Fragrant Flower Page 17

  Again there was a long walk down vast, empty corridors until they came to a row of doors, each with a grid in its centre. Azalea was sure they were the Nuns’ cells.

  A Sister carrying a key hurried forward to open one of the doors.

  It was the tiniest room Azalea had ever seen!

  There was one window, very high up, which had a view only of the sky. There was a wooden bed, a ewer and basin on a deal table. There was one hard chair and, on the wall, a crucifix.

  “This is your cell,” the Mother Superior said.

  “But I want to say – ” Azalea began.

  “I have heard of your behaviour,” the Mother Superior interrupted, “and I know how deeply you have distressed those who have tried to be kind to you. Because of what I have learnt, I want to give you time to think about your sins and to repent of them. You will see no one for six days.”

  Her expression was severe as she went on,

  “Your food will be brought to you, but you will have no communication with anyone outside this cell. Once a day you will be taken to a courtyard for exercise. After that you will continue to meditate on your sins and your immortal soul. Then I will see you again.”

  As she finished speaking, the Mother Superior went from the cell and the door closed behind her.

  There was the click of the key turning in the lock, then the sound of the Nuns’ footsteps as they walked away down the corridor.

  Azalea listened until they faded into the distance.

  Then there was only silence – a silence in which she could hear her heart breaking.

  Chapter Eight

  “I have been here for five days,” Azalea said to herself as the sun rose to illuminate her bare cell with a glimmer of gold.

  It might have been five months, five years, or even five centuries.

  She felt as if she had ceased to exist, as if she were living in a void where there was no time and no future.

  The first night, when she had been left alone in the cell, she had cried desperately, conscious that she was not only frightened but also losing hope.

  How could she ever be saved, ever be rescued from this prison that was more inviolable than any gaol could be?

  She knew that the Nuns who entered an enclosed Order were forgotten by the world, and once they passed through the door of the Convent they had no further contact with their relations or their friends.

  Her uncle and aunt had been very clever, Azalea thought, in removing her so quickly from Hong Kong and incarcerating her here.

  It would, she was certain, be quite impossible for Lord Sheldon to find her.

  Even if he disbelieved the letter she had been forced to write to him, even if he received the feather of the blue magpie she had handed to Ah Yok, he would still be up against an impenetrable wall of secrecy.

  Azalea was quite certain that, where the Nuns were concerned, there would be no gossip.

  The Mother Superior would make sure that she became as anonymous as her uncle and aunt wished, and Azalea feared despairingly that sooner or later they would wear down her resistance – she would become a Catholic, and take her final vows simply because there was no alternative.

  Her day began at five o’clock when a bell clanged in the Convent, echoing down the empty passages.

  She would hear the Nuns hurrying along to what she knew was a call for the first Service of the day.

  Far away in the distance she would hear them chanting, their voices intoning the prayers.

  At six o’clock her cell door was opened and an elderly Nun brought her a broom and a bucket with which she cleaned her cell.

  The Nun did not speak. She only made it obvious what she expected and Azalea found that every other day she had to go down on her knees and scrub the bare boards.

  The first morning after she had been awakened, the same Nun had taken away her clothes and left in their stead a black cotton habit, so shapeless and ugly that Azalea had looked at it in horror.

  There were coarse calico underclothes to wear beneath, rough and unbleached so that with every movement they hurt the soreness of her bruised and swollen back.

  The nightgown they had given her had been of the same material, and after spending an intolerable hour in it Azalea had taken it off and crept back into bed naked.

  Thick cotton stockings and serviceable leather shoes completed the outfit, and a postulant’s veil of thin black material covered her hair and fastened at the nape of her neck.

  Since there was no mirror in the cell, Azalea could not see herself, but she was well aware of what she must look like, and she thought with a little sob that dressed as she was now, no one would call her ‘Fragrant Flower’.

  The elderly Nun intimated that she must draw back her hair in a tight bun at the back of her head, and as she obeyed the unspoken order, Azalea remembered that when she took her vows her hair would be cut off and her head shaved!

  Every feminine instinct in her body revolted at the thought!

  When the cell was cleaned to the satisfaction of the Nun watching her, food was put inside the door and Azalea was left alone.

  At first she decided that she would not eat, then sheer hunger forced her to accept what was brought with monotonous regularity.

  For breakfast there was the coarse dark bread that peasants commonly ate in Europe and which Azalea knew was nourishing. With it came a small slice of goat’s cheese, and one day a few black olives.

  At ten o’clock the Nuns attended Chapel again and Azalea could hear them chanting for what seemed to her to be a long time.

  At eleven o’clock it was time for exercise, and Azalea was taken from her cell into a small courtyard.

  The walls rose high on two sides of it and on the top of them Azalea could see there were spikes of jagged glass which glittered in the sunshine like jewels, but which would be exceedingly dangerous to anyone who attempted to scale them.

  The walls were very high and menacing, and there were no trees near them.

  Azalea, looking at them speculatively, knew it would be impossible for anyone to climb them, however agile he might be.

  The courtyard contained no flowers, but there were some shrubs which grew wild and luxuriantly, similar to those she had seen in Hong Kong, and these were in bloom.

  They had small white blossoms not unlike lilac, and there was a faint scent about them. Otherwise the courtyard was severe and ugly, and the grass, although it was early in the season, was already browning in the heat of the sun.

  Azalea wondered if perhaps it was part of her punishment that there was to be only austerity and ugliness about her and that beauty was another worldly pleasure which was forbidden.

  At exactly half-past eleven she was taken back to her cell and locked in. There was then nothing to do but wait until the second meal of the day was brought to her at noon. This consisted of soup, sometimes containing fish, but mostly of vegetables that Azalea did not recognise, and with it a small bowl of rice.

  The same ingredients appeared for supper at six o’clock, and the hours in between seemed interminable.

  If only they would allow her books, Azalea thought, she would have been able to read and think of something else besides her own misery.

  But she knew it was part of the plan that she should, as the Mother Superior had said, “meditate upon her sins and repent of them.”

  She decided with the last flickering embers of her defiance she would never repent of having loved Lord Sheldon. She would sit thinking of him, sending her thoughts winging towards him.

  She imagined them being carried over the sea between Macao and Hong Kong, so that perhaps he would think of her and wonder where she could be and how he could see her again.

  At night Azalea would imagine that his arms were around her and his lips were on hers.

  Sometimes she would feel a little flicker of the fire he had awoken in her re-echoing in her breast. Then she would remember miserably that this was all she would have to sustain her through the long year
s ahead, and she wanted only to die.

  Kai Yin Chang had been ready to kill herself rather than be defamed, but Azalea thought helplessly that there was no way that she could do the same.

  Besides, she could not help remembering how she had told Kai Yin that it was wrong and wicked to take one’s own life, and that the British always believed that ‘where there was life there was hope!’

  Sometimes when the night seemed very long and dark she would tell herself a story in which Lord Sheldon climbed over the wall when she was walking in the courtyard and carried her away to safety.

  But her practical mind told her that this was impossible. Besides, she was certain that even if she could haul herself up on a rope and avoid the sharp points of glass on the top of the wall, someone looking through the windows of the Convent was bound to notice her.

  “Oh, God, save me!” Azalea prayed, night after night and day after day. “You saved me once when it seemed impossible by bringing Lord Sheldon to my rescue. Save me now from a life that would be – worse than – death!”

  Sometimes she wanted to scream, to beat her hands against the door of her cell, as she felt the walls were closing in on her and she was being suffocated by them.

  She told herself it was her Russian blood that was making her feel so wild and unrestrained.

  Her father had always been self-controlled and, except when he had been forced to take action against the brutality of Colonel Stewart to save a young girl, he had a reserve and a pride that would never have allowed him to give way to emotionalism.

  “You were brave, Papa!” Azalea found herself saying to him in the darkness. “Brave enough to stop a man who was behaving in a bestial fashion.”

  She gave a little sob as she continued in a whisper,

  “You were also brave enough to shoot yourself because it was the right and honourable thing to do.”

  Then, desperately, in a voice that pierced the darkness, Azalea cried,

  “Help me, Papa! Help me now, for I cannot endure this – I cannot!”

  After three or four days, the scars on her back, although tender, ceased to be so painful, and she could even lie comfortably in bed.

  She knew that her uncle had inflicted on her not only what he thought was just punishment for her behaviour, but also his resentment against her father and the scandal he feared. Azalea wondered whether, if she had gone on fighting him as she had wanted to do, he would have beaten her insensible because he was so determined to get his own way.

  Although she might despise herself for having given in so easily she knew that the end was inevitable, for she could not have resisted indefinitely.

  After several more beatings she would have capitulated ignominiously because both physically and mentally she would have been unable to stand any more.

  Sometimes she would walk up and down her cell because she felt so restless she could neither sit nor lie.

  “I am like a caged animal!” she told herself.

  Then she remembered that sooner or later in captivity even the fiercest animal became cowed, intimidated and finally apathetic.

  “How long will it be before I no longer care?” she asked. But she was sure that the thought of Lord Sheldon would always bring that dagger-like pain to her heart and an agonising torture to her mind.

  “I love him! I love him!” she whispered.

  Yet she wondered if the day would come when the words would have no meaning – when even the ecstasy of remembering him would fade and be forgotten.

  Although the silence and the fact that she was always alone was frightening and at times intolerable, Azalea could not help feeling that when the week was over it might be even worse.

  Then she was quite certain her religious instruction would begin. Gradually they would wear away her will and her critical faculties so that she would accept what she was told and become the automaton they desired.

  When, as usual, the Nun arrived at ten o’clock with a brush and pail for Azalea to clean her cell, she did what was expected of her automatically, and when the Nun left she waited listlessly for another half an hour before it was time for her exercise.

  She looked forward to being outside just because the air was fresher than it was in her cell, and at least she could feel the warmth of the sun on her head.

  She knew that beyond the walls there was the sea, blue against the green of the mountains, but she also knew despairingly that she would never see it again.

  Her only glimpse of the world she had found so beautiful would be the sky, sometimes blue, sometimes grey and overcast, and at other times, as it was this morning, translucent in the golden sun and shimmering with the promise of heat later in the day.

  She looked up, hoping to see a bird, but the sky was empty and she wondered if perhaps even they too would be forbidden to her.

  She remembered the yellow-green South China white-eye which the shopkeepers kept in cages to make their customers feel happy, and she recalled the flight of blue magpies which had risen in Mr. Chang’s garden when she and Lord Sheldon had stepped out onto the veranda.

  “I thought they would bring me luck!” Azalea told herself miserably.

  As she thought of the magpies, she saw at the end of the courtyard a patch of vivid blue on the rough green grass. Wonderingly she walked towards it and thought for a moment as she drew nearer that it was a blue magpie which had fallen into the courtyard, dead.

  She bent forward and saw that it was in fact just a little bunch of single feathers lying on the grass beside one of the flowering bushes.

  Then as she looked at it she heard a voice whisper,

  “Heung-Far! Heung-Far!”

  She started, thinking she must be imagining that someone was calling her. Then incredulously she saw, behind a bush against the wall, the fingers of a hand beckoning to her.

  For a moment she could only stare. The hand seemed to come out of the darkness low down on the ground.

  Then the voice, hardly above a whisper, came again.

  “Cum, Heung-Far! Cum quick!”

  Without hesitating, Azalea crawled under the bush. The hand was beckoning to her from a hole in the ground that appeared to come from right under the wall.

  She crawled forward and the hand retreated.

  “Cum! Cum!” the same voice insisted.

  Azalea stretched herself forward, her hands in front of her, her body spread out so that she crawled into the darkness that smelt of newly-dug earth.

  The hole broadened and Azalea realised that she must be in a tunnel that passed right under the high wall of the Convent.

  She felt her heart begin to beat quickly with excitement, and although she could not see, she could hear the movements of someone ahead of her.

  She must have hesitated for the hand touched hers and the whisper came again.

  “Cum quick! Cum!”

  She moved as fast as she could, hampered by the thick folds of her habit and the heavy shoes on her feet.

  She put up her hand. Realising that the tunnel was reinforced with wooden supports, she kept her head low.

  “Now – storm-water – drain,” the whisper came and Azalea realised the tunnel had ended and she was in fact inside a large round pipe.

  There was only just room enough for her to move her shoulders and she knew that had she been any broader, in fact the size of an average English girl, it would have been impossible for her to follow the small Chinese man moving ahead of her.

  It was pitch dark and yet every so often he touched Azalea’s hands as if to reassure her he was there. She knew that he must be crawling backwards down the pipe and she had only to follow him.

  It was eerie and rather frightening being so closely confined, but her passage was made easier by the fact that she was going downhill all the way.

  Although sometimes she had to drag herself forward jerkily because of her skirts, she was still progressing, and the incline was growing steeper.

  She seemed to have gone a long way, and it was hard t
o breathe, when Azalea had a moment of panic.

  Supposing she suffocated? Supposing she stuck in this pipe and there was no way out?

  She could not go backwards. That was impossible! Ahead there seemed to be no end in sight.

  The Chinese who was guiding her did not speak and Azalea thought it must be because their voices would echo, and however softly they spoke the sound would be magnified.

  There was a pervading smell of rainwater and decaying leaves, and Azalea found herself feeling very hot.

  “I cannot breathe!” she longed to cry to her guide. Then she told herself there must be air somewhere in the pipes and she must breathe slowly and deeply.

  She took one or two deep breaths and moved forward with what seemed fresh impetus.

  Quite suddenly she could smell the sea – what seemed a blessed smell of salt seaweed – and now it was much easier to breathe!

  Then, almost before she realised it, there was a glimmer of light shining above the dark head of the man in front of her.

  At last, far away at the end of the pipe, she could see daylight! She wanted to cry, then she told herself this was not the moment for weakness.

  She was not yet free. Her absence might by now have been discovered. They would find the tunnel, and the Nuns or those they employed could be waiting for her when she finally emerged.

  As if her guide also realised the importance of haste he slithered away ahead, moving down the pipe like a snake, and Azalea crawled as quickly as she could after him.

  The sunshine was suddenly blinding in her eyes and she saw the shimmer and glimmer of the sea. She looked out of the storm-water pipe and realised it opened in a stone wall high above the waterline of the sea. Below, the Chinese who must have guided her was standing in a sampan.

  The man took hold of Azalea’s arms and pulled her forward, and another man caught her round the waist.

  They dragged her clear of the drain and set her down in the sampan.

  There was a third man in the bow, his hand on the fixed oar with which the sampan was rowed, and as Azalea seated herself he started moving.

  One of the Chinese set a large coolie-hat on her head – another wrapped a wide piece of faded blue cotton round her shoulders.