Yellow Mama E zine

Reverend Mother Munchausen

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By Sophia Wiseman - Rose

 

       Part I: Childhood & Calling

 

       Since I was a child, I dreamt of being a nun.

        I was not one of those sweet, pliant little girls adored by teachers and praised in parish halls. No — I was a misfit born of misfits, a dark star among satellites too dull to notice me. My family was eccentric and academic, despised in equal measure by the simple, working-class people who inhabited the village below our Edwardian house on the hill. The villagers hated us instinctively, as chickens fear ravens.

         I felt set apart, which is the narcotic of the introverted awkward child. What you call rejection, I called election. I believed I was misunderstood because I was superior, that my difference was divine selection. God Himself, I fancied, had chosen me.

        When I informed my indifferent parents that I would dedicate my life to Him, they looked up from their books with the mild bafflement of scholars interrupted by a servant dropping a plate. Yet the proclamation freed me: I chose my subjects accordingly. Religious Studies, Latin, Scripture — yes. Mathematics and literature only because they could be exploited later in life. Sport, naturally, I abandoned. It would have been a grotesque waste of a mind like mine to soil it with the sweat of common games.

         My greatest tactical error was the IQ test. A dull experiment at school, meant to place us in remedial classes or grammar streams. I scored 166. Too good, too visible. My parents, suddenly animated by this evidence that their offspring was not only eccentric but gifted, shoved me into Mensa. That short-lived interest was almost worse than their indifference: it deprived me of the luxury of being underestimated. I could no longer widen my doe eyes and feign stupidity. Now I was forced to apply myself. So I mastered literature, mathematics, art, languages, and, to my own surprise, found myself preternaturally capable at science. Triple Science GCSE came easily, like prayer.

        Avoiding men was laughably easy. If any stirrings of attraction dared arise, they were instantly killed when the poor fool opened his mouth. Men are architects of their own undoing; my virginity was merely a matter of self-respect.

         Meanwhile, I scoured the internet for communities of women more exalted than myself — nuns. I visited nearly all that would admit a postulant. Each time I entered a convent I held my breath, praying I had found at last my true cloister. I became an Enquirer at three separate orders. At one of them, surely, I would pronounce vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

In my head, the convent would be a hive of veiled women, black-clad bees of intellect and spirit, humming in harmony on the cusp of ecstasy. I wanted a world where every day was a solemn liturgy and every night a private courtship with God.

          But, reality smelled of cough sweets, mothballs, and urine.

         Most communities were comprised of women who should have been in nursing homes but clung instead to vocations they could no longer fulfil. Senility reigned, thinly veiled beneath “holy eccentricity.” Undiagnosed autism was obvious in the majority. Some were dotty to the point of parody, others militant and creepily obsessed with myriad trivial things. Organisation was impossible when every day began with sisters contradicting what they themselves had said the day before. They refused to acknowledge their decline, and thus chaos ruled their supposed orders.

         The truth was obvious: religious life was dying. Vatican II had gutted it, leaving a hollow showpiece that seemed quaint by the 1980s and absurd by the millennium. Generation X had no patience for bitter women peddling body-shame and empty slogans. They were too cynical, too well-armed with education and therapy. Why abase yourself before mediocrity when you could survive on your own? They left in droves. And now, 30 years on, there wasn’t much left— just desperate autistic Boomers trying to drag their dead communities out of the grave.

         So why, I wondered, was God calling me to this life? Was I His last recruit? Would I spend my decades drowning in piss and incontinence pads, and shouting repeated questions into the ears of deaf senile relics until I became one myself?

         There were thriving orders, yes, the active sisters: hippie/flower child Franciscans ladling soup to the homeless, the bleeding heart Missionaries of Charity sweating with the dying in tenements. Admirable, if you wanted sainthood through filth and servitude. I did not. I wanted to die to the world, not feed it sandwiches.

           I craved austerity, formality, quiet. A true contemplative order. No caveats, no “community outreach” in polyester smocks.

           There was, at last, one. Pendle Abbey, 13th-century stone clinging to Lancashire soil like a black tooth in a ruined jaw. The Order of Saint Olga. Old. Mostly silent. Still housing some sisters with their minds intact, though the rest were crumbling. I applied and was accepted as an Aspirant.

          I began in autumn. There were four of us. Within a week we were promoted to Postulants of Saint Olga, pinafores and headscarves replacing the outside world.

         Kate, one of my fellow postulants, was delicate as a porcelain cup with a crack running through it. Fragile smiles, transparent lies. She had recently emerged from a psychiatric hospital, her wrists still red with the ghosts of bandages. Normally no community would admit her, but desperate orders cannot be choosy. She had “bipolar disorder, well controlled,” a phrase the sisters interpreted as permanent stability. They had no concept of psychiatric nuance. Nights of screaming corrected their error. Kate was the first to go.

         Six months later, three of us were clothed as novices. White veils instead of black, symbols of innocence and impermanence. I was given my new name: Sister Ruth.

          The lazy one went next. Gelatinous, always sleeping, always eating, leaving ancient women to scrub around her swollen ankles. She was asked to leave, and should have fallen on her knees in gratitude.

           The novice mistress, Sister Cecilia, was a clumsy frog like creature made of sighs. Long afflicted with depression, she now subjected herself to electroconvulsive therapy. Her lessons were rambling, half sentences dissolving into quietly hummed half forgotten lullabies as she stared into nothing. She was supposed to guide us; instead, she wandered like a ghost through corridors of her own making.

          Still, life had rhythm: prayer, work, wool spinning, organic farming. Staff cooked our meals, laundered our habits, delivered groceries and flowers. We arranged the blooms with reverence before Saint Olga’s stern statue. It could have been a beautiful life.

            But beauty, in its marrow, was already rotting.

 

           Part II: The Abbey’s Rot

 

          The Reverend Mother Mary Helena, was a woman of mortifications. She fasted, wore hair shirts, and knelt until her knees bloomed purple. These rituals tethered her faintly to reality; they gave her suffering structure. But even asceticism could not protect her from decay.

           First came the nerves. She startled at shadows, fretted over misplaced chalices, pressed her lips until they disappeared. Then came the physical disintegration: her heart stuttered, her stomach turned traitor. She took to her bed, only crawling out for the Divine Offices — fewer and fewer of them. Vespers especially she abandoned, as if the dusk itself mocked her weakness.

           Her withdrawal left us leaderless, save for Cecilia’s incoherent mutterings. The Abbey needed a shepherd, and from the murk arose Jean Agnes.

           It was impossible to know Sister Jean Agnes in any way that mattered. She was a bundle of scars and grudges wrapped in black serge. Her face announced her history: a small skull, hooded eyes, and a lip smooth as a plastic doll’s, the telltale absence of a philtrum. Fetal alcohol syndrome was written across her features in permanent ink.

         The whispered story was simple: an alcoholic mother with multitudes of boyfriends who treated her like waste, years of ridicule. It had fermented into a chip on her shoulder so massive it might have been described as a full grown oak. I might have pitied her had she not been vile, seething with resentment that twisted itself into cruelty. She despised and envied me openly, with the courage only a bully possesses.

        She was several decades older than us novices, yet the youngest among the professed sisters. And crucially, the only one with strength enough to act. The others were too feeble, too confused, too tethered to their own bodily failures. So Jean Agnes stepped forward. She called herself Reverend Mother, at first “temporarily,” but the word was a fig leaf. Everyone knew it was permanent. Their faces — pale, resigned, some trembling — said what none dared utter aloud.

        Even I, proud of my intellect and immune to sentiment, felt the pressure of her dominance. The Abbey was hers now, and we were subjects in her petty kingdom.

        I myself was unwell. A fog wrapped itself around my skull. My guts ached with ceaseless cramps. Exhaustion hollowed me out.

        Mary Eunice, the other surviving novice, suffered more. Agitation turned her into a vibrating wire. Sweat poured from her as if she were being wrung out. She vomited daily. Worst of all, her blood pressure climbed steadily, a dark tide.

        The doctor — an elderly patriarch with the smugness of a man accustomed to dismissing women — visited. He leaned on his cane and declared her symptoms “ all in her head,” or perhaps “early menopause.” He chuckled as though he had cracked a particularly clever joke.

        His blindness enraged me. Blood pressure rising, yet heart rate falling? — that’s not adrenaline. Stress excites the heart, it does not slow it. But he refused to see it. He patted our new Rev Mother Jean Agnes on the shoulder on his way out, calling her “a blessing, the real deal.” She preened at the compliment, her jagged too-loud laugh echoing against stone walls.

        Soon, Mary Eunice’s hair began to fall out in clumps. Weeping, she told me she had to return to London, to her family, to a doctor who would not call her hysterical. She packed her meagre belongings and staggered out of the Abbey, embraced by horrified relatives. She was a phantom of the girl who had once crossed its threshold.

        From eighteen residents, we had dwindled to nine who could still drag themselves to chapel. Three in nursing homes. Two in hospital beds. One novice fled. Two novices dismissed. Our old Rev mother, Mary Helena, reduced to a jittering wraith who only haunted the corridors at night, clutching her chest, muttering.

        Meals were quiet affairs punctuated by coughing fits. The sound was relentless, a hacking chorus that reminded me of accounts of 19th-century tuberculosis sanatoriums. The Abbey became an infirmary without nurses, a tomb filled with breath and phlegm.

        One night, anxiety and nausea twisted me until I could not sleep. The coughing in the corridor thickened, then changed timbre — into a wet, choking sob. I pulled on my dressing gown and opened the door.

        Mother Mary Helena collapsed into my arms. She was skeletal, sweat-drenched, drooling. Her eyes were pools of terror, pupils pinprick-small even in the dark.

         “Help,” she rasped. “It’s… Cecilia. Come.”

         She was weightless as air as I guided her down the hall. There, by the cloister entrance, lay Sister Cecilia. Her habit was soaked with bodily fluids, her stocky figure utterly still.

         I approached cautiously, checked her wrist. No pulse. Her neck: nothing. I turned her over. Her eyes were glazed, mouth slack, vomit trailing like a grotesque ribbon from the corner. She was gone.

        “Call an ambulance,” I told Mary Helena, though I knew it was futile. I began chest compressions out of formality, my hands mechanical, my heart absent. To revive her would be cruelty.

         Sisters shuffled from their cells, coughing, whispering questions. They watched me pound a corpse until the paramedics arrived. Cecilia’s body was carted away by dawn.

         At Lauds we prayed the Office for the Dead, our voices cracked, our bodies too ill to truly grieve. Then we dispersed into silence, skipping breakfast.

         Condolences rolled in like waves. The Church Times even wrote a piece lauding Jean Agnes, our new Reverend Mother. “What a wonderful woman, caring for all these frail sisters. What bravery!” She accepted it all with smug serenity, floating through the corridors like a saint in procession.

         Seconded by this I staggered to the bath.

I caught sight of myself in the bathroom mirror. A pale doll, cheeks swollen yet hollow, eyes rimmed red. My pupils: tiny black pinholes.

         Something was wrong.

         Something was poisoning us.

 

          Part III: The Poison

 

        The coughing never stopped. It was like living inside a dying lung. The Abbey stank faintly of sweat and rot; even the incense at Mass could not cover it.

         One morning during Prime, I pretended to be too ill to continue and slipped away before the office was complete. I had a purpose. Reverend Mother Jean Agnes removed her cloak before entering chapel, as was custom. I slipped my hand into its deep pocket and felt the cold metal of a key. I withdrew it quickly, then hurried down the corridor like a thief.

         Her office was plain, almost austere, but there was a rancid undertone: her sandals by the cupboard, slick with years of sweat. I rifled her drawers — ledgers, holy cards, nothing damning. At last, the cupboard. Bottles clustered on the floor: furniture polish, window cleaner, pesticide….. But our farming was organic. Why would we need poison?

        I picked up the pesticide bottle and read the ingredients. Water. Emulsifiers. And then — Chlorpyrifos.

         The word rang in my skull like a church bell. I knew it, but could not drag its meaning from memory. I scrawled it on the back of my hand with a pen and returned the key to her cloak before anyone could notice.

          Back in my cell I began tearing through my books, half-mad. A voice throbbed in my head: Sludge. Sludge. Dumbbels. Sludge.

         “What?!” I shouted at the silence.

         Sister Flavia, a child-sized woman with a horse-sized addiction to pain medications in the next cell, hissed, “Keep it down!”

          I threw a book at the wall. “No!”

          And then, the memory unfurled. Organophosphates.

          I sat rigid, breath shallow, the mnemonic rising like scripture from the recesses of my brain:

The mnemonics for organophosphate poisoning:

 

       SLUDGE:

          •       S – Salivation

          •       L – Lacrimation

          •       U – Urinary incontinence

          •       D – Defecation

          •       G – Gastrointestinal upset

          •       E – Emesis

 

      DUMBBELS:

          •       D – Diarrhoea

          •       U – Urination

          •       M – Miosis (pinpoint pupils)

          •       B – Bronchospasm

          •       B – Bronchorrhea

          •       E – Emesis

          •       L – Lacrimation

          •       S – Salivation

 

          Not a single, acute poisoning. No. A constant one. A drip-feed of toxin. We were not ill. We were being contaminated.

          I knew the doctor would laugh. To him, I was a hysterical girl with too much imagination. He would call it “all in my head.”

           So I wrote to our Bishop Protector. My letter begged him to believe me, though I knew the odds. I was only a novice, often mistaken for stupid at first impression. Who would believe I had solved the riddle of our decay? But it was all I could do. I prayed he would act swiftly. Activate Safeguarding.

          Days passed. No reply. The Bishop, I heard, was on retreat. Meanwhile I began my own survival. I refused communal meals, opening only tins I hoarded and eating in solitude. I hid bottled water beneath my bed. I left out a decoy toothbrush and used another one I kept hidden away. Within days, I began to feel stronger.

         I confided in Mary Helena. She was almost incorporeal, her body wasting, but I laid it out for her: Chlorpyrifos, organophosphates, SLUDGE and DUMBBELS. I spoke of plasma cholinesterase levels, the only test I knew of that might prove exposure. She nodded faintly, then fell to her knees, dabbing her mouth with a sodden handkerchief.

        “No more,” she whispered. Fluid bubbled at her lips.

        The next morning she was found hanging in her cell. “No more,” scrawled in ink across her pillowcase.

         Something snapped in me then. I called the diocesan office, demanded the Bishop. He was “unavailable.” I left a message: We are being poisoned. I have to call the police. Please help.

         I dialed emergency services myself. But before the final number, Sister Flavia yanked the phone cord from the wall. Her eyes were wet, her smile deranged.

         “You’re insane,” I whispered in shock.

         She only shook her head.

          I turned for the door but Rev Mother Jean Agnes  abruptly appeared, and with her the end of pretence. She swatted me hard, with her sinewy, masculine arms, and threw a letter at me — my own, to the Bishop.

         “You think he’d believe you?” she spat, her accent slipping into something rougher, commoner. “Bloody novice. I told him you’re mad. Mad, and we’re throwing you out.”

         She dragged me by the hair, down into the kitchen, through the wine cellar, into a coal cellar I had never seen. Her veil fell away, revealing her near-bald scalp, the tiny skull of her cursed birth. She hefted a coal shovel and beat me with it. I curled into a ball, metal striking bone until the world went black.

         I woke on cloth softer than my own mattress. Wooden boards above me. Darkness close, suffocating. I was in a coffin.

         I did not scream. That would have been vulgar. I said, quite calmly: “Hello? Could I have some water?”

         A pause. Then her voice: “You will stay there until I’m ready to let you out. Pray. Think about the damage you’ve done.”

         I acquiesced. For a time.

        Hours blurred into a day. I urinated on myself, felt dehydration creep into my skull. Eventually patience deserted me. I drew my knees up, pressed my feet against the lid, and pushed. Once, twice, until wood cracked and splintered. Air rushed in.

        The coffin was still in the coal cellar. She had not buried me. Perhaps she meant to, later. I climbed out, crept through the wine cellar and up into the kitchen. Midnight. Vigils would soon begin.

         I drank handfuls of water at the sink. Outside, the statue of Saint Olga stood in her granite severity. The wind moved shadows across her face, making her seem alive. I whispered, “What should I do?”

        The answer came, as though Olga herself bent close: Revenge.

         I took a kitchen knife. A bottle of red wine. My wet, sticky gown clung to my bruised body as I moved through pools of moonlight and shadows, exhilarated, sick with excitement.

         Mother Jean Agnes was in chapel, the only one still well enough to pray. Her voice a harsh drone against stone. I did not hesitate. I pressed the knife to her throat, dug it into her collarbone until blood welled. She froze.

         “Come with me,” I spoke in a bright  over annunciated manner into her ear. I wasn’t going to repeat myself this time.

          I marched her down the hall to her office, hand twisted around her left ear. She resisted only once, I stabbed her low in the stomach — calculated to avoid an artery, but enough to teach obedience. She crumpled into a chair, her androgynous face slack with disbelief.

          “What do you want from me?” she gasped.

          “Me?” I smiled. “I want a drink.”

          I smashed the neck of the bottle against her desk and poured two cups, one wine; the other, half wine, half toxin from her secret stash. She whimpered. I slapped her face to silence her. Not that the other sisters, hearing aids at their bedsides, would hear me in their ailing slumber.

         “Cheers,” I sang merrily, and sat on her lap whilst I forced her to drink.

         It took hours. The poison worked slowly, crawling through her organs. She convulsed, fouled herself, wept. At last respiratory failure dragged her down. She died ugly, her body surrendering fluids until she sat in a puddle of herself.

         I left her there for her pet lapdog, Sister Flavia, to find. The sisters would have a lovely funeral for her. Without the Rev. Mother Jean Agnes looking after them, they would recover.

        The official verdict: death by misadventure. To the church: A noble act of religious mortification, self-inflicted wounds mistaken for her old habit of flagellation. She even conveniently “left a note”. The note explaining how she was bringing suffering on herself, afflictive reparations to gain forgiveness for her sinful  sisters and to unite herself  with the redemptive sufferings of our Lord. Mediaeval theology, the church ate it up.

 

          Part IV: The Aftermath

 

          The Reverend Mother Jean Agnes’s death uncoiled through the Abbey like incense smoke — slow, invasive, impossible to avoid. At first there was relief, though none would admit it aloud. Sisters who had wasted away to grey husks began to recover. Appetite returned. The coughing lessened. Their faces filled again, though with suspicion as much as flesh.

         The funeral was grim theatre. A closed coffin, hymns rasped by voices still cracked, and the bishop himself presiding. He called her a faithful daughter of the Church, a woman of exceptional courage, who bore the sufferings of her sisters as her own. I nearly laughed aloud. Courage? Poison in the dinners of senior citizens was not courage. It was cowardice refined into craft.

         The self-stabbing, the poison — they explained it away as one last passionate fit of redemptive suffering. Rev Mother Jean Agnes, they agreed, had been known for her self-punishment. It was all so perfectly believable to those who wished it so.

          The Bishop never responded to my letter. His silence was its own verdict. If I pressed, if I tried to show them what had happened, it would be my own neck beneath the knife of suspicion. I was the novice who had “cracked up,” after all. The girl with “imaginary theories.” The odd, arrogant child grown into an inconvenient woman.

           I left the Abbey not long after. My departure was spun as “discernment,” as though God Himself had gently turned me back from His service. The truth — that I fled from a place of murder and complicity — was left unspoken.

 

            I returned home to my still  indifferent parents. I took a job in a bookstore, I considered medical school. But nothing seemed real to me. Outside, the world felt obscenely alive. Buses roaring, neon adverts screaming, people laughing with their mouths full of sugar and spit. I drifted among them like a spectre, still half-starved, still smelling of mildew and incense. No one knew where I had been. No one wanted to.

           I tried to tell the story once. At an obligatory book launch party at the store, glass in hand, I began lightly: “I was in a convent once. It didn’t end well.” Faces leaned in, curious. And I told them — the organophosphates, the symptoms, the mnemonics, the Bishop’s denial, the coffin.

          Laughter. Nervous at first, then louder. One man clapped me on the back: “Christ, you should write your own horror story!”

         I excused myself to the bathroom and vomited soured Prosecco into the sink.

        Nobody would ever believe me.

         That is the genius of Reverend Mother Munchausen. She did not just poison us. She poisoned the story itself, so that truth curdles into delusion the moment it’s spoken. She will be remembered as a martyr, and I — if remembered at all — as a silly, unstable girl.

         And yet I am still here. I carry the knowledge. I carry the scars from the coal shovel. I wake at night with the smell of vomit in my nose, the echo of my feet against that coffin lid.

        This is my scripture: SLUDGE, DUMBBELS, the catechism of toxin. My litany, my rosary of ruin.

         And you — reading this now — will wonder if I am mad.

          That is her final victory.

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        Sophia Wiseman-Rose is a Paramedic and an Anglican nun in the UK. These two vocations have shown her some of the best and the worst of humanity. Sophia is an avid painter and illustrator who is obsessed with poetry, both reading and writing it. She finds poetry cathartic, the best means of self- expression and the best way of making sense of what goes on inside of our heads.