Vow of Penance by Veronica Black

him of the vandalism more as an act of courtesy than because she thought he might be able to help.
    At least she had a few minutes to herself again. She turned towards the chapel wing, padded down the short passage that led past the two parlours with their grilled division and went into the chapel. It was tempting to stay, to kneel for a few minutes and try to regain her peace of mind but she genuflected briefly and went up the narrow stairs by the Lady Altar to the library and storerooms above.
    The newspaper cutting was where she had clipped it on to the requisite pile. She drew up the hard-backed chair and sat down to study it again. The item told her no more than when she had first glanced through it however. Twenty years before when the Tarquin family still lived in the great house and no Daughters ofCompassion had yet come into Cornwall a number of trees in the grounds had been badly slashed and hacked about. There was no indication in the clipping as to whether or not anyone had been found guilty of the crime. Was it a crime? She bit her lip, considering. A misdemeanour, certainly, as was damage to any property, but there was something peculiarly unpleasant about the picture rising in her mind of a shadowy figure raising an axe to strike again and again in a frenzy of destruction at a living part of nature.
    Certainly there seemed nothing tangible to connect one act with the more recent vandalism. Sister Joan pushed back her chair and went down into the chapel again. It was no longer empty. Sister Jerome, arms in the cruciform position, knelt bolt upright before the altar, head flung back so that it looked almost as if she was arguing with the Divine instead of joining herself with the Sacrifice.
    As she hesitated the other crossed herself and rose in one fluid movement, turning to scour the space behind her with her deep-set eyes.
    ‘Were you looking for me, Sister?’ Her voice was dry and passionless.
    ‘No, Sister Jerome.’ Sister Joan hesitated again, then said warmly, ‘Please don’t feel badly about the sugar in the soup. You were not to know.’
    ‘I am only sorry that a little extra penance during Lent is frowned upon here,’ Sister Jerome said coldly.
    ‘But Mother Agnes in the London house never encouraged excessive mortification either,’ Sister Joan was stung into replying, ‘unless, she has altered a great deal since I was there.’
    ‘I said I was accustomed to render my own food unpalatable,’ Sister Jerome said. ‘I never intimated it was general practice. However when I came here I thought the other sisters would like to share in what you are pleased to call excessive mortification.’
    ‘Only if we choose it ourselves, Sister. You were not in the London house when I was there? I don’t recall—’
    ‘There is no reason why you should,’ Sister Jerome said. ‘I try not to make myself conspicuous. However I may as well satisfy your curiosity by telling you that I did my initial training elsewhere and spent only eighteen months under Mother Agnes’s rule. Excuse me, please.’
    She genuflected towards the altar and went past without any further word. Sister Joan let out her breath in a silent ‘whoo’. So Sister Jerome had come from another order. Such a procedure was unusual but not entirely unknown where lay sisters were concerned. There had always been a shortage of vocations for the Marys of the enclosed and semi-enclosed orders but lay sisters, who shared few of the perquisites of the fully professed but had to exist uneasily between the cloister and the world, were like gold dust, to be cherished when they arrived. It was going to be hard to cherish Sister Jerome, she reflected, as she went back to the kitchen where a pile of potatoes waited to be peeled.
    From the infirmary she could hear Father Stephens talking to Sister Gabrielle and Sister Mary Concepta. Though he lacked Father Malone’s cosily confiding manner he did his best with the old ladies though he was rather too