“I am the rock,” I told her. “The anchor in the storm. To suspect me is unthinkable.”
There was a long pause. “I should have spoken when I had the chance,” said Juliette. I was not mistaken by her angry tone; her eyes were almost admiring.
“You wouldn’t have done it, my dear.”
Her eyes told me she knew that too.
“Perette has been very useful to me during the past weeks,” I said. “She’s quick-almost as quick as you were, Juliette-and she’s clever. She hid in the crypt, you know, the first time you saw the Unholy Nun. All the time you were searching she was there, curled up behind one of the coffins.”
Juliette shivered.
“But if you’re so concerned about her, then maybe-” I pretended to hesitate. “No. I need her still, Juliette. I cannot give her up. Not even to please you.”
She took the bait. “You said there was a way.”
“Impossible.”
“Guy!”
“No, really. I should never have spoken.”
“Please!”
I never could resist her pleading. An exhilarating delicacy, seldom tasted. I pretended reluctance in order to savor the moment. “Well, I suppose you might…”
“What?”
“If you agreed to take her place.”
There. The trap swings shut with an almost audible click. She ponders it for a moment. No fool she. She knows how she has been maneuvered. But there is the child…
“Fleur was never on the mainland,” I told her gently. “I placed her with a family not three miles from here. You could see her within the hour if only-”
“I won’t poison anyone,” said Juliette.
“That won’t be necessary.”
She was beginning to weaken. “If I agree,” she said, “you swear Perette’s involvement will cease?”
“Of course.” I pride myself on my look of honesty. This is the true, open look of a man who never cocked a card or loaded a die in all his life. Amazing that after all these years it still works.
“Three days,” I said, sensing her resistance. “Three days till Sunday. Then it ends. I promise.”
“Three days,” she echoed.
“After that, Fleur can come home for good,” I said. “You can have everything back as it was. Or-if you like-you can come with me.”
Her eyes shone-with scorn or passion, I could not tell-but she said nothing.
“Would it really be so bad?” I said gently. “To take to the road again? To be l’Ailée-to be back where you belong”-I lowered my voice to a whisper-“back where I need you?”
There was silence, but I felt her relax, just a little, just enough. I touched her cheek fleetingly. “Three days,” I repeated. “What can happen in three days?”
Rather a lot, I hope.
46
Fleur was waiting for me, as LeMerle had promised, not three miles from the abbey. A salter’s croft, built low to the ground, with a turf roof and walls of whitened daub, screened from view by a row of tamarisk bushes; I could have passed by it a hundred times and not seen it. Behind the croft, a shaggy pony cropped grass; beside it, a wooden hutch housed half a dozen brown rabbits. All around, the ditches of the salt marsh formed a kind of shallow moat, in which a couple of flat-bottomed platts were moored for access to the fields. Herons stood in the reeds at the water’s edge; in the long yellow grass I heard the scree of cicadas.
LeMerle, knowing that I would not abandon Perette, had seen no need to accompany me this time. Instead he sent Antoine as my guard, eyes narrowed in sly complicity beneath the sweat-stained wimple. I wondered if I was hers. The poisoner and the murderer, arm in arm, like inseparable friends. Fleur’s eyes lit up as she saw me, and I clasped her to my heart as if so doing I could merge our flesh into one and so never be parted. Her skin is soft and brown, startlingly dark against her flaxen hair. Her beauty almost alarms me. She was wearing her red dress, now grown a little short for her, and she had a fresh scrape on one knee.
“Sunday,” I whispered in her ear. “If all goes well, I’ll be here on Sunday. At noon, wait for me here by the tamarisk bushes. Don’t tell anyone. Don’t let anyone know I’m coming.”
Of course, LeMerle had tricked me. As soon as I returned from my visit to Fleur I knew from the reek of incense and burning that he had been at work on them once again. There had been another Dancing Mass, said Soeur Piété excitedly, more frenzied even than the first; pressed for explanations she spoke of their raptures, of her own possession by a lustful imp, of howlings and animal noises uttered by the unfortunates driven to their knees by the army of demons unleashed in rage against the Holy Sacrament.
With tears in her eyes she spoke too of Soeur Marguerite, of how in spite of her prayers she was forced to dance until her feet bled, and of Père Colombin, of his purification by fire of the infested air, of his struggle with the forces of evil until he too was brought to his knees in his attempt to wrestle them to the ground.
Mère Isabelle was with him now, revealed Piété. As the evil spell had begun to fall from the congregation, as the nuns, released from their frenzies by the sound of his voice, began to turn toward one another in wonder and bewilderment, Père Colombin had fallen to his knees, swooning, the pages of the Ritus exorcizandi slipping from his fingers. A minute of chaos as the bereft and panic-stricken nuns thronged to his aid, certain he had himself succumbed to the forces of darkness…
But it was merely exhaustion, explained Piété. To the relief of the nuns, Père Colombin managed to raise himself to his feet, held on either side by a member of his faithful flock. Raising a trembling hand, he declared himself in need of rest and allowed himself to be borne off to his cottage, where even now he rests, surrounded by books and holy artifacts, working on a further solution to the ills that plague us.
It must have been a fine show. A rehearsal, I supposed, for Sunday’s opening performance, but why had LeMerle arranged for me to be absent? Could it be, in spite of his bold words, that somehow he fears what I may discover? Is there some part of this performance that LeMerle does not want me to see?
47
Alfonsine has been officially pronounced possessed. So far the demons of her infestation number fifty-five, though Père Colombin swears there are more. The ritual of exorcism may not be completed until every one of these has been named, and the walls of his cottage are papered with lists to which he is constantly adding more names. Virginie too has acquired a pale and haggard look and has been seen on several occasions walking in tiny circles around the walled garden and muttering to herself. When asked to stop and rest she merely looks up with an air of terrible calm and says “no, no” before reverting to her interminable circling. Rumor has it that it is only a matter of time before she too is declared a victim of the infestation.
Mère Isabelle has still not left her rooms. LeMerle denies that she is possessed, but with so little optimism that few of us are convinced. A brazier of coals has been lit outside the chapel, on which have been scattered sanctuary incense and various powerful herbs. So far, this has served to protect us from renewed attack. Another burner was placed outside the infirmary, and yet another at the abbey gates. The smoke is sweet when fresh but turns sour very quickly, and the air, already stifling, hangs like dusty curtains across the white-hot sky.
As for the Apparitions, the Unholy Nun has been seen twice today and three times yesterday, once in the dorter, twice in the slype and twice more in the gardens. No one has yet commented that the Nun seems oddly grown in stature, or has noticed the large footprints she left in a vegetable patch. Perhaps by now such things are no longer meaningful to us.