Three-Cornered Halo by Christianna Brand

religious observances differed from her own. What she would have felt had a group of foreigners (with mackintoshes and umbrellas) in a similar spirit of contempt invaded St Asaph’s, Heronsford Green, she did not pause to think. Not that the Juanese would have cared a fig for her reflections. Gay as children on this fine fiesta day, they hailed one another across the great, dim, old church, met by appointment at this side-chapel, that group of confessional boxes, dragged rush-bottomed prie-Dieu into friendly circles and sat animatedly chatting, their picnic baskets banked high about them, the children chasing one another merrily among the legs of the vast, standing congregation. Among them, disregarded and undisturbed, knelt quiet figures, heads bent, hands tightly clasped, praying away happily all alone with God; and before the great crucifix crouched a woman, tears streaming down her face, her forehead pressed against the nailed bronze feet that the brows of countless supplicants had burnished to gold. (Pure exhibitionism, said Miss Cockrill, quite out loud; but the woman prayed on, a million miles away in some Gethsemane of her own; and cared not at all for Cousin Hat.)
    Innocenta arrived, a plump mother duck, bustling to a place of advantage, shoo-ing before her her exquisite little brood. The regulation black lace shawls of Juanese church-going were pulled decorously half across their faces, only their lovely eyes looked out, dark and enormous, cast modestly down to the ground. Except for Inez. Inez looked about her boldly and fluttered an eyelash at a couple of crew-cut touristi.… “That will do, Irreverence,” said Innocenta, kicking her smartly behind the knees with the edge of a well-filled hamper; and really, she confided to Tartine, that girl would have to go. “Not the morals of a cat !” In San Juan, the cats are lint white with pale blue eyes; they wear blue ribbons round their necks and are much loved and charmingly well-behaved: but not with other cats.
    A bell rang. There was a sudden hush, a scraping of chairs on the stone floor, everyone stood on tiptoe. But it was not the Mass beginning, it was the Grand Duke arriving with La Bellissima the Grand Duchess, and their train; the train including a flutter of the little French friends, sniggling behind their demure Juanese black lace veils. They giggled their way up into the gallery overlooking the altar, reserved for the ladies of the palace, in the wake of an ancient crone, carried in a sort of palanquin—La Madre, mother of El Margherita herself. The Grand Duke and Duchess went forward quietly and took their places at two great, carved and gilded wooden prie-Dieu, set apart, close up to the altar rails. They wore, as custom ordained, black velvet cloaks, his caught up by the right corner and thrown across his breast and over the opposite shoulder almost burying his mouth and chin, hers flowing out and down to her heels; with collars of wrought gold set with precious stones. La Bellissima, like every other well-conducted woman in the church, wore a heavy black veil pulled half across her face—it was widely believed that in this disguise she frequently sent a deputy to the Mass; but no other head, in that island of dark brunettes, could have shone beneath the lace with such a gleam of gold. Before the prie-Dieu, lazily glowing, the golden thurible * hung on its golden stand.
    The Mass began.
    El Patriarca sang the Mass. Robed in black, before an altar hung with black, he moved, a grey man with a clever, worldly face, pacing slowly through the age-old ritual, lingering over words unchanged through centuries, in a language dead to change. There was a rustle of pages as the congregation sought through their Missals for the Epistle for the Day, following the Latin in the Juanese translations alongside. He passed, bowing, across the altar front, to the Gospel side. An assistant lifted the great book from the Epistle corner and