Holy Fools (19 page)

Well done,
my Ailée. I knew it would be only a matter of time before you put the facts together. You remember the bishop, then? Monseigneur had the bad taste to disapprove of my Ballet Travesti. To order my removal from Paris. My ignominious removal.

My Ballet des Gueux outraged him, with its sequined ladies; my Ballet Travesti more so, with the ape dressed as a bishop and the Court beaux in petticoats and corsets. To tell the truth, I meant it so. What right had he to censure? No harm was done. A few left outraged, prudes and hypocrites for the most part. But the applause! It seemed never ending. We stood for five minutes with our smiles melting beneath the lamps and the greasepaint running down our faces. The boards glittered with flung coins. And you, my Ailée, too young yet to have earned your wings but lovely in your scandalous breeches, hat in hand, eyes like stars. It was our great triumph. Do you remember?

And then, more abruptly than we could understand, came the end. Évreux’s public letter to de Béthune. The furtive glances, the mumbled excuses from those I had counted as friends. The polite messages-
Madame has left town. Monsieur is not at home tonight
-whilst more favored visitors came and went with barely concealed disdain.

I was expected to leave quietly, discreetly, accepting my disgrace. But the Blackbird’s song is not so easily silenced. As they burned me in effigy at the steps of the Arsenal, I bought a new wardrobe. I paraded with vulgar exhibitionism about the town. I wore my women like costume jewelry, two on each arm. Madame de Scudéry’s salon was closed to me now, but there were many others not so choosy. The bishop watched me, enraged, but what more could he do?

I learned soon enough. A beating at the hands of lackeys, no less, as I returned drunk from a night of revelry. Without de Béthune as my benefactor I was defenseless, unprotected even by the law, for who would think to take my side against Monseigneur the bishop? I was unarmed, without even a dress sword at my side. There were six of them. But I was less drunk-or more desperate-than they imagined. I was forced to run, hiding in alleys infested with rats, crouching in open drains, skulking through shadows, heart pounding, head aching, mouth dry.

It could have been an Italian farce: Guy LeMerle, running from a bishop’s flunkeys, his silver-buckled shoes slipping in the street slops, his silk coat spattered with mud. Better, I suppose, than LeMerle lying in the gutter with his ribs broken. But it was enough; I lost the game. And there would be another time for Monseigneur. And another. My credit had finally run out, and we both knew it.

But memory is long on the road, with only whores and dwarves for company. And the road is a long one, crossing and recrossing with incestuous intimacy. We met there before, if you recall, in a village near Montauban, and after that in a cloister just outside Agen. All roads lead to Paris, and we met there too, several times. On one occasion there I relieved you of a silver cross-I wear it still, you’ll be glad to know-but once again you held the aces, and retaliation was swift. Shame on you,
mon père
. I lost a player, and one of my caravans. But the Blackbird’s feathers were barely singed. And after that, our stakes were higher.

Every man has a weakness, Monseigneur Bishop. It took me some time to find yours. But my dark star led me at last to the cradle of your ambition. Congratulations, by the way. Such a devout family. Two brothers highly placed in the clergy, a sister prioress of an abbey in the South. Innumerable cousins in monasteries and cathedrals throughout France. You’d have to be blind to miss the streak of nepotism that runs through the house of Arnault. But a line so rich in virgins must soon be doomed to sterility. Your one regret,
mon père,
must be that you never fathered a son to carry your line. Instead you lavished what affection you could on your dead brother’s daughter: Angélique Saint-Hervé Désirée Arnault, henceforth to be known as Mère Isabelle, abbess of Sainte Marie-la-Mère.

She looks like you. She has the same suspicious face and silver-gilt eyes. She has your contempt for the common man, and she has your pride too-beneath your pious attitudes you Arnaults conceal a level of hubris worthy of classical tragedy. In all but name she is your daughter. You schooled her well; she reads your letters with the devotion of Héloïse to Abelard; even from the nursery, her piety exceeded expectations. She eats no meat; drinks no wine but at Communion; fasts on Fridays. She does you credit, and such credit may be turned to good advantage-why not? After all, one cannot remain a bishop forever. A cardinal’s hat might sit well on Monseigneur, or at the very least an archbishop’s miter. Cunningly, you paved her way to Mother Church’s door: spread rumors of visions, angelic voices, and unofficial but well-publicized acts of healing. Your secret wish is of a canonization in the family-without sons, this is the only continuation your line can hope for-and with Mère Isabelle, this may not be entirely out of the question. Although her late mother judged her too young to take the veil,
you
took her in hand; encouraged the girl to dream of an abbey in the same way that a normal child might wish for a doll’s house.

If you’d only seen her when I gave her the news! God, I almost loved her for that, her eyes narrowed into crescents of ill temper, her mouth turning spitefully downward.

“Abbess of
where
?” she wailed. “But that’s
nowhere
! Nowhere at all!”

You spoiled her, Monseigneur. Made her believe, young as she was, that she might look higher. Perhaps she coveted Paris, the minx, with its towers and conceits and worldly whores on their knees in front of her. It would have been her style.

Or maybe it was for the penance I made her do for her anger, for my rebuke and the tenderness of my absolution when she had finished, for there is a hunger in her that I’m sure you never saw, a part of her in which sin rubs against sanctity to form a single, bright blade. One day she’ll be sharp enough to cut with, Monseigneur d‘Évreux. Till then, beware.

Juliette came to me
tonight, as I knew she would. It was a risk; she must have suspected Clémente might be with me, but having discovered my secret, she could not stay away.

It was like her too to confront me at once. In her place I would have kept my counsel and played a close game; my Winged One, as always, rushes forth in the heat of the moment, showing all her aces in her eagerness to confront me. It’s a flaw in her play-a beginner’s flaw, at that-and although it serves my purpose in this case, I cannot help feeling a little disappointed. I thought I’d taught her better.

“So
that
‘s why you’re here,” she said, when I opened the door. “The bishop of Évreux.”

“Bishop of where?” I feigned innocence, but poorly: just to see the look of triumph in her eyes. “And you used to be
such
a good liar,” she said, pushing past me into the cottage.

I shrugged modestly. “Maybe I’m out of practice.”

“I don’t think so.”

She sat down on the arm of my chair, one leg swinging. There was dust on the soles of her brown feet; her face was alight with her imagined victory. “So,” she said. “When are we expecting him? And what will you do when he’s here?”

“
Are
we expecting him?” I said, smiling.

“If not, you’ve lost your touch.”

I shrugged, conceding the point. “You can’t imagine I would have told you,” I said. “After all, you haven’t shown much trust in
me
so far, have you?”

“Why should I?” she said. “After Épinal-”

“Juliette, you’re being tiresome. I explained about that already.”

“Explained, but not excused.” Her tone was harsh, but there was something in her manner, a kind of obscure softening-as if her discovery, instead of increasing her suspicion of me, had somehow brought her reassurance. “Tell me about the bishop,” she said in a softer voice. “You know I won’t betray you.”

I smiled. “Loyalty? I’m touched. I-”

“Hardly,” she said. “You have my daughter.”

Ouch. Another hit. However, in the course of a long game, a calculated surrender may serve as well as a victory. “Very well,” I said, drawing her gently toward me. She did not pull away.

I confessed enough
to allay her fears and to flatter her-just a little-though she thought her face expressionless as she listened to me in silence. Women hear so often what they want to hear, even my Harpy-who has every reason to believe the worst. And a partial truth is often so much more effective than a total lie.

She has guessed the obvious, of course. I’d accounted for that. Perhaps she can even understand me a little-she’s a resentful piece, in spite of her assumed holiness, and she has no more reason to love the bishop than I have myself. All I want from her now is a little time; after all, good scandal, like good wine, takes time to ferment and mellow. Château d‘Évreux, not a subtle vintage but with a certain brazen charm that you, my Juliette, may find appealing. Let the brew froth just a little longer. When he arrives I want him drowned in a wave of suds.

Oh, I was convincing. Juliette listened first with skepticism, then with satisfaction, then with a reluctant kind of sympathy. When I had finished, she nodded slowly, looking into my eyes. “I thought it might be that. A special performance, to make him pay for that time in Paris? A return match?”

I managed to look rueful. “I don’t like to lose.”

“And you think
this
is winning?” she said. “Have you any idea of the harm you’ve done? The harm you’re still doing?”

“Me?” I shrugged. “All I did was set the stage. You did the rest yourselves.”

Her mouth thinned; she knew I was right. “And after the show?” she demanded. “What then? Will you ride away again, both of you, in your different directions, and leave us in peace?”

“Why not?” I said. “Unless you’d like to come with me.” She ignored that, as I expected her to. “Come on, Juliette,” I said, seeing her expression. “Give me credit for some intelligence. How far do you think I would get if I actually
harmed
the bishop? Did you hear what they did to Ravillac? And in any case, if I’d wanted to kill Évreux, don’t you think I would have found some way to do it by now?” I let her think that over for a while. “I want him humbled,” I told her quietly. “Monseigneur has high ambitions; pretensions to greatness for his line. I want them quashed. I want the Arnaults in the dust, along with the rest of us, and I want him to know that I was the one who put them there. A dead bishop is only a step removed from canonization; I want this one to live a long, long time.”

I stopped, and for several minutes she was silent. Then, finally, she nodded. “You’re taking a terrible risk,” she said. “I doubt whether the bishop would extend the same privilege to you.”

“I’m touched by your concern,” I said, “but a game without stakes is no game at all.”

“Must there always be a game?” she asked, so earnestly that I could have kissed her.

“Why, Juliette,” I said gently. “What else is there?”

Last night,
at long last, the rain came, but it fell to the west onto Le Devin, and did not refresh us. Instead we sweltered uncomfortably in the dorter and watched the heat lightning as it chased its tail across the bay. The sultry weather had brought a plague of midges from the flats, and they swarmed through the windows, settling on every inch of our unprotected flesh, eking out our blood. We slept poorly-or not at all-throughout the night, some slapping at the midges in a frenzy, others lying exhausted and resigned. I used citronella leaf and lavender to banish the creatures from my cubicle, and in spite of the heat I slept a little. I was one of the lucky ones; this morning I awoke to find myself virtually free of insect bites, though Tomasine was in a pitiful state, and Antoine, with her warm blood, was a quivering mass of red blotches. To make matters worse, the chapel too was infested with the flying creatures, which seemed unaffected by either incense or candle smoke.

Matins passed, and Lauds. Day broke, and the midges withdrew to their stronghold in the marshes. By Prime, however, the air had thickened still further and the sky was hot and white, promising worse to come. No one was still; we were a mass of tics and itches; even I, who had escaped the scourge, could feel my skin prickling in sympathy. It was to this that LeMerle made his morning appearance, looking cool and grave. Soeur Marguerite was at his left side; Mère Isabelle at his right.

A murmur ran through the chapel. This was the first time that Marguerite had attended a service since her attack, and we were still awaiting an official pronouncement on the nature of her affliction. Opinions were divided: some said Saint Vitus’ dance; others the palsy; yet more were convinced she was bewitched or bedeviled. Certainly she
looked
quiet enough-her tic was gone and her eyes were unusually dark and wide. That would be the poppy I had slipped into her strengthening draught, I told myself. I hoped it would be enough.

But I could hardly dose all sixty-five of them. Alfonsine was flushed and restive; Tomasine was so covered in bites that she could barely keep still; Antoine scratched at her legs continuously; even Clémente, usually so meek, looked agitated. Perhaps Germaine’s death had distressed her more than we had thought, for her eyes were heavy and her features unusually drawn. I noticed that she watched LeMerle constantly, but he took care not to pay her any attention, or even to meet her eye. Perhaps he really
had
tired of her, then; I was annoyed at myself for the satisfaction the thought gave me.

“My children,” he said. “For three days you have waited patiently for news of our sister Marguerite.”

We nodded; shifted; shuffled. Three days was long enough. Three days of rumor and uncertainty; three days of potions and possets. Superstition had never been very far, not even in the days of Mère Marie; now, robbed of our saint’s comforting presence, we turned to it more than ever. Order was what we needed: order and authority in the face of this crisis. Instinctively, we turned to LeMerle to provide it.

But Père Colombin was looking troubled. “I have examined Soeur Marguerite closely,” he said. “And I have found nothing amiss with her-body or soul.”

A whisper of revolt went through the crowd. There had to be
something,
it said. He had led us to this; had fed us such scraps as had given us an appetite for his words. There was evil in the abbey; who could question it?

“I know,” said LeMerle. “I understand your doubts. I have prayed; I have fasted. I have consulted many books. But if there are spirits in Soeur Marguerite, I cannot make them speak. All that I can conclude is that the forces that have infested our abbey are too powerful for me to deal with alone. I have failed.”

No!
The murmur went through the crowd like the wind through wheat. The Blackbird, hanging his head in fake humility, could not resist a smile. “I thought I could hunt the devil with nothing more than my faith and your trust in me,” he said. “But I could not. I have no alternative but to inform the proper authorities and place the situation-and myself-in their hands. Praise be.” And with that he stepped down from the pulpit and motioned to Isabelle to take his place.

The rest of us looked at one another, remembering the last time Isabelle had addressed us, and a ripple of dissatisfaction and revolt ran through the crowd. We could not rely upon Isabelle to keep order, we knew. Only LeMerle could control us.

Isabelle herself had been taken completely by surprise. “Where are you going?” she asked in a quavering voice.

“I’m no use to you here,” said LeMerle. “If I catch the morning tide, I should be able to bring help within a week.”

Now Isabelle was close to panic. “You can’t leave,” she said.

“But I must. What else can I do?”

“Mon père!”
Clémente too was looking alarmed. At her side Antoine turned her mottled face toward him in silent entreaty. A rumor, louder than before, swept over the crowd. We had lost everything else; we could not lose Père Colombin. Without him, chaos would descend upon us like a flock of birds.

He tried to explain above the mounting noise. If the evil could not be located-if the culprit was not found…But the thought that he might leave them at the mercy of that evil had taken possession of the sisters, and they began to wail, an eerie, catlike sound, which began at one side of the chapel and swelled until it had engulfed the entire assembly.

Mère Isabelle was almost beside herself. “Evil spirits, show yourselves!” she commanded shrilly. “Show yourselves and speak!”

The wave of sound passed over us again, and Perette, who was standing near me, put her hands to her ears. I made the sign against malchance behind my back. That cry had sounded too close to a cantrip for my liking. I whispered my mother’s good-luck charm under my breath but doubted that it would have very much effect in such surroundings.

LeMerle, however, was watching with an air of cool satisfaction. They were his now, I knew; they would perform at his command. The only question was: who would be first? I glanced around me. I saw the imploring face of Clémente, the moony features of Antoine, Marguerite, already twitching at the mouth as the draught began to wear off, and Alfonsine…

Alfonsine
. At first she seemed utterly still. Then the slightest of tremors went through her; a fluttering like that of a moth’s wing. She seemed unaware of what was happening around her; her entire body quivered. Then, very slowly, she began to dance.

It began in her feet. With tiny steps, hands splayed as if for balance, she might have been a rope-dancer feeling for the measure with her bare toes. Then came the hips, a scarcely perceptible undulating motion. Then the fingers, the sinuous arms, the rolling shoulders.

I was not the only one to have noticed. Behind me, Tomasine took a sharp breath. Someone cried out shrilly. “Look!”

Silence fell; but it was a dangerous silence, like a rock about to fall.

“Bewitched!” moaned Bénédicte.

“Just like Soeur Marguerite!”

“Possessed!”

I had to put a halt to this. “Alfonsine, stop it, this is ridiculous-”

But Alfonsine could not be stopped. Her body turned and twisted to an unheard rhythm, first to the left, to the right, then revolving round like a top, snaking and circling with grave deliberation, her skirts flying out about her ankles. And there was a sound coming from her mouth, a sound that was almost a word.
“Mmmmm…”

“They’re here!” wailed Antoine.

“Speaking to us…”

“Mmmmm…”

Someone behind me was praying. I thought I heard the words of the Ave Maria, oddly distorted and elongated into a mess of vowels.
“Marie! Marie!”

The front row before the
pulpitum
had begun to take up the chant. I saw Clémente, Piété, and Virginie throw their heads back almost at the same time and begin to rock in cadence.

“Marie! Marie!”

It was a slow rocking, heavy as the rolling of a huge ship. But it was contagious; the second row joined the first, then the third. It became a wave, inexorable as a wave, bringing each row-choir, pews, stalls-into surging motion. I felt it myself, my dancer’s reflexes returning to life, fears, sounds, thoughts submerging in this dizzy vortex of movement. I threw back my head; for a moment I saw stars in the vaulting of the church roof and the world tilted enticingly. I could feel warm bodies all around me. My own voice was lost in a thick murmur. There was complete and unspoken cooperation in this slow frenzy of dance; the tide dragged us to the right, then to the left, all of us treading a measure all seemed to know by instinct. I could feel the dance calling, urging me to join it, to plunge my being into the black surf of movement and sound.

I could still hear Mère Isabelle shouting above the crowd but had no understanding of what she was saying; she was a single instrument in an orchestra of chaos, voices blending and rising, hers a shrill counterpoint to the dark-mawed roar of the multitude, a few cries of protest-mine among them-in the howling tide of affirmation but lost as the rhythms, the raw-throated harmonies of pandaemonium engulfed us all…

And yet a part of my mind remained clear, floating coolly above the rest like birds. I could hear LeMerle’s voice without quite making out his words; in this shared madness it sounded like a refrain, a reminder of steps, of cadences in this Ballet des Bernardines.

Was this, then, to be his special performance? In front of me, Tomasine stumbled and fell to her knees. The dance shifted gracelessly to accommodate her, and another figure stumbled over her hunched figure. They fell heavily together, and I recognized Perette, sprawling on the marble, the other nuns now snaking and spinning, oblivious, around her.

“Perette!” I pushed my way to my friend’s side. She had struck her head in the fall and a bruise already marked her temple. I picked her up, and together we pushed our way toward the open door. Our intrusion-or their exhaustion-seemed to quell some of the dancers, and the wave faltered and broke. I noticed Isabelle watching me but had no time to wonder what her look of suspicion might portend. Perette was clammy and pale, and I forced her to breathe deeply, to put her head between her knees, and to smell the little sachet of aromatics I carry in my pocket.

“What’s that?” asked Mère Isabelle in the sudden lull.

The noise had begun to abate. I realized that several of the assembled nuns had broken their trance and were looking in my direction. “This? Just lavender, and anise, and sweet balm, and-”

“What were you doing with it?”

I lifted the sachet of herbs. “Can’t you see? It’s a scent sachet, you must have seen one before.”

There was a silence. Sixty pairs of eyes now turned toward me. Someone-I think it was Clémente-said softly, but very clearly:
“Witchcraft!”

And I seemed to hear the murmur of acquiescence, the voice that came from no throat but from the small movements of many pairs of fluttering hands as they made the sign of the cross, the
hishh
of skin against cambric, of tongues moistening dry lips, of breath quickening:
Yes,
it whispered, and my heart flipped over like a dead leaf.

Yes
.