A Journey of Discernment

A Darkly Hidden Truth [by] Donna Fletcher Crow
Oxford, Monarch Books [2011] 
978-0-85721-050-0

In her second outing in the Monastery Murders, Donna Fletcher Crow continues the story of the intrepid Felicity Howard and the lovable Father Antony Sherwood.

As we first come upon Felicity, she is telling one of the Fathers of her Anglo-Catholic College that she wishes to become a nun.  His advice is to test her Spirit by going on retreats with several of the communities of nuns in the United Kingdom to discern whether she is really suited to the cloistered life, and which House she would find most compatible.  She receives a letter from home, which she assumes is from her father – he was always the one who wrote – her mother was much too involved with her law practice, but, as the call for evening prayers has sounded, she must delay opening her letter until afterwards.

It is while she is at church that she notices that one of the icons is missing.  She points this out to one of her colleagues, a former artist, now studying for Holy Orders, Neville Mortara.

After the service, she reads her letter, curious when she realizes that it is her mother who has written, and stopping dead when she realizes that her mother says her father wants a divorce.  She shares the letter with Antony, and he is the one to point out that her mother will be arriving tomorrow – just when Felicity has decided to begin her pilgrimage to various convents.  Antony is stunned that she wants to do this, especially since he has been asked to look for the missing icon, and he’d looked forward to working with her again after they had solved the last bit of monastic trouble.  Felicity suggests that Antony work with Neville.

She goes off on her pilgrimage to the first convent, when, who should come calling but Antony, Neville, and – can it be?  Yes, it could – her mother, Cynthia Howard!  She’d wanted to avoid her, but they’d brought her mother right to her.  Making the best of it, they all stay at the convent that night.  The next morning, Felicity’s breakfast quietude is shattered by a loud noise.  She joins others running to the chapel, where they find one of the sisters on the floor in a pool of red.  The red turns out to be wine, rather than blood, but the nun was indeed knocked out.  The icon at the chapel has been stolen, and Neville is nowhere to be found.  The rest take a detour to visit the church where Julian of Norwich spent her last days giving advice through the window of her locked room attached to the side of the chapel.

Antony gets a brief but excited phone call from Neville, who wants him to come meet him at a ruined monastery in an isolated boggy part of Norfolk called the Broads. They borrow a car and then a boat to get there.  But their quarry isn’t there.  They call his phone again and again, but it just rings and rings.  The last try sounds a bell right below them, and they discover that Neville is dead.  They call the police, who interrogate them thoroughly.

When that is done, Antony calls the head of Neville’s family, but only gets a secretary.  Cynthia has gone on to London to meet with the law firm that might hire her, so Felicity decides to go on to the next convent.  There she sees a furtive figure escaping through the garden.  The next day, Felicity joins her mother in London, where she gets a phone call from Sir Cecil, head of Neville’s family.  Later, Cecil meets with Felicity and her mother, but he only has eyes for the mother, although he gives some pointers to Felicity about the Knights Hospitillar, which she later shares with Antony.  She also shares her fears with him about her mother’s date with Cecil.  What is going on with her mother, she wonders.

Felicity talks with an expert on icons, and, later, so does Antony, who sees his gallery.  The expert is found dead the next day, with no leads as to the culprit.  Antony and Felicity visit Knights’ locations in London, where odd people appear and odd things happen. Felicity ends up at the bottom of the escalator in an Underground station.  Fortunately, Antony comes along in time and saves her and takes her back to the current convent, where she recovers.

They run into Cecil Mortara and Cynthia, and Cecil tells them his brother has found a book by holy pilgrim Margery Kempe.  They visit Rupert Mortara’s crumbling house, where they stay the night, and Felicity translates the book from Latin, while Antony, the Church Historian, brings them up to speed on who Margery was.  It seems that Margery might have had something to do with the missing icons. They also meet some other Mortaras.  They think this book was what made the late Neville Mortara so excited.

The next stop is Walsingham, an important place for Margery.  They see the reproduction of Nazareth and the many icons in the church. There they leave Cecil and Cynthia, who go on to his estate, while Antony escorts Felicity back to the convent.  She goes inside, and he goes unconscious from a blow on the head outside.  The information she gets is that he has gone back to school to recover.  But he has not gone back to school, she finds out.  Pictures on a cell phone send her back to Norfolk, where she believes Antony is in a church.  But that proves not to be the case, as she and her mother, who drove in her rental car, are captured. 

The denouement is quite intense, as violent things happen behind the scenes at a Good Friday service and at Neville’s memorial service at school.  Antony gets to have the ecumenical service he’d hoped for with the Russian Patriarch and his party, who will take the newly-recovered icon back to Russia for a visit, while Felicity discovers who the real thieves and scoundrels are, and almost gets to be dead.

This is a dense book, full of good plotting, strong characters, interesting history, fascinating holy lore, several red herrings, and some nice romance.  It’s a great entry in, what this reader hopes anyway, will be a long and enjoyable series.  Highly recommended. ~ lss-r

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This is a Library book.