A Provençal Mystery (6 page)

While I weeded the garden, I tried to think of Jesus, who is my spouse, and pray to him, as is the holy way to work. I was unable to do so. Curiosity prevented me. What was plaguing Mother Fernande?

* * * * *

The buzzer on Chateaublanc’s desk broke my concentration—someone seeking entry to the archive. Shortly after, a tall man wearing a tan sweater tied around his neck walked into the room. In addition to the sweater, he wore a pair of expensive chocolate brown slacks, and a snow-white, ironed cotton shirt. He carried a camelhair coat over his arm. His short hair looked crimped – the curl had been cut off almost at the root. Professor Martin Fitzroy. A handsome and formidable man, who knew he was a handsome and formidable man. He marched up to Chateaublanc’s desk with what I could only call an “air”—an air of superiority, an air of expecting that superiority to be recognized. It was clear that he knew all too well that he was eminent. I had read his books on the history of purgatory and knew that he deserved his eminence. He had broken new ground and done it with elegance.

His graduate student, Jack Leach, got up and rushed over to him. Fitzroy waved Jack away. “In a moment. I must register,” he said.

Agatha frowned and glanced at Madeleine, whose face had turned pale and whose eyes had narrowed under lowered brows, as if she had pulled herself within her own skin. Madeleine reached down slowly, picked up her briefcase, and stole out of the room, almost tiptoeing, with the exaggerated slow motion of a small cat being stalked by a bigger one.

Fitzroy had not noticed her. As far as I could tell, he was so intent on lording it over Chateaublanc that he noticed no one else. He identified himself in French that sounded perfect to me, “
Je suis Martin Fitzroy, professeur d’histoire français aux Etats Unis.
”

Chateaublanc did not rise to Fitzroy’s eminence at all, but met it with his own hauteur, remaining seated, looking up with only a faint curiosity, “Monsieur. . . ?”

The readers looked up. Agatha smiled—a good confrontation of pomposities delighted her.

“Monsieur, you wish . . .?” said Chateaublanc in his heavily accented English.

Fitzroy said that he naturally (
nateurellement
) wanted to examine some documents. The subtext was: why else would I be here, you idiot?

With a glare, Chateaublanc reluctantly shoved request slips at him, which he took to the table where Jack Leach was sitting and began to fill out.

The scene was over.

I continued reading:

* * * * *

7 June, 1659

Antoinette had a little mischievous smile on her face as we talked today. We were sitting on a bench by the fig tree. The sun was warm on our backs.

She: Have you ever seen Mother Catherine’s head?

I: No, it is inside the reliquary, and I think there are no holes in it.

She: How did the head get inside the reliquary?

I: The back of the reliquary is hinged. Sister Marie Paule told me that. There is a key.

She: I’d like to see it.

I: What? The head?

She nodded, and she looked a little ashamed.

She: We could go look in the chapel. No one will know. We can say we went there to pray.

It was not the first time I have risked getting in trouble with Antoinette. Saying nothing, I rose and took her hand to pull her up from the bench. We stole into the chapel and approached the altar.

The reliquary was gone.

She: I wonder what happened to it,.

I: Perhaps the seigneur bought it. Who else would have?

She: Would the head inside the reliquary go with it? Can a person who lives in the world have such a thing, such a holy thing? It doesn’t seem right.

I: The bishop must have blessed the reliquary, too. The reliquary itself is holy.

She: If something has happened to Mother Catherine’s head, that is terrible. She is our founder. She watches over us from Heaven. I’m sure she is in heaven.

I: Yes.

Yet I thought that perhaps Mother Catherine was still in Purgatory.

She: This will bring evil down on us.

Though I didn’t say so, I agreed with her.

I: Don’t be superstitious, cousin. Besides, if something has happened to the head, what can we do about it?

But I felt a coldness in my body as I thought of the fire and the demon I had dreamed of. Demons exist. As does evil.

8 June, 1659

Today Mother Fernande called us together. She said we were to mortify ourselves with her. We knelt and prayed. This is what Mother Fernande said: Courage, my daughters. Heaven values it highly to take the discipline. It reduces the troubles of Purgatory.

Our whips are made of six hide strips, knotted at the ends and along their lengths. Mother Fernande’s is black with dried blood. She took the whip in one hand and slapped it against the other hand as if to test it. Then we began. It hurts. The discipline hurts. It is supposed to remind us of the suffering of Our Lord. Again the thought came to me: does He really wish us to do this? Blasphemy. I reached up and slashed down on my shoulder hard to punish myself for the thought. I heard myself grunt.

Mother Fernande: Harder. Harder!

Her face was very red. Her arm kept flying up and slashing down. The whip rose and fell faster and faster. It was as if it had a life of its own. Tears coursed down her face.

We tried to follow her example. Gertrude is quite fat. She fell to the ground in a faint. But Mother Fernande did not stop. Why did the rest of us continue? Why did we not make her stop? Blood flew off her whip and stained the white wall. It splashed on the plaster.

* * * * *

I was in the scene, that alien scene. The shadowy room. The sharp slash of the whip. The searing flame of pain. The wild trance-like fervor. Blood on the wall. The blissful abandonment denied, denied. I was there, for a moment, with them. In their flayed skins. Gone beyond the words on the page. Shocked, I jerked my head up and turned the sheaf of papers over, to hide them.

My heart was beating too fast. To slip into the mind and body of someone else had always been my dread and my desire, even though I knew it was—and should be—impossible. But this terrified me. I was afraid to look up. If I did, someone might be able to see what was in my eyes.

“What’s the matter?” asked Agatha.

“Nothing. I’ll tell you later.” I couldn’t look at her.

“If it’s nothing, then you’ll have nothing to tell me,” she said. “Come on.”

“I can’t talk about it now,” I said, watching Rachel as she badgered Chateaublanc for documents again.

“You said yesterday that you would look into the matter,” Rachel was saying.

“I did look into it, and the documents are still unavailable,” Chateaublanc replied.

Rachel lowered her clenched fists down on Chateaublanc’s desk. “Do I have to go to a higher authority?”

He smiled tightly, a thin line uplifted at either end, then shrugged delicately and dismissively. “Indeed, madame, do feel free to do that.”

Chapter 6

The following day, Foxy and I were on our way to lunch at the Cafe Minette, when turning off the Rue de la Republique, we saw Madeleine and Agatha down the block facing off against a group of teenagers who had been let out from their high school, Lycée Juarès, for the lunch hour. Agatha, a large figure in black, was gesticulating; the sleeves of her habit, seeming more antique here than in the archive, blew in the wind. The kids watched her with amused interest. Two girls were sitting close together on the stone steps of the old building, and three boys were leaning against the painted metal railings. All were wearing jeans and smoking. Like most teenagers in France they were fresh-faced and self-assured. Not a pimple dotted their faces, and they were at ease in their bodies.

As I drew nearer, a trail of smoke hit my nose and I sneezed. Madeleine poked Agatha, who turned and waved to us, then resumed her harangue at the students. She was expostulating about the importance of abstinence: “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” she said.

“What isn’t? Abstinence?” one of the male students asked, in that tone that asks the respondent to see the joke, recognize the one-upmanship. He glanced at the girls.

“Sex, you idiot!” replied Agatha, with her huge smile.

“Ah, so you say.” He sucked in a lungful of smoke.

“Truly.”

“And how would you know?” another boy asked.

“Be quiet, Guillaume. Don’t be fresh with a nun!” said one of the girls.

Agatha continued, “You don’t want to bring a screaming kid into the world, do you? Especially since you’ll stunt its growth with that nicotine habit of yours.”

Guillaume shrugged. “
On verra
.” A useful French phrase—“we shall see”—I thought. It serves so many purposes. Two male voices speaking English behind me disoriented me for a moment—I had become so immersed in French that English sounded like a foreign tongue. I turned to see who it was and looked briefly into Fitzroy’s hazel eyes. He wore his elegant coat unbuttoned; his ironed white shirt was tucked neatly into the elegant flat waistband of his elegant pants. Jack, a cigarette smoldering in his hand, stood next to him. When I turned back to Agatha and Madeleine, I saw that Madeleine had stiffened and gone pale. She tapped Agatha on the shoulder to say something, then tripped swiftly back down the Rue de la Republique. I wondered what it was about Fitroy that seemed to frighten Madeleine—they must have known each other somewhere. What had he done to her?

Agatha climbed few steps into the midst of the students.

“What’s the nun up to?” Fitzroy asked me.

“Exhorting the high school kids not to have sex,” I replied.

“She’s incorrigible,” said Jack Leach, attached, as usual, to his mentor. “She has no idea of how to mind her own business.”

“You’re right there,” said Fitzroy. “I can vouch for that.”

“How so?” I asked.

“It’s a long story. Some other time,” he replied. Why not now? I thought, but saw that his face was adamant.

“I saw her passing out abstinence pamphlets to the passersby at the Place Pie Tuesday night,” Jack said, taking a drag on a cigarette. It was as if he said she was defecating on the street.

“She’s a Catholic nun,” I said, annoyed at his judgmental attitude and wondering at it. Was he just being a sycophant, agreeing with Fitzroy about everything? “And it’s her job to save fallen women. Why not save them before they fall?”

“You can’t even begin to understand,” Jack said.

“Let’s go to lunch,” Fitzroy said to Jack, as Agatha came down the steps toward us “Who wants to get into a discussion without having some sustenance first?” The two of them disappeared around the corner.

I waited for Agatha, and when she had finished her encounter with the students, she and I continued on to the café. When we arrived, we saw Fitzroy, Jack, Griset, and Rachel Marchand seated at a table in the back. I watched Fitzroy talking to Jack. Quivering with excitement at being the great man’s focus, Jack was waving his hand anxiously as he tried to explain something.

“Look at that guy, that
mec
,” I said to Agatha, as we sat down at a table near the window. “See how he sucks up to Fitzroy.” In spite of what I said, I felt a little sorry for Jack, who looked like a boy with his thin body and curly blond hair, even though he was dressed, like Fitzroy, in slacks and an ironed shirt, and even though he was nearly thirty-five years old. “He’s like a little child, the way he plays up to the big man. Yet he’s married. His wife’s putting him through school.”

“Is that why she isn’t with him? She’s back in America making money?” asked Agatha.

“So he says. He brags about it—how she sacrifices for him. What a weasel he is!”

“Less of a weasel than his mentor,” Agatha said.

I considered her. “You don’t like Fitzroy, and he doesn’t like you. How come? Do you know him from somewhere? Where? I know he hangs out sometimes in Aix. That he teaches at the university there.”

She tightened her lips in a kind of grimace and evaded my question: “He’s a type.”

“You’re not one to categorize people, Agatha.”

“He thinks he’s an aristocrat.” Her tone was flat.

“Like Chateaublanc?”

“In an American way.”

“And you don’t like aristocrats?”

“You could say that. They’re arrogant and lazy. And Fitzroy’s anti-Catholic.” It was as if Agatha heard herself and didn’t like what she heard, because she added quickly, “Forget that I  said that. I am being uncharitable.”

I wondered again how Agatha knew about Fitzroy’s anti-Catholicism. Consumed with curiosity about all of them, I said, “Let’s go join them.”

Agatha shrugged and said, “All right. We must be polite. It will be my penance.”

With ill grace, Jack pushed another table up to theirs and moved chairs around. We sat down and switched to speaking French—Griset’s grip on English was limited to the vocabulary of document requests.

“Madame Red has a new enthusiasm,” Griset said. I knew he was referring to the diary.