Read Online Three-Cornered Halo by Christianna Brand - Free Book Online

to know is—how do they know which ones to set about embalming? Or do they just do everyone on spec., in the hopes that some will strike lucky and go on and get canonised? They take long enough about it in all conscience. Look at Juanita: twenty years!”
    â€œIt is their lives that are saintly, Cousin Hat. You don’t,” said Winsome, really quite tartly for her, “just collect up the dead and say eeny, meeny, miney, mo. Of course you know if a person’s a saint, when he dies.”
    â€œEveryone is a saint when he dies,” said Cousin Hat; adding with a sniff, “for a very short time.”
    Winsome said, tolerantly laughing that now, now, Cousin Hat mustn’t be cynical! Besides, there was the matter of miracles. As far as she understood it, it was required by Rome that there should be—as well as evidence of exemplary conduct and an influence for good in the lifetime—proof of four miracles, two during life and two after death. So far—and it might well be this was holding up matters with El Exaltida and the Patriarch—Juanita could really be credited with not more than three. Her own mother had been brought to her (furiously struggling, but Winsome was not to know that), with ears so distended and painful as to make it seem almost certain that she must die. And Juanita had just laid her hand on her mother’s head and her mother had given one convulsive shudder—Innocenta had seen it, she had been there!—and the distension had suddenly disappeared, just like that, and all the pain with it; and the mother was still living, at a very great age.…
    â€œAnd stone deaf,” said Cousin Hat.
    And there had been some business of a false accusation of robbery with violence, as to whose details Winsome was admittedly not very clear. But certainly the true villain had been miraculously brought by Juanita to confess his crime. They had given him, on his death-bed, some garment of hers.…
    â€œLike a bloodhound, you mean?”
    â€¦ and the man, a hardened criminal, had burst into tears and suddenly Told All. The miracle, had Winsome known it, lay not so much in anyone in San Juan confessing to anything, though that was rare enough, as in anyone having taken the slightest notice of a robbery, with violence or without. Still, the felon—at point of death and no longer within reach of Juanese law—had indubitably confessed; and it was not Juanita’s fault if, through his delay in applying for her remote-control ministrations, he had allowed the falsely accused to moulder long since ‘into merciful death.’ And finally there was the Arcivescovo who, patient and trustful, had from the first onset of the lupus, now many years ago, prostrated himself daily before the glass coffin; and to this attributed his present (not exactly enviable) condition—but who, at least, was alive: if he was alive. Variously interpreted, these demonstrations constituted Juanita’s claim to thauma-turgical powers: and it seemed to Miss Cockrill that only the eye of faith could review it as anything but a slender stock-in-trade. Her observations to this effect, however, were not well received. Winsome counted ten, counted twenty, opened her mouth to speak, ran up another ten: and suddenly found it a teeny bit chilly and thought she would go back to her room. Miss Cockrill continued to stand complacently at the balcony rail.
    It was not chilly at all: a lovely evening, balmy and clear and with, even at this hour, a little warm, scented breeze blowing in across the pines. Below her, the hotel guests strolled up and down the terrace awaiting the dinner hour, which in San Juan el Pirata as in Spain, is not earlier than nine. Snatches of their conversation drifted up to her. Someone had bought something ‘terribly cheap—smuggled my dear, of course,’ someone was rhapsodising over the olla del hongi, a stew of Juanese toadstools much delighted in