A Provençal Mystery (12 page)

Mother Superior Fernande was watching as Sister Marie Paule tried to hold a woman by the shoulders. When the woman threatened to break free, I reached over and took her arm. The sleeve of her blue silk dress was slippery in my hands.

Mother Fernande: Control yourself, Madame des Moulins.

Madame des Moulins: Why am I here? What have I done?

She struggled against my strong grip. She was small, dark, delicate, with a tiny waist and hands. She looked as if she had never worked in her life. But she was strong because she was desperate.

Madame des Moulins: Why did the police bring me here?

Mother Fernande: Madame des Moulins, the paper explains it. It was signed by the Vice Mayor.

Madame des Moulins: And just what does it accuse me of?

Mother Fermande: Salacious conduct.

Madame des Moulins: Salacious conduct? That makes me sound like a prostitute. I am not a prostitute. Do I look like a prostitute?

She tried to spin around to show off her fine dress but my grip was too strong.

Mother Fernande: No one says you are a prostitute, just that you have engaged in salacious conduct.

Mother Fernande sounds so reasonable sometimes. It can be irritating.

Madame des Moulins: This is unthinkable! I demand to be released!

It was unseemly for her to speak so loudly no matter how insulted she thought she was. Yet something in me thrilled at her nerve. Maybe that something was the devil. We need always to remember that the devil waits to seduce us.

Mother Superior Marie Fernande and Sister Marie Paule stood by silently while, eyes wild, the woman kept complaining,

Madame des Moulins: You are treating me like a woman of the ramparts!

Mother Fernande: God loves us all. Those women, too. In the eyes of God, we are all equal.

Madames des Moulins: I will not stay here!

My cousin Antoinette came in with a package wrapped in paper and handed it to Mother Fernande. Mother Fernande untied it and gave it to me to look for contraband—a knife, perhaps. I took out the linens one by one, undergarments, chemises and handkerchiefs. I kept one eye on Madame des Moulins.

Madame des Moulins: What are you doing?Those are my private linens! What are you looking for?

Mother FernandeL We need to examine them. It is the rule.

Sometimes Mother Fernande is very patient.

Madame des Moulins: You treat me as if I have committed a capital crime! As if I were in jail!

Mother Fernande ignored her. I kept inspecting the linens, being careful not to rumple them.

Madame des Mouins: I am not a criminal!

She was shrieking. Oh, she will be big trouble, I thought.

I handed the package to Mother Fernande, who said it was acceptable. She gave the package back to me.

Mother Fernande: She may take them to the dormitory.

Madame des Moulins: Dormitory? Do I not have my own room?

She looked to me.

I: No, madame.

She: No? How dare you say no to me.

Mother Fernande: You need a name as a daughter of the Our Lady of Mercy, so you may more easily forget your earthly life and come to God. You shall be Sister Magdelaine of the Cross.

Madame des Moulins: You strip me of my name, too?

Her face twisted. Now she was about to weep, which she did, all fight gone from her, as I escorted her to the dormitory. Once there, she put her hands over her face, and I saw a stump on the edge of her right hand. At first I thought she had lost a finger, but, no, she had all four fingers and a thumb. Once she must have had six, and someone must have cut off the extra one. Having six fingers goes against Nature. It is like the sow with one hundred teats I read about in the almanac. Those marvels or monstrosities portend trouble. It made me afraid.

Later during recreation, the nuns gossiped about the new arrival. Some said that they had heard things about Madame des Moulins, that she loves the man, her lover, in a carnal way. She is not married to him. He was seen carrying his shoes in his hand up the steps leading to her rooms in the Quartier St. Paul. How do the women here know these things? I grew up in the countryside where we have a different kind of gossip. They also said that she rode behind him on a horse in the country in front of the peasants, which is not proper. The little novice Jeanne, who will be invested this week, says she knows Madame des Moulins, but she refuses to say very much about her, only that she was a bad woman and in great trouble. Jeanne almost never says anything belittling about anyone, even fallen women. That is her character.

13 June, 1658

Antoinette and I met during recreation. I could see she was very worried.

She: Someone has been in the pharmacy, and has taken a whole packet of tansy.

I: Perhaps just some nun with a bad digestion?

She: That could be. But was more than one dose. Tansy is very strong. It can be a poison. If a person takes too much tansy, it can cause mortal fits. I am the pharmacist. I know the correct doses, but do the other nuns? Anyone could have asked me. But I was not asked. I am in charge of the pharmacy and have to keep records.

I: No one will blame you if someone stole it, Antoinette.

She: Don’t be so sure. Anyhow it is my task to guard the bodily health of the women in the convent. God has entrusted me with that. Perhaps I did not lock the cabinet, though I found it locked this morning.

14 June, 1659

Tears fill my eyes so that I cannot see the page, but I must write this down in spite of it.

It was supposed to be a happy occasion, the vestiture of our little Jeanne, only sixteen. Before we all assembled, she stood glowing with happiness, like a candle, knowing she would finally be one of us. The smallest of all the sisters, she tried on her new habit. It was too long and trailed on the floor behind her. So Sister Gertrude hemmed it up. It was even more poignant because Jeanne came to us as a pensioner, thought to be an orphan, when she was five. At first we knew her as the “little Jew,” there to be converted to the Faith. And soon she became one of us, took her first communion, and showed signs of a vocation. When she was fourteen, someone claiming to be her father, a James Bouton, came to the convent and tried to take her away. She cried, and was so piteous, that he relented and left. But he also renounced her. A seigneur, Mother Fernande’s father, who often gives money to the convent to save his soul, paid her pension, as he has paid her dowry to become a nun. No member of her family waited in the chapel to watch her take the habit.

The ceremony is always beautiful. After dusk fell, the professed nuns, wearing veils, came in candlelight procession. The flames of the candles made a pale yellow light that threw long shadows on the stone walls. It was very quiet, except for the soft sounds of our footsteps. Then we all sang “O gloriosa domina.” Our voices mounted to the Lord.

In the choir, we arranged ourselves in order, first by rank, then within that by age, the oldest first. I was no longer the last in line among the converses and could imagine myself through the years, soon strong and mature in the middle of the line, and finally feeble and revered at the beginning of it. Then I immediately felt ashamed for thinking of myself as important, which is always against the will of God. Particularly today, when my thoughts should center on Jeanne, and, as always, on God.

Sister Gertrude chanted the first part of the ceremony in a strong, clear voice. It seemed as if it came from Paradise

–Raise yourself, raise yourself;. Adorn yourself in the vestments of your glory, O spouse of Jesus Christ. And since you have left your own house and are far from your kin: enter, beloved of God, into this stone cave to sacrifice your son Isaac, the object of your affections.

I heard only certain words, I was so caught up in the sound.

I thought hard about the words I did hear, but did not understand some of them. Is our stone cave the convent? Or is it like the caves in the mountains to the east, the Luberon, where heretic Protestants live? And have lived for centuries? But why would we praise heretics? And is Isaac the child we will never have?

The priest questioned Jeanne about the sincerity of her vocation. Then she prostrated herself on the floor, as if struck down. Her arms spread out so that she was in the shape of a cross in imitation of Christ and to represent her death to the world. She looked like a child playing a game. Then two sisters, Gertrude and Anne, each holding a side of the huge black cloth, one on either side of Jeanne, shook the cloth out so that it rose up in the air, flapping like a black sheet in the wind, and let it fall over her. I remembered how I had felt during my own ceremony. The quiet falling of the cloth took my breath away, so that I felt suffocated. The sounds around me were muffled, so that I had a passing sense of myself in the grave.

The priest said a blessing, then the two nuns, kneeling and holding the cloth, spoke:

–You are our sister, for you are dead; and your life is hidden in God with Jesus Christ.”

We all recited the Miserere in a low voice. It reverberated through the chapel. And someone sounded the mourning bells, tolling for that part of Sister Jeanne that had gone. I saw the body under cloth tremble, and I wondered if Jeanne were giggling, as she sometimes did at inappropriate times.

The priest prayed:

–We offer you, Lord, our very humble prayers for your servant Jeanne who is here present, though being dead to the world; she lives no more except for you.

As he was praying, I saw the tiny body under the cloth shake even more, a deep shuddering. The other nuns had noticed it too, though they only looked at each other in wonder, not speaking. It could have been the spirit of God in her, causing her tremble, either in ecstasy or fear, I thought. But the shuddering seemed supernatural it was so profound. Could she be fighting the Demon?

After a while the two nuns raised the cloth, and Jeanne was supposed to arise, one of us, part of our body. She did not rise. Sister Marie Paule reached down and shook Jeanne’s shoulder a bit. Jeanne responded not at all. At first I thought she might have fainted from excitement, but no. Nothing would ever rouse her. She lay there, dead to us as well as to the world. What is it about a dead body that makes it so different from one that is alive, even if the live one is still? We all knew. We all knew that Sister Jeanne was dead, that she breathed no more. She was a little cage of bones, spirit gone.

15 June, 1659

Who knows what happened? She seemed healthy before the ceremony began, though a bit ill with excitement. As usual before such ceremonies, Mother Fernande allowed Gertrude and Anne to give her a tisane. Did God strike her down, wanting her to be with him in heaven? Mother Superior Fernande wept, then said to all of us assembled before her that it was the will of God and that it was a miracle, though how it could be a miracle I don’t know. The other sisters say that no one understands His ways. They say that she is happy in heaven. They too call her dying a miracle, remembering how she trembled. Yet they weep. She was a good girl, and gay in her love of Him. At this moment she should be celebrating her wedding to the good Lord Jesus. The sounds of the trumpet proclaiming their nuptials. And she happy in his arms. But I wonder, too, if it was not God but someone with tansy who made her die.

16 June, 1659

We buried Little Jeanne in the convent graveyard yesterday. I am afraid.

* * * * *

“Rose is in danger, yes?” The voice spoke clearly in my head. It was a moment before I realized it was Agatha’s voice—humorous, rough-edged. I came close to answering before I realized that Agatha was dead. Agatha was dead and the voice existed only in my head.

Now another nun was dead. True, she had died more than three hundred years ago, but I still wondered at the coincidence.

I continued reading the diary.

* * * * *

7 June, 1659

Last night, I was half asleep on my narrow bed in my cell when I saw a light. Then I heard footsteps coming down the hall. I knew it was Mother Superior Fernande coming to see if we are all in our beds. She often checks on us. She wants us to know that she is always watching. Perhaps she thinks she takes the place of God.

I heard the steps continue to the end of the hall. They stopped for a short time at each cell. Then they turned back, and came down my side of the hall. My cell is in the middle. I saw her severe face lit by her candle as she stood watching me from the door.

I wondered why she was there for so long. She has been acting so strange lately. She mortifies herself even more than usual.

I am so afraid.

* * * * *

I put the sheaf of papers back in their cover and took it to the copy machine, which was now working. I had enough francs to copy almost all of if. As I shoveled them into the slot, I studied the room. Roger Aubanas, now decked out in a Grateful Dead t-shirt, turned pages and wrote notes, but I noticed he also watched us all covertly. Chateaublanc turned off the coffee machine, then surreptitiously scratched his shoulder with his paper knife. Over in the far corner, Madeleine’s elegant head was lowered—she could have been a desk lamp. And tireless in her task of requisitioning documents, Rachel was writing out a request that would probably not be filled.