Girls’ retirement and departure procedure

The Girls’ retirement and departure procedure is the convent’s opaque method for removing girls from service, a practice that makes departure indistinguishable from disappearance. A girl is told only on the morning she is to leave, and her companions never learn what becomes of her. The uncertainty is not incidental: in a place where the monks control access, movement, and information, retirement offers no reliable passage back to the outside world.

Notice and Departure

A girl learns of her removal at nine in the morning, when the Officer of the Day arrives and announces that the monastery is sending her into retirement that evening. He then continues with his duties, while the girl is excused from the usual inspection. She embraces her companions and promises to help them, bring charges, or make the convent’s activities known. At the appointed hour, a monk returns and leads her away. No further news follows.

The procedure preserves the convent’s ordinary schedule while making the departing girl’s fate a private matter. Supper proceeds, though the monks are observed to drink more heavily than usual and to send the remaining girls to their chamber earlier. They take no one to bed that night, and even the Girls of the Watch are sent back to the seraglios. These changes mark a departure day as different, but reveal nothing about the girl who has gone.

Uncertainty and the Missing

The girls cannot establish whether those removed are killed, concealed, or otherwise prevented from making contact. The monks’ own explanations are inconsistent: when questioned, they sometimes answer negatively and sometimes affirmatively. Girls leaving the convent promise to report the abuses and seek help, yet none of those promises has produced a return or a message. New arrivals bring no news of their predecessors.

One long-serving captive estimates that, during her eighteen years in the house, she has seen more than two hundred girls depart. The scale of the turnover deepens rather than resolves the mystery. Each departure removes a possible witness, while the others are left to speculate about what happened and whether the same fate awaits them. Their uncertainty is described as a central source of unhappiness in their lives.

Caprice, Pregnancy, and the Logic of Removal

No consistent standard governs who is dismissed. Age and fading beauty do not explain the choices: the monks may remove a girl they caressed the previous day while retaining another for years, despite weariness of her. The superintendent herself has been kept for twelve years, while the speaker has seen fifteen-year-old girls removed. The only rule the girls can infer is the monks’ caprice.

Conduct offers no dependable protection either. Some girls who comply with every demand are removed within six months; others who are sullen or difficult remain for years. Pregnancy, however, is singled out as a serious offense within the establishment. A girl who had been there for less than a year was dismissed after becoming pregnant; another, aged sixteen, was removed while eight months pregnant; and a third was dismissed when childbirth began. These examples show that departure can be imposed at moments of acute vulnerability, without any explanation of what follows.

The girls understand themselves as replaceable: when one new captive arrives, another is removed. The system treats the population not as individuals with claims or histories, but as a succession of bodies to be brought in and taken away at the monks’ discretion. Even an apparent release remains subject to the same authority that has confined them.

Enclosure, Illness, and Unchecked Authority

The departure procedure belongs to a broader regime of enforced isolation. The girls are told that no one leaves except upon death, and the convent’s architecture reinforces their dependence: multiple barriers and a guarded underground passage make escape seem impossible. The monks’ confidence that the girls cannot summon witnesses or expose their conduct helps sustain the secrecy surrounding those who are removed.

Illness reveals the severity of this control. Girls receive care only from the surgeon friar, and the dead are denied religious rites and disposed of within the spaces between the convent’s surrounding walls. If a girl is gravely ill or contagion is feared, she may be carried out while still alive. A captive reports witnessing more than ten such cases during eighteen years. In this setting, “retirement” cannot be understood as an ordinary or verifiable discharge: removal from the convent may mean only that the others have lost the ability to know what happened.

The procedure therefore turns a supposed ending into an instrument of continued control. Promises of future assistance briefly sustain hope among the remaining girls, but the lack of contact repeatedly defeats it. By controlling both the girls’ departure and the evidence of what follows, the convent keeps its victims isolated from the law and one another; the missing become not just an unanswered question, but a warning about the limits of any freedom the institution appears to offer.