Colleen McCullough - The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet

On the following day Brother Jerome appeared with her bread and water, though no butter, cheese or jam. Pale eyes watching her contemptuously, he held out a hand. “Gimme your work.”

Silently she passed it through the bars, a miserably small set of pages compared to their earlier sessions, which had kept her so busy copying that she had little time for worry or idle thought.

One day steak, mushrooms and pudding, now bread and water, she thought. What is happening? Has that frail mind crumbled? Or is my new regimen merely a symptom of the fact that I am now miles away from the kitchen? Water aplenty can be collected everywhere, but bread and what one puts on bread come from a kitchen.

Father Dominus erupted screaming from behind the screen during her second day of bread and water, the pages she had given Jerome clutched in one hand.

“What is this? What is this?” he shrieked, beads of foam gathering at the corners of his mouth.

“It is what you dictated to me the day before yesterday,” Mary said, her voice betraying no fear.

“I dictated to you for two hours then, madam- two hours!”

“No, Father, you did not. You sat on your chair for two hours, but the only usable information you gave me is written down there. You rambled, sir.”

“Liar! Liar!”

“Why would I lie?” she asked reasonably. “I am quite intelligent enough to know that my life depends upon pleasing you, Father. Why therefore would I antagonise you?” She had an inspiration. “In fact, I thought you in sore need of sleep, and judged that tiredness caused this lapse in your concentration. Was I wrong?”

Two little pellets stared at her with the bluish, milky glassiness of skimmed milk, but she stared back unintimidated. Let him stare!

“Perhaps you are right,” he said finally, and stormed off with no intention, it seemed, of dictating to her this day.

His mind was failing, of that she no longer had any doubt, but whether it might be called madness was moot.

“Oh, if only I could establish sufficient rapport with him to talk rationally about the children!” she said to herself, perched on the edge of her bed. “I still have no idea why he acquired them, or how, or what happens to them when they attain maturity. Somehow I have to cozen him into a softer mood.”

Of Brother Ignatius there was no sign, nor did Jerome appear to replenish her supply of bread, down to half a loaf. An instinct had caused Mary not to waste water on washing her face or any part of her body: she might need what she had to drink, and that sparingly. With no dictation to copy and every book read at least several times, that day dragged, especially because she had not been let out for exercise. Sleep came slowly, was haunted by dreams, and lasted but a short time.

When Father Dominus appeared he was carrying a fresh loaf of bread and a pitcher of water.

“Oh, how glad I am to see you, Father!” Mary cried, smiling her best smile and hoping that it held no element of seduction. “I languish with nothing to do, and am looking forward to the next chapter of your Cosmogenesis.”

He sat down, apparently having decided that her smile was not seductive, but instead of putting the bread and water jug on her shelf, he put them on the floor beside his chair. His message, she was sure, was to tell her that receiving this largesse depended entirely upon her own conduct during their interview.

“Before we start the dictation, Father,” she said in her most winning voice-quite an effort for Mary-“there is so much I wish to understand about the darkness of God. Lucifer is self-apparent, and I agree with your philosophy wholeheartedly. But as yet we have not discussed Jesus, Who must be writ large in your cosmogeny, else you would not have christened your followers the Children of Jesus. There are fifty of them, you say, thirty boys and twenty girls. Those numbers must have a significance, for nothing you have said to date lacks import.”

“Yes, you are intelligent,” he said, pleased. “All numbers of import must end in no number-that is, what the Greeks called zero. A nought, we write in Arabic numbers. Not only is zero no number, but in Arabic it has no beginning and no end. It is eternal. The eternal zero. Five plus three plus two are ten. The line that never meets itself and the circle that always does.”

He stopped; Mary blinked. What utter nonsense! But she said in tones of awe, “Profound! Amazing!” She hesitated for as long as she thought she dared, then said, very delicately, “And Jesus?”

“Jesus is the offspring of a truce between God and Lucifer.”

Her jaw dropped. “What?”

“I would have thought that self-evident, Sister Mary. Men could not bear the formlessness and facelessness and sexlessness of God, but also refused to be completely taken in by Lucifer’s wiles. God was getting nowhere, and Lucifer was getting nowhere. So they met on a rock in the sky that briefly turned into a star and forged Jesus. A man, yet not a man. Mortal, yet immortal. Good, yet evil.”

Mary couldn’t help the sweat that broke out all over her body, nor the shudder of revulsion that precipitated her off her chair. “Father, you blaspheme! You are anathema! Apostate! But you have answered all my questions, even those I have not asked. Whatever you want with those children, it is evil. They will never be let grow up, will they? The little girls talk of a school in Manchester run by Mother Beata, who will train them as abigails, but there is no school, no Mother Beata! What do you do with the boys? Of that I have heard nothing, for Brother Ignatius is too dull and Brother Jerome too cunning to tell me. Wicked! You are wicked! I curse you, Dominus! You stole your children too young to be under cruel masters, which means you bought them for gin-money from their godless parents, or from the parish overseers! You exploit their innocence and think your duty acquitted because you feed, clothe and physick them! Like calves fatted for the table! You murder them, Dominus! You kill the innocent!”

He had listened to her diatribe in amazement, so stunned that he was speechless. What opened his mouth on a torrent of words was her accusation that he murdered the innocent; if she had needed any proof, his hideous tantrum proved it. Screaming shrilly, screeching, spitting, his body convulsed with the enormity of his rage, he called her bitch, strumpet, seductress, Lilith, Jezebel, the names of a dozen other biblical temptresses, then began again, and again, and again. While Mary, beside herself, shouted him down with one single accusation over and over.

“You kill the innocent! You kill the innocent!”

It seemed not knowing what else to do, he picked up the ewer and pitched it at the bars, showering Mary with shards and precious water. Then he turned blindly, blundering into the screen, and ran away shrieking curses on her head.

The screen tottered and fell, it seemed incredibly slowly, its upper border catching something beyond it and ripping that down too. An immensity of light poured in, so brilliant that Mary flung up an arm to shield her eyes. Only when she was sure she could cope with such intensity did she open her eyes to look upon a vista that, under different circumstances, would have awed her with its beauty. Wherever she lay at least a thousand feet above the surrounding countryside, which spread into the moors and weird rocks of peaks and tors. Derbyshire! Many miles from Mansfield!

A wind whistled into the cave, a wind that must have been excluded by a sheet of dark green canvas that now lay on the floor beyond the screen. So that was why her prison had been perpetually filled by a soft, moaning whine! Not a window left open on a crack, but a sheet of canvas that somewhere had not been entirely efficient, and gaped a tiny crack in the seal.