Chapter Thirteen
When Saoirse McKenzie was admitted to the convent at Sciennes, to the south of the city, past Hope Park, she found it a relief not to have to keep up appearances.
She was, in truth, the comeliest of the McKenzie sisters even into her fifties when she gave up her array of green outfits for the stark black and white of a nun’s habit.
But it wasn’t only her colourful wardrobe that Winifred forwent.
She was glad of her cell, a far cry from her warm, carpeted bedroom in Glenfinlas Street.
She quickly realised that despite the lack of the daily luxuries with which she grew up, she liked the gentle rhythm of living with the sisters.
The regular services, the mealtimes and bedtimes, the comfort of not having to socialise.
The ability to disappear among the ranks.
Gradually she understood that if she didn’t want to wash, she didn’t have to.
That she could eat raw onion if she chose, without reproach.
That she could make conversation or not. That her stockings needn’t match.
Some months after taking her vows, Mr Drummond, the McKenzies’ solicitor, arranged the transfer of Saoirse’s share of the McKenzie family trust to the convent, and although the ethos of the nunnery was for the women to be equal in all things, the generosity of this bequest meant that the abbess was, in practical terms, compliant towards her new sister.
In any case, they’d known each other since they were children, when they lived only a close’s distance apart in the Old Town, before the turn of the century.
It took some weeks before Winifred remembered to call the abbess Mother rather than Lizzie.
In her new life, Winifred is, in truth, no more devout than she was when she lived in town, which is to say, not particularly.
She chooses to play music in the mornings, practising on the chapel organ almost every day.
She accompanies the singing of hymns at the sisters’ services.
In the afternoons she writes letters and reads in the library.
She has started to teach herself French.
From time to time, Mother asks Winifred’s opinion on the convent’s accounts, which are reviewed monthly.
Over the years Winifred has suggested both savings to be made and investments to be considered.
The funds from the trust have thus not been her only contribution to the convent’s prosperity.
Because of Sister Winifred’s sound financial advice, the sisters have been able to set up a service at the apothecary in nearby Bruntis Field for mothers and babies and also give alms on the Canongate to the indigent, distributed through their sister house on Holyrood Road.
After the nuns’ final devotions, the night is Winifred’s own, said to be for spiritual reflection and, of course, sleep, but oftentimes even before her great niece came to Edinburgh, Sister Winifred preferred to leave the convent to walk through the trees in the moonlight.
This part of town has had a nunnery since the sixteenth century; indeed, the name Sciennes derives from that convent’s saint, Catherine of Sienna.
Winifred feels secure in the long tradition of devotion embedded in the landscape.
The medieval nuns’ gravestones line the wall of the old convent, near the place the Jews have started burying their dead.
At first these walks eased Winifred’s humiliation, the sting of the affair unmasked.
Now they’ve become a pleasant habit where she processes the events of the day.
Occasionally on her rambles, Winifred meets Reverend Reid near his manse at Hope Park for he is another night walker.
They converse about interesting matters: the two orphaned pauper girls he has taken in; sisters born on the Cowgate one of whom has read her way through the reverend’s entire library between chores.
Or their mutual acquaintance, Miss Susan Ferrier, who resides during the summer in nearby Church Hill, and who has given up writing novels for she could not bear the limelight.
‘Such is the way of spinsters,’ Reverend Reid comments.
It is Reverend Reid who, through his Cowgate connections, on short notice, provided the key for St Andrew’s Kirk where Winifred met Araminta for the first time only a few days before.
At first the humiliation of not being Brodie’s only love stung.
But now, Winifred misses neither her sister nor her lover.
Still, this doesn’t mean that from time to time when news from Glenfinlas Street has reached her, she hasn’t taken an interest. The sisters, while sequestered, remain part of the capital’s social fabric and women, even nuns, like to talk.
When Sir Walter Scott died, only five years ago, the news reached the convent before the Assembly Rooms, through a sister with a cousin who resides near Abbotsford.
News of Eilidh McKenzie’s death came from the minister at St George’s.
A letter was delivered within three hours of her passing, also containing the information that when she knew she was infirm, Eilidh had sent to London for Araminta McKenzie Moore, not to Sciennes for Winifred.
The truth is, this stung poor Winifred. They might not have spoken these last ten years but a sister is a sister most especially when both remain unmarried, and it would have been good to say goodbye.
The last few days have weighed heavily on the old nun – Araminta looks disarmingly like her mother, Winifred’s only niece.
Winifred however recognises that her religious duties have been easier than her domestic duties would have been at Glenfinlas Street.
Eilidh has done her bit and now the old nun is beginning to feel the tightening of old promises like a pair of shoes that have been made too small.
Duty is duty. And the truth is Winifred abandoned hers.
Not without reason, for she was humiliated. But still.
St George’s is the next place she has arranged to meet Araminta.
The minister is a lifelong friend and the side door key was easily obtained.
Winifred expected their first meeting to be a one-off, so she walked the two miles from Sciennes to the Cowgate.
The second time at the watchtower she walked again, but now, as the duty has become regular and her old knees stiff, she decides to ride into town swaddled in thick home-knitted mittens and a scarf that can only be termed ‘chunky’.
She tethers the convent’s old nag, whose usual job is pulling an equally old cart, at the junction with Queensferry Street and dodges the puddles so as not to get her tan leather sandals soaked.
She did not anticipate the proximity to her old home would rekindle memories of her old life.
Passing the mews transports her to a time when she hosted candlelit dinners and was feted for her wit.
When she sculpted her body inside laced stays and shopped on George Street for Bristol glass bottles of the popular bath oil manufactured near Canonmills.
Reminded now, she smells it in memory, as if the days when it scented her chamber were closer.
She’d hoped to set aside being a lady and being a lover too; yet here she is reminded.
She pauses behind the church with her mind racing.
From here she can make out the rear of number four Glenfinlas Street, candlelight emanating from the maids’ attic rooms. The shame twists her gut even now.
Eilidh was Brodie’s first choice. ‘How could you?’ she snapped all that time ago before the silence descended.
‘It’s been ten years . . .’ she started to accuse the butler.
That was the first barb. For Saoirse it had only been eight.
Eilidh, then, was younger, but she was first. Then there’s the fact that Winifred had kissed Brodie the first time, rather than the other way round.
Lady Charlotte Scott, God rest her soul, had lit in the McKenzie sisters an interest in buying unusual wine and Saoirse had laid down some kegs of Spanish sherry.
Brodie was unsure how to store these and she’d gone down with him to inspect the racks.
The proximity, the darkness, the illicit nature of being below stairs had conspired, and Miss Saoirse McKenzie had stepped too close and before she knew it, she was kissing the handsome butler and he was kissing her back.
The humiliation of Brodie defending himself still stings.
‘When I first reached for you . . .’ he said to Eilidh.
So Saoirse had been second, then, in everything.
It felt like Eilidh was more desirable and more accomplished too for, also, it was Eilidh who had unlocked clue after clue.
Winifred slams the back door of St George’s too loudly.
Memory is dogging her and she must shut it out.
Would Brodie have kissed her had she not stepped towards him?
She had served herself on a plate, unlike her sister.
Once, Winifred conversed with one of the other nuns about why they’d come to the convent.
‘If I hadn’t,’ the other sister said, ‘I’d have had to marry a man.
’ This was delivered with such disgust that Winifred knew she could not share her real reason for taking vows; that she had been shamed in her own home by her sister’s lover.
That she was his second choice. And him a servant.
Instead, she said she’d come to Sciennes for the same reason.
Pride is a sin. But then, so is everything else she’d done.
Now she taps her foot impatiently. At last, there is a knock at the door and she scoops up a lamp to let in her great niece. Araminta is excited.
‘You found it, then?’ Winifred says, recalling feeling like this when Eilidh unlocked one of Berenice’s damn clues. The thrill is a kind of communion. Another unsought-for memory.