LeMerle, however, was watching with an air of cool satisfaction. They were his now, I knew; they would perform at his command. The only question was: who would be first? I glanced around me. I saw the imploring face of Clémente, the moony features of Antoine, Marguerite, already twitching at the mouth as the draught began to wear off, and Alfonsine…
Alfonsine. At first she seemed utterly still. Then the slightest of tremors went through her; a fluttering like that of a moth’s wing. She seemed unaware of what was happening around her; her entire body quivered. Then, very slowly, she began to dance.
It began in her feet. With tiny steps, hands splayed as if for balance, she might have been a rope-dancer feeling for the measure with her bare toes. Then came the hips, a scarcely perceptible undulating motion. Then the fingers, the sinuous arms, the rolling shoulders.
I was not the only one to have noticed. Behind me, Tomasine took a sharp breath. Someone cried out shrilly. “Look!”
Silence fell; but it was a dangerous silence, like a rock about to fall.
“Bewitched!” moaned Bénédicte.
“Just like Soeur Marguerite!”
“Possessed!”
I had to put a halt to this. “Alfonsine, stop it, this is ridiculous-”
But Alfonsine could not be stopped. Her body turned and twisted to an unheard rhythm, first to the left, to the right, then revolving round like a top, snaking and circling with grave deliberation, her skirts flying out about her ankles. And there was a sound coming from her mouth, a sound that was almost a word. “Mmmmm…”
“They’re here!” wailed Antoine.
“Speaking to us…”
“Mmmmm…”
Someone behind me was praying. I thought I heard the words of the Ave Maria, oddly distorted and elongated into a mess of vowels. “Marie! Marie!”
The front row before the pulpitum had begun to take up the chant. I saw Clémente, Piété, and Virginie throw their heads back almost at the same time and begin to rock in cadence.
“Marie! Marie!”
It was a slow rocking, heavy as the rolling of a huge ship. But it was contagious; the second row joined the first, then the third. It became a wave, inexorable as a wave, bringing each row-choir, pews, stalls-into surging motion. I felt it myself, my dancer’s reflexes returning to life, fears, sounds, thoughts submerging in this dizzy vortex of movement. I threw back my head; for a moment I saw stars in the vaulting of the church roof and the world tilted enticingly. I could feel warm bodies all around me. My own voice was lost in a thick murmur. There was complete and unspoken cooperation in this slow frenzy of dance; the tide dragged us to the right, then to the left, all of us treading a measure all seemed to know by instinct. I could feel the dance calling, urging me to join it, to plunge my being into the black surf of movement and sound.
I could still hear Mère Isabelle shouting above the crowd but had no understanding of what she was saying; she was a single instrument in an orchestra of chaos, voices blending and rising, hers a shrill counterpoint to the dark-mawed roar of the multitude, a few cries of protest-mine among them-in the howling tide of affirmation but lost as the rhythms, the raw-throated harmonies of pandaemonium engulfed us all…
And yet a part of my mind remained clear, floating coolly above the rest like birds. I could hear LeMerle’s voice without quite making out his words; in this shared madness it sounded like a refrain, a reminder of steps, of cadences in this Ballet des Bernardines.
Was this, then, to be his special performance? In front of me, Tomasine stumbled and fell to her knees. The dance shifted gracelessly to accommodate her, and another figure stumbled over her hunched figure. They fell heavily together, and I recognized Perette, sprawling on the marble, the other nuns now snaking and spinning, oblivious, around her.
“Perette!” I pushed my way to my friend’s side. She had struck her head in the fall and a bruise already marked her temple. I picked her up, and together we pushed our way toward the open door. Our intrusion-or their exhaustion-seemed to quell some of the dancers, and the wave faltered and broke. I noticed Isabelle watching me but had no time to wonder what her look of suspicion might portend. Perette was clammy and pale, and I forced her to breathe deeply, to put her head between her knees, and to smell the little sachet of aromatics I carry in my pocket.
“What’s that?” asked Mère Isabelle in the sudden lull.
The noise had begun to abate. I realized that several of the assembled nuns had broken their trance and were looking in my direction. “This? Just lavender, and anise, and sweet balm, and-”
“What were you doing with it?”
I lifted the sachet of herbs. “Can’t you see? It’s a scent sachet, you must have seen one before.”
There was a silence. Sixty pairs of eyes now turned toward me. Someone-I think it was Clémente-said softly, but very clearly: “Witchcraft!”
And I seemed to hear the murmur of acquiescence, the voice that came from no throat but from the small movements of many pairs of fluttering hands as they made the sign of the cross, the hishh of skin against cambric, of tongues moistening dry lips, of breath quickening: Yes, it whispered, and my heart flipped over like a dead leaf.
Yes.
35
I could have stopped it with a word. But the scene was so compelling, so classic in its perspectives that I had not the heart to do so. The evil omens, the visions, the portentous death, and now the dramatic revelation amid the carnage…It was magnificent, almost biblicaclass="underline" I could not have scripted it better myself.
I wonder if she was conscious of the tableau she presented; head high, coiffe pulled back to reveal the dark fire of her curls, the wild girl clasped to her breast. Of course it is regrettable that tableaux should now be so out of fashion; more so that there should be so few here present able to appreciate it. But I have hopes for little Isabelle. An apt pupil in spite of her stolid upbringing, I could not have planned a more rousing performance myself.
Naturally, it was I who taught her all she knows, nurtured her, coaxed her from her meek obedience into this. I have, as you see, a vocation. A sense of pride moves me as I recall the tractable little girl she once was. But the good children, we are told, are always the ones to be careful of. A moment comes when even the most acquiescent of them may reach a point beyond which the cartographers of the mind can map nothing more.
A declaration of independence, perhaps. An affirmation of self.
She thinks in absolutes, like her uncle. Dreams of sanctity, of battles with demons. A fanciful child, in spite of everything, tormented by the visionary yearnings and uncertainties of her youth, the rigid conventions of her line. I suspected she’d declare herself today. You might say I staged it: a little divertissement between two acts of a great drama. Even so she surprised me. Not least by her perversity in choosing as her scapegoat the one woman I should have preferred her not to accuse.
Impossible to think that the girl suspects anything: it is instinctive with her, a child’s love of defiance. She feels the need to prove to me the rightness of her suspicions-I who have always remained maddeningly calm, almost skeptical in the face of her growing conviction-to earn my praise, even my discomfiture. For there is more to her now than submissive adoration. The declaration of self has elevated her, bred seeds of dissension in her that I must nurture whilst struggling to control. Her awe of me remains, colored now with a sullenness, a renewed suspicion…I must take care. Given her head she might fall upon me as easily as upon you, my l’Ailée, and in this the two of you are more alike than you know. She is a knife, and I must handle it with cunning. Perverse enough to welcome the subtle humiliations of my erstwhile designing, the core of breeding in her is strong, her pride obdurate.