“I was trying to tell you. She said it wasn’t seemly for her to be here. She said it would be a distraction from your duties. She sent her away.”
I stared at her in disbelief. “Sent her where?”
She eyed me humbly. “It wasn’t my fault.”
Something in her voice told me she thought it was.
“You told them?” I grasped her sleeve. “Antoine, did you tell them Fleur was mine?”
“I couldn’t help it,” whined the fat sister. “They would have found out sooner or later. Someone else would have let it slip.”
In rage I pinched her arm through her habit so that she almost screamed.
“Stop it! Aü! Stop it, Auguste, you’re hurting! It’s not my fault they sent her away! You should never have kept her here in the first place!”
“Antoine. Look at me.” She rubbed her arm, refusing to meet my eyes. “Where did they send her? Was it to someone in the village?” She shook her head helplessly and again I fought back the urge to strike at her. “Please, Antoine. I’m just worried, that’s all. I’m not going to tell anyone you told me.”
“You ought to call me ma soeur.” Antoine’s face was puffy with resentment. “Anger’s a sin, you know. It’s that hair of yours. You should cut it off.” She glanced at me with unusual daring. “Now the Reform’s coming, you’ll have to anyway.”
“Please, Antoine. I’ll give you the last bottle of my lavender syrup.”
Her eyes brightened. “And the candied rose petals?”
“If you like. Where’s Fleur?”
Antoine lowered her voice. “I overheard Mère Isabelle talking to the new confessor. Something about a fisherman’s wife, somewhere on the mainland. They’re paying her,” she added, as if I were to be held responsible for the expense. But I was barely listening.
“The mainland! Where?”
Antoine shrugged. “That’s all I heard.”
I stood dazed, as the truth of it slowly sank in. It was too late. Before I had even dared raise my voice against him, the Blackbird had out-maneuvered me. He must have known I would not run the risk of losing my daughter. Without her, I was forced to stay.
For a moment I considered making the attempt anyway. The trail was still warm, although by now I would have missed the tide and would have to await the next day’s crossing. Everyone on the island knew Fleur; someone must have seen where she had been taken. But my heart knew it was useless. LeMerle would have anticipated that too.
My stomach clenched. I imagined Fleur confused, unhappy, calling for me, thinking herself abandoned, taken away without even a cantrip or a star blessing to protect her. Who but I could keep her from harm? Who but I knew her ways, understood that she needed a candle near her cot on winter nights, knew to slice away the brown part of the apple before cutting it into quarters?
“I never even said good-bye.” I spoke for myself, but Antoine looked at me with returned sullenness. “It isn’t my fault,” she repeated. “None of us ever kept our babies. Why should you be any different?”
I did not reply. I already knew whose fault it was. What did he want? What could I possibly have that he still wanted? Returning to my cubicle I saw that the little cot had already been removed. My own things seemed untouched, my cache of books and papers behind the loose stone undisturbed. I found Fleur’s doll, Mouche, down the side of my bed, half hidden by the trailing blanket. Perette had made it out of rags and scraps when Fleur was a baby, and it is her favorite toy. Mouche’s arms and legs have been stitched back a hundred times; her hair is a bright tangle of multicolored wool, and her round face looks oddly like Perette’s with its shoe-button eyes and rosy cheeks. Like her creator too, Mouche is mute; where the mouth should be, there is only a blank.
For a while I stood with the doll in my hands, too numb to think. My first instinct was to find the new confessor, to force him to tell me-at knifepoint, if need be-where he had hidden my daughter. But I knew LeMerle. This was his challenge: his opening gambit in a game for which I did not yet know the stakes. If I went to him now, I played into his hands. If I waited, I might yet be able to call his bluff.
All night I turned and twisted on my hot bed. My cubicle is the farthest from the door, which means that although I have farthest to go if I wish to visit the reredorter in the night at least I have the advantage of only one neighbor. I have the window too, east-facing though it is, and the greater space that the end cubicles afford. The night was heavy, promising stormy weather, and as I watched sleeplessly into the small hours I saw the storm out at sea striding out on great silent stilts of lightning between the red-black clouds. But no rain came. I wondered whether Fleur saw it too or whether she slept, exhausted, her thumb in her mouth, in a house of strangers.
“Shh, Fleurette.” In my daughter’s absence, it was to Mouche that I spoke, stroking the woolly head as if it might have been Fleur’s hair beneath my fingers. “I’m here. It’s all right.”
I traced the star sign on Mouche’s forehead and spoke my mother’s cantrip. Stella bella, bonastella. Pig Latin it may be, but there’s comfort in an old rhyme, and although none of the ache in my heart subsided, I felt a slight diminishing of fear. After all, LeMerle must know that he would get nothing from me if any harm came to Fleur. I waited then, with Mouche under my arm, as all around me, my sisters slept and lightning stalked the islands, one by one.
15
Today held little of Reform. The new abbess spent much of the time in her private chapel with LeMerle, leaving us to our speculation. By now the holiday atmosphere had dissipated, leaving an uneasy vacuum. Voices were hushed, as if there were sickness in the place. Duties had been resumed, but mostly-with the exception of Marguerite and Alfonsine-in a slipshod manner. Even Antoine seemed ill at ease in her kitchen, her usual foolish good nature tempered by the previous day’s accusations of excess. A number of lay workers came to inspect the church, and scaffolding was erected on the west side, presumably to allow them to investigate the damaged roof.
Once again, my first impulse that morning had been to find LeMerle and to ask for news of my daughter. Several times I set out with this aim in mind, stopping myself just in time. No doubt that was precisely what he intended.
Instead I spent the morning at work on the flats, but my usually light touch was marred, and I found myself hoeing furiously at the salt stacks, pounding the careful white mounds into muddy sludge.
Fleur’s absence is a pain that begins deep in the pit of my stomach, digging inward like a canker. It touches everything, like a shadow behind bright scenery. It is stronger than I am; a dozen times I have flung down my tools and begun the march to LeMerle’s cottage, but I know that my silence is the only weapon I have. Let him be the first to reveal himself. Let him come to me.
I returned to find that LeMerle and the new abbess had retired to their respective quarters early-she to the cell previously inhabited by her predecessor, he to the gatehouse cottage just within the abbey walls-leaving the sisters in a state of unusual excitement. In their absence, there had been much whispered speculation on the nature of the intended Reforms, some murmured revolt, and a great deal of ill-informed and ill-considered gossip.
Much of this surrounded LeMerle, and I was unsurprised to overhear a number of favorable opinions. Although some voices among us were raised in condemnation of the little chit who presumed to overturn our way of life, there were few who failed to be impressed by the new confessor. Alfonsine, of course, was completely overwhelmed, enumerating the qualities of the fake Père Colombin with the zeal of one newly converted.