Holy Fools (14 page)

Perette returned this morning
as if nothing had happened. It was a disturbing fact of the new regimen that no one had mentioned her absence, not even in Chapter. If it had been any other than she, then perhaps someone would have spoken…But the wild girl was no true sister-or even a novice-of Sainte Marie-de-la-mer. A strangeness clung to her, an aloofness that no one had yet managed to penetrate. Even I had been too absorbed in my own affairs to pay any real attention to the absence of my friend. It was as if Perette had never been there at all, her disappearance from collective memory as complete as her removal from every aspect of our daily life. This morning, however, she was back: demure as a marble saint, she took her place as usual without a glance at anyone.

But there was something about her manner that disturbed me. She was too quiet, her face expressionless as only Perette’s can be, her gold-ringed eyes as flat and bright as the gilt on our altarpiece. I wanted to speak to her, to find out where she had been for the past three days-but Soeur Marguerite had already rung the bell for Vigils, and there was no time for questions, even if Perette had been inclined to reply.

Le Merle made no
appearance until Prime. He never was an early riser, not even in the old days, preferring to roll out of bed at eight or nine, then stay reading until midnight, squandering candles-good wax ones, not tallow-while the rest of us had barely enough food to keep body and soul together. It was always his way, accepted by all as if it were his due, as if he were the master and we his servants. The worst thing was we
liked
it; served him willingly and for the most part without resentment; lied for him, stole for him, made excuses for his most outrageous behavior. “It’s the way he is,” Le Borgne once told me, one day when my exasperation had been too much to contain. “Some people have it, and some don’t, that’s all.”

“Have what?”

The dwarf gave his crooked smile. “Grace, my dear, or what passes for it these days. That gilding that some of us receive at birth. That special gilding that sets his kind apart from mine.”

I didn’t understand, and I said so.

“Oh yes you do,” said Le Borgne with unusual patience. “You know he’s worthless, you know he doesn’t give a damn, and that he’ll betray you some day or another. But you want to believe in him all the same. He’s like those statues you see in churches, all gold and glitter on the outside, plaster on the inside. We know what they’re made of really, but we pretend we don’t, because it’s better to believe in a false god than in no god at all.”

“And yet you follow him,” I said. “Don’t you?”

He looked at me with his one eye. “I do,” he said, “but then I’m a fool. Every circus has one.”

Well, LeMerle, I thought as all eyes turned hungrily to watch him make his entrance, you can certainly take your pick of fools this morning. Late nights and privations had taken no toll on him, I noticed; he looked rested and well in his ceremonial robes, his hair tied back neatly with a piece of ribbon. The embroidered scapular of his office had been flung over his black soutane, and as always he wore the silver crucifix, upon which his pale hands rested. As if by chance, he had chosen to stand just beneath the single stained-glass window, through which reached the first rose-gold fingers of dawn. I guessed immediately that something was afoot.

With him was Alfonsine. Since her attack there had been a number of rumors, though most of us knew Alfonsine well enough to discount the wildest of these. Even so, her presence at LeMerle’s side attracted no little attention, and she played it for all she was worth, affecting a haunted look and a faltering step, and coughing repeatedly into her fist. She behaved as if her fit of hysterics in the crypt had elevated, rather than disgraced her, and her adoring eyes never left LeMerle.

Others were watching him too with varying expressions of hope, fear, and admiration; I caught Antoine staring, and Clémente, and Marguerite, and Piété. Not all looks were adoring, however. Germaine’s face was set in a look of dogged indifference, but I read a clearer message from her eyes. I knew that look: and LeMerle was a fool if he failed to recognize the threat. If Germaine had the chance, she would do him harm.

Then silence fell, and LeMerle began to speak. “My children,” he said. “It has been a testing time for us, these past few days. The contamination of our well by means unknown; the disruption to our services; the uncertainty of change.” A murmur of acquiescence passed through the crowd. Soeur Alfonsine seemed close to swooning. “But the testing times are over,” said LeMerle, beginning to move from the
pulpitum
to the altar. “We have survived them, and must be strengthened thereby. And as a token of our strength, our hope, our faith…”-he paused, and I could sense the expectation in the air-“we shall now take Communion, a sacrament that has been neglected here for all too long.
Quam oblationem, tu Deus, in omnibus quaesumus, benedictam-
”

At this Soeur Piété, who was in charge of the sacristy, moved slowly to the tiny cabinet where our few treasures were kept, and brought out the chalice and holy vessels for Communion. We seldom used these. I myself had taken the sacrament only once since my arrival, and our old Reverend Mother had been overawed by the finery of the treasures left by the black monks, ordering them to be kept safe and rarely allowing them to be seen at all. LeMerle broke that rule, as all others. There is an oven at the back of the sacristy for the baking of the holy wafers, but to my knowledge it had been twenty years since it was last used. Where he had got the wafers I can only guess; maybe he baked them himself, or maybe Mère Isabelle had one of the sisters make them. Bowing her head, Soeur Alfonsine carried the Host to LeMerle as he poured the wine into a dull-silver chalice knuckled with polished gems.

Mère Isabelle was first at the altar, kneeling to receive the sacrament. LeMerle put a hand on her forehead and took a wafer from the silver plate.

“Hoc est enim corpus meum.”

At those words I felt my hackles rise, and I forked the sign against malchance. Something was about to happen. I could feel it. It was in the air, like a promise of lightning.

“Hic est enim calyx sanguinis mei…”

Now for the chalice, huge in her small hands. Its rim was blackened, the uncut gems no brighter than pebbles. Suddenly I wanted to leap up and warn the child, to tell her not to drink, not to trust him, to refuse the false sacrament. But it was madness; I was already in disgrace, already under penance; I forked the sign again and could not watch as she parted her lips, drew the cup toward them and-

“Amen.”

The cup passed and moved on. Now Marguerite took Isabelle’s place in front of the altar, her leg quivering uncontrollably beneath her habit. Then Clémente. Then Piété, Rosamonde, and Antoine. Had I been wrong? Had my instincts deceived me?

“Soeur Anne.” Beside me, Perette flinched at the unfamiliar name, the unfriendly voice. The abbess’s tone was crisp, commanding. Any sweetness the Communion might have opened up in her was sealed up like honey in a bee’s cell. Perette took a step backward, heedless of the nuns at her back. I heard someone grunt as her bare heel stamped down on an unsuspecting foot.

“Soeur Anne, you will come forward and take the sacrament, if you please,” said LeMerle.

Perette looked at me in appeal and shook her head.

“Perette, it’s all right. Just go to the altar.” My whisper was hidden in the crowd. Still the wild girl held back, her gold-ringed eyes pleading. “Go on!” I hissed, pushing her forward. “Trust me.”

Perette knelt before him, conspicuous in her novice’s habit, her nostrils flaring like a dog’s. She whimpered a little as LeMerle placed the wafer on her tongue. Then he passed her the chalice. Her fingers closed around it and I saw her glance backward at me as if for comfort. Then she drank.

For an instant I thought I had been mistaken. His
Amen
rang clear in the bright air. He reached out to help Perette to her feet. Then she coughed.

Suddenly I was reminded of the monk of the procession in Épinal. The crowd drew away with just the same low sigh of distress, the fallen monk rolling to the ground, the chalice falling from his grasp.

Perette coughed again, leaned forward, then suddenly, shockingly, vomited between her feet. There was a silence. The wild girl looked up, as if for reassurance, then a new paroxysm of vomiting struck her, and she tried too late to cover her mouth. An appalling blurt of red sprayed from between her lips, spattering her white skirt.

“
Blood
!” moaned Alfonsine.

Perette clapped her hands to her mouth. She looked terrified, ready to bolt. I tried to reach her but Alfonsine got in my way, crying: “She defiled the Sacrament! The Sacrament!” Then she too doubled up coughing, and I was back in Épinal, watching as the crowd drew away from the stricken brother, hearing the human tide turn, crushing everything in its path. For a minute I could hardly breathe as the nuns in front of me backed me against the wall of the transept.

Then LeMerle stepped forward, and the sisters wavered back into uneasy half-silence. Alfonsine was still coughing, hectic patches of red standing out on her thin cheeks. Then she too bent over and retched, and a terrible wad of blood spattered the marble between her feet.

That ended all hope of rational discourse. In vain I tried to remind the nuns that Soeur Alfonsine had coughed up blood before, that this was the nature of her illness-the crowd heaved back just as it had in Épinal, and the panic began.

“It’s the blood plague!” cried Marguerite.

“It’s a curse!” said Piété.

I struggled against it, but their excitement had reached me too and I was drowning in it. My mother’s cantrip-
evil spirit, get thee hence
-calmed me a little, although I knew that it was a man, and not spirit, who had set this in motion. All around me faces mooned, eyes rolled. Marguerite had bitten her tongue and there was blood on her lips. One of Clémente’s flailing arms had caught Antoine in the face, and she was cursing, a hand clapped to her bloody nose. I’d seen a painting once, in a church in Paris by a man named Bosch, in which the souls of the damned clawed and clutched at one another in just such an ecstasy of savagery and fear. It was called
Pandemonium
.

But now LeMerle had raised his voice, and it rolled across the hall like the wrath of God. “For God’s sake, let us have respect for this place!” Silence returned, filled with eddies and small whimperings. “If this is a sign, and the Unholy One has dared to come upon us”-the murmur came again, but he stilled it with a gesture-“I say if the Evil One has dared assail us now in the very sanctity of our church, to desecrate God’s very sacrament-then I am glad of it.” He paused. “As you should
all
be glad of it! Because if a wolf threatens the farmer’s herd, it’s the farmer’s duty to
flush that wolf out
! And if a cornered wolf tries to bite, then what does that farmer do?”

We watched him, eyes wide.

“Does that farmer turn and run?”

“No!”
It was a thin cheer, like a splash of spray above the rolling wave.

“Does that farmer weep and tear his hair?”

“No!”
It was stronger now, more than half the sisters joining in the cry.

“No! That farmer takes what weapons he can-staff, spear, pitchfork-and he takes his friends and neighbors and his brothers and his good strong sons, and he hunts down that wolf, he hunts it down and kills it, and if the devil has made himself a home here, then I say it’s time we hunted him down and sent him back to hell with his tail between his legs!”

They were with him now, whimpering their relief and admiration. The Blackbird basked for an instant in that applause-so long since he had stood like this before a crowded house-then his eyes met mine, and he grinned. “But look to yourselves,” he went on softly. “If the devil has breached your defenses, ask yourselves how you let those defenses drop. With what unshriven sins, what secret vices have you fed him, in what shameful practices has he taken his solace during the unclean years?”

Once more the crowd lifted its voice, touched now with a new note.
Tell us,
it murmured.
Guide us
.

“The Unholy One may be anywhere.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “In the very Sacraments of our church. In the air. In the stones. Look to yourselves!” Sixty-five pairs of eyes flicked furtively sideways. “Look to one another.”

On that note LeMerle turned away from the pulpit, and I knew the performance was over. It was his style-opening, development, soliloquy, grand finale, and then, at last, to business. I’d heard that piece-or variations thereon-many times before.

His voice, so haunting and evocative before, changed register and became the brisk, impersonal tone of an officer giving orders. “Leave here now, all of you. There can be no more services until this place has been cleansed. Soeur Anne”-he turned to Perette-“will remain with me. Soeur Alfonsine will return to the infirmary. The rest of you may return to your duties and your prayers. Praise be!”

I had to admire it a little; from the beginning he had held them in the palm of his hand, cleverly guiding them from one extreme of feeling to another-but for what? He had hinted at some grander motive than his usual robberies and deceits, although I could not begin to guess at what profit he might find in a little abbey hidden away off the coast. I shrugged to myself. What could I do? He had my daughter. Let me deal with that first and foremost. The rest was the Church’s business.

We devoted that morning
to duties, prayer, and speculation. We held public confession at Chapter, during which it was revealed that five other nuns had tasted the tainted blood in their mouths after taking Communion. Mère Isabelle blames this inflammation of the senses on strong meats and excessive drink, and has decreed that nothing red-no red meat, no tomatoes, red wine, apples, or berry fruits-should be used in the kitchen or served at mealtimes, and that our food should henceforth be only of the plainest kind. Now that the new well is almost complete, the ale too has been restricted, to the dismay of Soeur Marguerite, who in spite of her ailments had become almost exuberant under its nourishing influence. Soeur Alfonsine is in the infirmary with Perette. Soeur Virginie watches over them both, with orders to report back anything unusual to Mère Isabelle. I find it impossible to believe that any of my sisters can truly suspect either of them of being possessed. Rumors abound, however. More dragon’s teeth of LeMerle’s sowing.

After dinner today we had half an hour to ourselves before prayer, Confession, and evening duties. I went to my herb garden-mine no longer-and ran my fingers over the neat bushes of rosemary and silver sage, releasing their dim sweetness into the darkening air. Bees droned from the purple spikes of the lavender and the small fragrant blooms of the thyme. A white butterfly paused for a moment on a patch of corn-flowers. Fleur’s absence was suddenly very immediate, very final, the memory of her orphan’s face clear as the turn of an evil card. I felt the grief which I had kept at bay come flooding back. A few seconds stolen in a crowd, a glimpse. It wasn’t enough. And I had paid for it dearly. Four days had passed. And still there was no sign from LeMerle, no hint of a second visit. A cold feeling entered me as I considered the thought that perhaps now that he had Clémente, there would be no more visits to Fleur. I was too old, too familiar for his tastes. LeMerle’s palate was for something younger. I had been too cold, too sure, too wilful. I had lost my chance.

I knelt down on the path. The scents of lavender and rosemary were heady and nostalgic. Not for the first time, and with increasing urgency, I wondered what the Blackbird had planned. If only I knew his mind, then maybe I could gain some hold over him. Was there gold in the abbey, upon which he planned to lay his greedy hands? Had he somehow discovered the existence of a secret treasure, which he hoped I would uncover during my excavation of the well? We’d all heard stories, of course, of monks’ treasures, buried under crypts, immured in ancient walls. But that’s my romantic imagination again. Giordano deplored it, preferring the poetry of mathematics to that of high adventure.
You’ll come to a bad end, girl,
he would say in his dry voice.
You’ve the soul of a buccaneer
. And then, with a twinkle in his eye as I seemed to approve the comparison:
The soul of a pirate, and the mind of a jackass. Come now, back to this formula
…

I know what Giordano would have told me. There was no gold in the abbey walls, and anything buried in that shifting soil would long since have been lost forever. Such things happened only in stories. And yet LeMerle was more like myself than my old tutor, more buccaneer than logician. I know what motivates him. Desire. Mischief. Applause. Sheer pleasure taken in wrongness, in biting his thumb at those who thwart him: the tumbling of altars, defiling of graves. I know this because we are still alike, he and I, each a small window into the soul of the other. Many passions run hot and cold in his strange blood, and wealth is only one of the lesser of these. No, this is not a question of money.

Power, then? The idea of having so many women under his thumb, for his use and manipulation? That was more like the Blackbird I knew, and would tally with his secret trysts with Clémente. But LeMerle could have had his pick of beauties; had never lacked for success in that direction, either in the provinces, or in the Paris salons. He had never valued these things before; had never gone out of his way to pursue them. What then? I asked myself. What drives a man like that?

There came a sudden cry from behind the wall of the herb garden close by, and I leapt to my feet.
“Miséricorde!”
The voice was so shrill that for a second I did not recognize it. I ran to the garden wall and hoisted myself to look over.

The orchard and herb garden give directly onto the west side of the church so that the plants and trees may be protected from the cold in winter. As I peered over the wall I could see the west entrance barely fifty feet away and poor old Rosamonde, her hands clasped to her face, wailing fit to split.

“
Aüi
!” she screeched. “
Men
!”

With an effort I pulled myself to the top of the wall and straddled it. There were six men at the west entrance. A contraption of ropes and pulleys had been left at the open door, and next to it a pile of logs as if in preparation to roll something heavy.

“It’s all right,
ma soeur,
” I called encouragingly. “They’re only workmen. They’ve come to mend the roof.”

“What roof?” Confused, Rosamonde turned to look at me.

“It’s all right,” I repeated, swinging my legs over onto her side. “They’re workmen. The roof’s been leaking, and they’re here to mend it.” I gave her a friendly nod and allowed myself to drop lightly into the long grass.

Rosamonde shook her head in bewilderment. Then, peering shortsightedly at me: “Who are you, young woman?”

“It’s Soeur Auguste,” I told her. “Remember me?”

“I don’t have a sister,” said Rosamonde. “Never did. Are you my daughter?” She peered shortsightedly at me. “I know I should know you, my dear,” she told me. “But I can’t quite remember…”

I put my arm gently around her shoulders. I could see a small group of sisters watching from the church door. “Never mind,” I said. “Look, why don’t we just go into the chapter house and-”

But as I turned her to face the church Rosamonde gave another shriek. “Look!” she cried. “Sainte-Marie!”

Either old Rosamonde’s eyes were not as feeble as I had thought, or she had actually been in the church when the work commenced, for I had seen nothing amiss in the group of workmen at the west entrance. But as I watched now I saw that none of the equipment that had been left at the door was for roofing. Indeed, no scaffolding had been erected up the walls, not even a ladder. And the men came from within the church, not without. With them, tethered like a great beast, inch by inch on her wooden rollers came Marie-de-la-mer.

A few nuns were already watching in silence. Alfonsine was among them, and Marguerite. Rosamonde looked at me in baffled distress. “Why are they taking the saint outside?” she demanded. “
Where
are they taking her?”

I shook my head. “Perhaps they’re going to transport her to somewhere more appropriate,” I said without conviction. What could be more appropriate than our own church, our own entrance, where she could be seen from every part of the building, touched by anyone entering?

Rosamonde was making her way as quickly as she could toward the group of workmen. “You can’t take her!” she shouted hoarsely. “You can’t steal her from us!”

I hurried after her. “Be careful,
ma soeur,
you’ll do yourself an injury.”

But Rosamonde was not listening. She hobbled to the doorway where the men were taking pains to avoid chipping the marble steps.

One positioned the rollers. Two others levered the statue into position. Two more at the rear kept her steady whilst the foreman directed the operation.

“What are you doing?” demanded Rosamonde.

“Careful, Sister,” said one of the men. “Don’t get in the way!” He grinned, and I saw the crooked line of his blackened teeth.

“But it’s the saint! The
saint
!” Rosamonde’s eyes were round with outrage.

In a way I understood her. The big saint-if saint she was-had been a part of the abbey for years. Her stony face had watched us live and die. Countless prayers had been uttered beneath her mute, impassive gaze. Her round belly, her massive shoulders, the black bulk of her tender, indifferent presence had been a comfort, a touchstone to us across changes and seasons. To remove her now, in this time of crisis, was to make orphans of us at a time when we needed her most.

“Who ordered this?” I said.

“The new confessor, Sister.” The fellow barely glanced at me. “Mind yourself, she’s coming down!” I thrust Rosamonde away from the steps just as the statue, supported on either side by the workmen and from beneath by the rollers, came crashing down the steps onto the path. Dust puffed up from the cracked earth. The man with bad teeth steadied the saint while his assistant, a young man with red hair and a cheery smile, maneuvered a cart into position on which to load her.

“Why?” I insisted. “Why remove it at all?”

The red-haired man shrugged. “It’s just orders,” he said. “Maybe you’re getting a new one. This one looks old as God.”

“And where will you put it?”

“Dump it in the sea,” said the red-haired man. “Orders.”

Rosamonde clutched at me. “They can’t do that!” she said. “Reverend Mother will never let them do it! Where is she? Reverend Mother!”

“
Ma fille,
I’m here.” The voice was small and flat, almost colorless like its owner, and yet Rosamonde stopped struggling and stared, her poor baffled face tugging between hope and dread.

Mère Isabelle was standing at the church door, hands folded. “It’s time we were rid of this blasphemy,” she said. “It has been here too long already, and the islanders are a superstitious folk. They call it the Mermaid. They pray to it. It has a
tail,
for God’s sake!”

In spite of myself I spoke out. “But
ma mère
-”

“This object-is not the Holy Mother,” said Isabelle. “And there is no such saint as Marie-de-la-mer. There never was.” Her nasal voice rose a little. “How can you bear it here? This thing in our church! Pilgrims coming to touch it! Women-
pregnant
women-scraping dust from it to brew their charms!”

I began to understand. Not the saint herself, but the use to which she had been put; the touch of fertility in the barren house of God.

Isabelle took a breath. Now she had begun to speak it seemed she could not stop herself. “I knew it the moment I set foot here. The unconsecrated burials. The secret excesses! The curse of blood!” It was almost hysteria, but she was cold for all that. Angélique Saint-Hervé Désirée Arnault had her own formula and would stick to it no matter what.

“And now,” she said. “It dares to attack me. Me! Taunts me with blood! My confessor locates the source and purifies it. But the evil remains. The evil remains.”

She stayed for a minute in silence, contemplating the evil. Then, with a crisp
Praise be!
, she turned and was gone.

The bell for Nones
went soon afterward, and there was little time for discussion. Not that I would have dared voice my doubts in any case, for the fear of losing contact with Fleur kept me from speaking my mind. Throughout Nones I found my mind straying to Mère Isabelle’s words on the church steps, words of which she herself seemed barely conscious.

The curse of blood. The evil remains
.

The new well is close to complete now, its water as sweet and clear as she could have wished. LeMerle has exorcised the church itself, the font, the sacristy, and all the holy vessels, declaring them free from taint. He has intimated the same of Perette and Alfonsine too, to my relief, although there are still rumors. Alfonsine seems quite disappointed that she has been given this clean bill of spiritual health, and her visible chagrin causes Marguerite to speak slightingly of actresses and attention-seekers.

And yet
the evil remains
.

I tried to keep my eyes from wandering, but time and again found myself staring at the giant emptiness that had once held Marie-de-la-mer. A small sacrifice, I told myself, compared with the return of my daughter, for what was a statue to a living child, a frightened child?

LeMerle was behind it, of course. What he wanted with the statue I could not guess, but its removal-that of the one symbol of our unity and our faith-had brought us one step closer to surrender. He must become our symbol now, I realized; he was to be our only salvation. During the service he spoke of female martyrs, of Sainte Perpetua and Sainte Catherine and Christina Mirabilis, of the mystery of death and the purity of fire, and he held us in his palm.