Summary

The mouse problem forces the community into new routines of containment. The narrator goes into town to buy supplies and returns with steel wool, which the sisters push into gaps between floorboards and walls. With the oven out of action, they cook outdoors on the barbecue and try to treat the change as temporary, even as mice continue to appear in unexpected places. The narrator watches the work take on an anxious urgency as the house becomes something that must be defended.

News arrives that Sister Jenny’s bones and Helen Parry are finally on their way, and the narrator dreams of tiny fossils being spilled onto grass, a vision that blends delicacy with loss. The next day, men deliver a casket to the abbey and place it in the good room on a trestle table dressed with a white cloth. The narrator, Josephine...