Free Vow of Sanctity by Veronica Black

kitchen. The notion that she might be regarded as a dangerous temptation made her want to giggle.
    Crossing herself, murmuring a grace, she set to on the biscuits and the apples, demolishing the lot and drinking a couple of glasses of the cold water. There was certainly a well somewhere on the island. The monks were almost entirely self-supporting. She wondered how large the community was – no more than twenty, surely, and probably fewer since the abbot had mentioned the lack of novices.
    And had it been the abbot who had crept in to turn the illuminated pages and then sigh deeply? It seemed unlikely. Perhaps her too vivid imagination was playing tricks but she was sure that the person who had turned over the pages was the same person who had watched her during mass and spied on her through the peep-hole in the antechamber.
    The problem had no solution because she wasn’t even certain if there was a real problem at all. If anyone particularly wished to speak to her there didn’t seem to be anything in the rule to forbid it. These were not Trappists, vowed to silence. She shrugged her shoulders impatiently, and went out again, leaving her painting equipment but carrying her sketch book and case of pencils.
    As she walked towards the church one of the figures leaning over a spade beyond the enclosure wall stuck it into the earth and came striding after her.
    ‘Would you be wanting to go back now, Sister?’ Brother Cuthbert wiped his hot face with the sleeve of his habit and smeared soil across his brow.
    ‘If it isn’t a trouble?’
    ‘Not a bit of trouble,’ he assured her. ‘To tell you the truth, Brother John will be delighted to be rid of me. I’m always rooting up what ought to stay in the ground and leaving weeds to flourish. You found the scriptorium?’
    ‘And left most of my things there. I’ve finished some preliminary sketches, and tomorrow I want to start translating them on to canvas. When is it possible to walk across on the stepping stones?’
    ‘Only when there’s a freak tide and that only happens a couple of times a month these days,’ he informed her. ‘They’re not really stones either, but the sheared off tops of fossilized tree trunks. Thousands of years ago the loch was much narrower and there was a long strip of land with trees on it that joined our land to the shore, but the sea ate it away and the trees fossilized. The water there used to be very low indeed and someone had the idea of shearing off the trunks and reinforcing them with iron to provide some kind of causeway, but the tides changed and now the water’s hardly ever low.’
    ‘So it wouldn’t be safe for me to try it?’
    ‘Not a bit safe, Sister,’ he said firmly. ‘Anyway I enjoy rowing. Watch your step now.’
    ‘The pot,’ said Sister Joan, nimbly boarding the small vessel, ‘ought not to call the kettle black.’
    ‘I’ve yet to do penance for getting my habit soaked,’ he said ruefully, glancing down at his sea-rusted garments. ‘As Father Abbot is always telling me it’s a sin against holy poverty to be careless about one’s clothes. The trouble is that it’s not easy to find a penance that isn’t pure pleasure for me to do. I mean, can you imagine doing anything more satisfying than praying?’
    Sister Joan, who had always considered it would be more of a penance to be forbidden to pray, concurred with enthusiasm and they gained the shore in high good humour.
    ‘See you tomorrow morning. God bless, Sister.’ He pulled away strongly as she alighted, judging her distance nicely and landing on a solid tussock of grass-grown earth with reeds pointing the way to heaven all around. The loch was almost deserted now, the fishermen having presumably gone home for a meal, and only the diminishing shape of Brother Cuthbert in his boat peopled the solitude. Sister Joan moved higher up the dry ground and sat down with her back against the cliff. This was a wonderful place to meditate in, with the sky arching