Colleen McCullough - The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet

“Therese, that is wonderful!” Mary cried, setting a lamp beneath the tripod and putting the kettle on its top. “Tea! So refreshing! Thank Father Dominus for me too, please.”

Therese turned to go. “I will be back later with your clean sheets, and will collect the kettle then. You can empty the leaves down the privy and keep the pot and stand.”

“Wait!” Mary called, but the little brown-robed girl was gone. “I will talk to her when she comes back,” she said, and went about making herself a much needed cup of tea.

Is this the carrot for the donkey? she asked herself as she sat sipping the scalding liquid. “Oh, this is so good! Father Dominus keeps an excellent sort of tea.”

Therese returned some time later; Mary gave her the kettle, but dallied about it, eager to learn what she could from this little member of the sect.

“How many children does Father have?” she asked, making a show of wiping the outside of the kettle.

The wide eyes looked into hers trustfully. “He says, fifty, Sister Mary. Thirty boys and twenty girls.” A shadow crossed her face, of grief or fear, but she squared her shoulders and drew a deep breath of resolution. “Yes, fifty.”

“Do you remember your bad master?”

Bewilderment! Sister Therese frowned. “No, but Father says that is usual. Brother Ignatius and I were the first, you see. We have been with Father a long time.”

“Do you like your life with Father?”

“Oh, yes,” she answered, but automatically; it was not a question aroused emotion in her. “Please, may I have the kettle?”

Mary handed it over. Hasten slowly, she thought. I have a strong feeling that there will be more than enough time to quiz her.

Not a prisoner in the way she, Mary, was a prisoner, she was forced to conclude. Therese had the run of wherever they were, so much was sure. Nor was she inclined to escape. Her life seemed to be the only one she knew, which set Mary to wondering. Mill and factory owners didn’t enslave very young children, who were too much trouble; they might take on an eight-year-old, but Argus said nine or ten was the ideal age for a child to commence a life of unpaid labour, existing for the food scraps and sordid shelter offered in return. Therefore Therese should recollect a life before being rescued: why didn’t she?

The need for exercise had driven her to pacing her cell-four double steps encompassed its dimensions. By walking thus for what she judged to be at least two hours, Mary tired herself out sufficiently to sleep when her eyelids grew heavy. When she woke she ate-the bread was always fresh, she noted-and sat down with John Donne to pass this dreadful inertia.

Which didn’t last very long; Father Dominus appeared.

“Are you ready to start work?” he asked, seating himself.

“In return for the answers to some questions, yes.”

“Then ask.”

“Describe my situation when you took me more fully, Father. Where exactly was I? With whom was I?”

“I know not the identity of your captor,” he said readily, “but he was big enough to suffer from some glandular anomaly, I concluded.” He tittered. “He had a bellyache, and set you down to relieve it. I happened to be gathering medicinal herbs in the vicinity, and had Brother Jerome and our handcart with me-the water in a spring nearby is unique, and I intended to fill my jars there. But you were fitting, and any fool could see you were not epileptic by nature. Brother Jerome put you on the handcart and-away we went! That is all.”

“Are you a physician, Father?”

“No. I am a druggist-an apothecary. The finest in the world,” he announced in ringing tones. “I cannot cure epilepsy, but I can keep it in abeyance, and that is more than anyone else can say. Some of my children are epileptic, but I dose them and they do not fit. Just as some of my children have been riddled with worms, parasites, flukes. But no more! I can cure almost anything, and what I cannot cure I can keep controlled.”

“From what did Therese suffer?”

“Sister Therese, if you please! As an infant, gin instead of milk, as a small child, lack of food. It affects their memories,” he said, sounding glib. “Now may we begin?”

“Begin what, precisely?”

“The story of my life. The story of the Children of Jesus. The fruits of my labours as an apothecary.”

“I am sure I will be consumed with interest.”

“It matters not, Sister Mary. Your task is to take down my dictation with a pencil on this cheap paper,” he said, producting a thick wad of it that went down on the shelf with a faint clang.

“My pencils will blunt,” she said.

“And you would like a knife upon which to sharpen them, you imply. But I have a better idea, Sister Mary. Each day I will give you five sharpened pencils in exchange for blunted ones.”

“I would appreciate a shelf for the books,” she riposted. “This table is not overly large, Father, and I would like to move it closer to the bars to take dictation. Books should not lie on a floor to get damp and mildewy.”

“As you wish,” he said indifferently, watching her transfer the books to the ground and move the table closer to him.

“Is your new bible also an autobiography, then, Father?”

“Of course. Just as the Old Testament is the story of the doings of God among men, and the New Testament the story of the doings of Jesus among men, so the Bible of the Children of Jesus is the story of God’s younger son-I-among men and the children of men,” Father Dominus explained.

“I see.” Mary sat down, pulled several sheets of cheap paper toward her and picked up a pencil.

“Here!” cried the old man with a faint screech. “One sheet at a time, madam! It is too difficult to bring in my supplies to permit of wanton waste by anyone.”

“Sir,” she said with like irony, “my pencil will go through one sheet of this paper, for the table surface is quite rough. I intend to use the dozen or so sheets under my writing sheet as a cushion. If you are a man of science, you should know that without needing to be told.”

“It was another test of your intelligence,” he said loftily. “Now commence, as follows: ‘God is the darkness, for God existed before the coming of light, and is not Lucifer the Bringer of Light? He was Lucifer first, Satan only afterwards. He falls every day in the person of the Sun, does battle with God through the darkness, and rises every morning on another bootless journey into nothing. The scales, he thinks, are evenly matched, but God knows better. For long after light is a spent force, the darkness will continue, and the darkness is God.

“‘This revelation burst upon me when, in my thirty-fifth year, I chanced upon the Primal Cave, the Omphalos, the Navel, the Universal Womb, that place I still call the Seat of God, His dwelling place. For where in this world of light is God to be found? Only when I chanced upon the Seat of God did I understand at last. There, in a blackness so profound mine eyes shrivelled for the lack of even one mote of light to see, there, in the silence so profound mine ears shrivelled for the lack of even one whisper, there, I stepped into the very belly of God. I was one with Him, and underwent the first of what were to be many revelations as He unfolded His darkness to me layer upon layer.’”

Father Dominus ceased while Mary’s pencil laboured to catch up and her mind, reeling, kept a part of itself for her own thoughts and reactions.

“Layer,” she wrote, and stopped, instrument poised, eyes on the seamed face and its smeared pale eyes with the pinpoint pupils. Why are they pinpoint? that exclusive-to-self segment of her mind asked. Has he drugged himself with something? The subject suggested it, certainly, yet-was it possible that he couldn’t see much? That it was not the crabbed hands forbidding his authoring his own treatise, but the quality of his vision?