“Shh.” I whispered. “Don’t say anything.”
Fleur looked puzzled but, to my relief, nodded.
“Listen to me,” I said in the same low voice. “I don’t have much time.”
As if to confirm this, the fishwife shot a suspicious gaze in my direction before returning to the order of mullet. I gave a silent prayer of thanks for the woman who wished to buy such an unusually large quantity of fish.
“Have you brought Mouche?” Fleur’s voice was tiny. “Have you come to take me home?”
“Not yet.” Her small face was gray with woe, and again I fought the urge to take her in my arms. “Listen, Fleur. Where are they keeping you? A cottage? A caravan? A farm?”
Fleur glanced at the fisherman’s wife. “A cottage. With children and dogs.”
“Did you cross the causeway?”
“Excuse me.” A big woman pushed between us, stretching out her arms for a packet of fish. I stepped sideways into a line of customers; someone called out in annoyance.
“Hurry up, Sister! Some of us have families to feed!”
“Fleur. Listen. Is it on the mainland? Is it over the causeway?”
From behind the large woman, Fleur nodded. Then, infuriatingly, she shook her head. Someone stepped into the space between us, and once again my daughter was lost to sight.
“Fleur!” I was almost weeping with frustration. The large woman was wedged beside me; the crowd was pushing at my back, and the customer who had called out had begun a noisy diatribe on people who stood around gossiping in queues. “Sweetheart. Did you go over the causeway?”
For a second, then, I thought she would tell me. Puzzled, she seemed to be trying to articulate or remember something, to give me some clue that would reveal to me where she was being kept. Was it the word causeway that she did not understand? Had she been taken to the mainland in a boat?
Then the woman with the mullet turned to face me, and I knew my chance to discover the truth was over. She looked at me and smiled, holding out her basket of fish to me in her meaty red arms. “What do you think?” she said. “Will it do for tonight’s dinner?”
It was Antoine.
The journey home was difficult. I carried the fish on my back as I had the potatoes, the stench of it growing in the sun in spite of the quantities of seaweed intended to keep it cool. The load was heavy, too, fishy water dripping through the weave of the basket onto my shoulders and into my hair, soaking my habit with brine. Antoine was in a cheery mood and talked incessantly of what she had done at the market, of the gossip she had heard, the sights she had seen, the news she had exchanged. A peddler from the mainland had brought news of a group immolation in honor of Christina Mirabilis, a woman had been hanged in Angers for masquerading as a man, and there were rumors that a man from Le Devin had caught a fish with a head at both ends-a sure sign of disaster to come. She did not mention Fleur, and for that, if nothing else, I was grateful. However, I knew that she had seen her. I could only hope that she would hold her tongue.
We followed the coastal path back to the abbey. It was a longer route, but LeMerle insisted upon it-after all, he was riding, and the extra mile or so meant nothing to him. It had been one of my favorite walks in happier times, passing by the causeway and along the dunes, but laden as I was, lurching through the soft sand with the fish basket, I found little enjoyment in it. LeMerle, on the other hand, seemed to derive great pleasure from watching the sea and asked a number of questions about the tides and the crossing times from the mainland, which I ignored, but which Antoine seemed more than happy to answer.
It was midafternoon when we reached the abbey, by which time I was exhausted, half-blind from squinting at the sun, and heartily sick of the smell of fish. With relief I delivered the stinking basket to the kitchens, then, my head still ringing from the heat and my throat parched, I made my way across the outer courtyard toward the well. I was about to throw down the pan for the water when I heard a cry from behind me; turning, I saw Alfonsine.
She seemed fully recovered from the previous day’s attack; her eyes were bright and her cheeks were flushed with excitement as she ran toward me. “For God’s sake, don’t touch that water!” she panted. “Don’t you know what’s happened?”
I blinked at her. I had completely forgotten LeMerle’s tablets of dye, and the instructions he had given me for their use. My daughter’s face seemed stamped across everything I saw, like the afterimage one gets from looking too long at the sun.
“The well, God save us, the well!” cried Alfonsine impatiently. “Soeur Tomasine went down to fetch water for the cook pots and the water had turned to blood! Mère Isabelle has forbidden anyone to use it.”
“Blood?” I repeated.
“It’s a sign,” said Alfonsine. “It’s a judgment on us for burying poor Mère Marie in the potato patch.”
In spite of my weariness, I tried not to smile. “Perhaps it’s a vein of iron oxide in the sand,” I suggested. “Or a layer of red clay.”
Alfonsine shook her head contemptuously. “I should have known you’d say something like that,” she said. “Anyone would think you didn’t believe in the devil, the way you always try to find reasons for everything.”
No, it was demonic influence, she was sure of it. Mère Isabelle was sure of it, and to such an extent that the new abbess had ordered Père Colombin to bless the well and the entire abbey grounds if necessary. Alfonsine felt unclean too, she said, and would not rest easy until Père Colombin had examined her minutely to ensure that no taint remained in her. Following this pronouncement, Soeur Marguerite had developed a tic in her left leg, which the new confessor had also promised to investigate. If this continued, I told myself, the place would soon be closer to an asylum than an abbey.
“What about the water?” I asked. “What are we going to do?”
Her face lit. “A miracle! A carter arrived near midday with a delivery of twenty-five barrels of ale. A present, he said, for the new abbess. While the new well is being dug, no one will go thirsty.”
That evening we dined on bread, ale, and mullet. The food was good, but I had little appetite. Something was wrong-in the layout of the tables, the silence of the assembly, the look of the food on our plates-which made me uneasy. When we danced for King Henri at the Palais-Royal and were led through his Hall of Mirrors I had the same sense of things reversed, slyly reflecting an altered truth, though perhaps the difference was in my mind only.
Mère Isabelle said grace, and after that there was no conversation-no sound at all, in fact, but for Rosamonde’s toothless gums sucking noisily at her food, the nervous tapping of Marguerite’s left foot and the occasional tick of cutlery. I motioned to Soeur Antoine that she should take from my plate what I did not eat, and she did so with gleeful deftness, her small weak eyes bright with greed. She glanced at me several times as she ate, and I wondered whether she took the extra food as payment for keeping silent about Fleur. I left her most of the ale too, eating nothing but the bread. The smell of fish, even cooked, made my stomach turn.
Perhaps it was that, or worry over Fleur, that made me slow this evening, for I had been at table for ten minutes or longer when I realized the source of my disquiet. Perette was not at her usual place among the novices. LeMerle too was absent, though I had not expected to see him. But I wondered where Perette could be. The last time I remembered seeing her was at the funeral yesterday, I realized; since then, nowhere-be it among the cloisters or in the performance of my duties in the bakehouse, or later at Sext in the church, or at Chapter, or now at dinner-nowhere had I glimpsed my friend.