Holy Fools Page 14

  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

  JULY 23RD, 1610

  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 encl
osed 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

  JULY 24TH, 1610

  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.