Holy Fools (11 page)

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.

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.