Holy Fools Read online

  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

  JULY 27TH, 1610

  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

  JULY 29TH, 1610

  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 he
r 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.