Holy Fools

  “There isn’t time. I could talk to you all night and still you’d be asking questions.”

  “One question, then,” I said, gripping his arm. “Just one, and I’ll go.”

  He nodded heavily; in his mask he looked like a big, sad carrion bird. “I know,” he said at last. “Isabelle.”

  I knew at that moment that my mother was dead. All those years I’d kept her untouched, like a locket worn close to my heart; her proud figure; her smile; her songs and cantrips. But she’d died in Flanders, Giordano told me, had died meaninglessly of the plague; now all that I had of her was fragments and dreams.

  “Were you there?” I said in a broken voice.

  “What do you think?” said Giordano.

  Love not often, but forever—it might have been my mother speaking, very quietly, behind the rasp of his breathing. I knew now why he had followed me; why he had risked his life for me and could not now bear to look at my face, or reveal his own behind the Plague Doctor’s mask.

  “Take it off,” I told him. “I want to see you before I go.”

  He looked old in the moonlight, his eyes sunk so far into his face that it looked like a different mask, eyeless still and more tragic in its attempt to smile. Moisture leaked from the holes and into the deep channels at either side of his mouth. I tried to put my arms around him, but he pulled away abruptly. He had always disliked physical contact.

  “Good-bye, Juliette. Get away as quickly as you can.” His voice was that of the old Giordano, crisp and sour and clever. “For your safety and theirs, don’t seek out the others. Sell the mule when you have to. Travel at night.”

  I hugged him anyway, though he was stiff and unresponsive in my arms, and kissed his old brow. From his clothes I again caught a familiar scent of spice and sulfur, the smell of his alchemical experiments, and I was engulfed in sorrow. In my arms I felt a tremor go through him, almost like a sob but deeper, from the bone, then he pulled away with a kind of anger.

  “Every moment you lose is a wasted chance,” he said in a voice that shook a little. “Be off with you, Juliette.” In his mouth my name sounded like a dry caress.

  “What will you do?” I protested. “What about you?”

  He gave a tiny smile and shook his head as he had always done when I said something he considered particularly unintelligent. “I’ve compromised my soul enough for you, girl,” he said. “In case you’d forgotten, recall that I don’t travel on the Sabbath.”

  Then he lifted me onto the mule’s back and slapped the creature’s flanks so that it leaped forward onto the forest path, its hooves tapping smartly on the dry earth. I still remember his face in the moonlight, his whispered farewell as the mule trotted down the path, the scent of earth and ashes in my nostrils and his voice as it pursued me with his Shalom, with the voice of my thirteenth year like that of my essential conscience pursuing me sourly, like the voice of God on the mountain.

  I never saw him again. From Épinal I traveled across Lorraine toward Paris, then back toward the coast as my belly increased. I foraged for food when Giordano’s supplies gave out and sold the mule on his advice. In the mule’s saddlebags I found such things as my old mentor had salvaged from my caravan—a little money, some books, the jewelry discarded among my costumes, paste indistinguishable from real. I dyed my hair to avoid detection. I listened attentively to the reports from Lorraine. But still there were no news, no names, no rumors of burnings. And yet a part of me is waiting still, five years later, as if time has been suspended since then, a quiet interval between two acts, a conflict unresolved that must one day inevitably end in blood.

  My dreams show me his face again and again. His woodland eyes. Our passion play continues there, the stage empty but not abandoned, waiting for the players to resume their roles, my mouth opening to speak lines I thought I had long since forgotten.

  One more dance, he tells me as I twist and turn on my narrow bed. You were always my favorite.

  I awake in sweat, certain this time that Fleur is dead. Even when I have checked a dozen times I dare not turn over but stay listening to the soft sound of her breathing. The dorter seems filled with unquiet murmurings. My jaw is a vise clenched around my fear. Release it and my scream will last forever.

  12

  JULY 18TH, 1610

  It was Alfonsine who saw them first. It was almost twelve o’clock, and they had to wait for the tide. Ours is not a true island; at low tide a broad pathway to the mainland is revealed, painstakingly cobbled to allow for safe passage across the flats. At least it appears safe: but there are currents across the bland surface strong enough to drag the cobbles free, sunk as they are in four feet of mortar. On both sides there is quicksand. And when the tide comes in, it sweeps the flats with terrible speed, spilling across the road and taking with it what it finds. And yet they moved with slow, relentless dignity across the sands, their progress mirrored in the shallows, the distant figures distorted in the rising column of hot air from the road.

  She guessed who they were immediately. The carriage limped across the uneven causeway, the horses’ hooves struggling for purchase against the green cobbles. Before it came a pair of liveried outriders. Behind it, a single man on foot.

  I had spent the morning alone on the far side of the island. Waking early and unrefreshed, I left the abbey and took Fleur for a long walk, basket in hand, to pick the tiny dune pinks, which when infused and distilled give peaceful sleep. I recalled a place where thousands of them grew undisturbed, but I was too restless for such work and I only picked a handful. In any case, the flowers were just another excuse to escape the cloister for a few hours.

  As it was, we lost track of time. Beyond the dunes is a little beach of sand, where Fleur likes to play. There are broad white scars on the dune where she and I have worn away the grass, climbing and jumping, climbing and jumping, and the water is clear and shallow and filled with small jeweled pebbles.

  “Can I swim today? Can I?”

  “Why not?”

  She swims like a dog, with shouting and splashing and great enjoyment. Mouche, her doll, watched us from the dune’s edge as I discarded my habit and joined Fleur in the water. Then I dried both of us with the skirt of my habit and picked some small, hard apples from a tree by the side of the road, for I realized that the sun was high, and we had missed lunch. Then at Fleur’s insistence, we dug a great hole, into which we flung pieces of seaweed to make a monster pit, and afterward she slept for half an hour in the shade, Mouche under her arm, while I watched over her from the duneside path and listened to the whisperings of the turning tide.

  It was going to be a dry summer, I thought. Without rain, harvests would be bad; forage meager. The early blackberries were already burnt to a gray fluff on the stems. The vines too were stunted by drought, the grapes hard as dried peas. I pitied those who, like Lazarillo’s players, traveled the road in the wake of such a summer.

  The road. I saw it in my mind’s eye, gilded with sunlight, strewn with the shards of my past. Was it really such a bad road? Had I suffered so much during those traveling years? I knew I had. We had endured cold and hunger, betrayal and persecution. I tried to recall those things, but still the road ahead of me gleamed like a path over quicksand, and I found myself remembering something LeMerle had once told me, in the days when we were friends.

  “We have a natural affinity, you and I,” he had said. “Like air and fire, combustion is our nature. You can’t change the element you are born to. That’s why we’ll never leave the road, my l’Ailée; any more than fire can choose not to burn, or a bird leave the sky.”

  But I had. I had left the sky, and for many years I had barely even raised my eyes to it. I had not forgotten, however. The road had always been there, patiently awaiting my return. And how I wanted it! What might I give to be free, to have a woman’s name once more, a woman’s life? To see the stars from a different place every night, to eat meat cooked over my own campfire, to dance—maybe to fly? I did not need to answer the
unspoken question. Joy leaped in me at the thought, and for a moment I might almost have been the old Juliette once more, the one who walked to Paris.

  But it was ridiculous. Leave my life, my comfortable cloister; the friends who had given me refuge? The abbey was hardly the home I had longed for, but it provided the essentials. Food in winter, shelter, work for my idle hands. And leave it for what? For a few dreams? For a hand of cards?

  The path, half-sand beneath my heavy boots, dragged at my feet. I kicked at it angrily. The explanation was simple, I told myself. Simple and rather stupidly obvious. The hot weather, the sleepless nights, the dreams of LeMerle…I needed a man. That was all. L’Ailée had had a different lover every night, choosing as she would—smooth or rough, dark or fair—and her dreams were scented and textured with their bodies. Juliette too was a sensual creature: Giordano scolded her for bathing naked in the rivers, for rolling in the morning grass, and for the secret hours she spent with his Latin poets, struggling with the unfamiliar syntax for the sake of the occasional taut glimpse of Roman buttock…Either of them would have known how to dispel this malaise. But I—Soeur Auguste, a man’s name and an old man, at that—what do I have? Since Fleur there have been no more men. I might have turned to women for comfort, like Germaine and Clémente, but those pleasures never appealed to me.

  Germaine, whose husband cut her face fifteen times—once for every year of her life—with a kitchen knife when he found her with another girl, hates all men. I’ve seen her watching me. I know she finds me beautiful. Not like Clémente, of the Madonna face and filthy mind, but enough to please her. She sometimes watches me at work in the garden, but never says a word. Her light hair is cropped shorter than a boy’s, and beneath the ungainly brown robes I can guess at a slim, graceful figure. Once, Germaine would have made a fine dancer. But something else is spoiled besides her face. Six years after the incident she looks older than I, her mouth pale and thin, her eyes almost colorless, like brine. She tells me she joined the convent so that she would never have to look at a man again. But she is like the sour apples and the dried-pea grapes, yearning to flourish but starved of rain.

  Lovely, spiteful Clémente sees it and makes her suffer, flirting with me as I go about my duties. In chapel she sometimes whispers words of seduction, offering herself to me as, behind her, Germaine listens helplessly, stolid in her suffering, her scarred face impassive.

  Germaine has no faith, no interest in religion of any kind. I spoke to her once about my female God—I thought it might appeal to her, hating men as she did—but she seemed as indifferent to that as she was to the rest. “If such a thing ever was,” she told me dryly, “then men have remade her. Why else should they want to lock us up and to make us ashamed? Why else should they be so afraid?”

  I said that men had no reason to be afraid of us, and she gave another sharp laugh. “Oh no?” She put her fingers to her face. “Then why this?”

  Perhaps she is right. And yet I don’t hate men. Only one, and even he…I dreamed of him again last night. So close I could smell his sweat and his skin, smooth as my own. I hate him, and yet in my dream he was tender. Even with his face in shadow I would have known him anywhere, even without the moonlight that gilded the scorched flower on his arm.

  The sound of birdsong awoke me. For an instant I was there again, before Épinal, before Vitré, with the blackbirds singing outside our caravan and my lover watching me with all of summer in his mocking eyes…

  For a moment only. A sly succubus crept into my heart as I lay asleep. A ghost. There can be no part of me that still wants him, I tell myself.

  No part at all.

  It was long past noon when at last we arrived at the abbey. I had taken off my wimple, but even so my hair was damp with sweat, my robe clammy against my skin. Fleur trotted beside me, Mouche dangling from one hand. There was no one in sight. Given the heat, this was not unusual, for many of the sisters, in the absence of authority, had taken to sleeping at that time, leaving what rudimentary duties they still performed until after Nones and the cooler evening. But when I saw the fresh horse dung by the abbey gate and the tracks of carriage wheels in the dust I was suddenly certain that what we had been expecting had finally happened.

  “Is it the players coming back?” asked Fleur hopefully.

  “No, sweetheart, I don’t think so.”

  “Oh.”

  I smiled at her expression, and gave her a kiss. “Play here for a while,” I said. “I have to go inside.”

  I watched her as she ran duck-footed along the path into the cloister, then turned toward the Abbey, feeling as if a great weight had been taken from me. At last, then, this uneasy, unsettled time had come to an end. We had a new abbess, a guiding hand for us in our aimlessness and fear. I could picture her already. She would be calm and strong, though no longer in the first blush of youth. Her smile would be grave and tranquil, but with the touch of humor necessary to lead so many disaffected women toward peace. She would be kind and honest, a good mainland woman, unafraid of hard work, her brown hands callused but deft and gentle. She would enjoy music and gardening. She would be hardheaded; experienced enough in the world’s ways to help us fend for ourselves and yet not too ambitious, not embittered by her knowledge but still able to face the world with simple joy, simple wisdom.

  Looking back in amazement at my own simplicity, I realize my fanciful picture owed a great deal to memories of my own mother, Isabelle. Her remembered face has altered a little since I last saw her, I know. Only the eye of love could recall her as I do, so sweet and so strong, her beauty crystallizing in my mind so that she is far lovelier than Clémente or the Holy Mother herself, though I cannot quite remember the color of her eyes, or the contours of her strong brown face. I put my mother’s head onto the shoulders of our new abbess before I even set eyes on her, and the relief I felt was like that of a child left too long in charge of a task too great for her, who, at last, sees her mother coming home. I began to run toward the strangely quiet building, my hair flying and my robes pulled up around my knees.

  The cloister was dark and cool. I called out as I entered, but there was no reply. The gatehouse was unoccupied; the abbey seemed deserted. I ran down the broad, sunny slype between the dorters but saw no one. I passed the refectory, the kitchens, the empty chapter house, making my way toward the church. It would be almost time for Sext, I told myself; perhaps the new abbess had called a meeting.

  As I approached the chapel I heard voices and chanting. Suddenly wary, I pushed open the door. All the sisters were present. I could see Perette; Alfonsine with her thin hands clasped at her chin; fat Antoine with her moony face and weak, excited eyes; stolid Germaine with Clémente at her side. There was silence as I came in and I blinked, disorientated by the dark and the reek of incense and the faces reflected in the light of many candles.

  Alfonsine was the first to move. “Soeur Auguste,” she exclaimed. “Praise God, Soeur Auguste. We have a new—” Her voice broke in what might have been excitement. I was already looking beyond her, my eyes moving eagerly in search of the wise, bright lady of my expectation. But beside the altar I saw only a young girl of eleven or twelve, her small, pallid face impassive beneath a neat white wimple, her hand held out in a limp gesture of benediction. “Soeur Auguste.” The voice was as small and cool as its owner, and I was suddenly very aware of my hoydenish appearance, of my flying curls, my glowing cheeks.

  “Mère Isabelle.” Alfonsine’s voice quavered with self-importance. “Mère Isabelle, the Reverend Mother.”

  For a second, my surprise was such that I almost laughed aloud. She could not be speaking of this child. The thought was absurd—this child with my mother’s name must be some novice, some protégée of the new abbess who must even now be smiling at my mistake…Then our eyes met. Hers were very light but without brilliance, as if all her vision were turned inward. Looking into her wan young face I could see no gleam of humor, no pleasure, no joy.

  “But she’s so young!” It
was the wrong thing to say. I knew it immediately and regretted it, but in my surprise I had spoken my thought aloud. I saw the girl stiffen, her lips half open to reveal small, perfect teeth. “Ma mère, I am sorry.” Too late to unsay my words, I knelt to kiss the pale outstretched hand. “I spoke without thinking.”

  I knew even as I felt the cool fingers beneath my lips that my apology was not accepted. For a moment I saw myself through her eyes: a sweating, red-faced island woman, hot with the forbidden scents of summer.

  “Your wimple.” Her coldness was catching, and I shivered. “I—I lost it.” I faltered. “I was in the fields. It was hot…”

  But her attention was already elsewhere. Her pale eyes moved slowly, incuriously across the faces turned in expectation toward her. Alfonsine watched her with an adoring expression. The silence was like ice.

  “I was Angélique Saint-Hervé Désirée Arnault,” she said in a small, expressionless voice, which nevertheless penetrated me to the bone. “You may think me young for the part God has chosen for me. But I am God’s mouthpiece here, and he will give me the strength I need.”

  For an instant I felt sorry for her, so young and defenseless, trying so hard to maintain her dignity. I tried to imagine what her life must have been, reared in the oppressive climate of the Court, surrounded by intrigue and corruption. She was a thin little thing: their banquets and sweetmeats, the guinea fowl basted with lard, the pies, the pièces montées, the trays of peacocks’ hearts and baked foie gras and larks’ tongues in aspic only serving to sharpen her disgust of their excesses. A sickly child, not expected to survive beyond her teens, drawn to the Church through its ceremony, its dark fatalism, its intolerance. I tried to imagine what it must be like for her, cloistered at twelve, repeating as if by rote the pronouncements of her religious tutors, closing the door on the world before she even understood what it had to offer.