Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

The smell of the stable, animal hides, soil, sweat and blood lingers for days.

Harold hunts pheasants, hundreds of wood pigeon, wild duck, quail, hares and thousands of partridge, who reappear at funeral banquets converted into patés, timbales, mousses and casseroles. The quails’ lifeless eyes are testament to the power of the patriarch’s chemical industry, called ‘Imperial’ for good reason. Harold is also an emperor: he plunges the knife into the meat, issues orders. Bring, put, do, open, add seasoning . Leonora is disgusted by the appearance of the hunt on her plate. One night she dreamt that she woke to find a bloodied rabbit lying dead on her stomach.

What Harold Carrington does not know is that the fox sits and silently laughs behind his chair, the wolf peers through the window and squints inside in astonishment, deer ring the table, partridges dance hand in hand; prey no longer, still less corpses. They have won the match and are laughing at the shotguns and the foxhounds panting with their lolling tongues.

‘The hounds are thoroughbreds, just like the children,’ the governess boasts to Mary Kavanaugh, who isn’t sure she has understood her.

‘I see the children talk to anyone and anything: dogs, cats, ducks, and the geese who stretch out their necks and sway as they waddle along behind them.’

‘They’d do better to prioritise their Latin and Greek. All I beg of them is less imagination and more wisdom! Knowledge is synonymous with precision and these children behave no differently to opium addicts.’

‘The truth of the matter is that the animals talk to these children, regardless of how much of a hurry they are in.’

‘Nanny, you are responsible for this madness.’

‘I have attained heights that you never shall, Mademoiselle. I travel through astral spheres.’

‘I don’t doubt it in the slightest.’

‘The problem is that you are French and in so being are fixated on matter. Merde! Merde! Shit! Shit!’

Father O’Connor, one of Patrick’s Jesuit teachers, comes to celebrate Sunday Mass in Crookhey Hall’s private chapel, attended by a number of guests and neighbours. Although Harold is a Protestant whose only real belief is in hard work, Maurie imposes her Catholicism. In addition, the priest is an intelligent man. After Mass he is invited to dinner and proposes:

‘Let’s take a look at the night sky, here in the northern hemisphere you can clearly see the spiral of the nebula of Andromeda, as well as some other constellations.’

On Leonora’s face falls the reflection of the brightest star of all: Orion. ‘Look up there, it’s Venus!’ The planets are revolving over the heads of the children. In the celestial dome over the north of England the circles made by the lights of Andromeda are clearly visible:

‘I’ve seen this spiral in my dreams, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen it. I recognise it,’ Leonora observes.

‘The division that exists between reality and the imagination is actually very tenuous,’ replies Father O’Connor.

‘My family tells me I’ve been seeing visions ever since I was two years old and nobody believes they’re real except Nanny and Gerard.’

‘And Pat?’

‘Pat’s a bossy boots and the fact he goes to Stonyhurst is no guarantee of intelligence.’

‘There are men and women whose dreams foretell what will happen to them.’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea what could happen to me, but I certainly know what I do not want to do.’

‘What is this you do not want to do, Prim?’

‘Don’t call me Prim, I hate it. What I don’t want to do is what everyone else does.’

‘Yes, it goes without saying that you succeed in creating quite a few problems.’

Father O’Connor pays his visits not only in order to celebrate Sunday Mass, but because the only female Carrington child intrigues him:

‘When the moon is full I sleep really badly.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s because she’s a she-wolf,’ interrupts Gerard. ‘Haven’t you heard her howl at the moon?’

‘One night I saw a mark on the carpet and, since I didn’t remember having spilt anything there, I looked up and saw how the moon’s reflection had landed at my feet. Is it true the moon has a store of fourteen thousand curses? Once I saw it drown in the lake. Is there water on the moon, Father O’Connor?’

‘If there is water then there is life.’

‘But is there water?’

‘I don’t think that scientists have found any yet.’

The girl surprises him. To him, curiosity is the greatest virtue, just as wisdom is the goal of every desire. Who knows where her erratic temperament could lead her?

‘The moon is a desert with craters on it,’ Pat informs her.

There is no way to get through to the young Leonora. Those who know her and make the attempt have no inkling of what will happen next. She laughs only occasionally, which is why Father O’Connor enjoys seeing her smile and hearing her giggle. When she tells him the human race is in no way superior to the equine one, she convinces him it is as she says.

HAROLD CARRINGTON SUMMONS his daughter to the library.

‘Your mother and I have decided to send you to convent school.’

A child is powerless. Once the adults have made a decision they point at the door and say: ‘Away to the convent with you!’ and in so doing, they divest themselves of the child.

‘Your education is costing us more than your brothers’,’ Maurie pleads, placating her with the explanation: ‘One has to be strict with children, to see them properly educated; if one is lax, they can go to rack and ruin.’

The Convent of the Holy Sepulchre occupies a palace built for Henry VIII at Newhall near Chelmsford, the town in Essex where Oscar Wilde was incarcerated.

The vast dormitory hardly inspires confidence. The windows are narrow and it is impossible to see outside without climbing on to a chair, except that there are no chairs, other than the night matron’s, which looks as if it collapsed sometime around a thousand years BC. The length of the two side walls are hung with curtains made of a cloth that resembles linoleum to divide off the beds with their thin mattresses and hard pillows. The first thing the girls do after their morning genuflections is to empty their chamber pots.

‘Don’t you complain. All of us just sleep on a board on a bare floor and we fast, and we put crowns of thorns on our heads for the love of Jesus Christ during Holy Week. Look, I’ve still got the scars here,’ one of the novices explains to Leonora.

‘Silence!’ commands the Mother Superior.

What do you do with silence? To begin with, Leonora gulps it down. At Crookhey Hall she used to talk to Nanny and Gerard. Now she knows that silence is solitude.

Tables as long as Lent are the first thing you see on entering the refectory. Sisters wearing white caps and aprons serve the girls swiftly. The Mother Superior sits at the head of the table and reads loudly from the Bible. The only sound is that of spoons scraping the bottom of soup plates. How convenient that in such a tedious place the sisters get lunch over and done with quickly!

‘I’ve just seen a griffin.’

‘There are no griffins here.’ The nun is getting annoyed.

‘Yes there are. In the corners of the chapel … Or maybe it’s just Father Carpenter, half lion and half eagle.’

The nuns huddle inside their black habits. To Leonora, walking behind them, their backs look like a pack of wild boar.

In class, told how Moses parted the Red Sea and Joshua caused the sun to pause on its path to its zenith, she thinks: ‘I could do that.’ Cosmic laws are a natural part of her life.