“My children.” I had coached them well; glassy-eyed with the burning incense, they watched me as if I were their only salvation. Mère Isabelle was standing at my right side, close to the brazier; through the smoke, her face was ash. “Today we celebrate the most sacred and most dear to us of our holy days. The festival of the Holy Mother.”
A rumor ran through the congregation, an ahhh of satisfaction and release. Above it, I could just hear the sound of drops beginning to fall on the roof slates; at last, it had begun to rain. I couldn’t have planned it better; come to think of it, a little strategic thunder would not come amiss. Perhaps the Lord would provide some when the time came, thereby proving that he does have a sense of irony. But I digress. Back to the Virgin, then, before she loses her freshness. Where was I? “The Mother, who watches down upon us in the presence of evil. The Virgin, who comforts us in our times of need; whose purity is that of the dove and the white lily”-nice touch, LeMerle-“whose forgiveness and compassion know no bounds.”
Ahhh. Not for nothing do we use the language of love to seduce these foolish virgins; pulpit rhetoric is indecently close to that of the bedroom, just as some of the more interesting sections of the Bible echo the pornographies of the ancients. I played now on this kinship in words they knew well, promising raptures beyond the realms of human endurance, ecstasies without limit in the arms of the Lord. Earthly suffering is less than nothing, I told them, in the face of the pleasures to come, the fruits of Paradise-I could see Antoine beginning to drool-the joys of unending service in the House of God.
It was a promising start; already I could see Soeur Tomasine grinning alarmingly; beside her, Marguerite’s face was a mass of twitches. Good. “But today is not simply a time of rejoicing. It is also our day of battle. Today we throw down the final challenge to the evil that has plagued us and plagues us still.”
Ahhh. Wrested from their pleasant thoughts, the sisters flinched and pranced like nervous mares.
“I do not doubt that today we shall defeat the forces of darkness-but if the worst happens, and we are once more tested to the limits of our faith, be of stout heart. There is always an escape for those of true faith, and with the courage to embrace it.”
Isabelle’s face was set in a grimace of determination. Saint or martyr, that look told me; this time, she was not to be thwarted. Angélique Saint-Hervé Désirée Arnault always gets her way.
Now, outside, I could hear a distant sound of horses’ hooves on the road, and I knew that my enemy was near; and just in time too. Timing is the greatest tool of an artist in my trade; good timing is a precision instrument, coaxing comedy or tragedy to one climax after another; bad timing is a bludgeon that kills all suspense and ruins both drama and punch line. By my reckoning I had maybe eight or ten minutes until Arnault’s grand entrance; time enough, anyway, to whip up the welcome he deserved.
“Courage, my children, courage. Satan knows we await him. We have faced him together, and we stand now united in our faith and our conviction, ready to go to war. The devil comes in a thousand guises, fair-faced or foul; he may be a man or a woman, a child or a beast, he may take the features of a loved one, of a man of power, even, on occasion, of a bishop or a king. The next countenance you see will be his, my children; already the Dark One approaches. I can hear the sound of his infernal carriage as it thunders toward us. Satan, we are here. Show us your face!”
Seldom has any audience-at Court or in the provinces-ever been so entranced by a single performer. Already, they were watching me as if their souls depended upon it. The braziers lit my face like the fires of purgatory; above us, the rain was cathartic; after so many days of heat and drought it exalted them, turned their faces toward the heavens, sent them staring toward the rafters as their feet began to move independently of their minds and my dea ex machina prepared to take the stage…
My hiding place was high in the bell tower, not far from the bell itself, which hangs from an iron crosspiece in the narrowest part of the spire. My eyrie was perilous, accessible only from the rough scaffolding erected by the workmen repairing the roof, but it was the only place from which I could work; and besides, Ailée has no fear of heights. Even so I could be certain of nothing; this performance could have no rehearsal, no second showing.
Even now I could see the bishop’s retinue, half a mile or less along the road; I could hear the outriders’ horses and the sound of the carriage wheels in the rain. It was a large group; as they approached I could see two banners, and I understood that the bishop had brought along a colleague, perhaps a superior, to share in his family’s triumph. I looked down into the chapel and I saw that Perette, with the swiftness that served her so well in her role as the Unholy Nun, had slipped once again into the shadows. I could only trust that she remembered all the instructions I had given her. Her eyes were bright with birdy intelligence, but I knew that the smallest distraction-a flight of gulls at a window, the lowing of cows on the marshes, the colors of the stained glass reflected upon the flagstones-might mean our undoing.
Inside the church the light was poor; from a cloudy sky only a little murky daylight filtered through the broken slates, and from below, the candlelight looked hazy beneath the pall of incense, a necklace of fireflies in the greater dark. In my habit I was the color of smoke; over my head I wore a hood so that the pale blur of my face did not attract attention. The rope-I hoped it was long enough-was looped three times around my waist, the end weighted with a piece of lead. My breathing seemed to fill the whole abbey as silence fell and LeMerle began his performance.
Oh, he was very good. He knew it too; and although I could not see his face from my position, I could tell from his voice that he was enjoying himself. The acoustics of the chapel were ideal for his purpose; they picked up every word to fling them unerringly to the back of the hall. The scenery was all in place: braziers, candles, flowers, a promise of heaven or hell. Much may be achieved, as LeMerle taught me in our Paris days, by the artful positioning of a few simple props; a lily in the hair or a pearl rosary in the hand suggests purity-even of the most debauched of whores-a flashy sword hilt carried ostentatiously at the belt will discourage attackers-even when there is no sword attached. People see what they expect to see. That’s why he wins at cards, and it’s why the sisters failed to identify the Unholy Nun. That’s his style-art and misdirection, and though I could see the bales placed all around the hall, although I could smell the oil with which he had saturated the straw, and guess at the oil-soaked rags that ran beneath every bench and pew, the sisters were blind to them for the moment, smelling only smoke and incense, seeing nothing but the stage and the performance into which they had been so carefully drawn.
But I-I could see it all now from my privileged position. Giordano had taught me something about engines and fuses; the rest needed only a little guesswork. A spark, correctly placed-from the pulpitum, for example-might be enough to set it off. And then, as Antoine had said, we light a flame.
I must be careful, I told myself. Timing was essential. I thought I knew his mind; now I prayed that I was right. He would not act until he had revealed himself; the temptation to gloat a little was too much for him to pass by. Vanity is his weakness; above everything else, he is a performer, and he needs his audience. That, I was hoping, would be his downfall. I waited, then, biting my lips as a murmur went through the congregation and the bishop made his long-awaited entrance.