Tomasine muttered something sullen and indistinct.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
I could sense the unrest, however. Throughout the day it walked with me; in the abbey, in the garden and the chapel; it worked alongside me in the bakehouse and in the fields. It did not help that the heat had soured; overnight, the air had become flat and humid, and the sun was a tarnished coin behind a sheet of cloud. Beneath it we sweated; sweating, we stank. No one spoke aloud of Germaine’s suicide, or even of the Unholy Nun, but it was there nevertheless; a murmur of revolt; a fear that grew with every silent hour. This was, after all, the second death in as many months-and both had occurred in unusual circumstances. A third outrage seemed only a matter of time.
Then, this evening, it finally came. Soeur Virginie arrived from the infirmary with the unwelcome news that during Chapter Soeur Rosamonde had died. Oh, it was to be expected at her age; but it was a blow nevertheless. Certainly it was enough to set rumors flying: Rosamonde had died of shock following a new Visitation by the Unholy Nun; she had been bewitched to death by the same evil spirit that had killed Mère Marie; she had committed suicide; she had died of the cholera, and everyone was trying to cover it up; she had perished of an overzealous bleeding, authorized by Mère Isabelle.
I was more inclined to believe this: Virginie’s handling of the old woman had been misguided from the start, and separated from her friends and cut off from the rest of the abbey, Rosamonde had soon fallen into a fatal decline. Her death was ill-timed, however. No amount of reasoning could persuade the other sisters that they were in no danger. Death is not contagious, I protested: only disease. At her own insistence I promised to make a medicine bag for Soeur Piété to protect her from evil humors, and strengthening drafts for Alfonsine and Marguerite, who had grown even thinner under Virginie’s care. After the evening meal several of the novices came to me for advice and protection; I told them to avoid excessive fasting, to drink only the water from the well, and to wash with soap morning and night.
“What good will that do?” asked Soeur Tomasine when she heard of it.
I explained that regular washing sometimes prevented disease.
She looked skeptical. “I don’t see how it can,” she said. “You need holy water, not soap and water, to drive out evil.”
I sighed. It is sometimes very difficult to explain these things without sounding heretical. “Some evils are waterborne,” I explained carefully. “Some travel by air. If the water or the air is tainted, then disease may spread.” I showed her the scented pomander I had made to dispel foul air and flying insects, and she turned it over suspiciously in her hand.
“You seem to know a lot about these things,” she said.
“Only what I’ve heard.”
At Vespers that night LeMerle spoke to us, looking tired after a day of fasting and prayer. Exhausted and afraid, the sisters brightened a little at the sound of his voice, but Père Saint-Amand seemed reluctant to mention the long day’s troubling business, and spoke of the trials of Saint Felicity with a forced cheer that convinced no one.
Then Mère Isabelle addressed us. I had noticed that the more LeMerle spoke to us of caution and restraint, the more agitated she became, as if she were purposely defying the new confessor. Today her address was longer and more confused than ever, and though she spoke to us of the Light of God in the darkness, her speech held little illumination.
“We must try to find the light,” she told us in a voice that quavered a little with fatigue. “But today it seems that try as we might we are infested, even to the heart. Even to the soul. Oh, we mean well. But even the best of intentions may lead the soul into hell. And sin is everywhere. No one is safe. Even a hermit alone for fifty years in a lightless cave may not be free of sin. Sin is a plague, and it is contagious.”
“There have been dreams,” she whispered-and a murmur rose from the assembly like poison smoke-“dreams and blood”-and the murmur echoed again like the voice of our longings-blood, yes-“and now the ichors of hell flow free among us, touching us with monstrous thoughts, monstrous cravings”-yes, whispered the voice of the multitude, oh yes, yes, yesss!
At her side LeMerle seemed to smile-or was it the candlelight?-his face ringed in the glow from the sacristy lantern so that a soft nimbus surrounded him.
“There have been lecheries!” cried Mère Isabelle. “Blasphemies! Secret abominations! Can anyone deny it?”
Before her Soeur Alfonsine began to wail, arms held out. Clémente too held out her hands in seeming entreaty. Behind them, a dozen more joined the chorus. “All of us, guilty!”
Guilty, yessss! An ecstasy of release.
“All of us tainted!”
Tainted, yes!
The candles, the incense, the stench of fear and excitement. The dark, teeming with shadows. A gust of wind slammed the door against the wall and set the candles guttering. A hundred shadows against the walls doubled, trebled, becoming three hundred, three thousand, an army from hell. Someone screamed. Such was the nervous power of Mère Isabelle’s soliloquy that the cry was echoed by a dozen more.
“See! It comes! It comes! It is here!”
Everyone turned to see who had cried out. Set slightly apart from the rest of the crowd stood Soeur Marguerite, arms uplifted. She had cast aside her wimple and her head was thrown back, revealing a face distorted with tics and tremors. Her left leg was shaking perceptibly through the thick folds of her habit, a vibration that seemed to pass through every muscle and nerve in her body.
“Soeur Marguerite?” LeMerle spoke in a clear, calm voice. “Soeur Marguerite, is anything wrong?”
With a visible effort, the thin nun turned her eyes toward him. Her mouth opened, but nothing came. The tic in her leg intensified.
“Don’t touch me!” said Marguerite as Soeur Virginie moved to help her.
LeMerle looked concerned. “Soeur Marguerite. Come here, please. If you can.”
It was clear she wanted to obey. But her limbs refused to do so. I had seen a similar case in Montauban, in Gascony, where several people had been afflicted by Saint Vitus’ dance. But this was not the same malady. Marguerite’s leg jerked and danced as if some evil puppeteer were pulling her strings. Her face worked frantically.
“She’s faking,” said Alfonsine.
Marguerite’s head twisted to face her. Grotesquely, her body kept the same unnatural posture. “Help me,” she said.
Isabelle had been watching in silence. Now she spoke. “Can you doubt it now?” she said in a low voice. “Possessed!”
LeMerle said nothing but looked well satisfied with himself.
All around them, the sisters had begun to murmur. The word-unspoken as yet until this moment-filled the air like a plague of moths.
Only Alfonsine looked skeptical. “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “It’s a tic, or the palsy. You know what she’s like.”
Privately, I agreed with her. There had been more than enough excitement in the abbey during the past weeks to provoke a frenzy in one as susceptible as Soeur Marguerite. Besides, Alfonsine had been coughing up more blood than ever in recent days, and it was getting hard to compete.
Isabelle, however, was not pleased. “There have been cases!” she snapped. “Who are you to question this one? What do you know about it?”
Alfonsine, abashed at the rebuke, began to cough. I could hear her forcing it, raking at her throat. If she’d had any sense she would have accepted the linctus I had prepared for her, and bandaged her throat with linen. Even so I knew that such remedies would not cure her but would merely slow the progress of her illness. The consumption is not an ill that can be cured with syrups.