Soeur Marguerite, scrawny as a skinned rabbit and eternally twitching with nerves and anxieties, comes to me for a tisane to banish dreams in which, she says, a man with fiery hands torments her. I brew her tinctures of chamomile and valerian sweetened with honey, she purges herself daily with salt water and castor oil, but I can see from the feverish look in her eyes that the dreams plague her still.
Then we have Soeur Antoine, plump and red-faced, hands perpetually greasy from her cook pots, mother of a dead child at fourteen. Some say she killed it herself; others blamed her father in his rage and shame. She certainly eats well for all her guilt; her stomach is perpetually swollen beneath the seam of her wimple, her helpless, moony face bracketed by half a dozen quivering chins. She holds her pies and pastries to her bosom like children; difficult to tell, in these shadows, who is feeding whom.
Soeur Alfonsine: white as bone but for the red spot on either cheek, who sometimes coughs blood into her palm and who lives in a state of perpetual exaltation. Someone has told her that the afflicted have special gifts, denied to those who are sound in body. As a result she cultivates an otherworldly air and has seen the devil many times in the form of a great black dog.
And Perette: Soeur Anne to you, but always Perette at heart. The wild girl who never speaks, aged thirteen or a little older, found naked on the seashore a year ago last November. For the first three days she would not eat but sat motionless on the floor of her cell, face turned to the wall. Then came the rages; the smeared excrement, the food flung at the sisters who tended her; the animal cries. She flatly refused to wear the clothes we gave her, strutting naked about the freezing cell, occasionally giving voice to the tongueless hooting sounds that signaled her frenzies, her strange sorrows, her triumphs.
Now, one might almost take her for a normal child. In her novice’s whites she is nearly pretty, singing our hymns in her high wordless voice, but happiest in the garden and the fields, wimple discarded on a bramble bush, skirts flying. She still never speaks. Some wonder if she ever did. Her eyes are gold-ringed, unreadable as a bird’s. Her pale hair, shorn to rid her of lice, has begun to grow back and stands out around her small face. She loves Fleur, often warbling to her in that high birdy voice and making toys for her from the reeds and grasses of the seashore with quick, clever fingers. I too am a special friend, and she often comes with me to the fields, watching me as I work and singing to herself.
Yes, I have a family once again. All refugees in our different ways; Perette, Antoine, Marguerite, Alfonsine, and I; and with us, prim Piété; Bénédicte, the gossip; Tomasine, with the lazy eye; Germaine of the flaxen hair and ruined face; Clémente, the troubling beauty who shares her bed; and senile Rosamonde, closer to God than any of the saner ones, innocent of memory or sin.
Life is simple here-or was. Food is plentiful and good. Our comforts are not denied us-Marguerite her bottle and her daily purges, Antoine her pastries. Mine is Fleur, who sleeps alongside my bed in a cot of her own and comes with me to prayer and fieldwork. A lax regime, some might say, more like a country girls’ outing than a sisterhood brought together in contrition, but this is not the mainland. An island has a life of its own; even Le Devin across the water is another world to us. A priest may come once a year to celebrate mass, and I’m told the last time the bishop visited was twenty years ago, when the old Henri was crowned. Since then, the good king too has been murdered-it was he who declared that each home in France should have a broiled fowl every week, and, thanks to Soeur Antoine, we followed his command with more than religious zeal-his successor a boy not out of shortcoats.
So many changes. I mistrust them; outside in the world there are tides at work that may tear the land apart. Better to be here, with Fleur, while all around us the dissolution rages and above us the birds of malchance gather like clouds.
Here, where it’s safe.
3
An abbey without an abbess. A country without a king. For four days now we have shared France’s restlessness. Louis Dieudonné-the God-given-a fine, strong name for a child brought to the throne beneath the shadow of assassination. As if the name itself might lift the curse and blind the people to the corruptions of Church and Court and the ever-growing ambitions of the Régente Marie. The old king was a soldier, a seasoned man of government. With Henri, we knew where we stood. But this little Louis is only nine years old. Already, barely two months after his father’s death, the rumors have begun: de Sully, the king’s adviser, has been replaced by a favorite of the Médicis woman. The Condés have returned. I need no oracle to foresee uneasy times ahead. Normally, these things do not concern us, here at Noirs Moustiers. But, like France, we need the security of leadership. Like France, we fear the unknown.
Without the Reverend Mother we remain in flux, left to our own devices, while a message is sent to the bishop in Rennes. But our holiday atmosphere is tainted by uncertainty. The corpse lies in the chapel with candles burning and myrrh in a censer, for it is high summer and the air is foul and ripe. We hear nothing from the mainland, but we know the journey to Rennes should take four days at least. Meanwhile, we drift anchorless. And we need our anchor: the laxity of our former regime has become stretched still further until it is shapeless and without meaning. We barely worship. Duties are forgotten. Each nun turns to what gives her most comfort, Antoine to food, Marguerite to drink, Alfonsine to the scrubbing of the cloisters over and over on her knees until her skin breaks and she has to be carried to her cell with the scrubbing brush still clutched in her trembling hand. Some weep without knowing why. Some have sought out the players, who have remained in the village, two miles away. I heard them coming back late to the dorter last night and caught laughter and a hot reek of wine and sex from the opened window.
Outwardly, little has changed. I carry on much as usual. I tend my herbs; I write my journal, I walk to the harbor with Fleur, I change the candles by the poor corpse in the chapel. This morning I said a prayer of my own, without recourse to the gilded saints in their niches, alone and in silence. But the trouble within me grows daily. I have not forgotten my premonition on the day of the players.
Last night in the silence of my cubicle, I read the cards. But there was no comfort for me there. As Fleur slept, heedless, in her cot at my bedside, again and again I drew the same combination. The Tower. The Hermit. Death. And my dreams were uneasy.
4
The Abbey of Sainte Marie-de-la-mer stands in a piece of reclaimed marshland some two miles from the sea. To the left, marshes that flood regularly in winter, bringing the brackish waters less than a stone’s throw from our doorway and occasionally seeping through into the cellarium where our food is stored. To the right, the road leading into town, where carts and horses pass and every Thursday a procession of vendors moving from one market to another with their assortments of cloths, baskets, leather, and foodstuffs. It is an old abbey, founded some two hundred years ago by a community of black friars and paid for in the only true coin the Church accepts: the fear of damnation.
In those days of indulgences and corruption a noble family ensured its succession to the Kingdom by giving its name to an abbey; but the friars were dogged by misfortune from the start. Plague wiped them out sixty years after the abbey’s completion, and the buildings were abandoned until two generations later, when the Bernardines took them over.