I am not allowed to visit. Antoine too has been removed from the infirmary, though Virginie remains to care for the possessed woman. Antoine tells me this with sly satisfaction; Clémente seems crazed and may never regain her sanity. So Virginie tells her. Antoine’s eyes are small and mean as she speaks of it. She has volunteered to help in the infirmary, washing blankets and preparing broths for the afflicted woman, into which, no doubt, she slips a regular dose of morning glories.
Lovely Clémente is no longer quite so lovely, she reports in that new, sly voice; her face will be scarred by the repeated assault of her fingernails; her hair is coming out in patches. I would have liked to go to her, to comfort her perhaps or to explain to her ravaged face that it wasn’t my fault…
What good would it do? Antoine’s hand may have given her the dose, but it was I who gave her the means. I would do it again in the same circumstances. LeMerle, wisely keeping his distance, knows it. Again he has opened a gulf inside me, has opened the dark budget of possibility within my entrails.
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
Giordano used to say that in the original Hebrew the word witch meant poisoner.
I wonder if Giordano would recognize his pupil now.
45
AUGUST 12TH, 1610
As expected, my affairs proceed according to plan. Mère Isabelle remains docile—for the present. She spends much of her time in prayer, heedless of her increasingly unruly flock.
Access to Clémente is limited, for even I can hardly dose the girl continuously, and her ravings have become increasingly violent.
Instead, I build upon my pupil’s fears with various lore and nonsense culled from a hundred books both sacred and profane. Whilst seeming to lull her terrors I artfully nourish them with anecdotes and fancies. The world is filled with horrors; you name it—burnings, poisonings, bewitchings, and evil enchantments; Père Colombin knows it, and he knows exactly how to bring the horrors to life. A checkered career may provide useful fuel for such deceits; after all, I even met the famous juris-consult Jean Bodin at one of Mme. de Sévigné’s soirées—and was thoroughly bored by the lengthiness of his discourse—the rest I borrowed from the great fictions of history. Aeschylus, Plutarch, the Bible…Clémente herself is quite unaware that the demoniac names she utters in her frenzies are for the most part merely the secret, forgotten names of God, reborn as blasphemies in her tortured brain.
My pupil has hardly slept for days. Her eyes are sunken and red. Her mouth is pale as a scar. Sometimes I see her watching me, she thinks in secret. I wonder if she suspects. In any case, it is too late for her. A dose of Clémente’s morning glories would be enough to kill her revolt, though I would only administer it in dire emergency. I want it to come to Arnault from a blue sky. The end of his hopes. Irrevocable.
Ironically, my pupil now takes what comfort she can at the prospect of Sunday’s treat, the long-awaited Festival of the Virgin. Now that our abbey has been reclaimed from the apostate saint, Marie-de-la-mer, we should be able to count on a personal intervention from the Holy Mother in our regrettable affairs. So she thinks, anyway, and redoubles her prayers. Meanwhile, I work on our spiritual defenses with many Latin incantations and a great quantity of incense. No demonic force must be allowed to penetrate our abbey on its holiest day.
Juliette came to find me in my rooms early this morning. I knew she might, and I was ready for her, raising my head from a stack of books to face her. She was fiercely prim in her clean, starched linen, not a stray curl softening the line of her pale, set face. This was about Perette, I told myself warily, and I must tread lightly.
“Juliette. Is the sun up already? The room seems brighter than it was a moment ago.”
Her expression told me that now was not the time for flattery. “Please.” Her voice was sharp, but with anxiety, I noticed, rather than anger. “You have to keep Perette out of this. She doesn’t understand the danger. Think of the risk, if she were to be found out!” Then, as I said nothing: “Really, LeMerle, you must see that she’s only a child!”
Ay, that was it. That was the mother in her. I tried misdirection. “Isabelle is feeling unwell,” I said gently. “While she rests in her rooms, I might arrange for you—and Antoine—to slip out for a time. To take a basket of food to—for example—a poor fisherman and his family?”
She looked at me for a second, and I could see the hunger in her eyes. Then she shook her head. “That’s very like you, LeMerle,” she said without heat. “And what would happen with me out of the way? Another Apparition? Another Dancing Mass?” She shook her head again. “I know you,” she said softly. “Nothing is free. You’d want something in return, then something more, then—”
I interrupted her. “My dear, you mistake my intentions. I made the suggestion out of concern for you, nothing more. You’re no danger to me, Juliette; you’re already as guilty as I am.”
She lifted her chin at that. “I?” But there was fear in her eyes.
“Your silence alone is proof of guilt. You recognized the Unholy Nun. And have you forgotten the business with the well? Or the poisoning of Soeur Clémente? And as for your vow of chastity…” I let the phrase hang maliciously.
She was silent, her cheeks flaring.
“Believe me,” I said, “a charge of witchcraft might be leveled upon you for any one of these things. And we have long since passed the point where you could have damaged me. No one alive could turn them against me now.”
She knew it was true.
“I am the rock,” I told her. “The anchor in the storm. To suspect me is unthinkable.”
There was a long pause. “I should have spoken when I had the chance,” said Juliette. I was not mistaken by her angry tone; her eyes were almost admiring.
“You wouldn’t have done it, my dear.”
Her eyes told me she knew that too.
“Perette has been very useful to me during the past weeks,” I said. “She’s quick—almost as quick as you were, Juliette—and she’s clever. She hid in the crypt, you know, the first time you saw the Unholy Nun. All the time you were searching she was there, curled up behind one of the coffins.”
Juliette shivered.
“But if you’re so concerned about her, then maybe—” I pretended to hesitate. “No. I need her still, Juliette. I cannot give her up. Not even to please you.”
She took the bait. “You said there was a way.”
“Impossible.”
“Guy!”
“No, really. I should never have spoken.”
“Please!”
I never could resist her pleading. An exhilarating delicacy, seldom tasted. I pretended reluctance in order to savor the moment. “Well, I suppose you might…”
“What?”
“If you agreed to take her place.”
There. The trap swings shut with an almost audible click. She ponders it for a moment. No fool she. She knows how she has been maneuvered. But there is the child…
“Fleur was never on the mainland,” I told her gently. “I placed her with a family not three miles from here. You could see her within the hour if only—”
“I won’t poison anyone,” said Juliette.
“That won’t be necessary.”
She was beginning to weaken. “If I agree,” she said, “you swear Perette’s involvement will cease?”
“Of course.” I pride myself on my look of honesty. This is the true, open look of a man who never cocked a card or loaded a die in all his life. Amazing that after all these years it still works.
“Three days,” I said, sensing her resistance. “Three days till Sunday. Then it ends. I promise.”
“Three days,” she echoed.
“After that, Fleur can come home for good,” I said. “You can have everything back as it was. Or—if you like—you can come with me.”
Her eyes shone—with scorn or passion, I could not tell—but she said nothing.
“Would it really be so bad?” I said gently. “T
o take to the road again? To be l’Ailée—to be back where you belong”—I lowered my voice to a whisper—“back where I need you?”
There was silence, but I felt her relax, just a little, just enough. I touched her cheek fleetingly. “Three days,” I repeated. “What can happen in three days?”
Rather a lot, I hope.
46
AUGUST 12TH, 1610
Fleur was waiting for me, as LeMerle had promised, not three miles from the abbey. A salter’s croft, built low to the ground, with a turf roof and walls of whitened daub, screened from view by a row of tamarisk bushes; I could have passed by it a hundred times and not seen it. Behind the croft, a shaggy pony cropped grass; beside it, a wooden hutch housed half a dozen brown rabbits. All around, the ditches of the salt marsh formed a kind of shallow moat, in which a couple of flat-bottomed platts were moored for access to the fields. Herons stood in the reeds at the water’s edge; in the long yellow grass I heard the scree of cicadas.
LeMerle, knowing that I would not abandon Perette, had seen no need to accompany me this time. Instead he sent Antoine as my guard, eyes narrowed in sly complicity beneath the sweat-stained wimple. I wondered if I was hers. The poisoner and the murderer, arm in arm, like inseparable friends. Fleur’s eyes lit up as she saw me, and I clasped her to my heart as if so doing I could merge our flesh into one and so never be parted. Her skin is soft and brown, startlingly dark against her flaxen hair. Her beauty almost alarms me. She was wearing her red dress, now grown a little short for her, and she had a fresh scrape on one knee.
“Sunday,” I whispered in her ear. “If all goes well, I’ll be here on Sunday. At noon, wait for me here by the tamarisk bushes. Don’t tell anyone. Don’t let anyone know I’m coming.”
Of course, LeMerle had tricked me. As soon as I returned from my visit to Fleur I knew from the reek of incense and burning that he had been at work on them once again. There had been another Dancing Mass, said Soeur Piété excitedly, more frenzied even than the first; pressed for explanations she spoke of their raptures, of her own possession by a lustful imp, of howlings and animal noises uttered by the unfortunates driven to their knees by the army of demons unleashed in rage against the Holy Sacrament.
With tears in her eyes she spoke too of Soeur Marguerite, of how in spite of her prayers she was forced to dance until her feet bled, and of Père Colombin, of his purification by fire of the infested air, of his struggle with the forces of evil until he too was brought to his knees in his attempt to wrestle them to the ground.
Mère Isabelle was with him now, revealed Piété. As the evil spell had begun to fall from the congregation, as the nuns, released from their frenzies by the sound of his voice, began to turn toward one another in wonder and bewilderment, Père Colombin had fallen to his knees, swooning, the pages of the Ritus exorcizandi slipping from his fingers. A minute of chaos as the bereft and panic-stricken nuns thronged to his aid, certain he had himself succumbed to the forces of darkness…
But it was merely exhaustion, explained Piété. To the relief of the nuns, Père Colombin managed to raise himself to his feet, held on either side by a member of his faithful flock. Raising a trembling hand, he declared himself in need of rest and allowed himself to be borne off to his cottage, where even now he rests, surrounded by books and holy artifacts, working on a further solution to the ills that plague us.
It must have been a fine show. A rehearsal, I supposed, for Sunday’s opening performance, but why had LeMerle arranged for me to be absent? Could it be, in spite of his bold words, that somehow he fears what I may discover? Is there some part of this performance that LeMerle does not want me to see?
47
AUGUST 13TH, 1610
Alfonsine has been officially pronounced possessed. So far the demons of her infestation number fifty-five, though Père Colombin swears there are more. The ritual of exorcism may not be completed until every one of these has been named, and the walls of his cottage are papered with lists to which he is constantly adding more names. Virginie too has acquired a pale and haggard look and has been seen on several occasions walking in tiny circles around the walled garden and muttering to herself. When asked to stop and rest she merely looks up with an air of terrible calm and says “no, no” before reverting to her interminable circling. Rumor has it that it is only a matter of time before she too is declared a victim of the infestation.
Mère Isabelle has still not left her rooms. LeMerle denies that she is possessed, but with so little optimism that few of us are convinced. A brazier of coals has been lit outside the chapel, on which have been scattered sanctuary incense and various powerful herbs. So far, this has served to protect us from renewed attack. Another burner was placed outside the infirmary, and yet another at the abbey gates. The smoke is sweet when fresh but turns sour very quickly, and the air, already stifling, hangs like dusty curtains across the white-hot sky.
As for the Apparitions, the Unholy Nun has been seen twice today and three times yesterday, once in the dorter, twice in the slype and twice more in the gardens. No one has yet commented that the Nun seems oddly grown in stature, or has noticed the large footprints she left in a vegetable patch. Perhaps by now such things are no longer meaningful to us.
We spent the rest of today in idleness not unlike that which followed the death of the old Reverend Mother. Mère Isabelle was unwell, LeMerle was studying, and robbed of our direction we once more fell into the roles to which we were accustomed, our thoughts returning to the events of the last week with increasing fear and anxiety. Our ship drifted rudderless toward the rocks and we were powerless to stop it, turning instead to gossip and unhealthy self-examination.
Soeur Marguerite scrubbed the already spotless floors of the dorter until her knees bled. Then she scrubbed the blood with increasing frenzy until she was returned to the infirmary for examination. Soeur Marie-Madeleine lay upon her bed, whimpering and complaining of itching between her legs that no amount of scratching could assuage. Antoine left the confines of the infirmary—there were now four sufferers there, strapped to their couches, and the noise, she said, was driving her mad—and regaled me with gruesome details, embellished no doubt to considerable effect. In spite of myself I listened.
Soeur Alfonsine, she says, is very ill. The smoke from the brazier, far from cleansing her lungs, seemed to have exacerbated her condition. Soeur Virginie takes this as a sign of possession, for the afflicted woman has been coughing up more blood than ever before, in spite of her cures and LeMerle’s frequent visits.
As for Soeur Clémente, reports Antoine, for three days she has taken no food and hardly any water. So weak that she can barely move, she looks at the ceiling with glazed, unseeing eyes. Her lips move, but senselessly. It will be a merciful release.
“What did she do to you, Antoine?” The question was out of me before I knew it. “What harm did she do to you, that you hate her so much?”
Antoine looked at me. I suddenly recalled the one moment in which I thought her beautiful—the thick sheaf of blue-black hair released from the wimple, the roundness of her rosy shoulders, her soft nape as LeMerle reached for the shears. She has changed beyond recognition since then. Her face was like basalt, remote and pitiless.
“You never did understand, Auguste,” she said with mild contempt. “You tried to be kind to me in your way, but you never understood.” She surveyed me for a moment, hands on hips. “How could you? You always had it easy. Men looked at you and saw something they wanted. Something beautiful.” She smiled, but the smile darkened her face rather than illuminating it. “I was always the dray horse, the fat slut, too stupid to hear their laughter, too good-natured even to hate them in my secret heart. To the men, just meat, just enough warmth for a quick fumble, just a pair of legs, a pair of tits, a mouth and a belly. To the women I was stupid, too stupid to keep a man, too stupid even to—” She broke off abruptly. “I never cared about the father. Never asked myself who he was. My child was all my own. No one even suspected the
fat slut was with child at all. My belly was always round. My tits were always heavy. I’d planned to have it in secret, to hide it perhaps, to keep it mine.” Her eyes were suddenly hard. “It was going to be the one thing I really owned. All mine. Needing me, not caring that I was fat or stupid.” She looked at me. “You might have known how to carry it off. Don’t think I ever believed in your tale, Auguste. I may be stupid, but even I know you were no more a rich widow than I was.” She smiled, not unkindly, but without warmth. “You kept your child, fatherless or no. There was no one to tell you what to do, or if there was, you ignored them. Isn’t that so?”
“It is, Antoine.”
“I was fourteen. I had a father. Brothers. Aunts and uncles. They all assumed I wouldn’t know what to do. They had it all arranged before I could say a word. They said I wouldn’t know how to care for a baby. They said I’d never live with the shame.”
“What happened?”
“They were going to give it to my cousin Sophie,” said Antoine. “I was never even consulted. Sophie had three children already, and she was only eighteen. She would raise mine with hers. The scandal would soon be forgotten. Laughed over. Fancy that! The stupid fat girl had a child! But, my dears, who was the father? A blind man?”
“What happened?” I said.
“I took a pillow.” Her voice was low and reflective. “I put it over my child’s head. My little son’s soft dark head. I waited.” She gave a smile of terrible tenderness. “No one wanted him, Auguste. He was the one thing I’d ever had of my own. It was the only way I could keep him.”
“And Clémente?” My voice was a whisper.
“I told her everything,” said Antoine. “I thought she was different. I thought she understood. But she laughed at me. Just like the others…” Again the smile, and just for a second I glimpsed once again the dark beauty of the woman. “But it doesn’t matter,” she said with a hint of malice. “Père Colombin promised—”