The Disobedient Virgin

Catarina had long ago figured out why the rules and the surroundings were so stark. The girls who boarded here during the week came from affluent homes; living a structured, even basic existence from Monday through Friday was expected to improve their character.

Curled in the window seat beside her cot, knees drawn to her chin as she gazed out at the dark night, Catarina Elena Teresa Mendes gave a deep, deep sigh.

The trouble was, Catarina lived that regimented existence seven days a week. Except for those twice a year trips to the theater, she’d never left the school in the eight years she’d been here.

You couldn’t go home for the weekend when you had no home.

It was a warm night. Catarina had cracked the window an inch, which was as much against the rules as not being in bed at this hour, but she wanted to smell the flowers that grew wild in the courtyard below. Not even Mother Elisabete had been able to get rid of them. The elderly gardener would dig them up one week and they’d reappear the next.

Catarina was pretty sure he didn’t really try very hard to kill the flowers. Once, when she’d walked by as he dug at them with a trowel, he’d looked up and closed one rheumy eye in a slow wink, as if to say that Mother Elisabete was powerful, but not powerful enough to destroy something as beautiful as a flower.

The flowers had a right to bloom. So did Catarina. Unfortunately, she didn’t have anyone like the old gardener to make sure she got the chance.

She didn’t hate the school, or the girls, or the Sisters for the limitations on her life. She didn’t even hate Mother Elisabete who was, after all, only doing her job.

It was just that Mother’s “job” was to be Catarina’s keeper.

Catarina’s long chestnut hair, free of its severely braided coronet only when she slept, tumbled down her back as she raised her eyes to the sky. On such a clear night, the stars seemed brighter than ever.

Maybe that was because of what lay ahead.

Maybe it was because of what would happen tomorrow, when she turned twenty-one.

Just thinking about it made Catarina tremble with excitement.

No more lights out at nine sharp. No more classes in such useless things as How To Arrange Flowers for a Dinner Party, interspersed with hours spent sneezing her way through the dusty files in Mother Elisabete’s office.

“If we had a computer,” she’d said, after a couple of weeks at the impossible task, “and a scanner, I could probably transfer all your files in a few days.”

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Mother Elisabete had reacted as if she’d suggested inviting the devil to dinner.

“We need no modern temptations, Mendes. And how do you know of such things in the first place?”

By reading magazines smuggled to her by the grocer’s delivery boy, that was how. But admitting it would have led to trouble for the both of them.

“I just do,” she’d said.

She’d been banished to her room each night after supper for the next two weeks. Locked in her room, as if she were twelve instead of almost twenty-one.

Catarina let out a breath.

Why dwell on the past? One more night, that was all, and she’d finally have back the freedom t

hat had been taken from her at age thirteen, when her mother and father had died in a boating accident. An ancient great-uncle she’d never met had become her guardian, and he’d sent her to live at this school run by the Little Sisters of the Mountains.

At first, she’d been too wrapped in grief to question anything. She’d settled, numbly, into the school’s routines. She watched girls reach the age of eighteen, graduate and leave. Five years after she’d first arrived, she’d waited with excitement for that glorious day.

“What will happen?” she’d asked Mother Elisabete. “Will a car come for me? Will my great-uncle be in it? Where will I go?”

“Your uncle will come that day, yes,” Mother Elisabete had replied. “He will explain everything.”

Catarina had been thrilled to know she’d see her uncle a second time. Surely he was going to take her home, wherever that might be. The morning of her birthday, she almost trembled with excitement as he wobbled into Mother’s office on a cane and sank into a chair.

“Uncle,” Catarina said, “I’m very happy to see you.”

The old man folded his hands around the golden head of his cane and told her that on her twenty-first birthday she would inherit a considerable fortune.

Then he told her the terms of that inheritance.