faithful vessel.

Polly

DEEP NIGHT. CLOUDED
sky. No moon. She heard a commotion in the hallway and her first thought was of her father. Alive, dead, murdered—all ways, he haunted her. But then she caught the orderly cadence of chanting and tried, as she had taken to doing, to remind herself that she needn’t fear his wildness here. What habit it was for her to lie in her bed like this: body stiff with fear, ears pricked to the smallest creak. She imagined his attacks as preludes to death. Indeed, she had often wished for it to be so.

Now, she heard the sound of slow footfalls and a low, melancholy song; doors opening and closing; the voices of grown men and women, their feet marching down the long wide way towards the room she shared with her dear friend. She could not help being afraid. Sister Charity sat up in the bed close by and lit a candle, her face white above the delicate red curls still covering her neck.

“The Midnight Cry,” she whispered. “We must be quick. Stand by your bedside and make ready. They are coming to sweep evil from our chamber. Be steady!”

Polly jumped up with difficulty—the ropes beneath her mattress had begun to slacken and needed tightening, and besides, her weakness was growing worse. Following Sister Charity’s every movement, she whipped the blankets up to cover the indentation made by her warm body as though such intimate evidence that she had lain there was a mark of impurity. It was dark and the cold bit at her naked feet and ankles as she rose to greet the voices at their door.

That day, they had joined in the slaughtering of the hogs, for it would soon be Christmas and there would be fresh roasts in celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, Holy Mother’s partner in Heaven. The harvesting had been a horrid affair, performed with dispatch by a large and determined group of sisters. They exhibited no pity, for the swine had been raised and fed in exact amounts—tallied to the mouthful in daily journals—so that they might be fattened to a precise weight, which, unfortunately for the creatures, they had successfully attained. A quick slitting of the throat did the job, and though Polly had helped to bring animals to slaughter before, never had it been so many and never had the killing taken place in such otherwise peaceful surroundings. In her old life, it had fit naturally into the violence of each day. And, too, there was the power of her ever-present hunger. Here, during her months in The City of Hope, she had been well fed and somehow the chore was made all the more unpleasant because, in so many ways, life had become easy.

She pulled herself from the memory of the animals’ warm, dark blood, their terrified squeals. In the shadows of the unbreathing room, Charity was standing close beside her, but Polly could not hear her fierce whispering. A droning had begun in her head, the buzz of a thousand bees; then the bees turned into a crowd of believers, each performing his duty with the same single-mindedness as the insects from which they had sprung. For a bee notices nothing of the beauty of the flower it attends. Immune to such delights, it returns to the hive over and over only to lose itself in the swarm. She felt herself rising, resting upon a dark cloud of moving bodies as though she were separate yet bound in some way to the believers’ obsession with work and order and union, their strange expressions of faith, the shame they wielded as a weapon against an endless string of human frailties.

She shuddered. She depended on them, yet she was
other
in her curiosity of mind and spirit. How long it had been since she had sat beneath a tree lost in the freedom of her own thoughts? How long since she’d looked at an apple blossom for its delicate beauty? She had exchanged the chaos of her old life for an existence governed by rules, and though it made for certainty where before she had experienced only brutal unpredictability, she could not forget the girl she had been.

Outside the door, the elders’ voices swelled, their steps as thudding and inexorable as those of a creature in a nightmare. The hinges creaked and a draft blew in as they entered, lantern light flooding the room. Its whiteness blinded, yet still they came forward, their voices growing more insistent with every word until they were by Polly’s bed, circling so close she could feel specks of their spittle as they sang.

There were six of them—three sisters and three brethren—breath foul with the lateness of the hour, faces distorted by the shadows, standing so near that one of them brushed his arm against Polly’s breast as he passed. He raised his eyes to meet hers and it was all she could do not to scream. Was her father here, inside the soul of one of these men?

As the light swept across the hastily made beds and fell on Sister Charity, Polly could see that fear had turned her back into a child. They had come to know each other well, the steadiness of her friend’s devotion wrapping round Polly like a cocoon. The security of Charity’s love made her feel less fractured and scared; but just as wondrous, she had seen a similar force exerting its power over her friend. Imperious, righteous, and tight at first, then kinder, joyful, and hungry for life, Charity had grown, and to Polly the visions that so excited the other believers were less of a miracle than was the excitement the two sisters shared when a tiger leapt across their path as they lost themselves in reading the red book.

The group’s song droned on as though it would never cease. Dressed in their somber brown day clothes, stepping in unison, arms making sweeping motions though none held a broom, they appeared to be playing out a pantomime. Polly would have described it like that to calm Ben, were he with her. But these elders were anything but mirthful as they sang.

On the last word of their chant, they shook their fists and swung their lamps slowly round the room, staring out into the darkness, searching. Then they took once again to singing and stamping—a dark, noisy cloud of foreboding they were as they made their way slowly, sweeping, sweeping until finally the brother who had moved so close to Polly in the dark closed the door and they were gone.

“They have come,” whispered Charity, “because they are bothered by recent events. Sister Philomen…” She stopped speaking and looked up. The glint of tears shone in Charity’s eyes.
Has my support of the lovers caused her sadness?
Polly wondered.

Charity said, “They want to be certain the Devil has found no purchase here.”

“Then why are you so afraid?” Polly asked. “There is no evil to be found around you.”

Sister Charity looked away. There was a divide between them; Polly could feel it.
There is no evil to be found around you.
How could she, of all people, say such a thing? Charity had begun to shiver with cold, and though Polly wanted nothing more than to hug her, she did not move. Instead, she felt a wave of nausea wash over her.

Elder Sister Agnes had made it plain a fortnight ago—when Polly chanced to meet Inspector Pryor—that she had more to demand of her; thus far Polly had succeeded in keeping her distance. She could think of only one reason the eldress had shielded her from the inspector’s inquiries: She wanted control. For Polly’s reputation among the believers was not a burden she bore alone. If she were to be arrested for arson or murder, her plummet from grace would cause havoc in The City of Hope and it would fall upon Elder Sister Agnes to restore faith and trust to the distraught community. Having witnessed Polly’s distress when faced with a man who knew her secrets, Elder Sister Agnes’s resolve to discover the truth could only have grown stronger. How she would choose to show it was the only mystery now.

The candle flame guttered and died. Even as her head ached from trying to figure out the schemes of others, Polly kept returning to the same thought:
It is only a matter of time before Charity and the rest of the believers see me for who I am.

“I do not think there is evil here, unless,” Charity said, holding out her mottled arms before letting them fall limp at her sides, “it is the fun being had by the Devil at my expense.”

Polly moved to sit beside Charity on the lumpy mattress. Snow tapped furiously at the window, for a storm had blown in. “Your skin has nothing to do with your soul. It is stained by a stubborn malady you have yet to find a remedy for, that is all. Fie on those who make more of it! There is nothing but good in you, my dear sister,” she said, stroking Charity’s ginger braid. “Why can you not see that for yourself?”

She took up Charity’s hand and clasped it tightly in her own.
“There is nothing but good in you,”
she repeated. “Do not contradict me.” Polly stared hard into Charity’s eyes. “You deserve a confidante who is your equal. If only I were such a person.” She looked down and gently pulled her friend’s hand into her lap. “I have not told you who I am,” she said cautiously. “On occasion, I have dared to think that I might be good—or at least,
good enough
. But when Elder Sister Agnes regards me with suspicion, she has her reasons. You know this to be true and yet you push the thought away—push
her
away.” Polly turned towards the darkness, her eyes filling with tears. She could not go on.

Charity leaned in and rested her head on Polly’s shoulder. “There is nothing you could say to keep me from loving you. I wouldn’t believe…”

Polly’s voice rose. “But that’s where you are mistaken…”

“Stop. Stop talking, please.” Charity stood and faced the window. “I will not allow you to continue. What do I care for anyone who suspects you? How dare—”

“Quiet now,” Polly said, reaching out for her once again. “You must listen. It is only fair. Why, look at you! You wear your markings openly. To me they reflect nothing but dignity and strength. You must allow me to show
my
markings now, so that you may gaze upon me and make up your mind about who
I
am.”

“But I know already who you are,” Charity said, turning back to face Polly.

“See me clearly, friend,” Polly answered wearily. “I grow weaker by the day. How can I say it, Sister? I have taken ill because I am not who you think I am. Every time a believer looks to me for strength, my faith falters. Every time you show me love, I feel myself slip closer to the ground. I am…”

Outside, someone began to shout. The sisters turned to stare. Over and over, a single brother called to the believers.

Charity gripped Polly’s hand tightly. “Why would anyone be summoning us in the middle of the night? Do you think they have found the Devil?”

“Perhaps there is a fire,” Polly answered, before realizing what she had said. A fire. The Devil. Their fears were one and the same.

“Go,” she said suddenly. “You must go and I will be right behind you. I just…” She gripped at her stomach. “I need a moment to collect myself.”

“No!” Charity said. “I will not leave you! What if there
is
a fire? I—”

“You must go,” Polly said firmly. “If you love me, you will do what I ask. Now, run. I shall come and I shall find you, wherever you are.”

Charity looked at Polly, then cracked open the door. Outside in the hall, the sisters were bustling to the stairs. Some of them laughed excitedly, while others—those who knew the tragedies fire could bring—hurried somberly behind as they exchanged worried glances.

Charity looked back at Polly. “You’re sure…”

“Please,” Polly begged. “Please go.”

The door shut behind her friend, and with the hall empty, there was not a sound to be heard inside the dwelling house.

Alone in the room, Polly threw herself down on her bed and grabbed at her skirts, pulling her knees in tight.
Please,
she thought.
Please, no. Not this.

Her mind was a riot of memory. Mama too tired to carry a pail in from the barn. Mama sleeping whenever Silas left for the fields. Mama…grabbing at her skirts as she bent over in pain.

Polly pulled her knees in tighter and rolled herself into a ball.
Why? How many more ways would she have to pay for his evil?
She began to cry—for the first time since she’d arrived in The City of Hope, she began to cry. Not even Ben could make her do that. She’d been strong, but no longer.

When had he last come at her? How long had his child lived inside her?