God's Loving Embrace

Part Twelve

'For a good tree bringeth not forth corrupt fruit; neither doth a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.'

Luke 6:43

Sister Caris did not think of herself as happy, but she would admit to being largely content with her lot at St. Theresa's. It bore no comparison with her previous convents, and she had Sammie. She had managed to convince the rest of the dormitory that they had never had it so good, and had made them see that they had to be careful not to ruin things. They had to be good nuns whenever their superiors were watching them, even Mother Esme, who all of them worshiped as a saint in human form, to earn their time alone, when the outer door was locked and they could all be set free. She still had to maintain some discipline. She learned to punish fairly but firmly, because her Sister's could still argue and get carried away at times, but she usually managed to keep the peace.

Outside of their dormitory they all tried to be perfect, both at work and prayer. It was a renowned feature of the St. Theresa's nurses. Their obedience and piety was quite obvious to everyone who came across them, and the hospitals they covered in their area were all soon amongst the best in the country. It was perhaps inevitable that beyond St. Theresa's, their superiors would start to wonder what was going on, and arrange to take a much closer look at things. The Order was growing so fast that the organisation struggled to keep up with many of the details but anomalies stuck out, like sore thumbs. Department of Health and Education officials technically had responsibility for convents, but clearly their male officials could not go inside their new institutions, and they did not have any female officials. Church officials or in other words Pastors, reporting to Michael Winstanley's small senior team, had similar problems, as the nuns were kept quite separate from preachers, except in the chapel, but the shining brilliance of the St. Theresa's project became apparent to everyone and questions had to be asked. Initially because they wanted to replicate it, because a lot of the time they were relying on trial and error.

The Order was a chaotic exercise in papering over the cracks. There were never enough nurses to go around and quality was a constant issue. Some of Harry Trevor's advisors and several senior church figures had general concerns about the regimes operating behind closed doors in convents around the country. There were reports of brutality and the effect that was having on the services provided, except in the south London area, where quite the opposite was true. Everyone wanted to know why.

'And now, Lord, what wait I for? My hope is in thee.'

Psalms 39:7

Brogan did not think of the Craig's house in Meadvale as home. She did not identify with it or her 'parents' as her few months spent living there were fairly traumatic, albeit that she fully accepted her own part in her catastrophic fall from grace. She had reached some level of understanding with her husband, which was neither love nor hate. She understood him, and perhaps most importantly in the circumstances, he understood her. She also had the children to think about, her own two boys who she wanted to grow up blissfully free from the shadows of the past, and Eloise and Grace, who thanks to their mother's continuing depression relied almost totally on her, although Miss Howard might well have argued that point. Being back in Meadvale served to broaden her horizons slightly again, because the Reformist community in London, at least to someone of her class, really revolved around Westminster and remained relatively small, so it was rather like living in a tiny bubble. Every time they all went out in London, they got a tantalising glimpse of a different life and yet it was never more than that in their splendid isolation; but down in Meadvale, the archetypal Reformist town, they could immerse themselves wholly in the Church, surrounded by peers, and it was quite possible to believe that there was no alternative anywhere else.

Meadvale was the epicentre of the Reformist movement by chance. The original disciples had chosen the sleepy Surrey backwater as the perfect place to escape the depravity of the rest of the world, under Pastor Richard Winstanley, the Archbishop's father, who had fled the Church of England when the decision to appoint women as vicars was first made. Even as the Church grew, it remained one of those country villages that seemed to be totally isolated from everywhere else, allowing the community to develop without any outside interference. Every business seemed to be Reformist, or quite certainly pandered to Reformism, and there was no diversity on the streets, as could be seen elsewhere. Even with the party in power, Meadvale still represented the core. Shopkeepers would talk of Charles Buckingham popping in for his morning paper, or spotting Harry Trevor in the back of an official car. Peter Munroe, it was said, jogged along the river when he was there, and the community prided itself on being not only the archetypal Reformist town, but the first one.