Jim Pinnells

The Causeway was born in a place of torture, sickness and death. The place is real, and to this day it has a chill that almost stops the heart. In the Bay of Naples, on the island of Ischia stands a convent, Santa Maria della Consolazione. Until the British navy destroyed it, the convent belonged to the Poor Clares. Saint Clare instructed that no nun should leave her convent even in death. Because the convent stood high on a rock overlooking the island, the dead nuns of Santa Maria could not be buried in the customary way, so their bodies were left to rot in a network of cellars. To the religious mind, the rotting, flyblown corpses are a useful memento mori. To help young nuns forget the temptations of this world, they were ordered to keep nightly vigil in this tomb. Nearby were punishment cells where nuns were flogged for every deviation from correct practice, for example for speaking to another nun. The discipline, the exposure to disease, the frugal diet and the absolute isolation from the outside world broke the spirit of most young women. Those who resisted, died. In time, the convent acquired a reputation as a dumping ground for unwanted daughters: the illegitimate, the handicapped, the unmarriageable for whatever reason. In exchange for a postulant dowry, the convent agreed to take care of a girl for the rest of her life—however short that might be. It was an evil trade conducted by professional killers with the support of the church. After my first visit to this fearful place, it stayed with me. My imagination peopled it with the savage women who must have run it and with the slaves who were their victims. And with one girl who escaped. It was some years before she took her final shape: a Scottish Catholic girl of seventeen, Marion, sent away by her father to die because she was in the way of his dynastic ambitions. In the story Marion arrives at the convent, rebels against the regime, and escapes with another nun, Teresa, who is stirred by Marion’s plight. They escape in the year 1778, one day after Admiral Nelson rescues Emma Hamilton together with the King and Queen of Naples from the revolutionary Neapolitan mob. Revolution, the Italian Jacobins, Nelson’s navy and a burgeoning love between Marion and Teresa all delay or assist Marion’s final escape from the island. The story is about corruption and liberation, hypocrisy and honesty, convention and revolution. But those are abstract terms. Really it is about Marion, a young girl sentenced to death by an evil establishment, finding in herself the courage and the strength to break free.