162
In This House of Brede
The nuns saw her go, and Dame Beatrice guarded the door as Abbess Catherine fell on her knees close to the chapel grille. “I can’t. I can’t,” she had cried silently; her face hot though her knees and feet and hands were cold. “I can’t.” Dame Catherine had a brother who, like Sister Julian’s, was a monk, but ordained priest when he was still very young, and a bishop now. When they were children, Mark and Catherine had taken a vow together. “Whatever you do, I will do, too. Whatever you are, I will be, too.” Mark had been ten, Catherine six, and she could remember how, sitting up in one bed, they had pricked their wrists with Mark’s penknife and held the two together so that their blood could mingle. “It’s a blood vow,” Mark had said solemnly. He was a Benedictine novice while she was still at school; then, for her, there had been Paris, further study in Rome, and when at last she had come home, she had still dallied, just staying at home, playing tennis, picnicking, going to every party and dance she could. Had her father and mother, Dame Catherine often wondered afterward, been trying to tempt her away from religious life—she was their only daughter—or had they been testing her vocation? Had she herself been trying to stifle the call that matched Mark’s? It was odd, she thought, that she who was so shy had, in those last months in the outer world, been almost feverishly gay. One night—it was in June—she had gone to a dance at the big house of the village, she, the doctor’s daughter. She