The Sins of the Fathers

Chapter Twenty

The Chapter House

Ellington Manor

Meadvale

Surrey

Hugh Blackstone did not go to bed that night. He returned to his makeshift medical centre to check on his patients. Three of them were locked in the cell, and asleep on their cots, and he was not allowed inside, but he could reach all of them through the metal bars and their chips gave him most of the information he needed anyway. Osborne had banned sleeping sacks, but the keeper had put them in sleeping gowns, like the one his wife had slept in the night before, but without the integral corsets. Miss Cooper told him that they were designed for younger girls who were still growing and did not tight lace. He took blood pressures and checked pulses, before heading down to the other end of the basement to check on Caris. She was not in a sleeping gown because she had several broken ribs and some severe bruising all over the place. Miss Cooper, who had detailed instructions to follow, had not liked that at all, because she was required to secure every Sister at night, but Slade had gone through the rules with her and got her to agree to just chaining Caris to the bed. Blackstone pulled back the curtain around the cot and stared down at the bald old woman, with a thick chain running around her neck, who was curled up beneath a thin blanket. He would never have recognised her in a million years.

He had been at medical school with Caris Johnson, and shared a chaotic flat with her for one memorable academic year, just before she qualified, because she was three years older than him, the same age as Sean Fletcher. Blackstone was already going out with Caroline by that stage, and Fletcher was dating Caris, so the four of them had socialised a fair bit, and they knew each other really well. The last time he had seen her had been at a barbeque, in his parent's back garden, in late August twenty-twenty. Fletcher had finally managed to get over from the States, after commercial flights resumed following the first lockdown, the Prof and Brianna were on their way up to Oxford and new jobs, with young Caitlin in tow, and Noddy was there with his big sister Imogen and her kids. Caris had come down from sunny Manchester, where she was working as an A&E doctor, primarily to see Fletcher, but also Hugh and Imogen, who she was also close to. She had been twenty-eight, with an enviable figure, long auburn hair and the darkest green eyes. Four months later, she was in a convent and forty-four long and obviously hard years later, she was a shadow of her former self, all skin and bone, wrinkled and scarred by decades of beatings.

Sitting on a plastic stool beside her, Blackstone fiddled with his remote, calling up her vital statistics. He had mixed feelings about the compulsory equipping of women, because there were huge medical benefits. Perfect sight and hearing for all, and a range of diagnostics at the touch of a button, made his job easier. Preventative medicine could be automated, and it was simple to isolate infections and stop other people being infected. Equipping was first introduced to slow the spread of Covid, and the results were miraculous. Blackstone had been working in a Covid hospital at the time, conscripted to the NHS for the duration, and every patient was chipped, which saved thousands of lives. But as with everything the Reformists did, the good things had to be weighed against the costs to personal freedoms. And yet, after forty years, no one worried about that sort of thing anymore. No one really mentioned gender equality or complained about the way women were treated, because they were used to it, and it was all just part of everyday life. His daughters were both fully-equipped on their twelfth birthdays, as per the law, and they did not know any different way to live. Blackstone realised that when his generation died out, there would be no one left to disapprove.

Caris shifted in her sleep, pulling the blanket back over her, and he wondered if she was waking up. He had sedated all four women when they reached the Chapter House, because they were all extremely distressed at the sight of four men waiting for them. And then, after Miss Cooper had stripped them out of their habits, he had discovered her injuries. So, he had kept her out of it, all day, giving her a chance to heal and recover. She was switched off, as women commonly were at night, certainly all nuns, but he turned her eyes and ears back on to see if she was conscious. And that made him think of Caroline. She was never switched off at home, and the only time her punishment chips were activated was if she earned an auto punishment, or was in the care of another keeper for some reason, and was deemed to have sinned. And they avoided those situations wherever possible. But bringing her with him to Ellington Manor was unavoidable.