Then came the exorcism at the well, with prayers and incantations before the cover was fastened shut with wattle and mortar. Then to the church again, and talk of roofing and stacks and arch supports. Then back to the gatehouse and Isabelle, who follows him everywhere like a small, sullen wraith.
In the terrible heat, work on the well was slow and laborious, and by midmorning my habit was caked with the yellow clay that forms a thick stratum below the surface sand. This clay enables the water that filters from beneath from evaporating. Penetrate it, and the water will ooze out, brackish at first but becoming clearer and sweeter as the well fills. It is seawater, I know, its salt content sifted out by the banks of fine sand upon which the island sits. We are halfway there now, and we save the clay carefully for Soeur Bénédicte, the abbey’s potter, who will use it to make the bowls and cups we use in the refectory.
Midday came and went. As manual workers, Germaine and I lunched on meat and ale-although under Mère Isabelle’s new order our main meal is now just after Sext, with the midday meal reduced to a frugal handful of black bread and salt-but even so I was exhausted, my hands puckered from the brackish water, my eyes raw. My feet were peeling painfully, and stones dug into the arch of my instep as I trod blindly around the darkening hole. The water was deeper now, the yellow clay giving place to a black ooze in which fragments of mica sparkle. Soeur Germaine pulled the buckets of ooze into the sunlight, where they would be used on the vegetable beds, for this evil-smelling stuff is barely salty at all and rich as alluvial soil.
As cool evening fell and the light began to fail, I climbed out of the well, helped by Soeur Germaine. She too was mud spattered, but I was many times caked with filth, my hair stiff with it in spite of a rag tied around my head, my face smeared like a savage’s.
“The water is good here,” I told her. “I tasted it.”
Germaine nodded. Never a woman of many words, she has been almost entirely silent since the new abbess’s arrival. It was strange too, I noticed, to see her without Clémente at her side. Perhaps they had quarreled, I told myself, for in the old days they had been inseparable. It is a bitter thought that barely two weeks after the death of Reverend Mother, I can already think of my previous life here as the old days.
“We’ll have to shore up the sides,” I told Germaine. “The clay seeps and taints the water. Wood, then stone and mortar, are the only things that can keep it out.”
She gave me a sour look that reminded me of Le Borgne. “Quite the engineer, aren’t you?” she said. “Well, if you think you can gain favor this way, you’re likely to be disappointed. You’d do better having a fit in church, or tattling on someone in Confession, or better still, reporting a monstrous potato, or thirteen magpies in a field-”
I looked at her in surprise.
“Well, that’s what everyone wants, isn’t it?” said Germaine. “All this talk-this nonsense about devils and curses. That’s what she wants to hear, and that’s what they give her.”
“Give who?”
“The girl.” Germaine’s words were eerily similar to those Antoine had spoken the day they took Fleur. “That dreadful little girl.” She was silent for a moment, a strange smile on her thin lips. “Happiness is such a frail thing, isn’t it, Soeur Auguste? One day you have it, the next it’s gone, and you don’t even realize how.”
It was a long, strange speech for Germaine, and I did not know how to reply to it, or even whether I wanted to. She must have read my expression, because she laughed then, a sharp barking sound, turned on her heel, and left me standing by the well in the gentle dusk, suddenly wishing I could call her back, but unable to think of anything to say.
Dinner was a solemn, silent business. Marguerite, who had taken Antoine’s place in the kitchens, had none of her cooking skills, and the result was a meager, oversalted soup, watery ale, and more of the hard black bread. Although I scarcely noticed the unappetizing fare, others were inclined to balk at the absence of meat on a weekday, though nothing was said openly. In the old days there would have been animated discussion of this at Chapter, but now, although the silence was laden with discontent, it remained unbroken. Soeur Antoine, sitting at my right, ate with thick, fierce bites, her black brows drawn together. She looked different now, her flabby moon face pinched and sullen. Her work in the bakehouse was long and difficult; her hands were covered in burns from the stone ovens.
A row away, Soeur Rosamonde ate her soup in happy ignorance of the abbess’s disapproval. The old nun’s distress at the changes in the abbey had been short-lived; she existed now in a state of placid bewilderment, going about her duties in a willing but haphazard fashion, called to services by a novice especially assigned the task of ensuring she did not stray too far. Rosamonde lived in a half-world between past and present, cheerfully confusing names, faces, times. Often she spoke of people long dead as if they were still alive, addressed sisters by names that were not their own, helped herself to others’ clothes, went to collect supplies from a barn demolished in winter storms twenty years before. But she seemed well enough, and I have seen this kind of thing many times before in the very old.
Yet her behavior irked the abbess. Rosamonde ate noisily at table, smacking her gums. Sometimes she forgot to observe silence or mistook the words of prayers. She dressed carelessly, often going to church without some necessary item of clothing until the novice was charged with her supervision.
The wimple was an especial burden to an old woman who had worn the quichenotte for sixty years and could not understand why it was suddenly to be forbidden. Even more irksome to the new abbess was her refusal to acknowledge her authority and her querulous calls for Mère Marie. True, Angélique Saint-Hervé Désirée Arnault had not had much exposure to senility. Her life-what there had been of it-was a nursery where mechanical toys replaced playmates and servants replaced family. For her there had been no clear window onto the world, her only view a procession of priests and doctors. The poor were kept safely out of sight. The old, the sick, the infirm, were not a part of Mère Isabelle’s Creation.
Soeur Tomasine said grace. We ate in a silence punctuated occasionally by slurping sounds from Rosamonde. Mère Isabelle looked up once, then her wrathful gaze returned to her plate. I could see her mouth tightened almost to invisibility as she ate in small, delicate jabs of her spoon.
An unusually loud smacking noise caused a ripple to move down the novices’ bench, perilously close to laughter. The abbess seemed about to say something, but her lips tightened once more and she was silent.
It was to be the last time Rosamonde took a meal with the rest of us.
I went to LeMerle’s cottage again that night. I am not certain why I went except that I could not sleep and that my need drew me, like a barb through the heart. Need for what, I cannot say. I knocked softly, but there was no reply. Looking in through the window I saw a soft glow from a dying fire, and on the rug a shape-no, two shapes-illuminated in the firelight.
The man was LeMerle. I saw on his arm the black scarf that hid the old brand. The girl was young, slender as a boy, face averted, cropped hair the color of raw silk beneath his hands, beneath his mouth.
Clémente.
I crept softly back to the dorter then, and silently I returned to my bed. Everyone sounded asleep. Even so a phantom mutter of laughter pursued me as I fled, burning with shame, to my place by the wall, past Clémente’s cubicle…I froze in midstep. Germaine was sitting bolt upright and motionless in Clémente’s bed. A stray strand of moonlight bisected her scarred face and I could see her eyes shining. She did not seem to see me, and I passed by without a word.