Index Librium Prohibitorum

CHAPTER 2: of "Jindy Kelly"

The red-haired girl (cailin rúa) with amnesia, who was delivered to the convent by Satan himself, is identified as Jindy Kelly, a survivor of the “Kerosene Creek incident”.

To a casual visitor, the convent’s library resembled a haphazard collection of books of all sizes crammed into shelves, or balanced precariously on the tops of cupboards, or rising in stacks from the floor like anthills. The classification system, which Sister Alexandria had devised, without regard to Dewey, the alphabet, subject matter or even colour, would have been incomprehensible to most, but it enabled the librarian to locate any book within minutes. When Jindy appeared at the door one day, the librarian welcomed her in and handed her a book of Bible stories. Jindy had no idea what to do with a book, which way was up, or how pages worked. The title on the spine meant nothing more to her than claw marks on the trunk of a tree. The printed words on the pages were as meaningless as sparrows perching on a clothesline or ants foraging from a nest. Sister Alexandria gave her a pen and told her to try and copy the marks, but they still made no sense.

On her second visit she was idly sorting through a pile of books donated by a parishioner, when she recognised an illustration on the cover of a slim, red volume. It depicted an ugly old man wearing a pointed cap and holding a candle. A word popped into her head: Scrooge. She said it aloud and the sound was strangely satisfying, so she repeated it and drew out the vowel sound Scroooooge. Then two words Ebeneeeza Scroooooge. Then in a flash of clarity she remembered the title, A Christmas Carol. A story she loved so much, she could recite it by heart: Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that…

Sister Alexandria listened to Jindy’s recitation in amazement, then sat down beside her and ran her finger beneath the words and repeated them herself: “Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt about that.” The ants on the page began to crawl together into clumps that resolved into sounds and meanings. Jindy continued reciting from memory and the librarian continued moving her finger beneath the words: Scrooge never painted out Old Marley’s name. There it stood, years afterward, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley… Jindy returned to the library the next day and the day after that and recited the entire book again, and again, until Sister Alexandra could point to any word and Jindy could say it aloud.

In the stack of donated books she recognised another picture: a girl with flowers in her long red hair and a fish’s tail instead of legs. She opened it to the first page and, running her fingers under the words, recited from memory: Far out in the sea, the water is as blue as the petals of the loveliest of cornflowers, and as clear as the clearest glass. The librarian was so pleased that she allowed Jindy to take A Christmas Carol and The Little Mermaid back to her her cell, where she happily sat on her straw bed, opened both books, and read from each alternately, until she was rudely interrupted by a voice in her head.

That is not reading, said the voice, You’re just remembering. Try to read a book you don’t know off by heart.

Sister Alexandria was very pleased when Jindy asked to widen her reading experience. Jindy struggled resolutely through the library’s hagiographies of saints and memoirs of missionaries and was soon able to read the most obscure texts with confidence, even though she found them repetitious and tedious. It was while searching for something more interesting to read that she discovered, in the shadows behind the librarian’s desk, a bookshelf with a locked grille. She put her eye up to the filigree, but could only make out the worm-eaten spines of ancient tomes and the shivering shadows of daddy-long-legs spiders. When she asked Sister Alexandra about the bookshelf, the librarian answered sternly, “If you so much as touch any of them books Jindy Kelly, you will burn in hell for eternity.”

“Have you read them?” Jindy asked innocently.

The librarian shook her head and crossed herself. “Pope Leo himself has declared them books to be Index Librium Prohibitorum. Just opening the covers of any one puts your soul in danger of eternal damnation.”

Needless to say, Jindy spent every unguarded moment hunting for the key. She eventually located it, attached by a chain to the Epistles of Saint Paul in Sister Alexandria’s desk top drawer. Jindy examined the key and weighed it in her hand: “Made of brass. Two-inch shank. Only two wards cut into the bit,” and as she said it to herself, the wondered, How do I know these words? The more pressing question was how to borrow the key without the librarian knowing, let alone returning it to its exact position.

Mould, hissed the voice in her ear.

“Who are you?” Jindy asked.

The Virgin Mary was calmly seated in the librarian’s chair, wearing her golden crown and blue cloak. She shook her head sadly, Have you forgotten me as well?

“Holy Mary Mother of God!” Jindy gasped.

We were once on more familiar terms. You used to call me “the VM”, if I remember.

A spark of lightning crackled in Jindy’s brain: a vision of Virgin Mary floating in the steam of the wash house. She remembered the voice that had whispered in her ear during Vespers. That’s Exodus Chapter 20, Verse 5.

“What do you mean ‘mould’?” Jindy asked. “What has mould got to do with the price of fish?”

Do you remember the time Mr Orbiston asked your father to copy the key to his privy?

“Da pressed the key into a lump of clay, fired it in the furnace, then poured melted brass into the hole to make a copy.”

In other words, he made a mould.

“Do you think I could do that?”

There’s a mountain of fine clay behind the stables. There’s tools in the gardener’s shed… Use your imagination.

That night Jindy left the convent via the cellar window, climbed the hill behind the stables and dug up a billycan of fine pipeclay. She worked a lump of it into a soft ball and pushed it into a tobacco tin scavenged from the hotel rubbish dump. The next day, she pushed the librarian’s key into the clay and held the tin tightly closed until she had made a clear impression. She volunteered to help the kitchen boy rake out the bread oven and while stacking it with new wood for the weekly baking, she concealed her tin of clay among the kindling. The clay in her tin hardened, along with the loaves of bread and the Sunday roast.

Well done! Said the VM as Jindy retrieved the baked clay mould and blew the ash out of the key-shaped depression.

That night at the Berrivale Iron Works, Tom Tinker was casting fence sections for the bishop’s new residence, when he saw the girl again. She offered him a canteen of cold water to drink and asked, “Tom, what do you know about me?”

“You’re Malachi Kelly’s daughter who has lost her memory. You rode on my shoulders a month ago. What can I do for you tonight?”

She pointed at the pool of glowing, swirling molten metal, “Could you spare a spoonful of that?” She showed him the tobacco tin with the mould, “The nuns are in sore need of a duplicate key to the holy relics.”

Tom examined the tobacco tin and nodded approvingly. “That’s a good mould you’ve made there Jindy Kelly, but this is iron, not brass. If you leave it with me, I’ll see what can be done.”

It was a week before a typewritten envelope from Berrivale Iron Works arrived at the convent, addressed to Miss Jindy Kelly. The nun who opened it discovered a pottery figurine of the Virgin Mary, painted blue, and of a size that one could attach to a string of Rosary beads, so she passed it on to Jindy.

Jindy cracked open the baked clay and extracted the shiny, brass duplicate key. She attached it to her rosary beads and the next time she was in the library, tried it on the lock to the forbidden bookshelf. It opened with a satisfying click.

You are a devious young woman, said the VM, and I fear the Pandora’s Box of blasphemies you are about to unleash on the world.

She reached out to touch the dusty books, half fearing that the sky would open and lighting would strike her down. Some of the volumes were old and worm-eaten and the pages crumbled when she turned them. In one, words were so close together it was next to impossible to decipher a sentence. She chose a slim volume with a startling illustration in the frontispiece: a girl with disordered clothes, cowering before a bully wielding a riding whip. However, the text was in a language she could not understand. As she was returning the volume to the shelf, a sheaf of handwritten pages slipped out onto the floor. The writing was so small she had to take it to the window to decipher the words. It was titled The Misfortunes of Virtue by Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade. It recounted a parable of two French sisters.

Juliette the eldest is sixteen, beautiful but vain as well as bold and flirtatious. Justine the younger is twelve, innocent, modest, pious, serious and naïve who believes that people always have good intentions. When their father is murdered, the cruel and corrupt landlord evicts them and the sisters are separated. Justine tries to find honest work but she constantly falls into the hands of evil men who ravish and torture her, and she ends up in prison. Meanwhile her sister Juliette lives a life of vice and debauchery and marries a senile nobleman and inherits his fortune. In the end, the pure and virtuous Justine is struck by lighting, while her debauched and immoral sister becomes the abbess of a convent.

Now you understand why the Pope locked this book away in his Index Librorum Prohibitorum. The Virgin Mary shook her finger, If I were you, I’d lock it back up and throw away the key.

But Jindy asked herself, if the Pope had locked away the book fearing it would corrupt anyone who read it, did it follow that she was now corrupt, immoral and depraved? Was it possible that the story of Justine might be the key to the mystery of why she couldn’t remember her past? Was it because she had been ravished and tortured like Justine? Or had she, like Juliette, lived a life of vice and debauchery and and was now being punished? How about the anonymous author of the hand-written document? The act of translating Mr Donatien’s novel into English must surely be a mortal sin.

Over the following days, Jindy searched the faces of the nuns at mealtimes and at prayer and listened in on conversations for hints that one of the nuns knew French and had damned her immortal soul.

Don’t be sanctimonious, said the VM, slipping the duplicate key into Jindy’s pocket, I’ll wager that if you discover the perpetrator, you will beg her to teach you French so you can wallow in more of this filth.

An Illustrated History of Martyrs, which Jindy discovered among the breviaries at the back of he chapel, contained even more violent yet thrilling stories, The frontespiece illustration depicted the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, her stomach pierced by an arrow, her mouth gaping open like a fish, her eyes rolled back in rapture. (It could have been an illustration of the trials of Justine!) Each chapter of the History described in lurid detail the tortures and ghastly deaths of pious women who sacrificed themselves to preserve their virginity. 12 year old Saint Agnes sent to work in a brothel; Saint Apollonia’s teeth knocked out before she was burned at the stake; Saint Euphrasia raped by a regiment; Saint Cecelia torn apart by horses. And then there were the women so much in love with pain they martyred themselves, like Saint Rose of Lima who blistered her face with pepper, and wore hair shirt studded with nails, a crown of thorns beneath her veil, and slept on a bed of broken tiles.

Saint Rose of Kerosene Creek, whispered the voice in her head, Rose, Rosie. Rosie-Posey. You always wanted to be like her.

Jindy’s body no longer bore the scratches and bruises she had arrived with, but her ankles and wrists were cobwebbed with white scars. She examined them carefully, wondering whether she had been tortured like Justine; whether she must spend the rest of her life atoning for sins she could not recall.

She resolved to become a nun.