Free Luckstones by Madeleine E. Robins

had
only gotten worse.
    “Doña de Silva is right, child,” Mother Beatriz
said. Thea clenched her hands in frustration: everyone addressed her as “child.”
“You have been too much inside,” the Superior went on.
    That made Silvy wince and flush unhappily; she was well
aware that it was her illness that had kept Thea indoors in the first sunny
days of spring. Thea could have struck the Superior for her well-intentioned
words; she and Silvy had become fiercely protective of each other in the last
months of their journey, and, with Silvy still weakened from her long fever, it
was all Thea could do to distract her from fretting over their future. It was
bleak enough, inarguably. Neither Dorothea, nor Mother Beatriz, nor Sister Juan
Evangelista, the convent Infirmarian, saw any point in Doña de Silva’s
undoing the hard work of her cure with worrying.
    “Do you hear me, Dorotea? Go walk in the orchard. Your
blessed mother would never forgive me if I were to let you fall ill, and
besides that, you make such a muddle of that linen it hurts me to see it,”
Silvy added with heavy humor.
    That was that. When Silvy invoked the memory of her mother
Thea understood that capitulation was the wisest course. She rose, made her
curtsy to Mother Beatriz, kissed Silvy’s narrow, dry cheek, and left the
room. She managed the awkward weight of the habit as best she could. After three
months it was still unfamiliar and cumbersome to her; to a girl raised in the
muslin dresses of an English schoolroom, the heavy layers of the borrowed habit
were not only a sorry trial but, at times, an absolute menace. She had tripped
over her skirts more times than her dignity permitted her to admit.
    Once she had closed the door behind her she was unable to
keep from stopping for a moment, hovering near the door, listening for what
they would say. They would be speaking of her. Not vanity, but an absolute
comprehension of her situation and of the trouble she posed to her guardian and
to the nuns made Thea think so. There was Silvy’s long sigh, the
inevitable, unanswerable question: “What am I to do with her? If only her
father were still alive, if only she had a vocation. . . .”
    “Clara,” she heard Mother Beatriz begin. Then
old Sister Ana came shuffling down the hall; she eyed Thea knowingly.
    “None of that, Señorita,” the old woman
admonished. “Mother and your duenna will talk, if they must; you have no
business to be listening. What sort of manners do the English teach their
daughters, after all? Go play in the garden like a good child.” To ensure
obedience Sister Ana settled herself heavily on the bench by the doorway, took
her rosary in her hand, and began a mumbled Ave. Left with no choice,
Thea gathered up her skirts and swept down the hall to the garden stair.
    She emerged from the cool and the damp of the hallway into
the full noon glare of the courtyard and waited for a moment until her eyes
could adjust; she picked out the darkened doorway of the kitchen to her left,
the little pathway beyond leading to the Chapel, the scuttling shapes of
chickens wandering across the yard. She paid no attention to what she saw: her
mind was still on Silvy and Mother Beatriz in the dimness of the sitting-room;
she wondered if they would come up with a new solution to the problem of her
future. She doubted it.
    “I will not take vows,” she muttered to
herself. “Silvy cannot ask that of me, and Mother won’t take me
without a vocation. I hope.” For a moment Thea had a vision of herself: a
member of the order, subject to the perpetual, sighing goodwill of the sisters—one
of them herself. Feeling ungrateful at the same time, she shuddered. They had
been kind—more than kind—since she and Silvy had arrived seeking
refuge. In these days, to take in an Englishwoman, no matter if half-Spanish,
was beyond kindness: it was bravery. After the months when she had realized
that none of her own people, neither her father’s family in