Holy Fools (15 page)

Abbaye de Sainte-Marie-MèreÎle-des-Noirs-MoustiersJuly 26th, 1610

Monseigneur,

It is with the Greatest Pleasure that I am able to inform Monseigneur that Everything He has so wisely foreseen is proceeding according to Plan. My Charge shows the most Commendable Zeal in all the Reforms she has instigated, and the Abbey is almost Restored to Former Glory. The Church Roof still requires some Labor, and I regret to say that much of the South Transept has been grievously Damaged by Weathering, however we entertain Great Hopes of seeing the Whole Complete by the Beginning of Winter.

The Original Name of our Abbey, as Monseigneur will have Noticed, has also been Restored and all Signs and Intimations of the Vernacular Name erased in favor of the Above. I add my most earnest Entreaties to those of Your Niece, Monseigneur, that if Your busy Schedule enables You to Grace us with a Visit in the Coming Months, we should be most Honored and Gratified to receive Your August Presence.

I remain your most obedient servant,

Blah, blah, blah.

I have to admit I’ve a neat turn of phrase.
Your August Presence
. I like that.

I’ll have it sent in the morning by special envoy. Or maybe I could ride out to Pornic myself and send it from there-anything to get out of the stink of this place for a few hours. How Juliette can bear it, I can’t imagine. I only bear it because I have to; and because I know I won’t be here for long. These cloistered ones, these toadstools, have a very special rankness, and the scent of their hypocrisy turns my stomach. Imprisoned here I can hardly breathe, hardly sleep; I must ask Juliette to make me a soothing draught.

Sweet Juliette. The fair girl-what’s her name? Clémente?-is well enough for my needs, and touchingly eager to please too, but she’s no worthy quarry. For a start, her eyes are too large. Their color, that of a flawless summer sky, lacks that discordant note of slate and embers. Her hair too, fair as foam, is hopelessly wrong. Her skin too white, her legs too smooth, her face unmarred by sun and grime. Call me ungrateful if you like. A honey-fall like that, and I must hanker after that stiff-necked maypole with her flinty eyes. Perhaps it’s her hatred of me that gives it spice.

There’s no heat in Clémente. Her pallor freezes my bones. She whispers constantly in my ears tales of romance, dreams of Bele Yolande, Tristan and Iseult, Abelard and Héloïse…In any case, there’s no danger of her talking. The little fool’s in love. I subject her to more and more prolonged miseries, but she seems to revel in each indignity. For myself, I enhance my pleasure how I can with dreams of red-haired harpies.

There’s no escaping her. The other night she came to me-in a vision, or so I thought. I saw her for an instant only, her face pressed to the pane of my window, her eyes reflecting the soft glow of the firelight so that for a moment she looked almost tender.

Clémente moved beneath me with the little bleating cries that masquerade as passion with her. Her eyes were closed and I saw her hair and flanks illuminated in fire. I felt a hot sudden surge of joy in my loins, as if the woman at the window and the one in my arms had unexpectedly become one and the same, then the face at the window vanished and I was left with nothing more than Clémente gasping like a landed fish in my hands. My pleasure-no great delight in any case-was marred by the growing certainty that Juliette’s face at the window had been no phantasm. She had seen us together. The look on her face-shock, disgust, and something that might have been chagrin or even rage-haunted me. For a second I could almost have run after her, ruinous though that would have been to all my careful plans. Wild thoughts fired me. I stood up and went naked to the window in spite of Clémente’s protests. Was that a pale figure half hidden in the shadows of the gatehouse? I could not be sure.

“Colombin, please.” I looked over my shoulder to see Clémente crouching by the hearth, her hair still deceptively brazen in the light of the dying embers. A sudden wave of fury washed over me and in two strides I was upon her.

“I gave you no leave to use my name.” I yanked her to her feet by a fistful of hair and she gave a stifled scream. I slapped her then, twice, not as hard as I should have liked, but enough to bring brief roses to her cheeks. “Who do you think you are, some Paris courtesan in her salon? Who do you think
I
am?”

She was weeping now, in braying sobs. For some reason this enraged me still more and I dragged her to the couch, still squealing.

I didn’t really hurt her. A red handprint or two on a white shoulder, a white thigh. Juliette would have killed me for far less. But Clémente watched me from her couch, her eyes reproachful but nevertheless bright with a strange satisfaction, as if this were how she expected things to be.

“Forgive me,
mon père,
” she breathed. One childish hand cupped a breast scarce bigger than a green apricot, making the nipple pout with imagined seductiveness. My stomach revolted at the thought of touching her again. But I had perhaps given too much away. I took a step toward her and brushed her forehead with languid fingers.

“Very well,” I said. “I’ll overlook it this time.”

Sainte Marie-de-la-mer
was taken in the stone-breakers’ wagon to the easternmost point of the island, where the coast is ragged from the eroding tides. There her remains were given to the sea. I was not present to see it-only LeMerle and the abbess were there-but we were told later that a great wind blew up from the sea where the effigy fell, that the water boiled and that black clouds obscured the sun so that day became night. Since LeMerle told us this, no one disputed it aloud, although I met Germaine’s cynical gaze during his performance.

Of course, she has lost someone to him too. Her face seems narrower these days, the scars very prominent on her pale skin. She sleeps as little as I do; in the dorter I hear her pretending sleep, but her breathing is too shallow, her lack of movement too disciplined to be that of rest.

Last night before Vigils I heard her quarreling with Clémente in a low, harsh voice, though I could not make out the words she spoke. There was silence from Clémente-in the darkness I guessed she had turned her back-and during the long hours between Matins and Lauds I heard Germaine weeping with long, harsh sobs, but I dared not approach her.

As for LeMerle…He had not sought me out since my visit to the market, and I had become increasingly convinced that Clémente-who after all, shared his bed-had also stolen his heart. Not that
that
troubled me, you understand. I’m long past caring where he lays his head at night. But Clémente is spiteful; and she has no love for Fleur or for me. I hated to think of the power she might wield over all of us, if LeMerle had succumbed to her charms.

I was working
in the laundry house when at last he came looking for me. I knew he was there; knew the sound of his feet against the flagstones, and knew from the clink of his spur against the step that he was dressed for riding. I did not turn round at once but plunged an armful of linens into one of the vats of boiling water, face averted, not daring to speak. My cheeks were burning, but that might have been the steam, for the laundry house was hot and the air was filled with clouds. He stood watching me for some minutes without a word, but I would not return his gaze, nor speak until he spoke first. At last he did, in the tone and style he knew had always infuriated me.

“Exquisite harpy,” he said. “I trust I am not interrupting your ablutions. Cleanliness, if not godliness, dearest, must be the prerequisite of your calling.”

I used the baton to pound the laundry. “I’m afraid I’ve no time for games today. I have work to do.”

“Really? What a pity. And on market day too.”

I stopped.

“Well, after all, perhaps I have no reason to go to market,” said LeMerle. “Last time the stench of fish and the common folk was almost unendurable.”

I looked at him then, not caring that he saw the pain in my eyes. “What do you want with me, Guy?”

“Nothing, my Ailée, but your own sweet company. What else should I desire?”

“I don’t know. I daresay Clémente could tell me.” It was out before I could stop it.

I saw him flinch, and then he smiled. “Clémente? Let me see now-”

“You know her, LeMerle. She’s the girl who comes to your cottage at night, in secret. I should have known you wouldn’t be here long without finding yourself a comfortable bedfellow.”

He shrugged, unabashed. “Light entertainment, that’s all. You wouldn’t believe how tedious I find the clerical life-and do you know, Juliette, she’s begun to bore me already?”

Yes, that was like him. I hid an unwilling smile. But it’s hard to keep a secret in a place like this, and even Mère Isabelle was not so besotted that she would overlook a charge of lechery. “They’ll find out, you know. You can’t trust Clémente to keep a secret. Someone will talk.”

“Not you,” he said.

His eyes had remained on me, and I felt uncomfortable beneath their scrutiny. I poured more water into the vat, my eyes stinging at the rise of steam over the lye soap. I would have poured more-it was needed for the starch rinse-but LeMerle took the water jug from me and set it down very softly on the floor.

“Leave me alone.” I made my voice sharp to stop it from trembling. “The laundry won’t wash itself, you know.”

“Then let someone else finish it. I want to talk to you.”

I turned and faced him. “What about?” I said. “What can you possibly want from me that you haven’t already taken?”

LeMerle looked hurt. “Must it always be a question of what
I
want?”

I laughed. “It always was.”

He was displeased at that, as I knew he would be. His mouth thinned, and a gleam came into his eyes; then he sighed and shook his head. “Oh, Juliette,” he said. “Why so unfriendly? If only you knew how hard it’s been these past few months. All alone, no one to confide in-”

“Tell that to Clémente,” I said tartly.

“I’d rather tell you.”

“You want to tell me something?” I reached for the baton to pound the clothes. “Then tell me where you’re hiding Fleur.”

He gave a soft laugh. “Not that, sweetheart. I’m sorry.”

“You will be,” I told him.

“I mean it, Juliette.” I had removed my wimple to do the laundry, and he brushed the nape of my neck with his fingertips. “I wish I could trust you. There’s nothing I’d like better than to see you and Fleur reunited. As soon as I’ve finished my business here-”

“Finished? When?”

“Soon, I hope. Enclosed spaces do nothing for my constitution.”

I poured another jug of hot water into the vat, sending up a great billow of stinging steam. Then I pounded the laundry some more and wondered what his game was. “It must be important to you,” I said at last. “This business.”

“Must it?” There was a smile in his voice.

“Well, I don’t imagine you’re here just to play practical jokes on a few nuns.”

“You may be right,” said LeMerle.

I took the wooden tongs, fished the linens out of the vat, and dumped them into the starch bath. “Well?” I turned toward him again, tongs in hand. “Why are you here? Why are you doing this?”

He took a step toward me, and to my surprise, on my hot forehead he placed the lightest of kisses. “Your daughter’s at the market,” he said gently. “Don’t you want to see her?”

“No games.” My hand was shaking as I put down the tongs.

“No games, my Ailée. I promise.”

Fleur was waiting
for us by the side of the jetty. Although it was market day, there was no sign today of the fish cart or the drab-faced woman. This time there was a man with her, a white-haired man who looked like a farmer, in his flat hat and rough-woven jacket, and a couple of children, both boys, who sat close by. I wondered what had happened to the fishwife: whether Fleur had been staying with her at all, or whether LeMerle had told me the story to put me off the scent. Was this white-haired man my daughter’s keeper? He said nothing to me as I walked up to them and took Fleur in my arms; his milky blue eyes were flat and incurious; from time to time he chewed on a piece of licorice, and his few remaining teeth were stained brown with its juice. Other than that, he gave no sign of movement; for all I knew he might have been a deaf-mute.

As I had feared, LeMerle did not leave me alone with my daughter but sat, face averted, on the edge of the seawall a few yards away. Fleur seemed a little uneasy at his presence, but I saw that she looked less pale, a clean red pinafore over her gray dress and wooden sabots on her feet. It was a bittersweet satisfaction; she has been gone for barely a week and already she is beginning to adapt, the orphan look fading into something infinitely more frightening. Even in this short time she seems altered, grown; at this rate in a month she will look like someone else’s child altogether, a stranger’s child with only a passing resemblance to my daughter.

I did not dare ask outright where she was being kept. Instead, I held her in my arms and put my face into her hair. She smelt vaguely of hay, which made me wonder whether she had been kept on a farm, but then she smelt of bread too, so it might have been a bakery. I ventured a glance at LeMerle, who was watching the tide, apparently lost in thought. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to Monsieur?” I said at last with a nod to the white-haired man.

The old man seemed not to hear. Neither did LeMerle.

“I’d like to thank him, anyway,” I went on. “If he’s the one taking care of you.”

From his observation point, LeMerle shook his head without bothering to look round.

“Mmm-mm. Suppose. Am I coming home today?”

“Not today, sweetheart. But soon. I promise.” I forked the sign against malchance.

“Good.” Fleur did it too, with plump baby fingers. “Janick taught me how to spit. D’you want to see how I do it?”

“Not today, thank you. Who’s Janick?”

“A boy I know. He’s nice. He’s got rabbits. Did you bring Mouche?”

I shook my head. “Look at the pretty boat, Fleur. Can you see boats from where you’re staying?”

A nod from Fleur-and a glance from LeMerle from his place on the wall.

“Would you
like
to go on a boat, Fleur?”

She shook her head furiously, bouncing her flossy curls.

Urgently now, seeing my chance: “Did you come here on a boat today? Fleur? Did you take the causeway?”

“Stop that, Juliette,” said LeMerle warningly. “Or I’ll see to it that she doesn’t come back.”

Fleur glared. “I
want
to come back,” she said. “I want to come back to the abbey and the kitty and the hens.”

“You will.” I hugged her, and for a second I was close to tears. “I promise, Fleurette, you will.”

Le Merle was unexpectedly gentle
with me on the return journey. I sat behind him on the horse and for a time he spoke in reminiscent tone of the old days, of L’Ailée and the Ballet des Gueux, of Paris, the Palais-Royal, the Grand Carnaval, the Théâtre des Cieux, of triumphs and trials past. I said little, but he seemed not to care. The merry ghosts of past times drifted by us, brought to life by his voice. Once or twice I found myself close to laughter, the unfamiliar smile sitting strangely on my lips. If it had not been for Fleur I would have laughed aloud. And yet this is my enemy. He is like the piper in the German tale who rids the town of rats, and when the townsfolk did not pay him his fee, led their children dancing to hell’s mouth and piped them in, the earth covering their screams as they fell. Such a dance he must have led them, though, and with such a merry tune…