Holy Fools

13

What an entrance, eh? I was born for the stage, you know-or for the gallows, some might say, though there’s little enough to choose between the two. Flowers and the trap, curtains at the end and the short, frenzied dance in the middle. There’s a kind of poetry even there. But I’m not yet ready to tread those boards. When I am, be sure you’ll be the first to know.

You don’t seem pleased to see me. And after all these years. My Ailée, my one and only. How you flew in your day! Invincible to the last, you never fell, never faltered. I could almost have believed your wings were real, cleverly folded beneath your tunic to carry you shrieking to the edge of the sky. My adorable Harpy. And to see you again here, wings clipped! I have to say you haven’t changed. As soon as I saw that foxy hair of yours-that’ll have to go, by the way-I knew you. And you knew me too, didn’t you, sweetheart? Oh yes, I saw you blench and stare. It’s good to have an appreciative audience-a captive audience, if you’ll pardon the expression-before which I can really show the extent of my talent. This is going to be the performance of a lifetime.

You’re very quiet. That can’t be helped, I expect. Discretion is the better part of virtue-certainly of yours. But your eyes! Glorious! Velvet spangled with black sequins. Speak to me, my Harpy. Speak to me with your eyes.

I know what it is. It’s that business, that little fracas-where was it now? Épinal? Shame on you. To hold that against me after so long. Don’t deny it, you had me tried, found guilty, judged, and hanged in an instant. Don’t you want to hear my side? All right, all right. In any case, I was sure you’d escape. No fortress could hold my Ailée. She opens the sky with her wings. Shatters prison bars with a flick of her tongue.

I know, I know. Do you think it was easy for me? I was hunted, alone. Torture and death if they caught me. Don’t you think I wanted to take you? I did it for your sake, Juliette. I knew that without me you’d have a better chance. I was going to come back. I swear. Eventually.

Is it Le Borgne? Is that what troubles you? He followed me as I prepared to leave. Pleaded with me to take him. Offered the rest of you as payment. Throats slit, he promised, nice and easy-if only I would take him with me. When I refused, he pulled his knife.

I was unarmed, exhausted from my day’s exertions, bruised and sore from my treatment at the hands of the rabble. He aimed for my heart, but I saw him coming and he caught me in the shoulder, paralyzing my knife arm. I struggled with him, he twisting at the blade until I almost passed out with the pain. In my attempt to break free I wrenched out the knife with my left hand, slashed him in the throat, and fled.

The blade must have been poisoned. Half an hour later I was too weak to ride, too dizzy to drive the rig. I did the only thing I could-I hid. Like a dying animal I crawled into a ditch and waited there for what might come.

Perhaps that was what saved me. They found the caravan four miles from Épinal, looted by scavengers; wasted time in finding and questioning the thieves. Weakened by the infected wound, I hid, feeding on the roadside plants and fruits you showed me when we were traveling together. Gaining strength, I made for the nearby forest. I lit a fire and made the infusions you taught me: wormwood for the fever, foxglove for the pain. Your teachings saved my life, dear witch. I hope you appreciate the irony.

You don’t? What a pity. Your eyes are like blades. All right. Maybe I lied about Le Borgne, just a little. We both had a knife. I was clumsy and he got to me first. Did I ever pretend to you that I was a saint? A man cannot change the element into which he was born. There was a time when you would have understood that, my firebird. Let’s hope, for both our sakes, that you still do.

Expose me? My dear. Do you really think you could? It might be amusing to see you try, but ask yourself this before you do. Who has the most to lose? And who is the most convincing? Admit it, I once convinced you myself. My papers are in order, you know. Their previous owner, a priest journeying by happy chance through the Lorraine, was suddenly taken sick (to the stomach, as I recall) as he entered a forest at dusk. A mercifully quick end. I closed his eyes myself.

Oh, Juliette. Still so suspicious? I’ll have you know that I’m very fond of our little Angélique. You think she is too young for an abbess. Believe me, the Church didn’t think so, welcoming her-and her dowry-with an eagerness that was almost unseemly. And besides, the Church has, as always, the best of the bargain. Yet more wealth to swell her ever-glutted coffers, her ever-increasing lands, and all in exchange for a tiny concession, a remote abbey half sunk in sand, its loose ways tolerated only because of its ex-abbess’s unrivaled skill with potatoes.

But I am forgetting my responsibilities. Ladies-or should I say sisters, daughters, even, to set the fatherly tone? Perhaps not. My children. That’s better. Their eyes glitter in the smoky air like those of sixty-five black cats. My new flock. Funny, but they don’t smell like women. I thought I knew that smell, its secret undertones, that complex of fish and flowers. Here there’s nothing but the reek of incense. My God, don’t they even sweat? I’ll change that, wait and see.

“My children. I come to you in grief and in great joy. Grief for our departed sister”-what was her name again?-“Marie, but in a joy of anticipation of the great work we begin here today.”

Simple stuff, I know, but effective. Their eyes are enormous. Why did I think of cats? They are bats, their faces wizened, eyes enlarged beyond recognition but sightless, black wings drawn across hunched shoulders, hands folded across flat bosoms, perhaps in the fear that I should inadvertently catch a glimpse of forbidden curves.

“I speak of the great Reform of which my daughter Isabelle has already spoken, Reform on such a scale that very soon the whole of France will turn its eyes toward the Abbey of Sainte Marie-de-la-mer in awe and humility.”

Time for a quote, I think. Seneca, perhaps? It is a rocky road that leads to the heights of greatness? No. I don’t think this company is quite ready for Seneca. Deuteronomy, then. Thou shalt become an astonishment, a proverb, and a byword, among all nations. Of course, the wonderful thing about the Bible is that there’s a quote to justify anything, even lechery, incest, and the slaying of infants.

“You have strayed from the righteous path, my children. You have fallen into the ways of wickedness, and forgotten the sacred covenant you have made with the Lord your God.”

This voice was made to declaim tragedies; ten years ago, my play L’Hermite Amoureux was already in advance of its time. Their eyes widen still farther, and behind the fear I begin to see a different light; something like excitement. The words are themselves a kind of titillation.

“Like the people of Sodom, you have turned your faces from him. You have pleasured yourselves whilst the holy flame grew cold in your keeping. You have harbored thoughts, which you believed secret, and reveled in your hidden vices. But the Lord saw you.”

Pause. A soft murmur thrills through the assembly as each enumerates her secret thoughts. “I saw you.”

In the semidarkness, faces blanch. My voice rises higher, growing in resonance until it might almost shatter glass. “I see you still, though you may now hide your faces in shame. Your vanities are innumerable, lighting this place with the flames of your iniquity.”

A good line, that. I must remember it when I come to write my new tragedy. There is promise in some of these faces. I see it already. The fat woman with the moist eyes, mouth trembling wetly on the brink of tears. You jade, I saw you flinch when the child spoke of fasting.

And the sour one with the scarred face. What’s your vice? You stand very close to your pretty neighbor, hands just touching in the shadows. Your eyes flick to her almost unwillingly as I speak, like a miser’s to his hoard.

And you-yes you-behind the pillar. Your eyes roll skyward like those of a shy mare. Tics and twitches distress your mouth. You plead silently with me, fingers clutching at your breasts. Every word I speak makes you itch with fear and pleasure. I know your dreams: orgies of self-abasement, ecstasies of remorse.

And you? Flushed and panting, eyes shining with something more than religious zeal. My first disciple, face upturned to mine, hands outstretched. A single touch, she begs, a single look and I will be your slave. But I will not submit so quickly, my dear. A moment more of anticipation, a frown that darkens the room. Then the glimpse of salvation, the softening of the voice, the mellifluous hint of forgiveness in the grand soliloquy.

“But the Lord’s mercy, like his wrath, is infinite. The erring lamb is inexpressibly more precious as it returns to the fold than its more virtuous brethren.” That’s a laugh; in my experience the erring lamb is by far more likely to become next Sunday’s roast for its pains. “Turn, o backsliding children,” says the Book of Jeremiah, “for I am married unto you, and will lead ye to Zion.” For a second I allow my eyes to meet my disciple’s. Her breathing quickens. She seems close to swooning.

My piece is said now. Scattering platitudes like manna, I prepare to leave them to ferment. I have shown how strong I can be and how gentle; a missed step and a hand across the eyes, a quiet reference to my fatigue and to the discomforts of my long walk, now illustrate my essential humanity. The eager sister-Alfonsine, was it?-is quick to offer her arm as support, gazing worshipfully into my face. Gently I draw away. No familiarities, please. Not yet, anyway.

14

LeMerle! I had immediately recognized his style, a heady blend of the stage, the pulpit, and the street-crier’s stall. The disguise too was very much his style, and from time to time his eyes met mine with the eloquent brightness I recognized, as if he were eager to share his triumph. For a while I wondered why he had chosen not to expose me.

Then I understood. I was to be his audience, his admiring critic. Pointless to give such a performance without someone with whom to share his secret, someone who could truly appreciate the daring of this imposture…This time, however, I refused to play his game. I could not avoid my duties in the salt fields that afternoon; but as soon as I could leave without giving cause for suspicion, I would collect Fleur and escape. I could take supplies from the kitchen, and although I disliked the thought of stealing from the nuns, the coffer containing the abbey’s savings was easily accessible in a small storeroom at the back of the root cellar, the door’s lock having long since been broken and never replaced. Our old Reverend Mother was a simple soul, believing that trust was the best defense against theft, and in all the time I was at the abbey I had never known anyone to take as much as a single coin. What did we need with money? We had everything we wanted.

He left us in a state of suppressed agitation, as no doubt he meant to, as we left to perform our various duties. As he went he shot me a comic look, as if to challenge me to come to him, but I ignored it and I was glad to see that he did not persist. The new abbess hurried to investigate her little empire, Clémente ran to see to the horses, Alfonsine busied herself in making the new confessor at home in the gatehouse cottage, Antoine returned to the kitchens to begin preparing the evening meal, and I went in search of my daughter.

I found her in the barn, playing with one of the kitchen cats. In a few words I warned her: she was to stay out of sight for the rest of the day; wait for me in the dorter; speak to no one until I returned.

“But why?” She had fastened a pinecone onto a piece of string and was dangling it in the air for the cat to jump at.

“I’ll tell you later. Don’t forget.”

“I can talk to the kitty, though, can’t I?”

“If you like.”

“What about Perette? Can I talk to her?”

I put my finger on my lips. “Shh. It’s a hiding game. Do you think you can keep very quiet, very still, until I come for you tonight?”

She frowned, eyes still on the cat. “What about my dinner?”

“I’ll bring it later.”

“And for the kitty?”

“We’ll see.”

It had been decided that LeMerle should attend Chapter with us but should not eat with the rest of us in the refectory. That didn’t surprise me-our new policy of abstinence was unlikely to find favor with him. Nor did it escape my attention that LeMerle’s cottage was just beside the abbey gates, giving him an ideal place to observe any traffic to or from the abbey. That made me anxious; it suggested advance planning and careful thought. Whatever his reasons, the confessor intended to stay.

Still, I told myself, his plans were of no interest to me at present. His absence from the evening meal would offer me the ideal opportunity to prepare my escape. I would plead a stomach ache; collect my things; raid the kitchen and storeroom for supplies; and hide my bundle of valuables somewhere within the abbey’s outer walls. Fleur and I would go to bed as usual, then creep away when everyone was asleep, collect our belongings, and make for the causeway and the morning tide. When we were safely out of his reach, then I could deal with LeMerle. A note-a word to the right authorities-would be enough to expose him. The gallows would find him in the end, and maybe then, my heart would find peace.

But when I came back to the dorter half an hour before the evening meal, Fleur was not there to greet me. Nor was she in the garden, the cloister, or the chicken house. I was annoyed, but not yet overanxious; Fleur was a lively spirit and often hid away at bedtime. I searched her secret hiding places, one by one, with no success.

Finally I went to the kitchens. It occurred to me that maybe Fleur had got hungry, and Soeur Antoine, the cook, was fond of the children, often giving them cakes and biscuits from the kitchen, or apples from the autumn windfalls. Today, however, she looked preoccupied, her eyes unusually reddened and with a slack look to her face, as if her cheeks had been partially deflated. At Fleur’s name she gave a wail of misery, as if remembering something she had been too busy to think about, and wrung her fat hands.

“The poor little one! I was going to tell you but-” She broke off, as if struggling to express several ideas at once. “So many changes! She came into my kitchen, Soeur Auguste-I was making a confit for the winter stores, with goose fat and wild mushrooms-and she looked at me in that terrible, scornful way-”

“Who? Fleur?”

“No, no!” Antoine shook her head. “Mère Isabelle. That terrible little girl.”

I made an impatient gesture. “Tell me later. I want my daughter.”

“I was trying to tell you. She said it wasn’t seemly for her to be here. She said it would be a distraction from your duties. She sent her away.”

I stared at her in disbelief. “Sent her where?”

She eyed me humbly. “It wasn’t my fault.”

Something in her voice told me she thought it was.

“You told them?” I grasped her sleeve. “Antoine, did you tell them Fleur was mine?”

“I couldn’t help it,” whined the fat sister. “They would have found out sooner or later. Someone else would have let it slip.”

In rage I pinched her arm through her habit so that she almost screamed.

“Stop it! Aü! Stop it, Auguste, you’re hurting! It’s not my fault they sent her away! You should never have kept her here in the first place!”

“Antoine. Look at me.” She rubbed her arm, refusing to meet my eyes. “Where did they send her? Was it to someone in the village?” She shook her head helplessly and again I fought back the urge to strike at her. “Please, Antoine. I’m just worried, that’s all. I’m not going to tell anyone you told me.”

“You ought to call me ma soeur.” Antoine’s face was puffy with resentment. “Anger’s a sin, you know. It’s that hair of yours. You should cut it off.” She glanced at me with unusual daring. “Now the Reform’s coming, you’ll have to anyway.”

“Please, Antoine. I’ll give you the last bottle of my lavender syrup.”

Her eyes brightened. “And the candied rose petals?”

“If you like. Where’s Fleur?”

Antoine lowered her voice. “I overheard Mère Isabelle talking to the new confessor. Something about a fisherman’s wife, somewhere on the mainland. They’re paying her,” she added, as if I were to be held responsible for the expense. But I was barely listening.

“The mainland! Where?”

Antoine shrugged. “That’s all I heard.”

I stood dazed, as the truth of it slowly sank in. It was too late. Before I had even dared raise my voice against him, the Blackbird had out-maneuvered me. He must have known I would not run the risk of losing my daughter. Without her, I was forced to stay.

For a moment I considered making the attempt anyway. The trail was still warm, although by now I would have missed the tide and would have to await the next day’s crossing. Everyone on the island knew Fleur; someone must have seen where she had been taken. But my heart knew it was useless. LeMerle would have anticipated that too.

My stomach clenched. I imagined Fleur confused, unhappy, calling for me, thinking herself abandoned, taken away without even a cantrip or a star blessing to protect her. Who but I could keep her from harm? Who but I knew her ways, understood that she needed a candle near her cot on winter nights, knew to slice away the brown part of the apple before cutting it into quarters?

“I never even said good-bye.” I spoke for myself, but Antoine looked at me with returned sullenness. “It isn’t my fault,” she repeated. “None of us ever kept our babies. Why should you be any different?”

I did not reply. I already knew whose fault it was. What did he want? What could I possibly have that he still wanted? Returning to my cubicle I saw that the little cot had already been removed. My own things seemed untouched, my cache of books and papers behind the loose stone undisturbed. I found Fleur’s doll, Mouche, down the side of my bed, half hidden by the trailing blanket. Perette had made it out of rags and scraps when Fleur was a baby, and it is her favorite toy. Mouche’s arms and legs have been stitched back a hundred times; her hair is a bright tangle of multicolored wool, and her round face looks oddly like Perette’s with its shoe-button eyes and rosy cheeks. Like her creator too, Mouche is mute; where the mouth should be, there is only a blank.

For a while I stood with the doll in my hands, too numb to think. My first instinct was to find the new confessor, to force him to tell me-at knifepoint, if need be-where he had hidden my daughter. But I knew LeMerle. This was his challenge: his opening gambit in a game for which I did not yet know the stakes. If I went to him now, I played into his hands. If I waited, I might yet be able to call his bluff.

All night I turned and twisted on my hot bed. My cubicle is the farthest from the door, which means that although I have farthest to go if I wish to visit the reredorter in the night at least I have the advantage of only one neighbor. I have the window too, east-facing though it is, and the greater space that the end cubicles afford. The night was heavy, promising stormy weather, and as I watched sleeplessly into the small hours I saw the storm out at sea striding out on great silent stilts of lightning between the red-black clouds. But no rain came. I wondered whether Fleur saw it too or whether she slept, exhausted, her thumb in her mouth, in a house of strangers.

“Shh, Fleurette.” In my daughter’s absence, it was to Mouche that I spoke, stroking the woolly head as if it might have been Fleur’s hair beneath my fingers. “I’m here. It’s all right.”

I traced the star sign on Mouche’s forehead and spoke my mother’s cantrip. Stella bella, bonastella. Pig Latin it may be, but there’s comfort in an old rhyme, and although none of the ache in my heart subsided, I felt a slight diminishing of fear. After all, LeMerle must know that he would get nothing from me if any harm came to Fleur. I waited then, with Mouche under my arm, as all around me, my sisters slept and lightning stalked the islands, one by one.

15

Today held little of Reform. The new abbess spent much of the time in her private chapel with LeMerle, leaving us to our speculation. By now the holiday atmosphere had dissipated, leaving an uneasy vacuum. Voices were hushed, as if there were sickness in the place. Duties had been resumed, but mostly-with the exception of Marguerite and Alfonsine-in a slipshod manner. Even Antoine seemed ill at ease in her kitchen, her usual foolish good nature tempered by the previous day’s accusations of excess. A number of lay workers came to inspect the church, and scaffolding was erected on the west side, presumably to allow them to investigate the damaged roof.

Once again, my first impulse that morning had been to find LeMerle and to ask for news of my daughter. Several times I set out with this aim in mind, stopping myself just in time. No doubt that was precisely what he intended.

Instead I spent the morning at work on the flats, but my usually light touch was marred, and I found myself hoeing furiously at the salt stacks, pounding the careful white mounds into muddy sludge.

Fleur’s absence is a pain that begins deep in the pit of my stomach, digging inward like a canker. It touches everything, like a shadow behind bright scenery. It is stronger than I am; a dozen times I have flung down my tools and begun the march to LeMerle’s cottage, but I know that my silence is the only weapon I have. Let him be the first to reveal himself. Let him come to me.

I returned to find that LeMerle and the new abbess had retired to their respective quarters early-she to the cell previously inhabited by her predecessor, he to the gatehouse cottage just within the abbey walls-leaving the sisters in a state of unusual excitement. In their absence, there had been much whispered speculation on the nature of the intended Reforms, some murmured revolt, and a great deal of ill-informed and ill-considered gossip.

Much of this surrounded LeMerle, and I was unsurprised to overhear a number of favorable opinions. Although some voices among us were raised in condemnation of the little chit who presumed to overturn our way of life, there were few who failed to be impressed by the new confessor. Alfonsine, of course, was completely overwhelmed, enumerating the qualities of the fake Père Colombin with the zeal of one newly converted.

“I knew it, Soeur Auguste. I knew it as soon as I saw his eyes. So dark, so piercing! As if he could see right through me. Right to the very soul.” She shuddered, eyes half-closed, lips parted. “I think he might really be a saint, Soeur Auguste. He has that holy presence. I can feel it.”

However, this was not the first time Alfonsine had been subject to a violent attack of hero worship-she had suffered one, in fact, on the occasion of a local prior’s visit, which left her prostrate for a fortnight-and given time I hoped that this fervent admiration of LeMerle might subside. For the present she glowed at the sound of his name, murmuring Colombin de Saint-Amand to herself like a litany as she scrubbed the floors.

Marguerite too was deeply affected. Like Alfonsine, she developed a cleaning frenzy, repeatedly dusting and polishing every available surface; she twitched at sudden noises, and when LeMerle was close by she stammered and flushed like a girl of sixteen, though she was a dried-up thing of forty, and had never known a man. Clémente saw her confusion and teased her mercilessly, but the rest of us held back. Somehow Marguerite’s reaction to the new confessor went beyond humor and into a dark territory few of us cared to explore.

Marguerite and Alfonsine-who had always been bitter rivals-had become temporary allies in the face of this joint infatuation. Together they had volunteered to clean out LeMerle’s cottage, which was in a pitiful state, having been abandoned since the time of the black friars. In the morning they had gathered together what furniture they thought might please the new confessor and brought it into the cottage, and before the day was over the place was spotless, with fresh matting on the earth floor and vases of flowers in its three rooms. Père Colombin expressed his gratitude with becoming humility, and from that moment the two sisters were his willing slaves.

The evening meal was a meager affair of potato soup, which we ate in silence, even though the two newcomers were not present. But later, as I prepared for bed after Vespers, I was sure I saw Antoine crossing the courtyard toward the little cottage, carrying something on a large, covered dish. The new confessor, at least, would eat well tonight. As I watched, Antoine looked up at the window, her face a blur against the night, her mouth wide with dismay. Then she turned abruptly, pulling her wimple to cover her face, and fled into the darkness.

Tonight I read the cards again, drawing them silently and carefully from their hiding place in the wall. The Hermit. The Deuce of Cups. The Fool. The Star, her round painted face so like Fleur’s with its wide eyes and crown of curly hair. And the Tower, falling against a red-black sky split with jagged bolts of lightning.

Tonight? I don’t think so. But soon, I hope. Soon. And if I have to topple it myself, stone by stone, I will, be sure of it. I will.

16

Terrible, isn’t it? Divination; close enough to sorcery to scorch the flesh. The Malleus Maleficarum calls it “a manifest abomination” whilst insisting it doesn’t work. And yet her cards, with their painstaking detail, are strangely compelling. Take this Tower, for example. So like the abbey itself with its square turret and wooden spire. This woman, the Moon, her face half turned away but so strangely familiar. And the Hermit, this hooded man, only his eyes visible from beneath the black cloak, in one hand a staff, in the other a lantern.

You can’t fool me, Juliette. I knew you’d have a hiding place. A child could have found it, tucked away behind a loosened stone at the back of the dorter. You were never much of a dissembler. No, I’ll not accuse you-not yet, anyway. I may need you. A man needs an ally-even a man like me.

For the first day I watched from afar. Close enough in my cottage by the gates to see everything without offending ecclesiastical sensibilities. Even a saint may have desires, I tell Isabelle. Indeed, without them, where would be the sanctity, or the sacrifice? I will not live in the cloister. Besides, I value my privacy.

There’s a door at the back of the cottage, which opens out onto a bare section of wall. The black friars were more concerned with grandiose architecture than with security, it seems, for the gatehouse is an impressive facade hiding little more than a hillock of tumbled stones between the abbey and the marshes. An easy escape route, if it ever comes to that. But it won’t. I’ll take my time over this business and leave when it suits me.

As I was saying, today I watched from afar. She tries to keep it from me, but I can see her pain, the tension in her lower back and shoulders as she strains to appear relaxed. When we were traveling together she never once cut short a performance, not even when she suffered an injury. The inevitable mishaps that occur in even the best troupes-sprains, damaged ligaments, even fractures of fingers and toes-never slowed her down. She always maintained the same professional smile, even when pain was blinding her. It was a kind of revolt, though against whom I never guessed. Myself, perhaps. I see it in her now; in her averted gaze, in the false humility of her movements, there is a pain that pride moves her to conceal. She loves the child. Would do anything to protect her.

Strange that I never imagined my l’Ailée bearing a child; I thought she was too much of a savage to accept that kind of tyranny. A pretty cub, with a look of her mother, and the promise of grace behind that little-girl slouch. She has her mother’s ways too; she bit me as I lifted her onto my horse, leaving the marks of her baby teeth in my hand. Her father? Some stranger of the road, perhaps: some chance-met peasant, peddler, player, priest.

Myself, even? I hope not, for her sake; there’s vicious blood in my line, and blackbirds make bad parents. And yet I am glad that the child is in safe hands. She kicked me in the ribs as I handed her down, and would have bitten me again if Guizau hadn’t stopped her.

“Stop that,” I said.

“I want my mamma!”

“You’ll see her.”

“When?”

I sighed. “I don’t think you should ask so many questions. Now be a good girl and go with Monsieur Guizau, who will buy you a sugar pastry.”

The child glared up at me. There were tears running down her face, but they were of rage and not of fear. “Crow’s foot!” she shouted, making the forked sign with her stubby fingers. “Crow’s foot, crow’s foot, curse you to death!”

That’s all I need, I thought as I rode away. To be witched by a five-year-old. It beats me why anyone should want a child anyway; dwarves are much easier to deal with, and far more amusing. She’s a brave little cub, though, whatever her parentage; I think I can see why my Juliette cares for her.

Why then this sudden sting of chagrin? Her affection, weakness though it is, makes my position so much easier. She thinks to deceive me, my Wingless One, like a snipe luring the enemy from her nest. She feigns stupidity, evading me except when there is a crowd, or working alone on the salt flats, knowing that in that wide expanse of unpeopled space I cannot approach her with discretion. Twenty-four hours. I would have expected her to have come to me before now. Her stubbornness is a characteristic that both angers and pleases me. Perhaps I am perverse, but I do enjoy her resistance and I feel I might have been disappointed if she had shown any less.

Besides, I already have my allies. Soeur Piété, who dares not meet my gaze; Soeur Alfonsine, the consumptive nun who follows me like a spaniel; Soeur Germaine, who detests me; Soeur Bénédicte, the gossip. Any of these might do to begin with. Or the fat nun, Soeur Antoine, nosing around the kitchen doorway like a timid sheep. I’ve been watching her, and I think I see potential there. Under the new order she now works in the garden. I’ve seen her digging, her cheeks marbled with the unaccustomed exertion. Another has been made cellarer in her place; the scrawny, twitching nun with the bright, wounded eyes. No more pies and pasties under her régime. No more trips to the market, or illicit samplings of old wine. Soeur Antoine’s arms are plump and red, her feet in their narrow boots unusually dainty for her bulk. There is something maternal in her ample bosom, a generosity given free rein in her kitchens among the sausages and roasts. Where will it go now? In a single day her cheeks have already lost some of their roundness. Her skin has a sick and cheesy sheen. She has not yet spoken to me, but she wants to. I can see it in her eyes.

Last night, when she brought me my meal, I inquired innocently how they had dined. Potato soup, she said without looking at me. But for mon père, something more substantial. A fine pigeon pie, if monseigneur pleases, and a glass of red wine. Peaches from our own gardens, such a shame the drought has left us so few. Her eyes darted to mine in silent appeal. Ha, you jade! Don’t think I didn’t suspect you. Potato soup, indeed. Your lips grew moist as you spoke of peaches and wine. A creature of passions, this Antoine; and where will they go now their outlet is closed?

A day of fasting has dulled her bright and foolish good nature. She looks bewildered but sullen, a desperate sullenness veering toward spite. She is almost ready for me. Another day, I tell myself. Another day until she realizes what she has lost. I would have preferred a sharper tool with which to begin my work, but perhaps this one is fitting.

After all, I have to start somewhere.

17

The daily services have been reestablished. We were awoken at two o’clock today for Vigils with the ringing of the old bell, and for a moment I was sure some terrible calamity had happened-a shipwreck, a gale, a sudden death. Then I saw Mouche lying discarded on the pillow and the pain of remembrance was suddenly more than I could endure. I bit my pallet so that I should not be heard and sobbed into the packed straw sparse, angry tears, which felt like runnels of powder on my face, ready at any moment to ignite.

It was at this moment that Perette found me, creeping to my bed so quietly that for a time I was not aware of her presence. If it had been anyone other than the wild girl, I would have lashed out like an animal in a trap. But Perette’s little face was so simple and woebegone in the dim light of the cresset that I could not focus my anger.

In the last few days I know I have neglected my friend. More pressing things concerned me, things the wild girl could not understand. But I wonder whether I do not often underestimate Perette. Her birdlike voice speaks no tongue that I can understand, but there is intelligence in her bright gold-ringed eyes, and a deep, unquestioning devotion. She tried a smile, indicating her eyes with a speaking gesture.

I wiped my face with the back of my hand. “It’s all right, Perette. Go to Vigils.” But Perette was already taking her place on the mattress beside me, her bare feet curling beneath her, for shoes are the only clothing she continues to refuse. Her small hand crept into mine. For a second she reminded me of a sad puppy, offering comfort in humble, loving silence, and I was ashamed at the twist of contempt in the thought.

With an effort I returned the smile. “Don’t worry, Perette. I’m tired, that’s all.”

It was true; it had taken me hours to get to sleep. Perette lifted her head and indicated the absence at the side of my bed where Fleur’s cot used to be. When I did not reply she pinched my arm gently and pointed again.

“I know.” I did not want to talk about it. But she looked so woeful and concerned that I had not the heart to rebuff her. “It won’t be for long. I promise.”

The wild girl looked at me. Her head was cocked to one side and she looked more like a bird than ever. Then she put both hands to the side of her face, changing her expression as she did so to mimic the new abbess with an accuracy that might in other circumstances have been comic.

I gave a wan smile. “That’s right. Mère Isabelle sent her away. But we’ll get her back, you’ll see. We’ll get her back soon.”

I wondered whether I was speaking to myself, or whether Perette knew what I was saying. Even as I spoke, her attention had already passed on to other things, and she was playing with a pendant around her neck. There was an image of Saint Christina Mirabilis on the pendant, enameled in orange and red and blue and white. She probably wore it because she liked the colors. The saint was floating unharmed in her ring of holy fire, and Perette held the image in front of her eyes, crooning happily. She was still doing it when we finally arrived in the chapel and took our places in the crowd.

Vigils lasted longer than I had expected. The new abbess kept the light to a minimum, passing occasionally with the cresset so that she could ensure no one was asleep. Twice she snapped a sharp rebuke at a lazy sister-Soeur Antoine was one, I think, and Soeur Piété the other-for the chanting was soft and almost soothing, and the night, warmed by eighteen hours of daylight, was not yet cold enough for discomfort. Almost two hours passed before the bell rang again for Matins, and I realized that the customary period of rest between the two services had been missed. I was shivering now in spite of my woollen stockings, though I could see the dawn piercing through the loose slates. The bell rang twice again for Lauds and a murmur went through the assembly as, once again, LeMerle made his entrance.

In a second, all drowsiness had dropped from the air. Around me I could feel the small barely perceptible movements of the sisters as they turned their sunflower faces toward him. I think I was the only one who did not look up. Eyes fixed firmly on my clasped hands, I heard him approach, heard the soft familiar sounds of his footsteps on the marble flags, sensed him standing at the lectern, motionless in his dark robe, one hand touching the silver crucifix he always wears.

“My children. I am lucis orto sidere. The star of the morning has risen. Raise your voices now to greet it.”

I sang the hymn with my face still lowered, the words resonating strangely in my skull. I am lucis orto sidere…But Lucifer was the Morning Star before his fall, brightest of all angels, I thought, and at that I could not help but glance once at LeMerle as I sang.

Too late, I averted my gaze. I am lucis orto sidere…He was looking directly at me and smiling, as if I had revealed my thoughts. I wished I had not looked.

The hymn ended. The sermon began. I vaguely heard some reference to fasting, to penance, but I was alone in my circle of misery; nothing could reach me. Words droned past me like bees-contrition-vanity-adornment-humility-penance. But they meant nothing to me. All I could think of was Fleur, all alone without even Mouche to comfort her, and how I had not even had time to wipe her nose or tie a ribbon in her hair before they took her away.

Tsk-tsk, begone! I made the sign with my fingers. No more of that bad-luck thinking. Whatever his intentions, LeMerle wasn’t planning to stay in the abbey forever. The moment he was gone, I would find my daughter. Meanwhile I’d play his game, I’d use every cantrip I knew to keep her from harm, and if by his fault anything happened to her, I would kill him. He knew I would; and he’d keep her safe. For now, anyway.

I was roused from my thoughts by a movement close by me and looked up. I had been standing near the back of the chapel; for a time I believed it was to receive a sacrament that we came forward one by one, heads bent in submission. A nun was kneeling at the altar, head bowed, her wimple in her hand. A line of sisters waited behind her, removing their wimples as they came, and I followed with the rest, as it seemed to be expected of me. As I came closer still, I passed the sisters who had already been to the pulpit as they returned. Shivering like lambs, they moved in a kind of dream, not meeting my eyes, their faces crumpled with indecision. Then I saw the shears in LeMerle’s hand, and I understood everything. The Reform had begun.

In front of me I saw Alfonsine take her place before the pulpit, accepting the shears with a thrill of submission. Then it was Antoine’s turn. I had never seen her without her wimple before, and the sudden beauty of her thick black hair was a startling revelation. Then came the shears and she was Antoine again, pale as a beached jellyfish, mouth working helplessly as LeMerle uttered the benediction. “I hereby renounce all worldly vanities, in the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit.”

Poor Antoine. What vanities had she known in her sad, fearful time but those of the table and the cellarium? The moment of beauty, so fleetingly glimpsed, was gone. She looked terrified, her hair standing out in uneven clumps, her eyes rolling and her fat hands kneading at each other as if in longing for the comforting routine of the bread pan.

Then it was Clémente, her flaxen hair catching at the light as she bowed her head. Oddly enough it was dour Germaine who cried out as the shears did their work; Clémente simply tilted her face at LeMerle, looking even younger than she had before the shearing; a wanton with the face of a little boy.

But hair was not the only vanity we were to relinquish; I saw old Rosamonde, her half-bald crown bared, reluctantly give up the gold cross that she wore about her neck. Her mouth moved, but her words did not reach me. She joined me a few moments later, her weak eyes roaming the chapel as if in search of someone who was absent. Then it was Perette, whose hair was already cropped, sullenly emptying her pockets of treasures. Magpie treasures, that’s all they were; a scrap of ribbon, a polished stone, a piece of rag-those small and harmless vanities that only a child could cherish. She was most reluctant to part with her enameled pendant and had almost succeeded in palming it when Soeur Marguerite pointed it out, and it was swept up with the rest. Perette bared her vicious little teeth at Marguerite, who piously looked the other way. From the corner of my eye I could see LeMerle trying hard to keep himself from laughing.

Then it was my turn. I watched the ground dispassionately as my hair fell, curl by bright curl, among the mounting trophies. I expected to feel something-anger maybe, or shame-instead I felt nothing but the burn of his fingers at the nape of my neck as he stretched out and drew aside the tangle of hair, cutting with a deftness and precision that drew the eye from the more intimate gestures-a thumb pressed against the earlobe, a lingering touch in the throat’s hollow-which he performed upon me in secret, without anyone noticing.

He spoke to me in two registers, the public one in which he intoned the Benedictus, and a thin, rapid whisper during which his mouth barely moved.

“Dominus vobiscum. You’ve been avoiding me, Juliette. Agnus Dei, very unwise, qui tollis peccata mundi, we need to talk, miserere nobis. I can help you.”

I shot him a glance of loathing.

“O felix culpa, you look wonderful when you’re angry. Quae talem ac tanctum, see me in the confessional, meruit habere Redemptorem-after Vespers tomorrow.”

And then it was over, and I went back to my place feeling dizzy and strange, with my heart pounding and the ghosts of his fingers still fluttering like burning moths against my neck.

At the end of the session, all sixty-five of us were sitting in our places, newly cropped and demure. My face still felt flushed and my heart was beating wildly, but I hid it as best I could and kept my eyes downcast. Rosamonde and some of the older nuns had been forced to exchange their old quichenotte for the crisp wimple favored by the new abbess, and they looked like a flock of seagulls in the semidarkness. Every cheap trinket, ring, necklace, every harmless scrap of braid or ribbon our old Reverend Mother had tolerated, was gone. Vanity, LeMerle told us in his grave voice, was the jewel of gold in the pig’s snout, and we had fallen to its lure. The Bernardine cross on our habits should be adornment enough, he said-while all the time the light played on his silver crucifix like a small malicious eye.

Then, after the communal blessing and act of contrition, which I mouthed with the rest, our new abbess stood up and began to speak. “This is the first of many changes I intend to make,” she began. “Today will be a day of fasting and prayer in preparation for the task we will undergo tomorrow.” She paused, perhaps to feel the impact of so many pairs of eyes. “The interment of my predecessor,” she continued, “where it best befits her, in our own crypt.”

“But we-” The protest was out before I could stop it.

“Soeur Auguste?” Her gaze was scornful. “Did you say something?”

“I’m sorry, ma mère. I should not have spoken. But the Reverend Mother was-a simple creature, who disliked the-the fanfare of church ceremony. We did what we thought best when we buried her. Surely it would be kinder now to leave her in peace?”

Mère Isabelle’s small hands clenched. “Are you telling me that it’s kinder to leave that woman’s body in some abandoned piece of ground?” she demanded. “Why, I believe the place was actually a vegetable garden, or something! What can have possessed you?”

There was nothing to be gained in confrontation. “We did what we thought was right at the time,” I said humbly. “I see now that it was a mistake.”

For a second Mère Isabelle continued to look at me with suspicion. Then she turned away. “I must remember,” she said, “that in such a remote area of the country old customs and beliefs still persist. There is not necessarily any sin attached to such a misunderstanding.”

Fine words. But the suspicion remained in her voice, and I knew I was not forgiven. The safety of the abbey was eroding every minute I remained. Twice already I had attracted the critical attention of the new abbess. My daughter had been taken from me. And now LeMerle held me between his careless, clever fingers, knowing perhaps that one more accusation-a hint of heresy, a casual reference to matters I had thought forgotten-would bring the weight of the Church’s investigation to bear upon me. It had to be soon. I had to leave soon. But not without Fleur.

And so I waited. We repaired to the warming room for a time. Then Prime and Terce, interminable chanting and prayers and hymns with LeMerle watching me all the time with that look of mocking benevolence in his eyes. Then to Chapter. In the hour that followed, duties were allocated, hours of prayer, days of fasting, rules governing decorum, dress, deportment laid down with military precision. The Great Reform was under way.

The church would be renovated, we were told. Lay builders would do much of the work on the roof, though the interior would be our own responsibility. The lay people who had until now done most of our menial duties were to be dismissed; it was unseemly for us to have servants to do our work whilst we spent our time in idleness. The rebuilding of the abbey must now be our main concern, and everyone was expected to take additional duties until the time of its completion.

I learned with dismay that our free time was to be curtailed to half an hour after Compline, to be spent in prayer and reflection, and that our excursions to the town and to the harbor were to cease at once. My Latin lessons to the novices too were to be discontinued. Mère Isabelle did not feel that it was appropriate for novices to learn Latin. To obey the Scripture was enough, she said; anything more was dangerous and unnecessary. A duty rota was established that reversed all our accustomed routines; without surprise I noted that Antoine no longer governed the kitchens or the cellars and that henceforth my herb garden would be tended by strangers, but I accepted this too with indifference, knowing that my time at the abbey was coming to an end.

Then came the penances. Confession had never taken more than a few minutes in Mère Marie’s day; this time it took over an hour, in public, with Alfonsine setting the tone.

“I had impious thoughts about the new Reverend Mother,” she murmured, with a sidelong glance at LeMerle. “I spoke out of turn in the church, when Soeur Auguste came in.” It was typical of her, I thought, to draw attention to my lateness.

“What kind of thoughts?” said LeMerle, with a gleam in his eye.

Alfonsine shifted beneath his gaze. “It’s what Soeur Auguste said. She’s too young. She’s only a child. She won’t know what to do.”

“Soeur Auguste seems rather free with her opinions,” said LeMerle.

I stared into my lap and would not look up.

“I shouldn’t have listened,” said Alfonsine.

LeMerle said nothing, but I knew he was smiling.

The rest soon followed Alfonsine’s lead, initial hesitation giving way to a kind of eagerness. Yes, we were confessing our sins, and sin was shameful; but it was also the first time many of us had ever received such undivided attention. It was painfully compelling, like scratching at a nettle rash, and it was contagious.

“I went to sleep during Vigils,” said Soeur Piété, a colorless nun who rarely spoke to anyone. “I said a bad word when I bit my tongue.”

Soeur Clémente: “I looked at myself when I was washing. I looked at myself and I had a wicked thought.”

“I stole a p-pasty from the winter cellar.” That was Antoine, red-faced and stammering. “It was p-pork and onion, with water crust p-pastry. I ate it in secret behind the gatehouse wall, and it gave me a b-bellyache.”

Germaine was next, intoning her list-Gluttony. Lust. Covetousness-apparently at random. She, at least, had not been dazzled by LeMerle-her face wore a careful, colorless expression I recognized as scorn. Then came Soeur Bénédicte, with a tearful tale of shirked duties, and Soeur Pierre, with a stolen orange. At each new confession there came an increased murmur from the crowd, as if to urge the speaker onward. Soeur Tomasine wept as she confessed lewd thoughts; several other nuns wept in sympathy, and Soeur Alfonsine eyed LeMerle while Mère Isabelle looked sullen and increasingly bored. Clearly she had expected more of us. Obediently, we gave it.

As the hour passed, the confessions grew more elaborate, more detailed. Every scrap of material was brought out for the occasion; tattered remnants of past transgressions, filched piecrusts, erotic dreams. The ones who had been first to make their confessions now found their performance overshadowed; resentful looks were exchanged; the murmuring grew to a low roar.

Now it was Marguerite’s turn to step forward; she exchanged glances with Alfonsine as she passed, and I knew then that there would be trouble. I forked the sign against evil into my palm; around me, the anticipation was so thick that I could barely breathe. Marguerite looked fearfully into LeMerle’s face, twitching like a snared rabbit.

“Well?” said Isabelle impatiently.

Marguerite opened her mouth and closed it again without speaking. Alfonsine looked at her with barely concealed hostility. Then, haltingly, and without taking her eyes away from LeMerle’s face, she began.

“I dream of demons,” she said in a low voice. “They infest my dreams. They speak to me when I lie in bed. They touch me with their fiery fingers. Soeur Auguste gives me medicines to make me sleep, but still the demons come!”

“Medicines?” There was a pause, during which I felt Isabelle’s eyes flick sharply at my averted face.

“A sleeping draught, that’s all,” I said as the other sisters turned toward me. “Lavender, and valerian, to calm her nerves. That’s all it is.” Too late, I heard the edge in my voice.

Mère Isabelle put her hand on Marguerite’s forehead and gave a small, chilly smile. “Well, I don’t think you’ll be needing any of Soeur Auguste’s potions anymore. Père Colombin and I are here to take care of you now. In penance and humility we will expel all trace of the evil that plagues you.”

Then at last, turning to me, she said: “So, Soeur Auguste. You seem to have something to say on almost every other subject. Have you no testimony to make here?”

I could see the danger but was at a loss at how to avoid it. “I-I don’t think so, ma mère.”

“What? Not one? Not a transgression, not a weakness, an act of unkindness, a wicked thought? Not even a dream?”

I suppose I should have made something up, like the rest of them. But LeMerle’s eyes were still on me, and I felt my face grow hot in revolt. “I-forgive me, ma mère. I don’t remember. I-I’m not used to public confession.”

Mère Isabelle gave a smile of singularly adult unpleasantness. “I see,” she said. “Soeur Auguste has a right to her privacy. Public testimony is beneath her. Her sins are between herself and the Almighty. Soeur Auguste speaks directly to God.”

Alfonsine sniggered. Clémente and Germaine grinned at each other. Marguerite piously raised her eyes to the ceiling. Even Antoine, who had blushed beet red during her own confession, was smirking. At that moment I knew that every nun in the chapel felt the same guilty twist of pleasure at the humiliation of one of their own. And behind Mère Isabelle, LeMerle gave his angel’s smile, as if none of this had anything to do with him.

18

My penance was silence. Two days’ enforced silence, with instructions to the other sisters to report immediately any breach of this command. It was no punishment to me. In fact I welcomed the respite. Besides if my suspicions were correct, Fleur and I might soon be gone. See me in the confessional after Vespers tomorrow, LeMerle had said. I can help you.

He was going to give me Fleur. What else could he have meant? Why else would he risk a meeting? My heart leapt at the thought, all my caution swept aside. To hell with strategy. I wanted my daughter. No penance, however severe, could begin to compare with the pain of her absence. Whatever LeMerle wanted from me, he was welcome to it.

Alfonsine, the perpetual gossip, who had been given the same penance as I, was far more troubled, assuming a look of deep contrition which no one-to her chagrin-appeared to notice. Her cough had worsened in recent days, and yesterday she refused her food; I recognized the signs and hoped that this renewal of zeal would not provoke one of her attacks. Marguerite was put in charge of the clock for a month to cure her nightly visitations; henceforth she would be the one to ring the bell for Vigils, sleeping alone on a box bed suspended by ropes in the belfry and waking every hour to ring the time. I doubted that it would work; but Marguerite seemed exalted by her punishment-although her tic had worsened, and there was a new stiffness down her left side that made her limp when she walked.

Never had there been so many penances. It seemed as if half the sisters or more were under some kind of discipline, from Antoine’s fasting-penance enough for her-and relocation to the overheated bakehouse, to Germaine’s work digging the new latrines.

It created a strange climate of segregation between the virtuous and the penitent. I caught Soeur Tomasine looking at me with a kind of contempt as I passed her in the slype, and Clémente did her best to taunt me into speech, though without success.

Today passed with terrible slowness. Between services, I spent two hours in the refectory, whitewashing the faded walls and scrubbing a floor slick with built-up grease. Then I helped with the repairs to the chapel, silently passing buckets of mortar to the cheery, bare-chested workmen on the roof. Then came prayers over the potato patch, with LeMerle intoning with incense and solemnity the Last Rites, which the poor Reverend Mother had never received, whilst I, Germaine, Tomasine, and Berthe performed the unpleasant task of opening the grave.

It was not yet noon, but already the sun was hot, the air sizzling with heat as we made our way with shovels and spades toward the burial mound. Soon we were sweating. The earth is dry and sandy here, whitish on the surface but becoming red at greater depth. Barely moist earth clung to the shroud and to our robes as we cleared away the sand from the body. It was a simple enough task, if one had the stomach for it; the earth had not had a great deal of time to settle and was still light enough to clear with a shovel. The body had been sewn into a sheet, now blackened where the corpse had rested against it so that the marks of head, ribs, elbows, and feet were clearly visible against the creamy linen. Soeur Tomasine wavered as she saw this, but I have seen enough bodies to be unmoved and I reached for it myself, carefully and with as much reverence as I could muster. Mère Marie was heavier than she had been in life, weighted by the earth that clung to her, and I struggled to raise her with dignity, gripping her by the shoulders, though her weight seemed strangely brittle, like that of a piece of driftwood washed onto the shore and half buried in sand. The shroud was badly stained on the reverse side, with the outline of the spine and ribs clearly defined, and as I heaved her from her unconsecrated resting place I uncovered a mass of brown beetles that boiled away into the sand like hot lead as soon as the sunlight reached them. At the sight of the creatures, Berthe gave a big, loose cry and almost dropped her end of the corpse. More of the beetles scattered along her sleeve and into the pit. I saw Alfonsine watching in appalled fascination. Only Germaine seemed unmoved, and she helped me hoist the body out of the hole, her scarred face impassive, her athlete’s shoulders straining. There was a light, dry smell of earth and ash, not too unpleasant at first, and then we turned Reverend Mother onto her back and the rankness struck us-a terrible midday blast of spoiled pork and excrement.

I held my breath and tried to stop myself from retching, but it was no use. My eyes streamed; I was all sweat. Germaine had brought up a fold of her wimple to cover her mouth, but it was not enough, and I could see distress in her face as she lifted the body to shoulder height.

From a distance I was aware of Mère Isabelle watching us, a plain white handkerchief held to her nostrils. I cannot say for sure whether she was smiling, but her eyes seemed unusually bright, her face flushed with something more than the heat.

I think it was satisfaction.

We buried Reverend Mother in the ossuary at the back of the crypt, inside one of the many narrow grave-housings left behind by the black friars. They look something like our stone bread ovens, each with a slab to cover the entrance, and some bear numbers, names, inscriptions in Latin. I noticed that some had been broken open, and I tried not to look too closely at these. There was dust and sand everywhere, and a cold, damp smell. I knew Mère Marie wouldn’t have cared for it at all, but that was no longer my concern.

After the short ceremony the sisters went up to the chapel while I remained to seal the vault. A candle rested on the earth floor to light my work: there was a bucket of mortar and a trowel at my side. Above me I could hear the sisters singing a hymn. I was beginning to feel a little lightheaded; my sleepless nights, the noon heat, the stench, the sudden cold of the crypt, all combined with the day’s fasting to create a kind of dark stupor. I reached for the trowel but it fell from my hand, and I realized I was close to fainting. I leaned my face against the wall for support, smelling saltpeter and porous stone, and for a second I was in Épinal again, and I grew cold with sudden fear.

At that moment, a draft from the vaults snuffed the candle, leaving me in darkness. Now panic bloomed horribly inside me. I had to get out. I could feel the dark pushing at my back, the dead nun grinning from her cell and the other dead ones, the black friars, sly in their dust, reaching out with withered fingers…I had to get out!

I took a shaky step in the darkness and knocked over the bucket of mortar. The ossuary seemed to yawn around me; I could no longer touch the walls. I felt a mad urge to laugh, to scream, to laugh. I had to get out! I fell, with an immense clatter, striking my head against an angle of stone so that I lay half-dazed, dark roses blossoming behind my eyelids. The litany stopped dead.

Alfonsine was the first to reach me. By that time the unaccustomed panic had left me and I was sitting up, still dazed, my hand to my bruised temple. The light from her candle revealed how very small the crypt was after all, little bigger than a cupboard with its neat cells and low vaulting, killing the illusion of space. Her face was all eyes.

“Soeur Auguste?” Her voice was sharp. “Soeur Auguste, are you all right?” In her eagerness she had forgotten our penance of silence.

I must have been less recovered than I thought. For a moment the name by which she had addressed me meant nothing. Even her face meant nothing, the features behind the smear of candlelight those of a stranger.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“She doesn’t know me!” The voice was unpleasantly shrill. “Soeur Auguste, don’t move. Help will be here in a moment.”

“It’s all right, Alfonsine,” I said. The name had returned to me as rapidly as it had fled, and with it the wariness of years. “I must have tripped on a broken slab. The candle went out. I was stunned for a moment.”

But my words came too late. The upheavals of the last few days, the darkness of the ossuary, the exhumation, the ceremony, and now this new excitement-Alfonsine had always been more susceptible to these things than the rest of us. Besides which, Soeur Marguerite had stolen the scene the day before, with her visions of demons…

“Did you feel that?” hissed Alfonsine.

“Feel what?”

“Shh!” She lowered her voice to a stage whisper. “Like a cold wind.”

“I felt nothing.” I got to my feet with difficulty. “Here. Give me your arm.”

She flinched at my touch. “You were down there a long time. What happened?”

“Nothing. I told you. I felt faint.”

“You didn’t feel…a presence?”

“No.” I could see a number of sisters peering down into the crypt, their faces blurred in the uncertain light. Alfonsine’s fingers were cold in mine. Her eyes seemed fixed upon a point just behind me. With a sinking heart, I recognized the signs. “Look, Alfonsine…,” I began.

“I felt it.” She was beginning to tremble. “It went right through me. And it was cold. Cold!”

“All right.” I agreed only to force her into motion. “Maybe there was something. It doesn’t matter. Now move!”

I had checked her excitement. She shot me a resentful look and I felt a sudden prick of mirth. Poor Alfonsine. It was cruel to rob her of her moment. Since the death of the Reverend Mother she has seemed more alive than at any time within the past five years. It’s the theater of it all that fires her-the tearing of hair, the penances, the public confessions. But for every performance there is a price to pay. She coughs more often than ever, her eyes are feverish, and she has been sleeping almost as badly as I do myself. I hear her in the cubicle next to mine, whispering with the rhythms of prayer or cursing, sometimes whimpering and crying out but mostly the same soft repetition, like a litany recited so often that the words have lost almost all their original meaning.

Mon père…Mon père…

I almost had to carry her back up the steps of the ossuary.

Suddenly she stiffened. “Holy Mother! The silence! The penance!” I shushed her furiously. But it was too late. There were sisters all about us now, unsure whether or not to address us. LeMerle kept his distance. This performance was for his benefit, and he knew it. Mère Isabelle stood next to him, watching us with lips slightly parted. This was more like it, I thought fiercely. This was what she had hoped for.

“Ma mère,” brayed Alfonsine, falling to her knees on the floor of the transept. “Ma mère, I am sorry. Give me another penance, a hundred penances if you must, but please forgive me!”

“What happened?” snapped Isabelle. “What did Soeur Auguste say to make you defy your vow of silence?”

“Mother of God!” Alfonsine was stalling for time. I could hear it in her voice as she became aware of her audience. “I felt in the crypt, ma mère! We both felt it! We felt its icy breath!” Her own skin was icy as if in response. I could almost feel myself growing cold in sympathy.

“What did you feel?”

“It’s nothing.” The last thing I wanted was to draw unwelcome attention to myself, but I could not allow this to pass. “A draft from the undercroft, that was all. Her nerves are disordered. She’s always-”

“Silence!” snapped Isabelle. She turned again to Alfonsine, whispered: “What did you feel?”

“The demon, ma mère. I felt its presence like a cold wind.” Alfonsine looked at me, and I thought I saw satisfaction in her face. “A cold wind.”

Isabelle turned to me, and I shrugged.

“A draft from the undercroft,” I said again. “It blew out my candle.”

“I know what I felt!” Alfonsine was shaking again. “And you felt it too, Auguste! You told me so yourself!” Her face convulsed and she coughed twice. “It blew into me, I tell you, the demon came right into me and-” She was choking now, clawing at her throat. “It’s still here!” I heard her cry. “It’s still here!” Then she sank, convulsing, to the floor.

“Hold her!” cried Mère Isabelle, losing some of her composure.

But Alfonsine would not be held. She bit, spat, shrieked, kicked her legs immodestly, the attack redoubling whenever I came close. It took three of us-Germaine, Marguerite, and a deaf nun called Soeur Clothilde-to hold her, to pry open her mouth to stop her from swallowing her tongue, and even then she continued to scream until finally Père Colombin himself came to bless her, and she lay rigid and still against him.

At that point Isabelle turned on me. “What did she mean, it’s still here?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“What happened in the crypt?”

“My candle blew out. I tripped and fell.”

“What about Soeur Alfonsine?”

“I don’t know.”

“She says you do.”

“I can’t help that,” I said. “She makes things up. She likes the attention. Ask anyone.”

But Isabelle was far from satisfied. “She was trying to tell me something,” she persisted. “You stopped her. Now what was she-”

“For God’s sake, can’t this wait?” I had almost forgotten LeMerle, artfully positioned in a chance shaft of sunlight, with Soeur Alfonsine gasping like a beached fish in his arms. “For the moment we must take this poor woman to the infirmary. I presume I have your authority to lift her penance?” Mère Isabelle hesitated, still looking at me. “Or perhaps you would prefer to discuss the matter in your own good time?”

Isabelle flushed slightly. “The matter must be investigated and dealt with,” she said.

“Of course. When Soeur Alfonsine is in a condition to speak.”

“And Soeur Auguste?”

“Maybe tomorrow.”

“But mon père…”

“By Chapter tomorrow we will know more. I’m sure you agree that it would be unseemly to act in haste.”

There was a long pause. “So be it. Tomorrow, then. At Chapter.”

I looked at him then, to find his eyes on me again, bright and troubling. For a fleeting moment I even wondered whether he had known what was going to happen in the crypt, had arranged it in some way in order to bring me further into his power…I would have believed almost anything of him then. He was uncanny. And he knew me too well.

Well, whether he had planned it or not, this had been a demonstration. LeMerle had shown me that without him I was helpless, my safety as perilous as a frayed rope. Like it or not, I needed his help. And the Blackbird, I knew of old, never sold his favors cheap.

19

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.“

At last. Confession. How good it feels to hold her captive like this, my wild one, my bird of prey. I can feel her eyes on me from behind the grille, and for a troubling moment I am the one who is caged. It is a curious sensation; I can hear her quickened breathing, sense the enormous effort of will that keeps her voice level as she intones the ritual words. Light from the window above us filters dimly into the confessional, painting her face with a harlequin pattern of rose and black squares.

“Well, if it isn’t my Ailée, giving up her wings for whiter ones in heaven.”

I am unused to such intimacies as this, the casual exposure of the confessional. It makes me impatient-sends my mind wandering down overgrown paths best left forgotten. Perhaps she knows it; her silence is that of a confessor, and not a penitent. I can feel it, drawing out reckless words I did not intend to speak.

“I suppose you still hold that business against me.” Silence. “That business at Épinal.”

She has withdrawn her face from the grille and the darkness speaks for her, blank and unremitting. I can feel her eyes on me, like irons. For thirty seconds I feel their heat. Then she folds, as I knew she would.

“I want my daughter.”

Good. It really is a weakness in her game; she’s lucky we’re not playing for money. “I find myself obliged to stay here for a while,” I tell her. “I can’t risk you leaving.”

“Why not?” There is a savage note in her voice now, and I revel in it. I can deal with her anger. I can use it. Gently I feed the flame.

“You’ll have to trust me. I haven’t betrayed you, have I?”

Silence. I know she is thinking of Épinal.

Stubbornly: “I want Fleur.”

“Is that her name? You could see her every day. Would you like that?” Slyly: “She must be missing her mother. Poor thing.”

She flinches then-and the game is mine. “What do you want, LeMerle?”

“Your silence. Your loyalty.”

That sound was too harsh to be laughter. “Are you mad? I have to get away from here. You’ve seen to that already.”

“Impossible. I can’t have you spoiling things.”

“Spoiling what?” Too fast, LeMerle. Too fast. “There’s no wealth here for you. What’s your game?”

Oh, Juliette. If only I could tell you. I’m sure you’d appreciate it. You’re the only one who would. “Later, little bird. Later. Come to my cottage tonight, after Compline. Can you get out of the dorter without being heard?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Till then, Juliette.”

“What about Fleur?”

“Till then.”

She came to me just after midnight. I was sitting at my desk with my copy of Aristotle’s Politics, when I heard the door open with a soft click. The glow from the single candle caught her shift and the copper-gilt of her cropped hair.

“Juliette.”

She had discarded her habit and wimple. Left them in the dorter, no doubt, to avoid arousing suspicion. With her hair cut short she looked like a beautiful boy. The next time we dance the classics I’ll cast her as Ganymede or Hyacinthus. She neither spoke nor smiled, and the cold draft from the open doorway swept between her ankles unnoticed.

“Come in.” I put down my book and drew up a chair, which she ignored.

“I would have thought it more appropriate for you to study some improving work,” she said. “Machiavelli, perhaps, or Rabelais. Isn’t Do what thou wilt your motto now?”

“It beats Thy will be done,” I said, grinning. “Besides, since when were you in any position to preach morality? You’re as much of an impostor as I am.”

“I don’t deny it,” she said. “But whatever else I may have done, I always stayed true to myself. And I’ve never betrayed a friend.”

With an effort, I bit back a retort. She had touched me on the raw. It was a knack she’d always had. “Please, Juliette,” I said. “Must we be enemies? Here.” I indicated a cut-crystal bottle on the bookcase beside the desk. “A glass of Madeira.”

She shook her head.

“Food, then. Fruit and honey cake.”

Silence. I knew she had spent the day in fasting, but she seemed unmoved. Her face was masklike, perfect. Only her eyes blazed. I put out my hand to touch her face. I never could resist playing with fire. Even as a child it was the dangerous games that appealed to me-walking the tightrope with a noose about my neck, firing wasps’ nests, juggling knives, swimming the rapids. Le Borgne called it chasing tigers, and scorned me for it. But if there’s no risk from the quarry, then where’s the joy of the chase?

“You haven’t changed,” I said, smiling. “One false move and you’d take out my eyes. Admit it.”

“Get on with it, LeMerle.”

Her skin was smooth beneath my palm. From her cropped hair I could smell the distant fragrance of lavender. I allowed my fingers to move down onto her bare shoulder.

“Is that it?” she said contemptuously. “Is that what you wanted?”

Angrily I withdrew my hand. “Still so suspicious, Juliette. Don’t you realize what I have at stake here? This is no ordinary game. It’s a scheme of such daring and ambition that even I-” She gave a sigh, stifling a yawn beneath her fingers. I paused, stung. “I see you find my explanation tedious.”

“Not at all.” Her inflection was a precise parody of my own. “But it’s late. And I want my daughter.”

“The old Juliette would have understood.”

“The old Juliette died in Épinal.”

That hurt, although I had expected it. “You know nothing about what happened in Épinal. For all you know I might be completely innocent.”

Indifferently: “As you say.”

“What, did you think I was a saint?” There was an edge to my voice that I could not subdue. “I knew you’d manage to get out of it; if you hadn’t, I’d have thought of something. Some kind of scheme.” She waited politely, eyes averted, one foot turned out in a dancer’s gesture. “They were too close, damn you. I’d tricked them once already, and now they were onto me. I could feel it: my luck was running out. I was afraid. And the dwarf knew it. It was Le Borgne who set the dogs on me, Juliette. It could only have been him. In any case he was ready enough to trade your necks for his own, the bastard, and to deal me a foul blow with a poisoned knife. What, did you think I’d deserted you? I would have come back for you if I’d been able. As it was I was lying sick and wounded in a ditch for days after your escape. You felt a little pique, perhaps. A little anger. But don’t say you needed me. You never did.”

I must have sounded convincing-in fact, I almost convinced myself. But her voice betrayed nothing as she repeated: “I want Fleur.”

Once more I bit down upon my anger. It tasted metallic, like a bad coin. “Please, Juliette. I’ve already told you. I can let you see Fleur tomorrow. Not to bring her back, not yet, in any case, but I can arrange it. All I ask in return is a truce. And a favor. A little favor.”

She stepped toward me then, and put her hands on my shoulders. Again I caught the scent of lavender from the folds of her shift.

“No, not that.”

“What, then?”

“A joke. A practical joke. You’ll enjoy it.”

She hesitated. “Why?” she said at last. “What are you doing here? What could we possibly have that would interest you?”

I laughed. “A moment ago you didn’t care.”

“I don’t. I want my daughter.”

“Well, then. Why ask?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

You can’t fool me, Juliette. You care about these poor toadstools, cowering in their darkness. They are your family now, as once we were in the Théâtre des Cieux. I have to say it’s a poor substitute, but each to his own. “Call it a game, if you like,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to play the priest. Now take these.” I handed her the tablets of dye. “Don’t get any of the color on your hands.”

She looked at me with suspicion. “What do you want me to do with it?”

I told her.

“And then I can see Fleur?”

“First thing in the morning.” Suddenly I wanted her to leave. I was tired and my head had begun to ache.

“You’re sure this is harmless? It won’t hurt anyone?”

“Of course not.” Well, not exactly.

She looked again at the tablets in her hand. “And it’s just this-little thing.”

I nodded.

“I want to hear you say it, LeMerle.”

I knew that she wanted to believe me. It’s in her nature to do so, as it is in mine to deceive. Blame God for making me this way. I made my voice gentle as I put my arm around her shoulders, and this time she did not flinch.

“Trust me, Juliette,” I murmured.

Till tomorrow.

20

I made my way back to the Abbey in haste. It was not truly dark; a sliver of moon lit the clear sky, and the stars were bright enough to cast shadows on the road beyond the gatehouse. In the distance, just above the dim line of the sea I could see a bank of clouds darker than the sky. Rain, perhaps. As I entered the dorter, I strained my ears for sounds of wakeful breathing, but heard nothing.

In five years I have become familiar with the sounds of my neighbors’ breathing; I know the casual sprawl of their limbs beneath the rough blankets, their nocturnal habits, the sighs and whimperings of their dreams. I passed Soeur Tomasine, first by the door, snoring in her high, whistling manner. Then Soeur Bénédicte, always on her face with her arms outstretched. Then Piété, prim in sleep as she is in waking; then Germaine, Clémente, and Marguerite. I needed all my dancer’s agility to pass without alerting her; even so she stirred as I passed, one hand outflung in grasping, blind entreaty. Then came Alfonsine’s empty cubicle, and opposite that, Antoine, hands folded demurely on her breast. Her breathing was light, effortless. Was she awake? She gave no sign of it. And yet she seemed too still, too quiet, her limbs arranged with more dignity and grace than sleep usually affords.

It could not be helped. If she was awake, I could only hope that she suspected nothing. I slid into my own bed, the hiss of my skin against the blanket very loud among the sounds of breathing. As I turned to the wall to sleep I heard Antoine give a sharp snore and felt some of my fear slip away, but even as it did so, it occurred to me that the sound rang false, too studied, too perfect in its timing. Resolutely I closed my eyes. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but Fleur. Not Antoine, not Alfonsine-not even LeMerle, alone now in his tiny study surrounded by books. And yet it was LeMerle, and not my daughter, who followed me into my dreams. I cared nothing for his games, I told myself as sleep closed over me. All the same I dreamed of him, standing on the far bank of a flood-gorged river with his arms outstretched, calling out to me above the roar of the water in words I could never quite hear.

I awoke with tears on my face. The bell for Vigils was ringing and Soeur Marguerite was standing at the foot of my bed with a cresset in one uplifted hand. I muttered the customary Praise be! and rose in haste, feeling between my mattress and the bed for the tablets of dye LeMerle had given me, wrapped in a scrap of cloth so that my fingers should show no telltale stains. It would be easy, I knew, to dispose of the tablets as instructed. That done, I would see my daughter.

All the same I hesitated. I lifted the tiny package and smelt it. It had a resinous, sweetish scent and I could detect the smell of gum arabic and the scarlet pigment Giordano called dragon’s blood through the weave. There was something else too: something spicy like ginger or aniseed. Harmless, he had promised.

LeMerle was not at Vigils, nor at Matins, nor Prime. Eventually he made his appearance at Chapter but said that he needed to attend to some business in Barbâtre, and selected two sisters-at random, or so it seemed-to assist him. I was one. Antoine was the other.

As Père Colombin addressed the Chapter and Antoine saw to the hens and ducks in the barnyard, I fetched LeMerle’s horse for the journey into Barbâtre. Antoine and I would walk, of course, but the new confessor would ride as befitted his noble status. I brushed the animal’s dappled flanks and strapped on the saddle whilst Antoine fed the other beasts-a mule, two ponies, and half a dozen cows-from the bins of hay at the back of the barn. It was more than an hour before LeMerle joined us, and when he returned I saw he had put aside his clerical robe in favor of the breeches and boots more suited to riding. He wore a wide-brimmed hat to protect his eyes from the sun, and thus clad he looked so like the Blackbird of the old days that my heart twisted.

It was market day, and he explained as we set off that he wanted us to arrange some food purchases and other errands on his behalf. Antoine’s eyes lit up as he mentioned the market and I kept mine cautiously lowered. I wondered what favor Antoine had performed-or might be called upon to perform-in return for this outing, or whether she had indeed been a random choice. Perhaps it simply amused him to see the fat nun sweat and struggle in the dust at his horse’s flanks. It didn’t matter in either case. Soon I would see Fleur.

We walked more slowly than my racing heart would have wished, and even so Antoine suffered from the heat. I was more used to walking, and although I was carrying a large basket of potatoes on my back for sale at the market, I felt no fatigue. The sun was hot and high as we reached Barbâtre, and the harbor and the square beyond were already thronged with market-goers. The traders come from everywhere on the island, sometimes even from the mainland if the causeway is open, and today it was; in the harbor the tide was at its lowest, and the place was riotous with people.

As soon as we entered the main street we tethered the horse next to a drinking trough. Antoine went off, basket in hand, on her errand, and I followed LeMerle into the crowd.

The market had been in progress for some time. I could smell roasting meats and pastries, hay, fish, leatherwork, and the sharp scent of fresh dung. A cart half blocked the passage while two men unloaded cases of chickens onto the road. Fishermen unloaded lobster pots and cases of fish from their craft. A group of women were at work with the fishing nets, picking them clean of seaweed and retying broken mesh. Children straddled the wall of the churchyard and gawked at passersby. The air was hot with stench and crackling with flies. The noise was overwhelming. After five years of virtual seclusion I had grown unused to this press of people, these cries, these smells. There were too many people; too many criers and peddlers and gossips and pamphleteers. A one-legged man behind a table stacked with tomatoes and onions and glossy aubergines winked and made a bawdy comment as I passed. Customers held their noses as they queued at a butcher’s stall, purple with flies and black with old blood. A beggar with no legs and only one arm sat on a ragged blanket; opposite him a piper played, while a little girl in a shabby overall sold packets of herb salt from the back of a small brown goat. Old women seated in a close circle made lace with incredible deftness, their gray heads almost touching over the needlework as their withered fingers danced and twisted. What pickpockets they would have made! I lost my bearings in the throng and paused at a vendor of printed sheets, selling illustrated accounts of the execution of François Ravaillac, Henri’s murderer. A fat surly woman with a tray of pies attempted to push past me. One of the pies fell to the ground, splitting open in a startling burst of red fruit. The fat woman turned upon me, squealing her displeasure, and I hurried on, my face burning.

It was then that I saw Fleur. Amazing that I had not noticed her before. Not ten feet away from me, head slightly averted, a grubby cap covering her curls and an apron, much too large for her, tied around her waist. Her face was set in an expression of childish disgust, and her hands and arms were stained with the leavings from the fish cart behind which she stood. My first instinct was to call her name, to run to her and take her in my arms, but caution halted me. Instead I looked at LeMerle, who had reappeared at my side and was watching me closely. “What’s this?” I said.

He shrugged. “You asked to see her, didn’t you?”

There was a drab-looking woman standing beside Fleur. She too wore an apron and false sleeves over her own to protect them from the stinking merchandise on display. As I watched, a woman pointed out the fish she wanted and the drab woman handed it to Fleur to gut. Her face twisted as she slid the short blade into the creature’s belly, but I was surprised at my daughter’s deftness with the unaccustomed task. There was a bandage, now slick with a fishy residue, on her hand. Perhaps she had not always been so deft.

“For God’s sake, she’s five years old! What business have they to make her do that kind of work?”

LeMerle shook his head. “Be reasonable. The child has to earn her keep. They have a large family. An extra mouth to feed is no little thing for a fisherman.”

A fisherman! So Antoine had been right about that. I looked at the woman, trying to determine whether or not I had seen her before. She could have been from Noirs Moustiers, I supposed; she had that look. On the other hand, she could easily be from Pornic or Fromentine, even maybe from Le Devin or one of the smaller islands.

LeMerle saw me watching. “Don’t concern yourself,” he said dryly. “She’s being well looked after.”

“Where?”

“Trust me.”

I did not reply. My eyes were already taking in every detail of my daughter’s transformation, each one bringing with it a new kind of pain. Her pinched cheeks, their roses gone. Her lank hair under the ugly cap. Her dress, not the one she wore at the abbey but some other child’s castoff of prickly brown wool. And her face: the face of a child with no mother.

I turned back to LeMerle. “What do you want?”

“I told you. Your silence. Your loyalty.”

“You have it. I promise.” My voice was rising and I was powerless to stop it. “I promised last night.”

“You didn’t mean it last night,” he said. “You do now.”

“I want to talk to her. I want to take her back!”

“I can’t allow that, I’m afraid. Not yet, anyway. Not until I’m certain you won’t just take the child and disappear.” He must have seen murder in my eyes then, because he smiled. “And in case you were wondering, there are precise instructions to be carried out in case of any misfortune happening to me,” he said. “Very precise instructions.”

I sheathed my gaze with an effort. “Let me talk to her, then. Just for a moment. Please, Guy.”

It was harder than I had expected. LeMerle had told me that if I caused any mischief or suspicion, then there might be no further opportunities to see Fleur. But I had to take the risk. I moved slowly, curbing my impatience, through the crowd to the fish cart. I was vaguely aware of the women on either side of me, one demanding fifty red mullet, the other exchanging recipes with the fishwife. At my back, more customers jostled. Fleur lifted her eyes to mine and for a moment I thought she had not recognized me. Then her face lit up.

“Shh.” I whispered. “Don’t say anything.”

Fleur looked puzzled but, to my relief, nodded.

“Listen to me,” I said in the same low voice. “I don’t have much time.”

As if to confirm this, the fishwife shot a suspicious gaze in my direction before returning to the order of mullet. I gave a silent prayer of thanks for the woman who wished to buy such an unusually large quantity of fish.

“Have you brought Mouche?” Fleur’s voice was tiny. “Have you come to take me home?”

“Not yet.” Her small face was gray with woe, and again I fought the urge to take her in my arms. “Listen, Fleur. Where are they keeping you? A cottage? A caravan? A farm?”

Fleur glanced at the fisherman’s wife. “A cottage. With children and dogs.”

“Did you cross the causeway?”

“Excuse me.” A big woman pushed between us, stretching out her arms for a packet of fish. I stepped sideways into a line of customers; someone called out in annoyance.

“Hurry up, Sister! Some of us have families to feed!”

“Fleur. Listen. Is it on the mainland? Is it over the causeway?”

From behind the large woman, Fleur nodded. Then, infuriatingly, she shook her head. Someone stepped into the space between us, and once again my daughter was lost to sight.

“Fleur!” I was almost weeping with frustration. The large woman was wedged beside me; the crowd was pushing at my back, and the customer who had called out had begun a noisy diatribe on people who stood around gossiping in queues. “Sweetheart. Did you go over the causeway?”

For a second, then, I thought she would tell me. Puzzled, she seemed to be trying to articulate or remember something, to give me some clue that would reveal to me where she was being kept. Was it the word causeway that she did not understand? Had she been taken to the mainland in a boat?

Then the woman with the mullet turned to face me, and I knew my chance to discover the truth was over. She looked at me and smiled, holding out her basket of fish to me in her meaty red arms. “What do you think?” she said. “Will it do for tonight’s dinner?”

It was Antoine.

The journey home was difficult. I carried the fish on my back as I had the potatoes, the stench of it growing in the sun in spite of the quantities of seaweed intended to keep it cool. The load was heavy, too, fishy water dripping through the weave of the basket onto my shoulders and into my hair, soaking my habit with brine. Antoine was in a cheery mood and talked incessantly of what she had done at the market, of the gossip she had heard, the sights she had seen, the news she had exchanged. A peddler from the mainland had brought news of a group immolation in honor of Christina Mirabilis, a woman had been hanged in Angers for masquerading as a man, and there were rumors that a man from Le Devin had caught a fish with a head at both ends-a sure sign of disaster to come. She did not mention Fleur, and for that, if nothing else, I was grateful. However, I knew that she had seen her. I could only hope that she would hold her tongue.

We followed the coastal path back to the abbey. It was a longer route, but LeMerle insisted upon it-after all, he was riding, and the extra mile or so meant nothing to him. It had been one of my favorite walks in happier times, passing by the causeway and along the dunes, but laden as I was, lurching through the soft sand with the fish basket, I found little enjoyment in it. LeMerle, on the other hand, seemed to derive great pleasure from watching the sea and asked a number of questions about the tides and the crossing times from the mainland, which I ignored, but which Antoine seemed more than happy to answer.

It was midafternoon when we reached the abbey, by which time I was exhausted, half-blind from squinting at the sun, and heartily sick of the smell of fish. With relief I delivered the stinking basket to the kitchens, then, my head still ringing from the heat and my throat parched, I made my way across the outer courtyard toward the well. I was about to throw down the pan for the water when I heard a cry from behind me; turning, I saw Alfonsine.

She seemed fully recovered from the previous day’s attack; her eyes were bright and her cheeks were flushed with excitement as she ran toward me. “For God’s sake, don’t touch that water!” she panted. “Don’t you know what’s happened?”

I blinked at her. I had completely forgotten LeMerle’s tablets of dye, and the instructions he had given me for their use. My daughter’s face seemed stamped across everything I saw, like the afterimage one gets from looking too long at the sun.

“The well, God save us, the well!” cried Alfonsine impatiently. “Soeur Tomasine went down to fetch water for the cook pots and the water had turned to blood! Mère Isabelle has forbidden anyone to use it.”

“Blood?” I repeated.

“It’s a sign,” said Alfonsine. “It’s a judgment on us for burying poor Mère Marie in the potato patch.”

In spite of my weariness, I tried not to smile. “Perhaps it’s a vein of iron oxide in the sand,” I suggested. “Or a layer of red clay.”

Alfonsine shook her head contemptuously. “I should have known you’d say something like that,” she said. “Anyone would think you didn’t believe in the devil, the way you always try to find reasons for everything.”

No, it was demonic influence, she was sure of it. Mère Isabelle was sure of it, and to such an extent that the new abbess had ordered Père Colombin to bless the well and the entire abbey grounds if necessary. Alfonsine felt unclean too, she said, and would not rest easy until Père Colombin had examined her minutely to ensure that no taint remained in her. Following this pronouncement, Soeur Marguerite had developed a tic in her left leg, which the new confessor had also promised to investigate. If this continued, I told myself, the place would soon be closer to an asylum than an abbey.

“What about the water?” I asked. “What are we going to do?”

Her face lit. “A miracle! A carter arrived near midday with a delivery of twenty-five barrels of ale. A present, he said, for the new abbess. While the new well is being dug, no one will go thirsty.”

That evening we dined on bread, ale, and mullet. The food was good, but I had little appetite. Something was wrong-in the layout of the tables, the silence of the assembly, the look of the food on our plates-which made me uneasy. When we danced for King Henri at the Palais-Royal and were led through his Hall of Mirrors I had the same sense of things reversed, slyly reflecting an altered truth, though perhaps the difference was in my mind only.

Mère Isabelle said grace, and after that there was no conversation-no sound at all, in fact, but for Rosamonde’s toothless gums sucking noisily at her food, the nervous tapping of Marguerite’s left foot and the occasional tick of cutlery. I motioned to Soeur Antoine that she should take from my plate what I did not eat, and she did so with gleeful deftness, her small weak eyes bright with greed. She glanced at me several times as she ate, and I wondered whether she took the extra food as payment for keeping silent about Fleur. I left her most of the ale too, eating nothing but the bread. The smell of fish, even cooked, made my stomach turn.

Perhaps it was that, or worry over Fleur, that made me slow this evening, for I had been at table for ten minutes or longer when I realized the source of my disquiet. Perette was not at her usual place among the novices. LeMerle too was absent, though I had not expected to see him. But I wondered where Perette could be. The last time I remembered seeing her was at the funeral yesterday, I realized; since then, nowhere-be it among the cloisters or in the performance of my duties in the bakehouse, or later at Sext in the church, or at Chapter, or now at dinner-nowhere had I glimpsed my friend.

Guilt at my disloyalty burned my cheeks. Since Fleur’s disappearance I had paid little attention to Perette-in fact I had barely noticed her. She might be ill-in a way I hoped she was. That, at least, would explain her absence. But my heart told me she was not. What plans he might have for her, I could not guess; she was too young for his taste, and too much of a child to be of any use to him, but all the same, I knew. Perette was with LeMerle.

21

Well, it’s a beginning. Act one, if you like, of a five-act tragicomedy. The main roles are already established-noble hero, beautiful heroine, comic relief, and a chorus of virgins in the style of the ancients, all in their proper places-except for the villain, who doubtless will make his appearance in due course.

The blood in the well was a poetic touch. Now everyone’s out looking for omens and prodigies-birds flying north, double-yolked eggs, strange smells, unexpected drafts-all are grist to the mill. The irony is that I barely have to do anything to help it along; the sisters, cloistered for so long with nothing to relieve the boredom, will see-with a little encouragement-precisely what I want them to see.

Soeur Antoine has proved invaluable to me during the past few days. Easily bought-for an apple, a pasty, or even a kind word-from her I hear the abbey’s gossip, its little secrets. It was Antoine, acting on my instructions, who caught the six black cats and let them loose around the abbey, where they wrought havoc in the dairy and brought bad luck to no fewer than forty-two nuns who inadvertently crossed their paths. She too it was who found the monstrous potato shaped like the devil’s horns, and served it to Mère Isabelle at dinner; and who frightened Soeur Marguerite into a spasm by hiding frogs in the meal bin. Her own little secret-that of her child and its untimely death-I know from Soeur Clémente, who scorns the fat nun and seeks to be my favorite. Of course she is not, but she too is easily flattered, and to tell the truth, I prefer her to Alfonsine-breastless as the wooden panels in the chapel-or Marguerite, dry as kindling and riddled with tics and twitches.

Soeur Anne is less cooperative. A pity, that: for there are distinct advantages in having an accomplice who will not speak, and if I read the signs correctly, then the wild girl is brighter than she looks. As easy to train as a good dog, in any case, or even a monkey. And Juliette cares for her, of course-an added bonus in case my hold on the child should somehow slip.

Ah, Juliette. My Winged One remains unamused at my little jokes, though she is secretly exasperated at the commotion they have caused. That’s like her; a lifetime of spells and cantrips has done little to alter her essential practicality. I knew she would not be fooled by tricks and vapors: but now she is as responsible for the confusion as I am myself, and will not betray me. I am tempted, sorely tempted, to take her into my confidence. But I have taken enough risks already. Besides, she has a regrettable tendency toward loyalty, and if she knew what I was planning, she would probably try to stop me. No, my dear; the last thing I need with me on this trip is a conscience.

Today I rode out to Barbâtre and spent most of the afternoon at the causeway watching the tides. It is a pastime that never fails to calm my thoughts, as well as providing a welcome respite from the abbey and the increasing demands of the good sisters. How can they bear it? To be caged like chickens, pecking over and over the same little backyard? For myself, I have never been able to bear enclosed spaces; I need air, sky, roads rushing away in every direction. Besides, I have letters to send that are best delivered without my Isabelle’s knowledge; a week’s ride should do it, payment on reply. The tide takes eleven hours to turn around-a fact that few islanders have bothered to note, even though it is useful knowledge-leaving the causeway clear for just under three hours every time. Some have written that the moon draws the tide, as some heretics whisper the sun draws the earth; certainly, the tide comes higher at full moon, and shows less movement with the new. As a boy I was repeatedly punished for my interest in such matters-idle curiosity, they called it, presumably to distinguish it from the industrious apathy of my devout tutors-but they never quite cured me of my inquiring tendency. Call me perverse, but God made it thus never seemed a satisfactory enough explanation to me.

22

Today and yesterday we spent in a fury of activity. Prayers in church have been officially suspended as LeMerle deals with the special services, though we had Vigils and Lauds as usual. I have been set to digging the new well with Soeur Germaine, and as a result we are excused from all but the most necessary of duties. Perette is still absent, but no one talks of her disappearance, and something prevents me from asking too many questions and of course I dare not speak of it to LeMerle. As for the others, they talk of nothing now but devils and curses. Every book in the scriptorium has been consulted; every old wives’ tale brought out. Piété remembers a man in her village, years ago, who was bewitched to death by bleeding. Marguerite speaks of the sea of blood in Revelation, and swears the Apocalypse is at hand. Alfonsine recalls a beggar who may have muttered an incantation against her when she refused to give him money, and fears she may have been cursed. Tomasine suggests a charm of rowan berries and scarlet thread. It would have been funny if it had not also been a little frightening: although there had been no official acknowledgment of our island saint by the new abbess and her confessor, by noon there must have been fifty tapers burning under the statue of Marie-de-la-mer, plus a little pile of offerings at her feet-mostly flowers, herbs, and pieces of fruit-and the air was blue with incense.

Mère Isabelle was furious. “You have no business trying to take matters into your own hands!” she snapped when Bénédicte protested that we were only trying to help. “It is completely irregular to ask for the intervention of the saint-if indeed she is a saint-in a situation such as this. As for these”-she gestured at the offerings-“they are tantamount to paganism, and I shall have them removed.”

Meanwhile, LeMerle was everywhere. Throughout the morning I heard his voice ringing across the courtyard, calling, hectoring, encouraging…instructions to workmen here-he has three of them on the church roof to inspect the damage and to estimate the cost of repairs-there to a carter with a delivery of food, sacks of flour and grain, green and white cabbages from the market, a case of pullets for breeding. Soeur Marguerite is now in charge of supplies as well as the cooking, and gloats visibly over Antoine’s envious expression. I noticed that she gloats over LeMerle too, pausing frequently to ask his opinion on the best way to store grain, the drying of herbs, and whether the consumption of fish counts as fasting.

Then came the exorcism at the well, with prayers and incantations before the cover was fastened shut with wattle and mortar. Then to the church again, and talk of roofing and stacks and arch supports. Then back to the gatehouse and Isabelle, who follows him everywhere like a small, sullen wraith.

In the terrible heat, work on the well was slow and laborious, and by midmorning my habit was caked with the yellow clay that forms a thick stratum below the surface sand. This clay enables the water that filters from beneath from evaporating. Penetrate it, and the water will ooze out, brackish at first but becoming clearer and sweeter as the well fills. It is seawater, I know, its salt content sifted out by the banks of fine sand upon which the island sits. We are halfway there now, and we save the clay carefully for Soeur Bénédicte, the abbey’s potter, who will use it to make the bowls and cups we use in the refectory.

Midday came and went. As manual workers, Germaine and I lunched on meat and ale-although under Mère Isabelle’s new order our main meal is now just after Sext, with the midday meal reduced to a frugal handful of black bread and salt-but even so I was exhausted, my hands puckered from the brackish water, my eyes raw. My feet were peeling painfully, and stones dug into the arch of my instep as I trod blindly around the darkening hole. The water was deeper now, the yellow clay giving place to a black ooze in which fragments of mica sparkle. Soeur Germaine pulled the buckets of ooze into the sunlight, where they would be used on the vegetable beds, for this evil-smelling stuff is barely salty at all and rich as alluvial soil.

As cool evening fell and the light began to fail, I climbed out of the well, helped by Soeur Germaine. She too was mud spattered, but I was many times caked with filth, my hair stiff with it in spite of a rag tied around my head, my face smeared like a savage’s.

“The water is good here,” I told her. “I tasted it.”

Germaine nodded. Never a woman of many words, she has been almost entirely silent since the new abbess’s arrival. It was strange too, I noticed, to see her without Clémente at her side. Perhaps they had quarreled, I told myself, for in the old days they had been inseparable. It is a bitter thought that barely two weeks after the death of Reverend Mother, I can already think of my previous life here as the old days.

“We’ll have to shore up the sides,” I told Germaine. “The clay seeps and taints the water. Wood, then stone and mortar, are the only things that can keep it out.”

She gave me a sour look that reminded me of Le Borgne. “Quite the engineer, aren’t you?” she said. “Well, if you think you can gain favor this way, you’re likely to be disappointed. You’d do better having a fit in church, or tattling on someone in Confession, or better still, reporting a monstrous potato, or thirteen magpies in a field-”

I looked at her in surprise.

“Well, that’s what everyone wants, isn’t it?” said Germaine. “All this talk-this nonsense about devils and curses. That’s what she wants to hear, and that’s what they give her.”

“Give who?”

“The girl.” Germaine’s words were eerily similar to those Antoine had spoken the day they took Fleur. “That dreadful little girl.” She was silent for a moment, a strange smile on her thin lips. “Happiness is such a frail thing, isn’t it, Soeur Auguste? One day you have it, the next it’s gone, and you don’t even realize how.”

It was a long, strange speech for Germaine, and I did not know how to reply to it, or even whether I wanted to. She must have read my expression, because she laughed then, a sharp barking sound, turned on her heel, and left me standing by the well in the gentle dusk, suddenly wishing I could call her back, but unable to think of anything to say.

Dinner was a solemn, silent business. Marguerite, who had taken Antoine’s place in the kitchens, had none of her cooking skills, and the result was a meager, oversalted soup, watery ale, and more of the hard black bread. Although I scarcely noticed the unappetizing fare, others were inclined to balk at the absence of meat on a weekday, though nothing was said openly. In the old days there would have been animated discussion of this at Chapter, but now, although the silence was laden with discontent, it remained unbroken. Soeur Antoine, sitting at my right, ate with thick, fierce bites, her black brows drawn together. She looked different now, her flabby moon face pinched and sullen. Her work in the bakehouse was long and difficult; her hands were covered in burns from the stone ovens.

A row away, Soeur Rosamonde ate her soup in happy ignorance of the abbess’s disapproval. The old nun’s distress at the changes in the abbey had been short-lived; she existed now in a state of placid bewilderment, going about her duties in a willing but haphazard fashion, called to services by a novice especially assigned the task of ensuring she did not stray too far. Rosamonde lived in a half-world between past and present, cheerfully confusing names, faces, times. Often she spoke of people long dead as if they were still alive, addressed sisters by names that were not their own, helped herself to others’ clothes, went to collect supplies from a barn demolished in winter storms twenty years before. But she seemed well enough, and I have seen this kind of thing many times before in the very old.

Yet her behavior irked the abbess. Rosamonde ate noisily at table, smacking her gums. Sometimes she forgot to observe silence or mistook the words of prayers. She dressed carelessly, often going to church without some necessary item of clothing until the novice was charged with her supervision.

The wimple was an especial burden to an old woman who had worn the quichenotte for sixty years and could not understand why it was suddenly to be forbidden. Even more irksome to the new abbess was her refusal to acknowledge her authority and her querulous calls for Mère Marie. True, Angélique Saint-Hervé Désirée Arnault had not had much exposure to senility. Her life-what there had been of it-was a nursery where mechanical toys replaced playmates and servants replaced family. For her there had been no clear window onto the world, her only view a procession of priests and doctors. The poor were kept safely out of sight. The old, the sick, the infirm, were not a part of Mère Isabelle’s Creation.

Soeur Tomasine said grace. We ate in a silence punctuated occasionally by slurping sounds from Rosamonde. Mère Isabelle looked up once, then her wrathful gaze returned to her plate. I could see her mouth tightened almost to invisibility as she ate in small, delicate jabs of her spoon.

An unusually loud smacking noise caused a ripple to move down the novices’ bench, perilously close to laughter. The abbess seemed about to say something, but her lips tightened once more and she was silent.

It was to be the last time Rosamonde took a meal with the rest of us.

I went to LeMerle’s cottage again that night. I am not certain why I went except that I could not sleep and that my need drew me, like a barb through the heart. Need for what, I cannot say. I knocked softly, but there was no reply. Looking in through the window I saw a soft glow from a dying fire, and on the rug a shape-no, two shapes-illuminated in the firelight.

The man was LeMerle. I saw on his arm the black scarf that hid the old brand. The girl was young, slender as a boy, face averted, cropped hair the color of raw silk beneath his hands, beneath his mouth.

Clémente.

I crept softly back to the dorter then, and silently I returned to my bed. Everyone sounded asleep. Even so a phantom mutter of laughter pursued me as I fled, burning with shame, to my place by the wall, past Clémente’s cubicle…I froze in midstep. Germaine was sitting bolt upright and motionless in Clémente’s bed. A stray strand of moonlight bisected her scarred face and I could see her eyes shining. She did not seem to see me, and I passed by without a word.

23

Perette returned this morning as if nothing had happened. It was a disturbing fact of the new regimen that no one had mentioned her absence, not even in Chapter. If it had been any other than she, then perhaps someone would have spoken…But the wild girl was no true sister-or even a novice-of Sainte Marie-de-la-mer. A strangeness clung to her, an aloofness that no one had yet managed to penetrate. Even I had been too absorbed in my own affairs to pay any real attention to the absence of my friend. It was as if Perette had never been there at all, her disappearance from collective memory as complete as her removal from every aspect of our daily life. This morning, however, she was back: demure as a marble saint, she took her place as usual without a glance at anyone.

But there was something about her manner that disturbed me. She was too quiet, her face expressionless as only Perette’s can be, her gold-ringed eyes as flat and bright as the gilt on our altarpiece. I wanted to speak to her, to find out where she had been for the past three days-but Soeur Marguerite had already rung the bell for Vigils, and there was no time for questions, even if Perette had been inclined to reply.

Le Merle made no appearance until Prime. He never was an early riser, not even in the old days, preferring to roll out of bed at eight or nine, then stay reading until midnight, squandering candles-good wax ones, not tallow-while the rest of us had barely enough food to keep body and soul together. It was always his way, accepted by all as if it were his due, as if he were the master and we his servants. The worst thing was we liked it; served him willingly and for the most part without resentment; lied for him, stole for him, made excuses for his most outrageous behavior. “It’s the way he is,” Le Borgne once told me, one day when my exasperation had been too much to contain. “Some people have it, and some don’t, that’s all.”

“Have what?”

The dwarf gave his crooked smile. “Grace, my dear, or what passes for it these days. That gilding that some of us receive at birth. That special gilding that sets his kind apart from mine.”

I didn’t understand, and I said so.

“Oh yes you do,” said Le Borgne with unusual patience. “You know he’s worthless, you know he doesn’t give a damn, and that he’ll betray you some day or another. But you want to believe in him all the same. He’s like those statues you see in churches, all gold and glitter on the outside, plaster on the inside. We know what they’re made of really, but we pretend we don’t, because it’s better to believe in a false god than in no god at all.”

“And yet you follow him,” I said. “Don’t you?”

He looked at me with his one eye. “I do,” he said, “but then I’m a fool. Every circus has one.”

Well, LeMerle, I thought as all eyes turned hungrily to watch him make his entrance, you can certainly take your pick of fools this morning. Late nights and privations had taken no toll on him, I noticed; he looked rested and well in his ceremonial robes, his hair tied back neatly with a piece of ribbon. The embroidered scapular of his office had been flung over his black soutane, and as always he wore the silver crucifix, upon which his pale hands rested. As if by chance, he had chosen to stand just beneath the single stained-glass window, through which reached the first rose-gold fingers of dawn. I guessed immediately that something was afoot.

With him was Alfonsine. Since her attack there had been a number of rumors, though most of us knew Alfonsine well enough to discount the wildest of these. Even so, her presence at LeMerle’s side attracted no little attention, and she played it for all she was worth, affecting a haunted look and a faltering step, and coughing repeatedly into her fist. She behaved as if her fit of hysterics in the crypt had elevated, rather than disgraced her, and her adoring eyes never left LeMerle.

Others were watching him too with varying expressions of hope, fear, and admiration; I caught Antoine staring, and Clémente, and Marguerite, and Piété. Not all looks were adoring, however. Germaine’s face was set in a look of dogged indifference, but I read a clearer message from her eyes. I knew that look: and LeMerle was a fool if he failed to recognize the threat. If Germaine had the chance, she would do him harm.

Then silence fell, and LeMerle began to speak. “My children,” he said. “It has been a testing time for us, these past few days. The contamination of our well by means unknown; the disruption to our services; the uncertainty of change.” A murmur of acquiescence passed through the crowd. Soeur Alfonsine seemed close to swooning. “But the testing times are over,” said LeMerle, beginning to move from the pulpitum to the altar. “We have survived them, and must be strengthened thereby. And as a token of our strength, our hope, our faith…”-he paused, and I could sense the expectation in the air-“we shall now take Communion, a sacrament that has been neglected here for all too long. Quam oblationem, tu Deus, in omnibus quaesumus, benedictam-”

At this Soeur Piété, who was in charge of the sacristy, moved slowly to the tiny cabinet where our few treasures were kept, and brought out the chalice and holy vessels for Communion. We seldom used these. I myself had taken the sacrament only once since my arrival, and our old Reverend Mother had been overawed by the finery of the treasures left by the black monks, ordering them to be kept safe and rarely allowing them to be seen at all. LeMerle broke that rule, as all others. There is an oven at the back of the sacristy for the baking of the holy wafers, but to my knowledge it had been twenty years since it was last used. Where he had got the wafers I can only guess; maybe he baked them himself, or maybe Mère Isabelle had one of the sisters make them. Bowing her head, Soeur Alfonsine carried the Host to LeMerle as he poured the wine into a dull-silver chalice knuckled with polished gems.

Mère Isabelle was first at the altar, kneeling to receive the sacrament. LeMerle put a hand on her forehead and took a wafer from the silver plate.

“Hoc est enim corpus meum.”

At those words I felt my hackles rise, and I forked the sign against malchance. Something was about to happen. I could feel it. It was in the air, like a promise of lightning.

“Hic est enim calyx sanguinis mei…”

Now for the chalice, huge in her small hands. Its rim was blackened, the uncut gems no brighter than pebbles. Suddenly I wanted to leap up and warn the child, to tell her not to drink, not to trust him, to refuse the false sacrament. But it was madness; I was already in disgrace, already under penance; I forked the sign again and could not watch as she parted her lips, drew the cup toward them and-

“Amen.”

The cup passed and moved on. Now Marguerite took Isabelle’s place in front of the altar, her leg quivering uncontrollably beneath her habit. Then Clémente. Then Piété, Rosamonde, and Antoine. Had I been wrong? Had my instincts deceived me?

“Soeur Anne.” Beside me, Perette flinched at the unfamiliar name, the unfriendly voice. The abbess’s tone was crisp, commanding. Any sweetness the Communion might have opened up in her was sealed up like honey in a bee’s cell. Perette took a step backward, heedless of the nuns at her back. I heard someone grunt as her bare heel stamped down on an unsuspecting foot.

“Soeur Anne, you will come forward and take the sacrament, if you please,” said LeMerle.

Perette looked at me in appeal and shook her head.

“Perette, it’s all right. Just go to the altar.” My whisper was hidden in the crowd. Still the wild girl held back, her gold-ringed eyes pleading. “Go on!” I hissed, pushing her forward. “Trust me.”

Perette knelt before him, conspicuous in her novice’s habit, her nostrils flaring like a dog’s. She whimpered a little as LeMerle placed the wafer on her tongue. Then he passed her the chalice. Her fingers closed around it and I saw her glance backward at me as if for comfort. Then she drank.

For an instant I thought I had been mistaken. His Amen rang clear in the bright air. He reached out to help Perette to her feet. Then she coughed.

Suddenly I was reminded of the monk of the procession in Épinal. The crowd drew away with just the same low sigh of distress, the fallen monk rolling to the ground, the chalice falling from his grasp.

Perette coughed again, leaned forward, then suddenly, shockingly, vomited between her feet. There was a silence. The wild girl looked up, as if for reassurance, then a new paroxysm of vomiting struck her, and she tried too late to cover her mouth. An appalling blurt of red sprayed from between her lips, spattering her white skirt.

“Blood!” moaned Alfonsine.

Perette clapped her hands to her mouth. She looked terrified, ready to bolt. I tried to reach her but Alfonsine got in my way, crying: “She defiled the Sacrament! The Sacrament!” Then she too doubled up coughing, and I was back in Épinal, watching as the crowd drew away from the stricken brother, hearing the human tide turn, crushing everything in its path. For a minute I could hardly breathe as the nuns in front of me backed me against the wall of the transept.

Then LeMerle stepped forward, and the sisters wavered back into uneasy half-silence. Alfonsine was still coughing, hectic patches of red standing out on her thin cheeks. Then she too bent over and retched, and a terrible wad of blood spattered the marble between her feet.

That ended all hope of rational discourse. In vain I tried to remind the nuns that Soeur Alfonsine had coughed up blood before, that this was the nature of her illness-the crowd heaved back just as it had in Épinal, and the panic began.

“It’s the blood plague!” cried Marguerite.

“It’s a curse!” said Piété.

I struggled against it, but their excitement had reached me too and I was drowning in it. My mother’s cantrip-evil spirit, get thee hence-calmed me a little, although I knew that it was a man, and not spirit, who had set this in motion. All around me faces mooned, eyes rolled. Marguerite had bitten her tongue and there was blood on her lips. One of Clémente’s flailing arms had caught Antoine in the face, and she was cursing, a hand clapped to her bloody nose. I’d seen a painting once, in a church in Paris by a man named Bosch, in which the souls of the damned clawed and clutched at one another in just such an ecstasy of savagery and fear. It was called Pandemonium.

But now LeMerle had raised his voice, and it rolled across the hall like the wrath of God. “For God’s sake, let us have respect for this place!” Silence returned, filled with eddies and small whimperings. “If this is a sign, and the Unholy One has dared to come upon us”-the murmur came again, but he stilled it with a gesture-“I say if the Evil One has dared assail us now in the very sanctity of our church, to desecrate God’s very sacrament-then I am glad of it.” He paused. “As you should all be glad of it! Because if a wolf threatens the farmer’s herd, it’s the farmer’s duty to flush that wolf out! And if a cornered wolf tries to bite, then what does that farmer do?”

We watched him, eyes wide.

“Does that farmer turn and run?”

“No!” It was a thin cheer, like a splash of spray above the rolling wave.

“Does that farmer weep and tear his hair?”

“No!” It was stronger now, more than half the sisters joining in the cry.

“No! That farmer takes what weapons he can-staff, spear, pitchfork-and he takes his friends and neighbors and his brothers and his good strong sons, and he hunts down that wolf, he hunts it down and kills it, and if the devil has made himself a home here, then I say it’s time we hunted him down and sent him back to hell with his tail between his legs!”

They were with him now, whimpering their relief and admiration. The Blackbird basked for an instant in that applause-so long since he had stood like this before a crowded house-then his eyes met mine, and he grinned. “But look to yourselves,” he went on softly. “If the devil has breached your defenses, ask yourselves how you let those defenses drop. With what unshriven sins, what secret vices have you fed him, in what shameful practices has he taken his solace during the unclean years?”

Once more the crowd lifted its voice, touched now with a new note. Tell us, it murmured. Guide us.

“The Unholy One may be anywhere.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “In the very Sacraments of our church. In the air. In the stones. Look to yourselves!” Sixty-five pairs of eyes flicked furtively sideways. “Look to one another.”

On that note LeMerle turned away from the pulpit, and I knew the performance was over. It was his style-opening, development, soliloquy, grand finale, and then, at last, to business. I’d heard that piece-or variations thereon-many times before.

His voice, so haunting and evocative before, changed register and became the brisk, impersonal tone of an officer giving orders. “Leave here now, all of you. There can be no more services until this place has been cleansed. Soeur Anne”-he turned to Perette-“will remain with me. Soeur Alfonsine will return to the infirmary. The rest of you may return to your duties and your prayers. Praise be!”

I had to admire it a little; from the beginning he had held them in the palm of his hand, cleverly guiding them from one extreme of feeling to another-but for what? He had hinted at some grander motive than his usual robberies and deceits, although I could not begin to guess at what profit he might find in a little abbey hidden away off the coast. I shrugged to myself. What could I do? He had my daughter. Let me deal with that first and foremost. The rest was the Church’s business.

24

We devoted that morning to duties, prayer, and speculation. We held public confession at Chapter, during which it was revealed that five other nuns had tasted the tainted blood in their mouths after taking Communion. Mère Isabelle blames this inflammation of the senses on strong meats and excessive drink, and has decreed that nothing red-no red meat, no tomatoes, red wine, apples, or berry fruits-should be used in the kitchen or served at mealtimes, and that our food should henceforth be only of the plainest kind. Now that the new well is almost complete, the ale too has been restricted, to the dismay of Soeur Marguerite, who in spite of her ailments had become almost exuberant under its nourishing influence. Soeur Alfonsine is in the infirmary with Perette. Soeur Virginie watches over them both, with orders to report back anything unusual to Mère Isabelle. I find it impossible to believe that any of my sisters can truly suspect either of them of being possessed. Rumors abound, however. More dragon’s teeth of LeMerle’s sowing.

After dinner today we had half an hour to ourselves before prayer, Confession, and evening duties. I went to my herb garden-mine no longer-and ran my fingers over the neat bushes of rosemary and silver sage, releasing their dim sweetness into the darkening air. Bees droned from the purple spikes of the lavender and the small fragrant blooms of the thyme. A white butterfly paused for a moment on a patch of corn-flowers. Fleur’s absence was suddenly very immediate, very final, the memory of her orphan’s face clear as the turn of an evil card. I felt the grief which I had kept at bay come flooding back. A few seconds stolen in a crowd, a glimpse. It wasn’t enough. And I had paid for it dearly. Four days had passed. And still there was no sign from LeMerle, no hint of a second visit. A cold feeling entered me as I considered the thought that perhaps now that he had Clémente, there would be no more visits to Fleur. I was too old, too familiar for his tastes. LeMerle’s palate was for something younger. I had been too cold, too sure, too wilful. I had lost my chance.

I knelt down on the path. The scents of lavender and rosemary were heady and nostalgic. Not for the first time, and with increasing urgency, I wondered what the Blackbird had planned. If only I knew his mind, then maybe I could gain some hold over him. Was there gold in the abbey, upon which he planned to lay his greedy hands? Had he somehow discovered the existence of a secret treasure, which he hoped I would uncover during my excavation of the well? We’d all heard stories, of course, of monks’ treasures, buried under crypts, immured in ancient walls. But that’s my romantic imagination again. Giordano deplored it, preferring the poetry of mathematics to that of high adventure. You’ll come to a bad end, girl, he would say in his dry voice. You’ve the soul of a buccaneer. And then, with a twinkle in his eye as I seemed to approve the comparison: The soul of a pirate, and the mind of a jackass. Come now, back to this formula…

I know what Giordano would have told me. There was no gold in the abbey walls, and anything buried in that shifting soil would long since have been lost forever. Such things happened only in stories. And yet LeMerle was more like myself than my old tutor, more buccaneer than logician. I know what motivates him. Desire. Mischief. Applause. Sheer pleasure taken in wrongness, in biting his thumb at those who thwart him: the tumbling of altars, defiling of graves. I know this because we are still alike, he and I, each a small window into the soul of the other. Many passions run hot and cold in his strange blood, and wealth is only one of the lesser of these. No, this is not a question of money.

Power, then? The idea of having so many women under his thumb, for his use and manipulation? That was more like the Blackbird I knew, and would tally with his secret trysts with Clémente. But LeMerle could have had his pick of beauties; had never lacked for success in that direction, either in the provinces, or in the Paris salons. He had never valued these things before; had never gone out of his way to pursue them. What then? I asked myself. What drives a man like that?

There came a sudden cry from behind the wall of the herb garden close by, and I leapt to my feet. “Miséricorde!” The voice was so shrill that for a second I did not recognize it. I ran to the garden wall and hoisted myself to look over.

The orchard and herb garden give directly onto the west side of the church so that the plants and trees may be protected from the cold in winter. As I peered over the wall I could see the west entrance barely fifty feet away and poor old Rosamonde, her hands clasped to her face, wailing fit to split.

“Aüi!” she screeched. “Men!”

With an effort I pulled myself to the top of the wall and straddled it. There were six men at the west entrance. A contraption of ropes and pulleys had been left at the open door, and next to it a pile of logs as if in preparation to roll something heavy.

“It’s all right, ma soeur,” I called encouragingly. “They’re only workmen. They’ve come to mend the roof.”

“What roof?” Confused, Rosamonde turned to look at me.

“It’s all right,” I repeated, swinging my legs over onto her side. “They’re workmen. The roof’s been leaking, and they’re here to mend it.” I gave her a friendly nod and allowed myself to drop lightly into the long grass.

Rosamonde shook her head in bewilderment. Then, peering shortsightedly at me: “Who are you, young woman?”

“It’s Soeur Auguste,” I told her. “Remember me?”

“I don’t have a sister,” said Rosamonde. “Never did. Are you my daughter?” She peered shortsightedly at me. “I know I should know you, my dear,” she told me. “But I can’t quite remember…”

I put my arm gently around her shoulders. I could see a small group of sisters watching from the church door. “Never mind,” I said. “Look, why don’t we just go into the chapter house and-”

But as I turned her to face the church Rosamonde gave another shriek. “Look!” she cried. “Sainte-Marie!”

Either old Rosamonde’s eyes were not as feeble as I had thought, or she had actually been in the church when the work commenced, for I had seen nothing amiss in the group of workmen at the west entrance. But as I watched now I saw that none of the equipment that had been left at the door was for roofing. Indeed, no scaffolding had been erected up the walls, not even a ladder. And the men came from within the church, not without. With them, tethered like a great beast, inch by inch on her wooden rollers came Marie-de-la-mer.

A few nuns were already watching in silence. Alfonsine was among them, and Marguerite. Rosamonde looked at me in baffled distress. “Why are they taking the saint outside?” she demanded. “Where are they taking her?”

I shook my head. “Perhaps they’re going to transport her to somewhere more appropriate,” I said without conviction. What could be more appropriate than our own church, our own entrance, where she could be seen from every part of the building, touched by anyone entering?

Rosamonde was making her way as quickly as she could toward the group of workmen. “You can’t take her!” she shouted hoarsely. “You can’t steal her from us!”

I hurried after her. “Be careful, ma soeur, you’ll do yourself an injury.”

But Rosamonde was not listening. She hobbled to the doorway where the men were taking pains to avoid chipping the marble steps.

One positioned the rollers. Two others levered the statue into position. Two more at the rear kept her steady whilst the foreman directed the operation.

“What are you doing?” demanded Rosamonde.

“Careful, Sister,” said one of the men. “Don’t get in the way!” He grinned, and I saw the crooked line of his blackened teeth.

“But it’s the saint! The saint!” Rosamonde’s eyes were round with outrage.

In a way I understood her. The big saint-if saint she was-had been a part of the abbey for years. Her stony face had watched us live and die. Countless prayers had been uttered beneath her mute, impassive gaze. Her round belly, her massive shoulders, the black bulk of her tender, indifferent presence had been a comfort, a touchstone to us across changes and seasons. To remove her now, in this time of crisis, was to make orphans of us at a time when we needed her most.

“Who ordered this?” I said.

“The new confessor, Sister.” The fellow barely glanced at me. “Mind yourself, she’s coming down!” I thrust Rosamonde away from the steps just as the statue, supported on either side by the workmen and from beneath by the rollers, came crashing down the steps onto the path. Dust puffed up from the cracked earth. The man with bad teeth steadied the saint while his assistant, a young man with red hair and a cheery smile, maneuvered a cart into position on which to load her.

“Why?” I insisted. “Why remove it at all?”

The red-haired man shrugged. “It’s just orders,” he said. “Maybe you’re getting a new one. This one looks old as God.”

“And where will you put it?”

“Dump it in the sea,” said the red-haired man. “Orders.”

Rosamonde clutched at me. “They can’t do that!” she said. “Reverend Mother will never let them do it! Where is she? Reverend Mother!”

“Ma fille, I’m here.” The voice was small and flat, almost colorless like its owner, and yet Rosamonde stopped struggling and stared, her poor baffled face tugging between hope and dread.

Mère Isabelle was standing at the church door, hands folded. “It’s time we were rid of this blasphemy,” she said. “It has been here too long already, and the islanders are a superstitious folk. They call it the Mermaid. They pray to it. It has a tail, for God’s sake!”

In spite of myself I spoke out. “But ma mère-”

“This object-is not the Holy Mother,” said Isabelle. “And there is no such saint as Marie-de-la-mer. There never was.” Her nasal voice rose a little. “How can you bear it here? This thing in our church! Pilgrims coming to touch it! Women-pregnant women-scraping dust from it to brew their charms!”

I began to understand. Not the saint herself, but the use to which she had been put; the touch of fertility in the barren house of God.

Isabelle took a breath. Now she had begun to speak it seemed she could not stop herself. “I knew it the moment I set foot here. The unconsecrated burials. The secret excesses! The curse of blood!” It was almost hysteria, but she was cold for all that. Angélique Saint-Hervé Désirée Arnault had her own formula and would stick to it no matter what.

“And now,” she said. “It dares to attack me. Me! Taunts me with blood! My confessor locates the source and purifies it. But the evil remains. The evil remains.”

She stayed for a minute in silence, contemplating the evil. Then, with a crisp Praise be!, she turned and was gone.

The bell for Nones went soon afterward, and there was little time for discussion. Not that I would have dared voice my doubts in any case, for the fear of losing contact with Fleur kept me from speaking my mind. Throughout Nones I found my mind straying to Mère Isabelle’s words on the church steps, words of which she herself seemed barely conscious.

The curse of blood. The evil remains.

The new well is close to complete now, its water as sweet and clear as she could have wished. LeMerle has exorcised the church itself, the font, the sacristy, and all the holy vessels, declaring them free from taint. He has intimated the same of Perette and Alfonsine too, to my relief, although there are still rumors. Alfonsine seems quite disappointed that she has been given this clean bill of spiritual health, and her visible chagrin causes Marguerite to speak slightingly of actresses and attention-seekers.

And yet the evil remains.

I tried to keep my eyes from wandering, but time and again found myself staring at the giant emptiness that had once held Marie-de-la-mer. A small sacrifice, I told myself, compared with the return of my daughter, for what was a statue to a living child, a frightened child?

LeMerle was behind it, of course. What he wanted with the statue I could not guess, but its removal-that of the one symbol of our unity and our faith-had brought us one step closer to surrender. He must become our symbol now, I realized; he was to be our only salvation. During the service he spoke of female martyrs, of Sainte Perpetua and Sainte Catherine and Christina Mirabilis, of the mystery of death and the purity of fire, and he held us in his palm.

25

Abbaye de Sainte-Marie-MèreÎle-des-Noirs-MoustiersJuly 26th, 1610

Monseigneur,

It is with the Greatest Pleasure that I am able to inform Monseigneur that Everything He has so wisely foreseen is proceeding according to Plan. My Charge shows the most Commendable Zeal in all the Reforms she has instigated, and the Abbey is almost Restored to Former Glory. The Church Roof still requires some Labor, and I regret to say that much of the South Transept has been grievously Damaged by Weathering, however we entertain Great Hopes of seeing the Whole Complete by the Beginning of Winter.

The Original Name of our Abbey, as Monseigneur will have Noticed, has also been Restored and all Signs and Intimations of the Vernacular Name erased in favor of the Above. I add my most earnest Entreaties to those of Your Niece, Monseigneur, that if Your busy Schedule enables You to Grace us with a Visit in the Coming Months, we should be most Honored and Gratified to receive Your August Presence.

I remain your most obedient servant,

Blah, blah, blah.

I have to admit I’ve a neat turn of phrase. Your August Presence. I like that.

I’ll have it sent in the morning by special envoy. Or maybe I could ride out to Pornic myself and send it from there-anything to get out of the stink of this place for a few hours. How Juliette can bear it, I can’t imagine. I only bear it because I have to; and because I know I won’t be here for long. These cloistered ones, these toadstools, have a very special rankness, and the scent of their hypocrisy turns my stomach. Imprisoned here I can hardly breathe, hardly sleep; I must ask Juliette to make me a soothing draught.

Sweet Juliette. The fair girl-what’s her name? Clémente?-is well enough for my needs, and touchingly eager to please too, but she’s no worthy quarry. For a start, her eyes are too large. Their color, that of a flawless summer sky, lacks that discordant note of slate and embers. Her hair too, fair as foam, is hopelessly wrong. Her skin too white, her legs too smooth, her face unmarred by sun and grime. Call me ungrateful if you like. A honey-fall like that, and I must hanker after that stiff-necked maypole with her flinty eyes. Perhaps it’s her hatred of me that gives it spice.

There’s no heat in Clémente. Her pallor freezes my bones. She whispers constantly in my ears tales of romance, dreams of Bele Yolande, Tristan and Iseult, Abelard and Héloïse…In any case, there’s no danger of her talking. The little fool’s in love. I subject her to more and more prolonged miseries, but she seems to revel in each indignity. For myself, I enhance my pleasure how I can with dreams of red-haired harpies.

There’s no escaping her. The other night she came to me-in a vision, or so I thought. I saw her for an instant only, her face pressed to the pane of my window, her eyes reflecting the soft glow of the firelight so that for a moment she looked almost tender.

Clémente moved beneath me with the little bleating cries that masquerade as passion with her. Her eyes were closed and I saw her hair and flanks illuminated in fire. I felt a hot sudden surge of joy in my loins, as if the woman at the window and the one in my arms had unexpectedly become one and the same, then the face at the window vanished and I was left with nothing more than Clémente gasping like a landed fish in my hands. My pleasure-no great delight in any case-was marred by the growing certainty that Juliette’s face at the window had been no phantasm. She had seen us together. The look on her face-shock, disgust, and something that might have been chagrin or even rage-haunted me. For a second I could almost have run after her, ruinous though that would have been to all my careful plans. Wild thoughts fired me. I stood up and went naked to the window in spite of Clémente’s protests. Was that a pale figure half hidden in the shadows of the gatehouse? I could not be sure.

“Colombin, please.” I looked over my shoulder to see Clémente crouching by the hearth, her hair still deceptively brazen in the light of the dying embers. A sudden wave of fury washed over me and in two strides I was upon her.

“I gave you no leave to use my name.” I yanked her to her feet by a fistful of hair and she gave a stifled scream. I slapped her then, twice, not as hard as I should have liked, but enough to bring brief roses to her cheeks. “Who do you think you are, some Paris courtesan in her salon? Who do you think I am?”

She was weeping now, in braying sobs. For some reason this enraged me still more and I dragged her to the couch, still squealing.

I didn’t really hurt her. A red handprint or two on a white shoulder, a white thigh. Juliette would have killed me for far less. But Clémente watched me from her couch, her eyes reproachful but nevertheless bright with a strange satisfaction, as if this were how she expected things to be.

“Forgive me, mon père,” she breathed. One childish hand cupped a breast scarce bigger than a green apricot, making the nipple pout with imagined seductiveness. My stomach revolted at the thought of touching her again. But I had perhaps given too much away. I took a step toward her and brushed her forehead with languid fingers.

“Very well,” I said. “I’ll overlook it this time.”

26

Sainte Marie-de-la-mer was taken in the stone-breakers’ wagon to the easternmost point of the island, where the coast is ragged from the eroding tides. There her remains were given to the sea. I was not present to see it-only LeMerle and the abbess were there-but we were told later that a great wind blew up from the sea where the effigy fell, that the water boiled and that black clouds obscured the sun so that day became night. Since LeMerle told us this, no one disputed it aloud, although I met Germaine’s cynical gaze during his performance.

Of course, she has lost someone to him too. Her face seems narrower these days, the scars very prominent on her pale skin. She sleeps as little as I do; in the dorter I hear her pretending sleep, but her breathing is too shallow, her lack of movement too disciplined to be that of rest.

Last night before Vigils I heard her quarreling with Clémente in a low, harsh voice, though I could not make out the words she spoke. There was silence from Clémente-in the darkness I guessed she had turned her back-and during the long hours between Matins and Lauds I heard Germaine weeping with long, harsh sobs, but I dared not approach her.

As for LeMerle…He had not sought me out since my visit to the market, and I had become increasingly convinced that Clémente-who after all, shared his bed-had also stolen his heart. Not that that troubled me, you understand. I’m long past caring where he lays his head at night. But Clémente is spiteful; and she has no love for Fleur or for me. I hated to think of the power she might wield over all of us, if LeMerle had succumbed to her charms.

I was working in the laundry house when at last he came looking for me. I knew he was there; knew the sound of his feet against the flagstones, and knew from the clink of his spur against the step that he was dressed for riding. I did not turn round at once but plunged an armful of linens into one of the vats of boiling water, face averted, not daring to speak. My cheeks were burning, but that might have been the steam, for the laundry house was hot and the air was filled with clouds. He stood watching me for some minutes without a word, but I would not return his gaze, nor speak until he spoke first. At last he did, in the tone and style he knew had always infuriated me.

“Exquisite harpy,” he said. “I trust I am not interrupting your ablutions. Cleanliness, if not godliness, dearest, must be the prerequisite of your calling.”

I used the baton to pound the laundry. “I’m afraid I’ve no time for games today. I have work to do.”

“Really? What a pity. And on market day too.”

I stopped.

“Well, after all, perhaps I have no reason to go to market,” said LeMerle. “Last time the stench of fish and the common folk was almost unendurable.”

I looked at him then, not caring that he saw the pain in my eyes. “What do you want with me, Guy?”

“Nothing, my Ailée, but your own sweet company. What else should I desire?”

“I don’t know. I daresay Clémente could tell me.” It was out before I could stop it.

I saw him flinch, and then he smiled. “Clémente? Let me see now-”

“You know her, LeMerle. She’s the girl who comes to your cottage at night, in secret. I should have known you wouldn’t be here long without finding yourself a comfortable bedfellow.”

He shrugged, unabashed. “Light entertainment, that’s all. You wouldn’t believe how tedious I find the clerical life-and do you know, Juliette, she’s begun to bore me already?”

Yes, that was like him. I hid an unwilling smile. But it’s hard to keep a secret in a place like this, and even Mère Isabelle was not so besotted that she would overlook a charge of lechery. “They’ll find out, you know. You can’t trust Clémente to keep a secret. Someone will talk.”

“Not you,” he said.

His eyes had remained on me, and I felt uncomfortable beneath their scrutiny. I poured more water into the vat, my eyes stinging at the rise of steam over the lye soap. I would have poured more-it was needed for the starch rinse-but LeMerle took the water jug from me and set it down very softly on the floor.

“Leave me alone.” I made my voice sharp to stop it from trembling. “The laundry won’t wash itself, you know.”

“Then let someone else finish it. I want to talk to you.”

I turned and faced him. “What about?” I said. “What can you possibly want from me that you haven’t already taken?”

LeMerle looked hurt. “Must it always be a question of what I want?”

I laughed. “It always was.”

He was displeased at that, as I knew he would be. His mouth thinned, and a gleam came into his eyes; then he sighed and shook his head. “Oh, Juliette,” he said. “Why so unfriendly? If only you knew how hard it’s been these past few months. All alone, no one to confide in-”

“Tell that to Clémente,” I said tartly.

“I’d rather tell you.”

“You want to tell me something?” I reached for the baton to pound the clothes. “Then tell me where you’re hiding Fleur.”

He gave a soft laugh. “Not that, sweetheart. I’m sorry.”

“You will be,” I told him.

“I mean it, Juliette.” I had removed my wimple to do the laundry, and he brushed the nape of my neck with his fingertips. “I wish I could trust you. There’s nothing I’d like better than to see you and Fleur reunited. As soon as I’ve finished my business here-”

“Finished? When?”

“Soon, I hope. Enclosed spaces do nothing for my constitution.”

I poured another jug of hot water into the vat, sending up a great billow of stinging steam. Then I pounded the laundry some more and wondered what his game was. “It must be important to you,” I said at last. “This business.”

“Must it?” There was a smile in his voice.

“Well, I don’t imagine you’re here just to play practical jokes on a few nuns.”

“You may be right,” said LeMerle.

I took the wooden tongs, fished the linens out of the vat, and dumped them into the starch bath. “Well?” I turned toward him again, tongs in hand. “Why are you here? Why are you doing this?”

He took a step toward me, and to my surprise, on my hot forehead he placed the lightest of kisses. “Your daughter’s at the market,” he said gently. “Don’t you want to see her?”

“No games.” My hand was shaking as I put down the tongs.

“No games, my Ailée. I promise.”

Fleur was waiting for us by the side of the jetty. Although it was market day, there was no sign today of the fish cart or the drab-faced woman. This time there was a man with her, a white-haired man who looked like a farmer, in his flat hat and rough-woven jacket, and a couple of children, both boys, who sat close by. I wondered what had happened to the fishwife: whether Fleur had been staying with her at all, or whether LeMerle had told me the story to put me off the scent. Was this white-haired man my daughter’s keeper? He said nothing to me as I walked up to them and took Fleur in my arms; his milky blue eyes were flat and incurious; from time to time he chewed on a piece of licorice, and his few remaining teeth were stained brown with its juice. Other than that, he gave no sign of movement; for all I knew he might have been a deaf-mute.

As I had feared, LeMerle did not leave me alone with my daughter but sat, face averted, on the edge of the seawall a few yards away. Fleur seemed a little uneasy at his presence, but I saw that she looked less pale, a clean red pinafore over her gray dress and wooden sabots on her feet. It was a bittersweet satisfaction; she has been gone for barely a week and already she is beginning to adapt, the orphan look fading into something infinitely more frightening. Even in this short time she seems altered, grown; at this rate in a month she will look like someone else’s child altogether, a stranger’s child with only a passing resemblance to my daughter.

I did not dare ask outright where she was being kept. Instead, I held her in my arms and put my face into her hair. She smelt vaguely of hay, which made me wonder whether she had been kept on a farm, but then she smelt of bread too, so it might have been a bakery. I ventured a glance at LeMerle, who was watching the tide, apparently lost in thought. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to Monsieur?” I said at last with a nod to the white-haired man.

The old man seemed not to hear. Neither did LeMerle.

“I’d like to thank him, anyway,” I went on. “If he’s the one taking care of you.”

From his observation point, LeMerle shook his head without bothering to look round.

“Mmm-mm. Suppose. Am I coming home today?”

“Not today, sweetheart. But soon. I promise.” I forked the sign against malchance.

“Good.” Fleur did it too, with plump baby fingers. “Janick taught me how to spit. D’you want to see how I do it?”

“Not today, thank you. Who’s Janick?”

“A boy I know. He’s nice. He’s got rabbits. Did you bring Mouche?”

I shook my head. “Look at the pretty boat, Fleur. Can you see boats from where you’re staying?”

A nod from Fleur-and a glance from LeMerle from his place on the wall.

“Would you like to go on a boat, Fleur?”

She shook her head furiously, bouncing her flossy curls.

Urgently now, seeing my chance: “Did you come here on a boat today? Fleur? Did you take the causeway?”

“Stop that, Juliette,” said LeMerle warningly. “Or I’ll see to it that she doesn’t come back.”

Fleur glared. “I want to come back,” she said. “I want to come back to the abbey and the kitty and the hens.”

“You will.” I hugged her, and for a second I was close to tears. “I promise, Fleurette, you will.”

Le Merle was unexpectedly gentle with me on the return journey. I sat behind him on the horse and for a time he spoke in reminiscent tone of the old days, of L’Ailée and the Ballet des Gueux, of Paris, the Palais-Royal, the Grand Carnaval, the Théâtre des Cieux, of triumphs and trials past. I said little, but he seemed not to care. The merry ghosts of past times drifted by us, brought to life by his voice. Once or twice I found myself close to laughter, the unfamiliar smile sitting strangely on my lips. If it had not been for Fleur I would have laughed aloud. And yet this is my enemy. He is like the piper in the German tale who rids the town of rats, and when the townsfolk did not pay him his fee, led their children dancing to hell’s mouth and piped them in, the earth covering their screams as they fell. Such a dance he must have led them, though, and with such a merry tune…

27

We returned to find the abbey in turmoil. Mère Isabelle was waiting at the gatehouse, looking ill and impatient. There had been an incident, she said.

LeMerle looked concerned. “What kind of incident?”

“A visitation.” She swallowed painfully. “A damnable visitation! Soeur Marguerite was in the church, praying. For the soul of my p-predecessor. For the soul of S-Mère Marie!”

LeMerle watched her in silence as she stammered out her tale. She spoke in short, bitten-off sentences with much repetition, as if trying to make the business clear in her mind.

Marguerite, still greatly troubled by the events of the morning, had gone to the chapel alone to pray. She went to the closed gate of the crypt and knelt on the little prie-dieu which had been placed there. Then she shut her eyes. A few moments later she was roused by a metallic sound. Opening her eyes she saw at the mouth of the crypt a figure in a Bernardine nun’s brown habit with its linen tucker, the face hidden inside a starched white quichenotte.

Standing up in alarm, Marguerite called out, demanding that the strange nun name herself. But her legs were weak with terror and she sank to the ground.

“Why this dread?” asked LeMerle. “It might have been any of our older sisters. Soeur Rosamonde, perhaps, or Mère Marie-Madeleine. All have occasionally worn the quichenotte, especially in this hot weather.”

Mère Isabelle turned on him. “No one wears it now! No one!”

Besides, there was more. The lappets of the strange nun’s white bonnet, the tucker, even the hands of the apparition, were stained with red. Worse still-here Mère Isabelle’s voice dropped to a whisper-the cross stitched onto the breast of every Bernardine nun had been torn off, the stitches still faintly visible against the bloody cambric.

“It was Mère Marie,” said Isabelle flatly. “Mère Marie, back from the dead.”

I had to intervene. “That isn’t possible,” I said crisply. “You know what Marguerite is like. She’s always seeing things. Last year she thought she saw demons coming out of the bakehouse chimney, but it was only a nest of jackdaws under the eaves. People don’t come back from the dead.”

Isabelle cut me short. “Oh, but they do.” The little voice was hard. “My uncle, the bishop, dealt with a similar case in Aquitaine years ago.”

“What case?” Impossible for me to keep the scorn from my voice. She looked at me, no doubt concocting some penance to inflict upon me at a later time.

“A case of witchcraft,” she said.

I stared at her. “I don’t understand,” I said at last. “Mère Marie was the kindest, most gentle woman alive. How could you possibly believe-”

“The devil may take a pleasing countenance if he chooses.” Her tone was cold and final. “The signs-the curse of blood, my dreams, and now this damnable visitation…How can anyone doubt it? What other explanation can there be?”

I had to stop this. “A person given to fanciful imaginings may see things which are not,” I told her. “If anyone else had seen this-apparition…”

“But they did.” The small voice was triumphant. “We all did. All of us.”

Her pronouncement was not strictly true. When Marguerite screamed, maybe half a dozen nuns were within earshot, Mère Isabelle among them. Running from the dazzling sunshine into the dark church, their vision unused to the gloom, what they saw was little enough. A shape, a white bonnet…The vision turned at their approach and seemed to flee into the crypt. By then more nuns had arrived. Later each claimed to have seen the same apparition-even the latecomers who could only have witnessed the ensuing disturbance. I even found so-called witnesses to the incident who had been working in the fields all afternoon. But Mère Isabelle, armed with crucifix and lantern, flanked by Marguerite and Tomasine, entered the crypt to search for evidence of human interference, having first unlocked the gate through which no mortal could have passed. Their search was in vain. No sign of the ghostly nun was found. But by Mère Marie’s tomb, its seal unbroken and the mortar still fresh, they found traces of the same sweet-smelling red ichor that had tainted the abbey water, a dribble of the stuff having seemingly leaked from the stone cell containing Mère Marie’s coffin…

LeMerle looked concerned and insisted upon going to inspect the scene of the incident at once. I returned to my duties. It was clear Mère Isabelle was annoyed that I had accompanied LeMerle to Barbâtre-though she grudgingly accepted his assurance that I was needed to carry food and medicines to a poor family there-and I was put to work in the kitchens, peeling vegetables for the evening meal. There I had plenty of time to think over what had happened.

It seems too much of a coincidence. Last week I went to Barbâtre and Perette vanished for three days. This week, Marguerite saw visions, once more in my absence. Both times I was with LeMerle. Had he engineered this purposely to have me out of the way? Certainly I would have tried to intervene in both cases if I had been there. But what reason can he have for such action? A practical joke, he told me when he gave me the tablets of dye for the well. And a fake vision of a hooded nun might as easily be another. I can easily envisage Clémente accepting to take part. But what reason can he have for such a cruel succession of practical jokes? Surely the last thing he wants is to attract notice to the abbey or to himself. And yet LeMerle is subtle, cunning. If he planned it so, it must have been for a reason. But what that reason may be eludes me. If only I could somehow find out who played the ghost and how she managed to escape seemingly into midair…But the frenzy of interest that this prank has already ignited must be enough to still the most voluble of tongues. Did he plan that too? And how many other trifling favors has he granted, payment to be deferred? And who are his acolytes here? Alfonsine? Clémente? Antoine? Myself?

28

A dissolution is taking place among us, the sisterhood broken into pieces as far-flung as the figure of our patron. Clémente seems distant, banished to dig latrine trenches for a week as penance for idleness. I find myself wondering whether it is the stench of her work that has given LeMerle a distaste for her, or whether this cruel caprice is merely his nature. A blackbird may decimate the fruit on a tree, pecking hither and thither at random, spoiling but never finishing. Does she love him? Her dreamy abstraction, the look in her eyes when he does not notice her, suggests she does. The more fool she. Germaine’s company she will no longer tolerate, though the other woman has volunteered to help her with the latrines as a desperate measure to be close to her.

First thing this morning I eventually spoke to Perette, but she was restless and abstracted, and I could make no sense of her. Perhaps she is angry; with Perette it is always so difficult to tell. I would like to tell her about LeMerle and Fleur and the contaminated well, but my silence keeps Fleur safe. I must believe that, or lose my mind. And so I deceive my friend, and try not to mind if she holds me in contempt. I miss her, but I miss Fleur so much more. Perhaps there can be room only for one in my hard heart.

Rosamonde is no longer with us. Two days ago she was moved to the infirmary, where the sick and dying are kept. Soeur Virginie, the young novice entrusted with her care, has taken vows at last and has taken over the duty of hospitaller. A plain girl, as I recall from our Latin classes, with little spirit and less imagination, her angular features even now beginning to take on the coarse and ungrateful look of so many of the island women. Mère Isabelle has, I think, warned her against me. I can tell from her sharp looks and evasive replies. She is barely seventeen. Rosamonde is a foreign country to her. Her youth calls to the new abbess, whom she copies slavishly.

I saw Rosamonde yesterday over the wall of the infirmary garden. Seated on a small bench, huddled into herself, as if by doing so she could somehow present the world with a smaller target for its cruelties, she looked more bewildered than ever. She looked up at me, but without recognition. Robbed of her routine, the thin skein that bound her to reality, she drifts in aimless anxiety, her only contact with the rest of us the sister who brings her meals and the bland-faced, unsmiling child appointed her keeper.

I was enraged enough at the pitiful sight to bring up Rosamonde’s case at Chapter this morning. LeMerle is not normally present at Chapter, and I hoped to be able to sway the abbess out of his presence.

“Soeur Rosamonde is not ill, ma mère,” I explained in a humble voice. “It is not kind to keep her from what small pleasures she can still enjoy. Her duties, her friends…”

The abbess looked at me from the distant continent of her twelve years. “Soeur Rosamonde is seventy-two,” she said. Sure enough, that must have seemed an eternity to her. “She barely recalls what day it is. She recognizes no one.” Ay, I thought. That was more like it. The old woman had not recognized her. “And she is feeble,” continued Isabelle. “Even the simplest duties are too much for her now. Surely it’s kinder to let her rest than to set her to work in her condition? Surely, Soeur Auguste,” she said, her eyes glinting slyly, “you do not begrudge her this well-earned respite?”

“I grudge her nothing,” I said, stung. “But to be shut up in the infirmary, just because she’s old and sometimes slops at her food-”

I had said too much. The abbess put up her chin. “Shut up?” she echoed. “Are you inferring that our poor Soeur Rosamonde is a prisoner?”

“Of course not.”

“Well then…” She let her voice trail for a moment. “Anyone who wishes to visit our ailing sister may do so, of course, provided Soeur Virginie feels she is strong enough to receive visitors. Her absence from the dinner table merely means that she can be allowed a more nutritious diet and more regular meals than the rest of us, at times more agreeable to her age and condition.” She gave me a sly look. “Soeur Auguste, you would not deny our old friend her few privileges? If you live to be her age, I’m sure you’ll be glad of them too.”

Clever, the little minx. LeMerle was teaching her well. Anything I said now would seem like envy. I smiled, conceding a point, even though my heart seethed. “I’m sure we all will, ma mère,” I said, and was pleased to see her lips tighten.

Well, that was the end of my attempt at rescue. As it was, I had almost overstepped the mark; Mère Isabelle looked at me askance throughout the rest of Chapter and I narrowly escaped another penance. Instead I accepted a turn of duty in the bakehouse-a hot, filthy, disagreeable task in this sultry weather-and she seemed satisfied. For the present, anyway.

The bakehouse is a round, squat building on the far side of the cloister. Its windows are glassless slits, most of the light coming from the huge ovens in the center of the single room. We bake in clay ovens as the black monks did, on flat stones heated red by the heaped faggots beneath. The smoke from the ovens escapes through a chimney so wide that the sky is visible through its mouth, and when it rains the droplets of water fall onto the domed ovens and turn to hissing steam. Two young novices were making dough as I arrived, one picking out the weevils from a stone jar of flour, the other mixing yeast in a basin, preparing to make the mixture. The ovens were stoked and ready, and the heat was like a shimmering wall. Behind the wall was Soeur Antoine, sleeves rolled up over her thick red forearms, hair tied into a rag that she had rolled about her head.

“Ma soeur.” Antoine looked different somehow, her usually kind, vacuous look replaced by something harder and more purposeful. She looked almost dangerous in the red light, the muscles of her wide shoulders rolling beneath her fat as she kneaded the dough.

I set to work, kneading the bread in the huge pans and placing the loaves on the oven shelves to bake. It is a tricky business; the stones need to be heated perfectly even, for too high a heat will scorch the dough whilst leaving the inside raw, and too low a heat will bake flat, sad loaves as dense as stones. We worked in silence for a time. The wood in the oven crackled and snickered; someone had stoked it with green wood, and the smoke was acrid and foul. Twice I burned my hands on the heated bake stones and cursed under my breath. Antoine pretended not to notice, but I’m sure she was smiling.

We finished the first batch of loaves and began the second. An abbey needs to do at least three batches of baking a day, each batch making twenty-five white or thirty black loaves. Plus the hard biscuit for winter when fuel is less abundant, and cakes for storing and special occasions. The smell from the loaves was good and rich in spite of the smoke that made my eyes sting, and I felt my stomach growl. I realized that since Fleur’s disappearance I had hardly eaten. Sweat trickled through my hair, soaking the rags that bound it. My face was bearded with sweat. My vision doubled momentarily; I put out my hand to steady myself and touched the hot bread pan instead. The metal was cooling but still hot enough to sear the tender webbing between my finger and thumb, and I gave a sharp cry of pain. Antoine looked at me again. This time there could be no doubt about it; she was smiling.

“It’s hard at first.” She spoke softly enough for me to hear her: no more. The young novices were sitting near the open door, too far to catch her words. “But you get used to it eventually.” Her mouth was very red, too ripe for a nun’s, and her eyes reflected the fire. “You get used to anything eventually.”

I shook my burned hand to cool it and said nothing.

“It would be a pity if someone found out about you,” Antoine went on. “You’d probably be here for good then. Like me.”

“Found out about what?”

Antoine’s lips curled wolfishly, and I wondered how I could ever have thought her stupid. There was mean intelligence behind the small, bright eyes, and in that moment I almost feared her. “Your secret visits to Fleur, of course. Or did you think I hadn’t noticed?” Now there was bitterness in her voice too. “No one expects fat Soeur Antoine to notice anything. Fat Soeur Antoine thinks of nothing but her belly. I had a child once, but I wasn’t allowed to keep it,” she said. “Why should you keep yours? What makes you any different to the rest of us?” She lowered her voice, the little red light still dancing in her eyes from the oven. “If Mère Isabelle finds out, that will be the end of it, whatever Père Saint-Amand says. You’ll never see Fleur again.”

I looked at her. She seemed a thousand leagues away from the fat soft woman of last month who wept when I pinched her arm. It was as if some of the saint’s black stone had entered her. “Don’t tell, Antoine,” I whispered. “I’ll give you-”

“Syrups? Sweetmeats?” Her voice was harsh and the young novices looked up curiously to see what was happening. Antoine snapped a sharp command at them and they dropped their heads at once. “You owe me, Auguste,” she said in a low voice. “Just remember that. You owe me a favor.”

Then, turning, she went back to check her loaves as if nothing had passed between us, and I saw nothing but the stolid curve of her back for the rest of that long morning.

Perhaps I should have felt reassured. It was clear Antoine did not intend to disclose my secret. And yet her unwillingness to be bought was unnerving; more so was the phrase she had used-you owe me a favor- the Blackbird’s habitual coin.

This evening I went to the well after Compline to collect a jug of washing water. The sun had set and the sky was a dark and brooding violet, striated with red. The courtyard was deserted, as most of the nuns had already retired to the warming room or the dorter in preparation for sleep, and I could see the warm yellow lights shining from the unprotected windows of the cloister. The well is still incomplete, awaiting a stone finish to its rough earthen walls and a protective wall around; today it is almost invisible in the shadows, a primitive wooden fence erected in haste around the hole to prevent anyone from falling in by accident. A crossbar, furnished with a bucket, rope, and pulley, looks like a thin figure standing against the purple ground. Twelve paces. Six. Four. The thin figure detached itself from the well side with a sudden start. I saw a small, pale face made violet in the reflected sky, eyes wide with surprise and-I could have sworn-guilt.

“What are you doing here?” Her voice was suspicious. “You should be with the others. Why are you following me?”

There was something in her hands, a bundle like wet rags. My eyes fell to it and she tried to hide the bundle in the folds of her skirt. In the shadows I thought I saw staining on the linen, dark blotches that in the poor light looked black. I held out my jug.

“I needed some water, ma mère.” I made my voice toneless. “I didn’t see you.” Now I could see the bucket of water at her feet, its contents slopping over to form a puddle on the trodden earth of the courtyard. The bucket also seemed to contain rags or clothing. Isabelle saw the direction of my gaze and seized the rags. They slapped against her skirt, but she made no attempt even to wring them dry.

“Get your water, then,” she said curtly, pushing the bucket with a clumsy foot. It overturned, spreading a dark stain on the darker ground.

I would have done as she asked, but I could feel the tension coming from her. Her eyes were huge and strangely brilliant, and in a stray sliver of light I noticed her face was sheened with moisture. There was a smell too, a bland and sweetish scent I recognized.

Blood.

“Is anything wrong?”

For a second she stared me out, her face rigid with the effort of maintaining her dignity. Her chest hitched once. The front of her skirt was dark with water from the dripping rags.

Then she began to sob, the raking, pitiful tears of a confused child, a child who has wept so bitterly and for so long that she no longer cares who hears her. For an instant I forgot with whom I was dealing. This was no longer Mère Isabelle, formerly of the house of Arnault and latterly, Abbess of Sainte Marie-la-Mère. As I stepped forward she clung to me and for a second it might have been Fleur in my arms, or Perette, in despair over some real or imagined sorrow such as only children endure. I stroked her hair. “There, little one. It’s all right. Don’t be afraid.”

Against the breast of my habit she spoke, but her words were muffled. I could feel water from the stained rags-which she still held tightly in her hand-trickling down my back. “What happened? What’s wrong?” The swampy scent of fever was sharp on her, like that of the marshes after rain. Her brow was so hot that I wondered whether she were trulyill. I asked her the question.

“Cramps,” said Isabelle with an effort. “Belly cramps. And blood. Blood!”

There had been so much talk of blood in the past few days that for an instant I did not understand. Then it came to me. Her words-the curse of blood- the stained rags that she had tried to hide. The cramps. Of course. I held her closer.

“Am I going to die?” The flat voice quavered. “Am I going to go to hell?”

No one had ever told her. I was lucky; my own mother had no false delicacy. The blood was neither wicked nor unclean, she told me. It was a gift from God. Janette told me more as she taught me how to fold the pad and tie it into place; it was wise blood, she whispered mysteriously. Magical blood. Her quick hands fingered the cards, the new game of tarot, which Giordano had brought with him from Italy. Her eyes were pale with cataracts, yet she had the most piercing eyes I knew. See this card? The Moon. Giordano says the tides follow the moon’s cycle, in, out, high, low. So are a woman’s tides, dry at the wane, and full at the waxing of the moon. The pain will pass. To receive the gift, it may be necessary to suffer a little, a very little. But this is the magical gem of which Le Philosophe speaks. The fountain of life.

Of course, I could say nothing of this to Isabelle. But I explained as well as I could until her sobs lessened and her limp body grew rigid next to mine, and she finally pulled away. “Your own mother should have told you,” I said patiently. “It’s certain to be a shock to you otherwise. But it happens to all girls when they become women. It’s no shame.”

She looked at me, already hardening. Her face was contorted with disgust and rage.

“There’s nothing bad about it.” For the child’s sake, I had to make her understand. “It isn’t the devil, you see.” I tried to smile at her but her gaze was accusing, hateful. “It only happens once a month, for a few days. You fold the pad like this…” I demonstrated with a panel of my habit, but Isabelle seemed barely to be listening.

“Oh, you liar!” She pulled away from me, kicking the water jug aside with such violence that it flew through the fence pickets and into the well. “You liar!”

I tried to protest, but Isabelle struck out at me wildly with her fists. “It isn’t true! It isn’t! It isn’t!”

I knew then that I had committed the unforgivable sin. I had seen her without defenses. I had offered compassion. Worse, I knew a secret now, a secret she considered shameful enough for her to wash her soiled rags at night to ensure privacy…

I read all this in her last look at me as she turned momentarily to face me. “You liar! You filthy witch! You’re the one! You’re the devil’s whore and I can prove it!”

I tried to call her back.

“I won’t listen!” Even then I could feel pity for her: her youth, her frailty, her terrible loneliness…“I won’t listen! You’ve always hated me! I see you watching me with your insolence! Comparing me!” She gave an angry sob. “Well, I won’t be deceived! I know what you’re trying to do and I won’t-I won’t!”

Then she was gone.