Holy Fools Read online

  “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! Aii! 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

  JULY 19TH, 1610

  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

  JULY 19TH, 1610

  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 m
aternal 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

  JULY 20TH, 1610

  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.