Holy Fools Page 19

  Following the first sighting of the Unholy Nun there have been a number of further incidents that may or may not be of a demonic nature; crosses removed from nuns’ habits during the night; obscene writings on statues in the church; red dye in the font and on the stones in front of the altar. Père Colombin, however, remains defiant in the face of these new outrages and spends hours each day in prayer; an occasional catnap saves me from complete exhaustion, and Soeur Marguerite ensures that I do not starve.

  And what of you, my Juliette? How far will you follow me, and for how long? The market at Barbâtre has served its purpose. There cannot be another visit there without arousing suspicion. Isabelle watches me with something akin to jealousy, and her vigilance, assiduously honed, is a compass needle ever pointing in my direction. Père Saint-Amand is an innocent for all his wordly wisdom, easily swayed by feminine wiles. Far harder on her own sex than any man could be, she knows this is my essential weakness and values this proof of my humanity. If she learned of my involvement with Clémente now, she would take my side, assuming that the girl led me into temptation. But her eye is on Juliette. Instinct shows her where the enemy lies. My Winged One works in the bakehouse—hard enough work, I’m told, but an easier task than digging the well. She does not approach me, though she must long for news of her daughter, but preserves that look of stolid, almost stupid docility that goes so ill with what I know of her. Only once she slipped and drew attention to herself when the old nun was taken to the infirmary. Yes, I heard about that. A foolish lapse, and for what? What loyalty can such as she have to these people? She always had too soft a heart. Except, of course, with me.

  This morning I spent two hours I could ill afford with Isabelle in confession and prayer. She has a study of her own next to her bedchamber with a shrine, candles, a portrait of herself by Toussaint Dubreuil, and a silver figurine of the Virgin taken from the sacristy treasures. Time was when I would have coveted that figurine, and the treasures too, but the time for pilfering is long past. Instead I listened to a spoilt girl’s rantings with a grave, compassionate air whilst deep in my stomach, I grinned.

  Mère Isabelle is troubled. She tells me so with the unconscious arrogance of her breeding, an adult’s pride masking the child’s fears. For she does fear, she tells me. For her soul; for her salvation. There have been dreams, you see. She sleeps only three or four hours a night—is the sea never quiet?—and what sleep she finds is stitched through with uneasy dreams of a kind she has never before known.

  “Of what?” I narrowed my eyes to hide the smile within. She may only be a child, but her senses are alert, her instincts uncanny. In another life I might have made a fine cardplayer of her.

  “Blood.” Her voice was low. “I dreamed blood flowed from the stones of the crypt and into the church. Then I dreamed of the black statue in the chapel, and blood came welling from beneath it. Then I dreamed of Soeur Auguste”—I told you her instincts were sound—“and of the well. I dreamed blood came from the well Soeur Auguste was digging, and it was all over me!”

  Very good. I never credited my little pupil with such an imagination. I notice that her face is marked with a number of small blemishes about the mouth and chin, indicating ill health. “You must not push yourself so hard, ma fille,” I told her gently. “To encourage physical collapse through self-denial is no way to ensure the completion of our work here.”

  “There’s truth in dreams,” she muttered, sullen. “Was not the well water tainted? And the Sacrament?”

  Gravely I nodded. Difficult to remember that she is twelve years old; with her pinched small face and reddened eyes she looks ancient, used up.

  “Soeur Alfonsine saw something in the crypt.” Again that mutter, half-sullen, half-imperious.

  “Shadows,” I told her crisply, feeding the flame.

  “No!” Her shoulders hunched instinctively; she put her hand to the pit of her stomach with a grimace.

  “What is it?” My hand lingered at the nape of her neck and she pulled away.

  “Nothing. Nothing!” she repeated, as if I had contradicted her. A cramp, she tells me. An ache that has afflicted her for the past few days. It will pass. She seemed about to tell me more, the wizened mask falling for an instant to reveal the child she might have been. Then she recovered, and for a moment I could clearly see her uncle in her. It’s a welcome resemblance; it reminds me that this is not a normal child I am dealing with, but one of a vicious and degenerate brood. “Leave me now,” she told me haughtily. “I wish to pray alone.”

  I nodded, hiding a smile. Say your prayers, little sister. The house of Arnault may need them sooner than you think.

  31

  AUGUST 3RD, 1610

  Last night, Germaine killed herself. We found her this morning, hanging from the crossbar halfway down the well, her weight had dragged the wooden strut from which she was suspended without dislodging itself from the earth walls. A few more feet and the corpse might have tainted the well water more certainly than LeMerle’s red dye. As it was, Germaine’s suicide was as cryptic as she was in life. Close by, we found obscene, barely decipherable messages on the church walls as well as on several statues, scrawled in the same black grease pencil that had been used to deface the new Marie, and she had removed the Bernardine cross from the front of her habit, carefully unpicking the tiny stitches, as if to spare us the shame of seeing it on the breast of a suicide.

  I saw only a glimpse of her face as they pulled her from her vertical grave, but it seemed to me virtually unchanged: even in death her mouth had just the same pinched and cynical look, that look of always expecting and receiving the worst life had to offer, which hid a heart more vulnerable and more easily bruised than anyone knew.

  She was buried without ceremony before Prime, at the crossroads beyond the abbey grounds. I dug the grave myself, remembering our work on the well together, and I spoke a few silent, sorry words to Sainte Marie-de-la-mer. Tomasine wanted to put a stake through the corpse’s heart, to prevent her from walking, but I would not allow it. Let Germaine rest as she could, I said; we were nuns, not savages.

  Tomasine muttered something sullen and indistinct.

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing.”

  I could sense the unrest, however. Throughout the day it walked with me; in the abbey, in the garden and the chapel; it worked alongside me in the bakehouse and in the fields. It did not help that the heat had soured; overnight, the air had become flat and humid, and the sun was a tarnished coin behind a sheet of cloud. Beneath it we sweated; sweating, we stank. No one spoke aloud of Germaine’s suicide, or even of the Unholy Nun, but it was there nevertheless; a murmur of revolt; a fear that grew with every silent hour. This was, after all, the second death in as many months—and both had occurred in unusual circumstances. A third outrage seemed only a matter of time.

  Then, this evening, it finally came. Soeur Virginie arrived from the infirmary with the unwelcome news that during Chapter Soeur Rosamonde had died. Oh, it was to be expected at her age; but it was a blow nevertheless. Certainly it was enough to set rumors flying: Rosamonde had died of shock following a new Visitation by the Unholy Nun; she had been bewitched to death by the same evil spirit that had killed Mère Marie; she had committed suicide; she had died of the cholera, and everyone was trying to cover it up; she had perished of an overzealous bleeding, authorized by Mère Isabelle.

  I was more inclined to believe this: Virginie’s handling of the old woman had been misguided from the start, and separated from her friends and cut off from the rest of the abbey, Rosamonde had soon fallen into a fatal decline. Her death was ill-timed, however. No amount of reasoning could persuade the other sisters that they were in no danger. Death is not contagious, I protested: only disease. At her own insistence I promised to make a medicine bag for Soeur Piété to protect her from evil humors, and strengthening drafts for Alfonsine and Marguerite, who had grown even thinner under Virginie’s care. After the evening meal several of the novices ca
me to me for advice and protection; I told them to avoid excessive fasting, to drink only the water from the well, and to wash with soap morning and night.

  “What good will that do?” asked Soeur Tomasine when she heard of it.

  I explained that regular washing sometimes prevented disease.

  She looked skeptical. “I don’t see how it can,” she said. “You need holy water, not soap and water, to drive out evil.”

  I sighed. It is sometimes very difficult to explain these things without sounding heretical. “Some evils are waterborne,” I explained carefully. “Some travel by air. If the water or the air is tainted, then disease may spread.” I showed her the scented pomander I had made to dispel foul air and flying insects, and she turned it over suspiciously in her hand.

  “You seem to know a lot about these things,” she said.

  “Only what I’ve heard.”

  At Vespers that night LeMerle spoke to us, looking tired after a day of fasting and prayer. Exhausted and afraid, the sisters brightened a little at the sound of his voice, but Père Saint-Amand seemed reluctant to mention the long day’s troubling business, and spoke of the trials of Saint Felicity with a forced cheer that convinced no one.

  Then Mère Isabelle addressed us. I had noticed that the more LeMerle spoke to us of caution and restraint, the more agitated she became, as if she were purposely defying the new confessor. Today her address was longer and more confused than ever, and though she spoke to us of the Light of God in the darkness, her speech held little illumination.

  “We must try to find the light,” she told us in a voice that quavered a little with fatigue. “But today it seems that try as we might we are infested, even to the heart. Even to the soul. Oh, we mean well. But even the best of intentions may lead the soul into hell. And sin is everywhere. No one is safe. Even a hermit alone for fifty years in a lightless cave may not be free of sin. Sin is a plague, and it is contagious.”

  “There have been dreams,” she whispered—and a murmur rose from the assembly like poison smoke—“dreams and blood”—and the murmur echoed again like the voice of our longings—blood, yes—“and now the ichors of hell flow free among us, touching us with monstrous thoughts, monstrous cravings”—yes, whispered the voice of the multitude, oh yes, yes, yesss!

  At her side LeMerle seemed to smile—or was it the candlelight?—his face ringed in the glow from the sacristy lantern so that a soft nimbus surrounded him.

  “There have been lecheries!” cried Mère Isabelle. “Blasphemies! Secret abominations! Can anyone deny it?”

  Before her Soeur Alfonsine began to wail, arms held out. Clémente too held out her hands in seeming entreaty. Behind them, a dozen more joined the chorus. “All of us, guilty!”

  Guilty, yessss! An ecstasy of release.

  “All of us tainted!”

  Tainted, yes!

  The candles, the incense, the stench of fear and excitement. The dark, teeming with shadows. A gust of wind slammed the door against the wall and set the candles guttering. A hundred shadows against the walls doubled, trebled, becoming three hundred, three thousand, an army from hell. Someone screamed. Such was the nervous power of Mère Isabelle’s soliloquy that the cry was echoed by a dozen more.

  “See! It comes! It comes! It is here!”

  Everyone turned to see who had cried out. Set slightly apart from the rest of the crowd stood Soeur Marguerite, arms uplifted. She had cast aside her wimple and her head was thrown back, revealing a face distorted with tics and tremors. Her left leg was shaking perceptibly through the thick folds of her habit, a vibration that seemed to pass through every muscle and nerve in her body.

  “Soeur Marguerite?” LeMerle spoke in a clear, calm voice. “Soeur Marguerite, is anything wrong?”

  With a visible effort, the thin nun turned her eyes toward him. Her mouth opened, but nothing came. The tic in her leg intensified.

  “Don’t touch me!” said Marguerite as Soeur Virginie moved to help her.

  LeMerle looked concerned. “Soeur Marguerite. Come here, please. If you can.”

  It was clear she wanted to obey. But her limbs refused to do so. I had seen a similar case in Montauban, in Gascony, where several people had been afflicted by Saint Vitus’ dance. But this was not the same malady. Marguerite’s leg jerked and danced as if some evil puppeteer were pulling her strings. Her face worked frantically.

  “She’s faking,” said Alfonsine.

  Marguerite’s head twisted to face her. Grotesquely, her body kept the same unnatural posture. “Help me,” she said.

  Isabelle had been watching in silence. Now she spoke. “Can you doubt it now?” she said in a low voice. “Possessed!”

  LeMerle said nothing but looked well satisfied with himself.

  All around them, the sisters had begun to murmur. The word—unspoken as yet until this moment—filled the air like a plague of moths.

  Only Alfonsine looked skeptical. “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “It’s a tic, or the palsy. You know what she’s like.”

  Privately, I agreed with her. There had been more than enough excitement in the abbey during the past weeks to provoke a frenzy in one as susceptible as Soeur Marguerite. Besides, Alfonsine had been coughing up more blood than ever in recent days, and it was getting hard to compete.

  Isabelle, however, was not pleased. “There have been cases!” she snapped. “Who are you to question this one? What do you know about it?”

  Alfonsine, abashed at the rebuke, began to cough. I could hear her forcing it, raking at her throat. If she’d had any sense she would have accepted the linctus I had prepared for her, and bandaged her throat with linen. Even so I knew that such remedies would not cure her but would merely slow the progress of her illness. The consumption is not an ill that can be cured with syrups.

  Meanwhile, Marguerite’s affliction had not abated. The tremor had passed to her right leg, and now both legs were infected with the dancing sickness. Her eyes rolled in dismay as her feet seemed to move independently of the rest of her body, rocking her from side to side. The word—possessssed—rolled around the vaults, picking up momentum as it went.

  Isabelle turned to LeMerle. “Well?”

  He shook his head. “It’s too early to say.”

  “How can you doubt it?”

  The Blackbird looked at her. “I can doubt it, child,” he said with an edge of irritation, “because, unlike you, I have seen many things, and I know how easily judgment may be clouded by impatience and lack of thought.”

  For a moment Isabelle held his gaze defiantly, then her eyes dropped. “Forgive me, mon père,” she said through her teeth. “What shall I do?”

  He thought about it for a while. “She should be examined,” he decided, with a seeming reluctance. “Immediately.”

  32

  AUGUST 4TH, 1610

  Only I could appreciate how deftly the Blackbird had handled this scene. By seeming to hold back, by adopting a reasoned posture at variance with the atmosphere of fear and mistrust he had already created, he had made it seem as if they, and not he, were making the decisions. Soeur Marguerite was taken to the infirmary, where she remained with LeMerle and Soeur Virginie throughout the night and the following day. According to the rumors, Marguerite’s tic had continued for more than an hour after the aborted service. She was bled twice, on Soeur Virginie’s recommendation, after which she was too exhausted to be examined and had to be put to bed.

  I listened to the reports with barely restrained impatience. Of course I know that Soeur Virginie is a silly girl who should never have been put in charge of the infirmary. Already weakened by fasting and nervous exhaustion, the last thing Marguerite needs at the moment is bleeding. She needs rest, quiet, and good, wholesome food: meat, bread, and a little red wine—all the things, in fact, that Mère Isabelle has forbidden. Demons respond to sanguineous humors, declares Soeur Virginie, and to prevent infestation it is essential to thin the blood. In fact, the color red would have been outlawed alt
ogether except for the crosses stitched onto our habits, and Mère Isabelle looks with suspicion on any sister who does not share her own sickly pallor. Red is the devil’s color: dangerous; immodest; blatant. For the first time I am glad that I wear the wimple, and hope that she does not remember the color of my hair.

  In this sullen heat, ill humor and suspicion breed like the plague. There are cantrips to bring rain, but I dare not use them; already I sense the disapproval of Soeur Tomasine and others, and I want no more unwelcome attention. Instead, this evening, alone in the chapel, I sat at the feet of the new Marie, lit a candle for Germaine and Rosamonde, and tried to compose my thoughts.

  Tsk-tsk, begone! But the Six of Swords is not so easily banished. It hangs above my head like a curse and will not be satisfied. I looked across the pew where, only the night before, Marguerite had suffered her attack of the tremors, and foreboding warred with curiosity in my heart. Was this what LeMerle had intended? Was this another stage of his mysterious plan?

  I tried a little prayer—a heresy, you might call it, but the old saint would have understood. The new one, however, just stood in her chilly silence and gave no sign of having heard. She knows only good Latin, this new Marie, and the prayers of such as I are of no interest to her. Once more I thought of Le Borgne—and too of Germaine and Rosamonde, and I began to understand the desire to attack this clean new saint; to bring her down, deface her, make her more like ourselves.

  Observing her more closely I could see that she was not all white, as first I had thought. There was a slim ribbon of gilt running around the edge of the Virgin’s mantle, and her halo too was picked out in gold. Carved from the finest marble, veined in the tenderest rose, she stood on a pedestal of the same material, engraved with her name and that of our abbey in gilded letters. There was a crest carved underneath, which on close scrutiny I recognized as that of the house of Arnault, and this time I also noticed another, rather smaller crest, modestly placed beneath, the design of which—a white dove and the Holy Mother’s fleur-de-lis picked out against a gilt background—suddenly looked strangely familiar…