Colleen McCullough - The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet

“But Father Dominus’s pet, am I correct?”

“Yes, they’re thick,” she said, but would say no more.

“What kind of work do you girls perform for Father Dominus?”

“We bottle the liquids, put the pills in boxes, fill the tins with ointment, label everything, and make sure the corks are tight in the bottles,” she said, as if by rote.

“And this work keeps twenty of you busy?”

“Yes, Sister Mary.”

“Father Dominus’s cure-alls must be famous.”

“Oh, yes, very! Especially the choler elixir and the horse ointment. We have a special arrangement for those.”

“Special arrangement?”

“Yes, with an apothecary’s warehouse in Manchester. They go there, and then to shops all over England.”

“Does Father have a brand name?”

“A what?”

“A name that every different kind of product you make has in common. Father Dominus, for instance?”

Therese’s brow cleared. “Oh, I know what you mean! Children of Jesus. Everything is called Children of Jesus this or that.”

“I have never heard of it.”

“Well, lots must have, or we wouldn’t be so busy.”

When Father Dominus appeared, Mary was able to hand him forty pages of exquisitely neat, handwritten manuscript. The hand that plucked it from the shelf trembled slightly; the sheaf of paper went up to his eyes and there was pored over, his face registering an awed delight that was not, she divined, counterfeited in any way. “But this is beautiful!” he cried, looking up before tucking the top sheet under all the others. “You write straight across the page, and have marginated perfectly without ruling it.”

So he does see something, she thought, but not the sense of the words; she had deliberately put the pages out of numerical order. He can see the straightness and apparently a pencil line, but only if he holds a page five inches from his nose.

“A publisher will be happy,” she said. “Where do we begin today? Is it to be darkness, lightness, or how God has formed caves?”

“No, no, not today! I must take this and read it properly. I will see you tomorrow, Sister Mary.”

“Wait! If I am to be idle this day, give me exercise!”

Not long afterward, Brother Ignatius appeared carrying a coil of thin rope and two lanterns. Grinning like a conjurer about to pull a rabbit from a hat, he made a trumpeting noise and produced her boots from behind his back.

“Exercise!” carolled Mary, leaping off her chair.

“Of a sort,” he said. “Father will allow me to take you down to the river and back, but you’ll need your boots-’tis very wet in places. But I dasn’t let you keep the boots-they’re to go back to him after I lock you up again. And please don’t think of running away,” he said as he unlocked the door and came into her cell, loosening the rope. “There’s none place to go, and without a lantern it’s God’s Insides. I have to tie one end of this around you and the other around me, and we got a lantern each. The oil lasts long enough to do the round trip with a rest by the river, but there’s naught in it after that.”

“I won’t try to escape, I promise,” said an ecstatic Mary, allowing him to knot the rope around her waist while she laced up her boots.

Hoping to see what lay beyond the screen, she was disappointed to find herself led into the maw of a tunnel that, had she known it was there, she could actually see; she had dismissed it as a dense black shadow. At first the path, illuminated by his lantern in the lead and hers coming on behind, was dry and strewn with rubble, but perhaps ten minutes into the downward-sloping tunnel appeared the first puddle, and after that the floor grew steadily moister. At the end of half an hour Mary found herself standing on the bank of a rushing turbulence, a considerable body of water that formed the bulk of the floor in a cavern so vast that the puny light from their lanterns gave the merest hint of its dimensions. Now she could see what Charlie had sometimes talked about! Great glistening fingers pointed down from above, their encrusted surfaces glittering and sparkling; an occasional formation that looked for all the world like semi-translucent, scintillating cloth was flung across the abyss like a shawl; long crystal whiskers sprouted out of pools or from some source hidden in the shadows.

“Beautiful!” she breathed, stunned.

Now I begin to understand how Father Dominus formulated his bizarre concept of God. To be caught down here lightless might well trigger insanity, nor would the kindling of a tiny light remove the terror from such an immensity. I pray I am never lost down here.

“It be pretty,” said Brother Ignatius, “but we got to go back now, Sister Mary.”

Tramping upward was harder work, but Mary relished it; if she did not exercise, she would not keep up her strength.

“How long have you been with Father Dominus?” she asked.

“Dunno. Don’t rightly remember being anywhere else. Me and Therese are the oldest, been with Father the longest.”

“So Therese said. Also that Father brought Jerome from Sheffield. Do you come from Sheffield too?”

“Dunno. Jerome’s a special case, Father says. Reads ’n’ writes.”

“Did you suffer a bad master?”

“A bad what?”

“A bad master. A nasty man who whipped you to make you work.”

“Father Dominus don’t whip” was the answer, sounding puzzled.

“What do you eat?”

“Fresh bread we bake. Butter ’n’ jam ’n’ cheese. Roast beef for dinner on Sundays. Stew. Soup.”

“What kind of soup?”

“Depends. Good, but.”

“Who cooks?”

“Therese. Camille helps, so do the other girls in turns.”

“So you don’t starve.”

“What’s starve?”

“Feeling hungry from too little food.”

“No.”

“What do you drink?”

“Small beer. Hot chocolate on Sundays.”

“Do you get pudding?”

“Treacle tart. Steamed pud. Rhubarb tart. Cream.”

“Have you cows?”

“No. Jerome brings the milk ’n’ cream.”

“Do you have a day of worship?”

“Worship?”

“Saying hello to God. Thanking Him for His kindness.”

“No. We thank Father.”

Well, that was interesting! So Father Dominus’s god was his god, did not belong to the children. Apparently they belonged to Jesus, though it would be interesting on their next walk to ask Brother Ignatius what he had been taught about Jesus.

But when Father Dominus appeared the next day Mary feared that she might not be allowed to walk again. The Founder of Cosmogenesis was not pleased with his secretary.

“You put my pages out of order!” he accused, still standing.

“Oh, my goodness, did I?” asked Mary, looking blank. “I do apologise, Father. Not having a watch or a timepiece of any kind, I am afraid that I become confused. I was sorting the pages out to make sure that every single one was free from error, and you caught me unaware. I gathered them together in such a hurry that I forgot I hadn’t collated them. Pray forgive me, please!”

His pose relaxed a little, though his face did not soften. “As well for you, then, that you had numbered the pages,” he said stiffly. “A pity that you cannot print, as in a genuine book.”

“The only persons who ever did that, Father,” she said, her temper tried, “were medieval monks. I do not say I could learn to do it, but do you have the time to permit me to learn?”

“No, no, no! Today we work. Begin as follows: ‘Light is evil, created by Lucifer to his own image. God has no eyes, but Lucifer took two sparks off his body and made them into eyes so that he could see his own beauty. That is the evil of light-its beauty, its seductiveness, its capacity to dazzle, to daze and numb the mind, throw it open to Lucifer to work upon.’” He stopped to look at her. “You have Lucifer’s hair,” he said. “I warn you, Sister Mary, that I saw the devil in you even while you lay comatose upon that bank. Yet God gave you to me to answer my prayers, and forewarned is forearmed. You proved the efficacy of my treatment for oedema, and now you serve me as a scribe. But I know your origins! Never forget that!”