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The day begins with the ringing of bells. Nuns sleep while I pace and watch the darkness. Dawn breaks with lauds, prayers of praise. The sun rises slowly, like Christ from the dead, and we rise like the dead from our mattresses of rope. Growling bellies folding over, we kneel and we pray.

At 12, I entered this order. First, they cut off my river of hair. At 13, I began to bleed, but not as the Christ, His stigmata for handprints. Surely I am going to Hell, I thought, for I am bleeding from a hidden well and my mother was a courtesan. At 14, I found the hinge between my legs and worried at it between bells and prayers when no one was watching but God. At 15, I asked Father to come for me, told him I did not suit this nun-ness. No letter came back.
Bells ring for prime and for sext and for nones. Bells tell us the time and tell us to pray. ‘Sister,’ a young voice calls at my door. ‘Sister, come for your worship.’ I am the oldest nun here now and I am afforded the occasional luxury of lateness.

At 16, I was married to the Christ. I took His gold ring while I thought of the student who kissed me beneath a bridge when I was 12, and cupped his hand over my flat breast as if showing me what was to come. My sister married the Christ before me. She always gets to everything first.

At 20, I began to vomit unsalted soup. ‘Tell Father,’ I told my sister. ‘Tell Father I must have cheese.’ I watched her write the words. Surely Father would not ignore her? Her letter-writing began.

We wait in our cells for the bell that is vespers, to tell us the sunset is come. This flock of black-veiled nuns will fall on their faces, beg forgiveness for sins they are unable to commit now, then sit in holy silence with their holy and unholy thoughts. My sister could pray with ease for hours. Her knees did not feel the tiles. In our cell between prayers, her pen scratched in the darkness. I could not sleep for the sound of her writing. ‘Sleep,’ she would say, as if she could command it. I stayed awake to spite her, though my eyes would sting and weep through prayers.

At 21, I developed the spiritual gift of manifesting sores on my legs. I was admitted to the infirmary: to escape the bells and my sister; to take my clothes off; to lie in clean white sheets. ‘When Father hears I am ill,’ I told my sister, ‘he will come.’

The doctor’s hair had curls that hung like cherries. I longed to bounce them on the flat of my hand. ‘You, again,’ he would say, and smile at me with his bone-white teeth.

He tried every manner of healing. He cloaked me in leeches. He jewelled me with hot glass cups, sucking and burning off sores I had willed there. ‘I want to understand you,’ he would say, ‘you and your suffering’. I made of my body a map of tiny wet sores for him to navigate and claim.

At 24, a novice was placed on a bed beside me. Her face was bloodied and flat, from smashing her own head into the floor at prayer. My cherry-haired doctor inspected her wounds with his smiles. He said he wanted to understand her and her suffering, and my own sores dried up and shrank on my stomach and thighs.

I tried to make myself as thin and small as possible, so that I might keep my bed, but I was returned to my sister. In our cell I opened her trunk, looking for emetic apothecary and purgative potions. I found it filled with letters: Father’s letters to her. I sifted through them, searching for word of me, and read of my maladies, my diagnoses, my pleas for cheese. Mention of me was so slim and so spare.

Beneath them I found her knife. It smelled of lemons. I raised it to the night sky, as if to show Father. ‘Can you see me now? Will you come?’ When my arm rained red ribbons, I returned to the infirmary. The flat-faced nun had improved, glory be to God, and my wounds were the worst the doctor had seen, until the city bloomed with plague and I was bandaged and released, to make room for the buboes.

The bell rings for compline. We take to our beds, fully clothed, to wait for death and the coming of Christ, to take us up into heaven. God forbid we should meet our bridegroom in a state of undress.

We prayed for a year to end the plague. Cloistered from infection we were healthy, disappointingly, and all of us lived. The city died around us, all our farmers and vintners and suppliers. Times were hard for the Sisters of San Matteo, but we were told to be mindful, to think of Catherine of Siena who sustained herself on a single communion wafer. My sister and I lay side by side in our cell, stomachs rumbling; two prunes in an empty bowl. She worried for our father’s health.

At 28, I was given a job. My sister wrote with greater urgency. I want you to know that I found something more healing than doctors, more effective than leeches or bloodletting. It was both stimulating and purgative, and remains so. I know it is why we were kept from the plague, though my sister insisted it was a miracle.

I grew round in my habit. Not from doctor’s hands but from vats of ruby liquid. ‘Look how well I am, well and truly cured,’ I boasted. My sister complained of the casks I drained, but as cellarer it was my job to ensure the integrity of the wine. It required a great deal of tasting. Out of concern for my welfare, my sister asked for me to be reassigned to draper. It became my job to bleach and count tablecloths and towels.

In the midst of her scratching, I had had enough. ‘Why do you have to stick your nose into everything? Why can’t you let me have one thing that is mine?’

‘It’s my job to look after you,’ she said.

‘I am 32 years old! I don’t need looking after!’

‘I take care of people! It’s what I do!’

‘No, you butt in – you boss –’

‘I work for you and the sisters and the Mother! I manage Father’s household and accounts and his papers! I have my teaching and my apothecary and letters to write to him and for him! Every hour of the day is spoken for. Nothing would happen if I didn’t do these things!’ When she was little, the world spun round her, much as the universe swung round the earth. It took me a long time to learn that the sun was the centre of the universe and not my sister. ‘You would not have lasted here without me,’ she said.

‘Why didn’t you leave me in the cellar? I was happy! For once!’

‘It is not our job to be happy! Think of poor Father, locked up and alone! You only think of yourself! You are selfish and petty and sinful –’

‘You don’t know who I am!’ I shouted at her. I took off my veil and threw it at her.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t.’ And she said no more words to me thereafter.

I knew I was selfish and petty and sinful. I was the youngest; it was my place to be so. Show me a woman in here who was not, save my sister, and even she was proud and covetous.

When Father finally visited, he found only me behind the grille.

‘Livia,’ he said, looking past me. ‘Where is your sister?’

‘Dead,’ I told him.

‘Dead? Your sister? But she wrote to say you were so often sick.’

‘God has a sense of humour,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think He does.’

‘No, sire. Dysentery, sire. She even had better diseases than me.’ He had nothing to say to me and I nothing to him. I retreated.

‘Wait!’ he called.

‘I have been waiting.’ No further reply came from him.

Matins. The night office. Our old bones creak to kneel. A man dies and bequeaths a farm to the Sisters of San Matteo. As thanks, we agree to say one mass per day for him for the next 400 years. I am afraid I will live that long.

A new novice took my sister’s cell. Her things came to my room. Her vials and herbs and papers. Her breviary, worn out. Her letters, well read. Her telescope. My room filled with nutmeg and the smell of her. I had watched her body enter the ground, wrapped in linen, dressed as we slept. Sisters watched over her and prayed that she might enter heaven, as if there were anywhere else she might plausibly go.

I wanted her to tell me what dying is like. I wanted her to tell me that dying was like opening your hand, letting go of something that you thought was so precious, but now you see was so small, so that you see all of life as through a telescope, larger than anything you could ever hope to hold, all of these moments, the people you loved who loved you. No man had seen farther than my father, but even he had never seen that. Neither had I.

I am told when my father dies. I am told when the Pope dies and when war unravels the world. I read and reread his letters to her. Beloved, beloved daughter, he called her. Still, I looked for word of me. I lived as they lived, but wrote nothing. I was here, but will I be remembered? I wanted to see what they saw. But they only looked up and at each other, and I was still down here with my bleeding and my roaring belly.

My mother was a courtesan, my father was a heretic, and I am still this nun, this pale unbeliever. My sister knew writing and herbal medicine and the principles of astronomy, but I know the power of spark and fire. I build one, in my cell before lauds, conjuring light from darkness. His letters are dry and make lovely, warm fuel. I drop them onto the fire, burning them letter by letter: his words, his thoughts, his science, his love. Smoke rises and fills my room.

I call up to their heaven: ‘See, I have outlived you!’ And nobody knows. I think of a time when I was little, small enough to sit on his broad, bony shoulder. ‘Look!’ I called out to him. ‘Look, Father. The sky.’ Even then, he was looking at my sister.

PEGGY RILEY wrote about her Literature Development work in issue 48, but ‘Archangela’ is her first story to appear in any magazine. She was born in the US and moved to the UK in 1995. Peggy studied theatre at university and earned a perilous living as a playwright, with plays produced in fringe and off-West End theatres in London, and on the radio. Deciding to try her hand at prose, she moved to a fishing town on the Kent coast, and is working on a novel set in a women’s internment camp on the Isle of Man in World War II. You can read about her progress at www.ukpr.wordpress.com

This story is the first prize-winner of the 2011 Mslexia Short Story Competition. All of the winning stories are published in the current issue of Mslexia. For the latest on the writing world, publishing and creativity subscribe now. To sample more Mslexia features or to find out about the latest issue click here.