'The finale must be the heroine and her faithful friends, singing as they walked to their deaths. Their voices would gradually diminish as each one ascended the scaffold. Each time there would be the whoosh of the blade coming down. Finally, the heroine would be left alone and her lone voice would ring out until the blade silenced it for ever.'
(Phineas Fox Mystery #3)
A nun is sentenced to death in revolutionary France for being the keeper of proscribed music once sung when people were walled in to die, so too her fellow nuns though they for refusing to accept all that the new regime demanded of them. They had travelled to France from England and, centuries later, their secrets were uncovered when it emerged that the bizarre ritual and its chilling accompaniment had not completely died out.