Obscurity, The Fourth Chapter
In which a rather mysterious figure appears to know the widow’s secrets.
e last read The Third Chapter, in which the widow enters society and rumors about her become a rather ghastly thing.
The nuns were singing vespers in the chapel at the hour the man approached the convent door. He was tall, dark, and stoic, ever the portrait of justice as his long black cloak billowed behind him on the convent steps. Three steady knocks announced his presence on the precipice and the abbess opened the door quietly and invited him in.
Music wailed through the hallways, the nuns singing a hymn that seemed an omen of the evening to come. Their voices echoed throughout the convent halls and when the man spoke, his voice lent a rich baritone to the nuns’ angelic soprano. He spoke to the abbess in hushed tones, but she spoke to him in much harsher ones.
If the reader had been privy to their conversation, it might have been surmised that the man was looking for something. But whatever words were spoken between them were halted when the abbess refused him entrance to her convent. He would not be allowed to conduct his audit here, she assured him, and the women in her care would not be removed of their piety for the sake of his lack of creativity.
Her words lent a foreboding legato to their terse discussion, but the man’s voice resonated deeply beneath it, attempting to soothe into those condemnable tones some sense of reason. To find some alternative that would see her convent’s piety ensured, and not the recipient of unfortunate and unintended consequences.
“Consequences,” the abbess seethed. “For whose sins must the convent pay?”
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