I learned with dismay that our free time was to be curtailed to half an hour after Compline, to be spent in prayer and reflection, and that our excursions to the town and to the harbor were to cease at once. My Latin lessons to the novices too were to be discontinued. Mère Isabelle did not feel that it was appropriate for novices to learn Latin. To obey the Scripture was enough, she said; anything more was dangerous and unnecessary. A duty rota was established that reversed all our accustomed routines; without surprise I noted that Antoine no longer governed the kitchens or the cellars and that henceforth my herb garden would be tended by strangers, but I accepted this too with indifference, knowing that my time at the abbey was coming to an end.
Then came the penances. Confession had never taken more than a few minutes in Mère Marie’s day; this time it took over an hour, in public, with Alfonsine setting the tone.
“I had impious thoughts about the new Reverend Mother,” she murmured, with a sidelong glance at LeMerle. “I spoke out of turn in the church, when Soeur Auguste came in.” It was typical of her, I thought, to draw attention to my lateness.
“What kind of thoughts?” said LeMerle, with a gleam in his eye.
Alfonsine shifted beneath his gaze. “It’s what Soeur Auguste said. She’s too young. She’s only a child. She won’t know what to do.”
“Soeur Auguste seems rather free with her opinions,” said LeMerle.
I stared into my lap and would not look up.
“I shouldn’t have listened,” said Alfonsine.
LeMerle said nothing, but I knew he was smiling.
The rest soon followed Alfonsine’s lead, initial hesitation giving way to a kind of eagerness. Yes, we were confessing our sins, and sin was shameful; but it was also the first time many of us had ever received such undivided attention. It was painfully compelling, like scratching at a nettle rash, and it was contagious.
“I went to sleep during Vigils,” said Soeur Piété, a colorless nun who rarely spoke to anyone. “I said a bad word when I bit my tongue.”
Soeur Clémente: “I looked at myself when I was washing. I looked at myself and I had a wicked thought.”
“I stole a p-pasty from the winter cellar.” That was Antoine, red-faced and stammering. “It was p-pork and onion, with water crust p-pastry. I ate it in secret behind the gatehouse wall, and it gave me a b-bellyache.”
Germaine was next, intoning her list-Gluttony. Lust. Covetousness-apparently at random. She, at least, had not been dazzled by LeMerle-her face wore a careful, colorless expression I recognized as scorn. Then came Soeur Bénédicte, with a tearful tale of shirked duties, and Soeur Pierre, with a stolen orange. At each new confession there came an increased murmur from the crowd, as if to urge the speaker onward. Soeur Tomasine wept as she confessed lewd thoughts; several other nuns wept in sympathy, and Soeur Alfonsine eyed LeMerle while Mère Isabelle looked sullen and increasingly bored. Clearly she had expected more of us. Obediently, we gave it.
As the hour passed, the confessions grew more elaborate, more detailed. Every scrap of material was brought out for the occasion; tattered remnants of past transgressions, filched piecrusts, erotic dreams. The ones who had been first to make their confessions now found their performance overshadowed; resentful looks were exchanged; the murmuring grew to a low roar.
Now it was Marguerite’s turn to step forward; she exchanged glances with Alfonsine as she passed, and I knew then that there would be trouble. I forked the sign against evil into my palm; around me, the anticipation was so thick that I could barely breathe. Marguerite looked fearfully into LeMerle’s face, twitching like a snared rabbit.
“Well?” said Isabelle impatiently.
Marguerite opened her mouth and closed it again without speaking. Alfonsine looked at her with barely concealed hostility. Then, haltingly, and without taking her eyes away from LeMerle’s face, she began.
“I dream of demons,” she said in a low voice. “They infest my dreams. They speak to me when I lie in bed. They touch me with their fiery fingers. Soeur Auguste gives me medicines to make me sleep, but still the demons come!”
“Medicines?” There was a pause, during which I felt Isabelle’s eyes flick sharply at my averted face.
“A sleeping draught, that’s all,” I said as the other sisters turned toward me. “Lavender, and valerian, to calm her nerves. That’s all it is.” Too late, I heard the edge in my voice.
Mère Isabelle put her hand on Marguerite’s forehead and gave a small, chilly smile. “Well, I don’t think you’ll be needing any of Soeur Auguste’s potions anymore. Père Colombin and I are here to take care of you now. In penance and humility we will expel all trace of the evil that plagues you.”
Then at last, turning to me, she said: “So, Soeur Auguste. You seem to have something to say on almost every other subject. Have you no testimony to make here?”
I could see the danger but was at a loss at how to avoid it. “I-I don’t think so, ma mère.”
“What? Not one? Not a transgression, not a weakness, an act of unkindness, a wicked thought? Not even a dream?”
I suppose I should have made something up, like the rest of them. But LeMerle’s eyes were still on me, and I felt my face grow hot in revolt. “I-forgive me, ma mère. I don’t remember. I-I’m not used to public confession.”
Mère Isabelle gave a smile of singularly adult unpleasantness. “I see,” she said. “Soeur Auguste has a right to her privacy. Public testimony is beneath her. Her sins are between herself and the Almighty. Soeur Auguste speaks directly to God.”
Alfonsine sniggered. Clémente and Germaine grinned at each other. Marguerite piously raised her eyes to the ceiling. Even Antoine, who had blushed beet red during her own confession, was smirking. At that moment I knew that every nun in the chapel felt the same guilty twist of pleasure at the humiliation of one of their own. And behind Mère Isabelle, LeMerle gave his angel’s smile, as if none of this had anything to do with him.
18
My penance was silence. Two days’ enforced silence, with instructions to the other sisters to report immediately any breach of this command. It was no punishment to me. In fact I welcomed the respite. Besides if my suspicions were correct, Fleur and I might soon be gone. See me in the confessional after Vespers tomorrow, LeMerle had said. I can help you.
He was going to give me Fleur. What else could he have meant? Why else would he risk a meeting? My heart leapt at the thought, all my caution swept aside. To hell with strategy. I wanted my daughter. No penance, however severe, could begin to compare with the pain of her absence. Whatever LeMerle wanted from me, he was welcome to it.
Alfonsine, the perpetual gossip, who had been given the same penance as I, was far more troubled, assuming a look of deep contrition which no one-to her chagrin-appeared to notice. Her cough had worsened in recent days, and yesterday she refused her food; I recognized the signs and hoped that this renewal of zeal would not provoke one of her attacks. Marguerite was put in charge of the clock for a month to cure her nightly visitations; henceforth she would be the one to ring the bell for Vigils, sleeping alone on a box bed suspended by ropes in the belfry and waking every hour to ring the time. I doubted that it would work; but Marguerite seemed exalted by her punishment-although her tic had worsened, and there was a new stiffness down her left side that made her limp when she walked.
Never had there been so many penances. It seemed as if half the sisters or more were under some kind of discipline, from Antoine’s fasting-penance enough for her-and relocation to the overheated bakehouse, to Germaine’s work digging the new latrines.