The Testaments(78)

When Dr. Grove was torn apart at the Particicution, Becka fainted. Some of the Aunts put this reaction down to filial love—Dr. Grove was a wicked man, but he was still a man, and a high-status man. He was also a father, to whom respect was due by an obedient daughter. However, I knew otherwise: Becka felt responsible for his death. She believed that she should never have told me about his crimes. I assured her that I hadn’t shared her confidences with anyone, and she said she trusted me, but Aunt Lydia must have found out somehow. It was how the Aunts got their power: by finding things out. Things that should never be talked about.



* * *



—

Becka and I had returned from the Particicution. I’d made her a cup of tea and suggested she should lie down—she was still pale—but she’d said that she’d controlled her feelings and would be fine. We were engaged in our evening Bible readings when there was a knock at the door. We were surprised to find Aunt Lydia standing outside; with her was the new Pearl, Jade.

“Aunt Victoria, Aunt Immortelle, you have been chosen for a very special duty,” she said. “Our newest Pearl, Jade, has been assigned to you. She will sleep in the third bedroom, which I understand is vacant. Your task will be to help her in every way possible, and instruct her in the details of our life of service here in Gilead. Do you have enough sheets and towels? If not, I will arrange for some.”

“Yes, Aunt Lydia, praise be,” I said. Becka echoed me. Jade smiled at us, a smile that managed to be both tremulous and stubborn. She was not like the average new convert from abroad: these were likely to be either abject or filled with zeal.

“Welcome,” I said to Jade. “Please come in.”

“Okay,” she said. She crossed our threshold. My heart fell: already I knew that the outwardly placid life Becka and I had been leading at Ardua Hall for the past nine years was at an end—change had come—but I did not yet grasp how wrenching that change would be.



* * *



—

I have said our life was placid, but perhaps that is not the right word. It was at any rate orderly, albeit somewhat monotonous. Our time was filled, but in a strange way it did not seem to pass. I’d been fourteen when I’d been admitted as a Supplicant, and although I was now grown up, I did not appear to myself to have grown much older. It was the same with Becka: we seemed to be frozen in some way; preserved, as if in ice.

The Founders and the older Aunts had edges to them. They’d been moulded in an age before Gilead, they’d had struggles we had been spared, and these struggles had ground off the softness that might once have been there. But we hadn’t been forced to undergo such ordeals. We’d been protected, we hadn’t needed to deal with the harshness of the world at large. We were the beneficiaries of the sacrifices made by our forebears. We were constantly reminded of this, and ordered to be grateful. But it’s difficult to be grateful for the absence of an unknown quantity. I’m afraid we did not fully appreciate the extent to which those of Aunt Lydia’s generation had been hardened in the fire. They had a ruthlessness about them that we lacked.





48


Despite this feeling of time standing still, I had in fact changed. I was no longer the same person I’d been when I’d entered Ardua Hall. Now I was a woman, even if an inexperienced one; then I had been a child.

“I’m very glad the Aunts let you stay,” Becka had said on that first day. She’d turned her shy gaze full upon me.

“I’m glad too,” I said.

“I always looked up to you at school. Not just because of your three Marthas and your Commander family,” she said. “You lied less than the others. And you were nice to me.”

“I wasn’t all that nice.”

“You were nicer than the rest of them,” she said.

Aunt Lydia had given permission for me to live in the same residence unit as Becka. Ardua Hall was divided into many apartments; ours was marked with the letter C and the Ardua Hall motto: Per Ardua Cum Estrus.

“It means, Through childbirth labour with the female reproductive cycle,” Becka said.

“It means all that?”

“It’s in Latin. It sounds better in Latin.”

I said, “What is Latin?”

Becka said it was a language of long ago that nobody spoke anymore, but people wrote mottoes in it. For instance, the motto of everything inside the Wall used to be Veritas, which was the Latin for “truth.” But they’d chiselled that word off and painted it over.

“How did you find that out?” I asked. “If the word is gone?”

“In the Hildegard Library,” she said. “It’s only for us Aunts.”

“What’s a library?”

“It’s where they keep the books. There are rooms and rooms full of them.”

“Are they wicked?” I asked. “Those books?” I imagined all that explosive material packed inside a room.

“Not those I’ve been reading. The more dangerous ones are kept in the Reading Room. You have to get special permission to go in there. But you can read the other books.”

“They let you?” I was amazed. “You can just go in there and read?”

“If you get permission. Except for the Reading Room. If you did that without permission, there would be a Correction, down in one of the cellars.” Each Ardua Hall apartment had a soundproofed cellar, she said, which used to be for things like piano practising. But now the R cellar was where Aunt Vidala did the Corrections. Corrections were a kind of punishment, for straying beyond the rules.