A Provençal Mystery (21 page)

"So you did know Madeleine," I said to Fitzroy. “And well.”

"Yes," he replied, sitting down on a chair. "But it was nothing. And again, this is none of your business. It comes close to slander for you to say . . .”

“Me to say what?” Now I was even more angry.

"Martin is right. Madeleine exaggerates,” said Rachel. As she talked I realized she was repeating what Fitzroy had told her. “She sees the world through her own eyes. She misinterpreted Martin. You heard her—she saw a simple academic argument as a hostile threat.” But there was doubt in her voice.

“And you believed him? How can you be that gullilble!” Madeleine said.

“This is insane!” said Fitzroy,. He left the room, slamming the door behind him.

The next couple of days passed without incident, though we were all ill at ease and buried ourselves in work. I ordered the records of the Hospital of the Holy Spirit, where des Moulins' child had been taken, but there was no child recorded under the name des Moulins or Chateaublanc for the year 1658.

Then, late on Wednesday, I saw that the diary was back. The copier was finally working so I copied it and took the copy home with me to read until the last broken sentence

After a cheese sandwich dinner, with Pal dog food for Foxy, I stretched on my narrow bed, with its flowered spread, Foxy by my side, and listened to laughter floating up from the street interspersed with snatches of French—“
Tache d’Encre
” (Inkspot, a nightclub down near the ramparts) and “mais non!” The sound of a car engine. Uneven footsteps on the creaking old stairs—Monsieur Racitti, with his gimpy leg, on his way to his apartment. Then I started reading the diary, after recalling where I had left off: tansy stolen, Madame des Moulins incarcerated in the Refuge, Antoinette escaped, and Jeanne dead.

* * * * *

20 June, 1659

I am thinking of leaving the convent, in spite of my vows. But where would I go? What would I do? I miss home. Could I go home? My father is becoming old. His fingers are all crippled with age. At times he comes to visit me in the convent parlor. Mother Fernande allows such visits, but does not encourage them. If I left, I could help to care for him, as daughters are supposed to do. He is a rich man and can pay someone to care for him, but I would do it with love. And that would be a gift to God, though perhaps not as great as giving my life to the convent.

I remember home so well. I remember the sun streaming through doorways, the smell of cooking from our kitchen. And the baker, Suzanne, wearing an apron over her fat stomach, covered with flour, always had a tasty piece of gossip when I would sometimes go for bread in the morning. Suzanne hears everything that goes on. And others, too, even the butcher André, who tells very funny stories, though the stories are not always proper.

The stars and moon would come out for us to marvel at in the cold dark night. We would go to bed content, after saying a prayer, for we always remembered God.

Now I am in the convent, where I lead a good life. Yet how good can it be when so much evil exists here? I should not look to the past. Yet everything is not right here. And though I do not want to be, I am afraid.

Mother Fernande screamed that Antoinette was responsible for Jeanne's death. Sister Gertrude joined in with her. Gertrude is usually a very quiet woman. The screaming did not seem sincere to me. It was too loud, too much like an actor shouting on the stage.

I wonder if it would have been harder for someone to kill little Jeanne had she not been a Jew? Some of the nuns did not think of Jeanne as a real Christian, as if her blood was tainted. It seems to me that she is the more holy for her conversion. God came to her especially. And if Jeanne’s father had not renounced her for becoming a nun, so that she had no family to protest, would it have been so easy to kill her? She was alone, without kin, just as in the song we sang at her investiture. Did someone want to remind God that Jeanne’s people were killers of Christ? And what did Jeanne know about Madame des Moulins that she

* * * * *

The diary ended there.

I raised my eyes from the page, and I felt myself start to cry. It was the page itself that affected me—the writing of one long dead, seeming to call out from beyond time. My hand fell over the paper as if to protect it. Rose—in her narrow cot, looking into the darkness of an unlit building and unlit world. Rose—quietly weeping for a beloved sister—a little, younger one. Rose—knowing something had gone terribly wrong and not knowing how to fix it except to write about it.

The writing was like a rope thrown out, and I had caught it. The thought filled me with awe.

The convent seemed to me then a big womb of death, where the nuns waited to slide into the grave. It loomed in my brain—a dark place taking over the inside of my skull. I conjured up Rose's face in my mind. Enclosed in the circle of the wimple, as in a picture frame, her face, a dark Provençal face with bright light-brown eyes Those eyes inquiring and shrewd, but haunted. Eyebrows stretching across her brow, feathery and black, scant over her nose.

At my desk, the printout of my article sat stacked in a messy pile and around it were note cards and pieces of grid paper covered with transcribed records. Another week, and I would have to mail the draft back to the States, probably by express mail. After rising from the bed, I walked reluctantly to the stack of paper and flicked it with my finger—“uninspired” was the word that came to mind, but then weren’t most journal articles uninspired, merely workmanlike? Actually, if I were to be honest, I would have to admit that what I was calling a “very rough draft” consisted of cobbled-together notes. Its thesis had nothing original about it, and no logical organization dictated its contents.

Maybe I just needed time to let it all settle. The research was done. All I had to do was write it up elegantly. That’s what I told myself, while in the back reaches of my brain the voice of my adviser in graduate school anxiously asked, “Are you writing yet?” and I remembered that the writing beyond the draft always took much more thought and time than I anticipated
.

I looked away from the desk, knowing it was symbolic to do so. Publishing the article, if I could put it together nicely, could cement my career—like feet in concrete, I found myself thinking inadvertently. Who else cared about early modern French nuns? A few historians working on related topics, perhaps. It was a footnote in the literature if I was lucky. But clues to Agatha’s murder lay in documents of the past, so those documents had immediacy, could change the present. More. Rose spoke to me. In graduate school, I had been trained out of the notion that history was alive, yet wasn’t that why I had started to study it in the first place? The irony of the discipline was that it sought to kill what it loved, as Oscar Wilde said about men in “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” A vast rebelliousness rose in me. I could feel it spreading through my body. It made me feel as if I could spread my arms and fly in the face of anything. The hell with the article for now.

Perhaps I would find the rest of the diary in the convent.

Chapter 19

Her feet whispering along the corridor floor, an old nun led Rachel and me to a row of small chambers and installed us in the two facing cells. My cell was very simple—an iron bed with a white bedspread, a table with Bible and a lamp, a wardrobe, a prie-dieu with a wooden crucifix hung above it. The floors were stone, the walls white plaster. It had no bathroom; the facilities were down the hall. Ordinarily, I hate sleeping in a room with the bathroom down the hall, but this gave us a chance to wander, an excuse for being out of our rooms, particularly at night. Settling in took very little time. I read the literature given to me on entry: the hours of devotions in common, masses, the location of the garden, the bathrooms, the library.

I then started looking for the stones Rose had talked about, where she might have hidden the rest of the diary. I spent some time testing those on the floor by walking over them. None rocked with an instability that might indicate something under it. Later, I told myself, I would try the floor in Rachel’s room.

The nuns were gliding black presences, and sometimes I heard them singing and chanting from far off in the chapel, where voices echoing in the high vaulted ceiling, echoing the voices of their dead sisters of the past. I heard the noise of quiet feet, of beads clicking, low orders. With the others, Rachel and I attended mass and dinner, then retired early after agreeing to meet at one o’clock that night to nose around the convent, I in search of documents, Rachel in search of the reliquary. I tried to sense Rose’s presence in my cell and felt foolish about it. The woman was moldering bones by now, wasn't she?

The sounds of the last devotions died away into silence

Willing myself to be patient, I waited, reading in
Revelation
a story of such terror that I could barely finish it. It made me remember a seventeenth-century engraving I once saw: the devil sat on a chamber pot, eating tiny sinners and shitting them out into a fecal hell. Each sinner was shown all his anguish—arms out in supplication, mouth wide open in a scream—while the Devil sat, fiendish, a hundred times their size, a maniacal grin on his face.

What was it like to fear sin so much? I wondered. Fear snaking into your entrails like ice, freezing, mounting to your head, creating nausea and trembling. And fire of hell, never-ending pain, did it seem to ease the frigid, inhuman cold? No decent God would ever make such a hell. Death is bad enough—obliteration!—but this old human hell seemed far worse, so horrible no divine mind could create it.

The edges of those seventeenth-century people, the edges with which they defined themselves, were different from those of modern people. Those people could slide into the devil’s gullet, like Jonah into the fish, and come out intact, if terrified, at the other end. And look what could enter in! God could come in through the portal of the soul, his sweet flesh made into a holy cookie or his intoxicating blood pressed into the wine of love. A devil, often more than one, could slip by devious means into a body and disport himself there, swimming upwards as through a lake, cutting cruelly across the grain of the flesh and organs. And dark angels wrap you in their feathery wings, like swans in ultimate seduction, until you swoon and melt slowly into the Presence. These things never happen now, I thought, but perhaps Agatha had known them. Certainly Rose.

The church bell rang eleven times, its mellow clapper slow and deliberate—a ringing clangor of brass. In the cell to the right of mine, Madame LaFiche, a fragile pensioner of eighty-five, was breathing right on the edge of a snore. After the last echoes died away, I counted to sixty, got up, and ventured out into the corridor. Lit with small night lights, it stretched the length of the building, a long tunnel of exposure. I thought of Mother Superior Fernande and her candle, but no ghost walked that I could sense.

Off a hall at the end of the corridor was the library, a large room under a row of windows looking out on the convent garden, with shelves of books on three walls and a big wooden table running along the other. All was open in the room—it contained no locked cabinets.

I lit a table lamp, then began to search the room. It didn’t take me long to discover that if there were original manuscripts concerning the convent, they were obviously not kept there. Books, yes. Manuscripts, no. As I surveyed the shelves, I could see that the older books were higher on the shelves. I moved the library ladder carefully by its sides rather than rolling it, which would make noise, then climbed up. Most of the books were devotional, though there were a few pious novels and books of non-religious nonfiction. On the third shelf down, a title leaped out at me:
Notre Dame de Mis
éricorde
(Our Lady of Mercy). I took the book down, opened it up, and saw that it was an eighteenth century illustrated history of the convent. I placed it flat on the shelf, accidentally dislodging a rather large volume so that it fell. The sound was like a pistol shot as it slammed on the wooden floor. Had anyone heard? I stood listening, but nothing but the echo of silence that reverberates when there is no sound at all came back to me. The thick stone walls of the convent eliminated all outside noise, especially from an inside room like this one.

I picked up the convent history and stood on the second step of the ladder, reading it and examining the lithographs.

"Cannot sleep?" The voice belonged to Mother Superior Therese, who reached up and put her hand on my arm, as if warning me not to speak too loudly. I climbed down to the second step. "I heard a sound a while ago, and I came down to see what was happening," she added.

"I dropped a book. Sorry. And, no, I can’t sleep, perhaps because it so quiet here. My apartment on the Rue des Teinturiers is noisy with night life, and I guess I’m used to it. I thought I would read a bit."

"A convent history?" She raised her eyebrows. "That is not entertainment."

"Preparing for my vocation, my call," I said, joking, then seeing how serious she looked, added, “It will help my research.”

"It’s dangerous to be roving about so late. You might trip over something."

"May I borrow this book to take to my cell?” I asked, saying nothing about her admonition.

Therese smiled in the half-light of the shaded lamp. "Of course. Good night. The first bell is at five, and though you need not get up then, the noise of others arising may awaken you."