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between the high banks of winter bleached heather and gorse.
    She would have liked the excuse to drive over to the Romany camp and ask after her former pupils but she had no valid reason for going there, so put the desire to the back of her mind, and concentrated on the faults she’d be confessing soon at the Sacrament of Penance. After seven years as a religious the list of her faults seemed to get longer, she thought wryly. Not that there were any serious infringements of the rule to regret. Instead there were a multitude of small omissions, tinydeviations from the practice of charity and obedience, like pebbles in a wall which would be washed away from the solid base and cause the wall itself to tumble if she didn’t take care.
    A tall figure shambled across the track, causing her to brake sharply.
    ‘Luther, take care!’ She slowed further, putting her head out of the window to shout a warning.
    The figure paused, took a few steps towards her, said in a high complaining tone, ‘Wasn’t me did it, Sister! Wasn’t me. Honest! Wasn’t me!’
    Sister Joan lowered her voice slightly, using the soothing accents that one needed to employ with the overgrown man whose mind sometimes worked perfectly well but at other times either flew off at a tangent or fixed itself obsessively upon some object beyond his reach. Luther had spent time in psychiatric care but now lived with his Romany relatives who had the sense to accept him as harmless if a trifle eccentric.
    ‘I’m sure you haven’t done anything, Luther,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you.’
    ‘They’ll say it was me done it,’ Luther persisted.
    ‘Nobody says you’ve done anything wrong, Luther. You go on back home now,’ Sister Joan said.
    ‘You don’t come no more to the camp,’ he complained.
    ‘It’s Lent. Remember I told you that in Lent we don’t go visiting unless it’s absolutely necessary. I’ll come at Easter. I promise.’
    ‘That’s a while away,’ he said plaintively.
    ‘It will come the way it always comes. Go home, Luther.’
    Leaving him to lope off, the recent anxiety already half erased from his mind by the prospect of the coloured eggs that signified Easter for him, she drove on. Luther was fine as long as he was kept occupied with small jobs around the convent grounds or waspermitted to accompany his cousins when they went to sell scrap iron but when time hung heavy on his hands he was apt to start imagining things. She would ask Sister Martha if there were any tasks he could undertake before the spring sowing proper began.
    ‘You’re late,’ Sister Perpetua observed when she had garaged the car and made her way to the kitchen.
    ‘I showed Father Timothy the way to the presbytery and Mrs Fairly asked me to stay for a cup of tea. Did you want me for anything, Sister?’
    ‘A bit of cheerful conversation if it wasn’t Lent.’ Sister Perpetua tugged her veil into place over the two-inch span of reddish hair allowed by the rule to be revealed, and gave a rueful grin. ‘I don’t know why but I’ve been at sixes and sevens this morning. Sister Gabrielle’s knee is troubling her again. It must be pretty bad because she actually admitted as much and I hadn’t enough of the linament left so I asked Sister Jerome to boil up some comfrey and she said she was lay sister and not infirmarian and had some penance to do anyway – left over from her last confession I suppose, since she hasn’t made any confession since she got here, and Sister Teresa went off to help Sister Martha and Sister Katherine, and then Luther came bothering round – it has been a morning and a half, Sister!’
    ‘What did Luther want?’
    ‘Went on and on about not having done something or other. I’m afraid I was a little short with the poor creature. Temper always was my problem.’
    ‘I’m sure you had cause,’ Sister Joan said. ‘Now that I am here what do you need doing?’
    ‘All done; I boiled up the linament myself,