Doctor Death (14 page)

“Sweet Beatrice. You have to keep an eye on her,” said Sister Bernadette, with no apparent acknowledgment of her own sightlessness. Her hand was resting lightly on my arm, but I was not sure that she needed my support at all. It seemed as if she moved without difficulty, in spite of her blindness, at least on the neat garden paths where she presumably knew every stone and tree. “Otherwise she begins to walk around looking for her siblings, in spite of the fact that one has been dead for many years and the other is seventy-two and is unlikely to need her supervision any longer. But I understand that you are here because of Cecile?”

“Yes,” I said. “We are trying to determine with whom she has
been in contact so we can trace the source of the illness she died from. Mother Filippa said that you knew her well?”

“I must be the sister that knew her best. But she was a girl with many secrets.”

“What do you mean by that?” Her brother had described her as open and alive, not secretive.

“Cecile was not suited to a life such as ours. But for her family, anything other than a convent school was unthinkable, and, as you know, we are more liberal than most others. We do not believe in too rigid a discipline. Still, Cecile kept butting her head against the rules again and again, especially in the beginning.”

“In what way?”

“She could not sit still. She had to get out, had to move, she was more like a boy than a girl in this respect, and then . . .” Sister Bernadette hesitated, and I think she changed her mind several times before she at last continued. “She was not of a contemplative nature. I might even call her . . . sensuous. Even though she was very independent, she was constantly hanging on some classmate’s arm, had to touch and be touched, could not tolerate isolation and enclosure. The one time we attempted to confine her to her room, she cried like a small child and hammered on the door with such force that we feared she would harm herself. In time, she got better at following the rules, but . . .”

“But what?”

A small and somehow sad smile pulled one side of the sister’s mouth out, not up.

“I do not think we taught her to obey the rules, just to pretend and cheat so that it was noticed less frequently when she broke them. That is not the kind of effort I think we should be proud of.”

“And now she is dead . . .”

“Yes. And Emile has disappeared.”

“Did you know him?” I asked.

“Yes. He came here when he was ten or eleven, orphaned and very alone in the world. He, too, was . . . different from most. When he got older, he helped out in the stables and especially in the wolf pen; he had an amazing way with animals. Probably got along better with them than with people.”

“So they met each other here?”

“Yes. That must have been the way it was. Cecile loved animals, too.”

“But no one suspected that they developed an affection for each other as well?”

Even though she presumably could not decipher anything at all about my expression with her weak sight, she still looked directly into me.

“You know . . . everyone talks as if it was Emile who lured Cecile to run away. But I think it was the other way around.”

When we returned to the bench where Mother Filippa sat with Beatrice, Beatrice had moved on to a singing game that I had played as child.

The maid goes into the dark forest

picking berries

picking berries

Father Wolf, he is in the dark forest

Prowling here

Prowling there

First she drops one shoe

Then the other, then the other

First she drops one ribbon

Then the other, then the other

Father Wolf in the dark forest

is hungry for little girl pie

When the little maid does not come home

Oh, how her mother must cry, must cry

Willy-nilly

You’re in the wolf’s belly

Rip, nip, nip, you’re dead!

Suddenly I clearly remembered the prickling sensation of going through the “forest”—usually two older girls who stood with their arms in the air and pretended to be trees—waiting to see if the one caught in the “wolf’s belly” was me. If you were caught on the “Rip, nip, nip,” they pinched your arms and legs and especially your midriff and belly, and some of the most merciless pinched so hard the bruises lasted for weeks. Still, it was one of our favorite games.

I examined the two older sisters on the bench in the sunlight, and, as I had gradually come to expect, got a negative result.

“Then you are the only one left,” I said to Mother Filippa.

“Let us go back to the office,” said the abbess. “It is closer to the gate.”

This time I was prepared for the wolf, so it was not quite as disturbing to see it get up and come over to greet Mother Filippa, with lowered head and tail. It did not demean itself by anything so submissive and puppy-like as wagging its tail, and it was still not possible to mistake it for a dog. It ignored me completely this time.

I asked Mother Filippa to bend her head back and directed
the lamp at her nostrils, not without a certain gratitude that this was the last nose I needed to examine for now. As I had gradually come to expect, her mucous membranes were healthy and normal, without a trace of irritation or mite infection.

“That was it, I believe,” I said and straightened, with a soreness in my lower back from having bent over so many times in so many hours. “I will return when we have examined the samples in the microscope, but I am happy to say that it looks as if both the school and the convent are free from infection.”

“Should I ask our coachman to drive you back to town?” asked Mother Filippa.

“No, thank you. The Commissioner is picking me up himself when his investigations are concluded.” He and my father had earlier that day taken samples from the entire Montaine household and were presumably now examining Father Abigore’s circle of acquaintances. The task of tracing the infection was daunting, but necessary, and the fear that we were not going to do it thoroughly enough was a nagging uneasiness in my stomach.

The abbess looked at me with clear, calm eyes. “I understand that you are not a Catholic?”

“No,” I said, somewhat surprised by the sudden change of subject. “We belong to the Reformed Church.”

“I do not wish to offend you,” she said, “but I would like to ask permission to bless you.”

I discarded the first responses that occurred to me—“Why?” and “Well, it can’t hurt”—and just said, “Thank you.” After which I just stood awkwardly, waiting.

“Would you kneel?” she asked. “It is not necessary, but . . . that is usually what one does.”

I hitched up the skirt of my traveling suit and got down onto my knees. Suddenly it felt natural, as if I had been doing it my whole life. She touched my forehead lightly while in a low voice
she chanted the ancient Latin invocations and ended with an even quieter “Amen.”

At that moment the wolf sneezed several times and rubbed its snout energetically between its front paws. And I realized that Mother Filippa’s nostrils were not in fact the last that I would need to examine that day.

The wolf looked at me with its moon-pale eyes. Mother Filippa’s hands lay on either side of its broad skull, and its jaws were open so I could see the dark ribbed throat, the meat-colored tongue, and the yellowed, worn teeth.

“I promise you, he will not harm you,” she said.

Her words brought back memories from my childhood that I would have preferred to have forgotten. Big wild dogs that came running toward me, tongues hanging out, even more enormous and fear inducing because I myself was so little, while the owner cheerfully yelled, “Don’t worry, they’ll not hurt you,” from his comfortable position on a distant park bench.

And this was no dog.

I directed the lamp so that its light fell as directly as possible on the wolf’s face. It blinked once but otherwise stood completely still. I raised the mirror and the loupe, but my hands were shaking so badly that I could not see a thing.

Empty your heart of fear.

“What?”

I broke off my eye contact with the wolf for a brief moment and instead looked at Mother Filippa.

“I said, ‘Empty your heart of fear,’ ” she said.

But she had not spoken out loud. I was almost certain of that. Or had I just been so focused on the wolf’s gaze that I could no
longer distinguish what I saw and heard from what I was merely thinking?

All at once I felt an extraordinary clarity and calm inside. The world was as it was. The wolf lived in it, and so did I. Its breath enveloped me, its body was as warm as mine. It breathed, and I breathed. Right now, in this moment, we breathed in the same rhythm and shared the same life.

My hands stopped shaking.

I directed the loupe first at its throat and, later, with great care, at one damp, dark nostril. Even with the mirrors it was almost impossible to see anything. But when I drew the delicate instrument out again, it was covered by yellow mucus. And something in the mucus was moving.

I reached for a pipette and managed to suck the struggling organism into the narrow glass tube and raised the tube to the light. In spite of the filaments of phlegm that had been sucked up with it, I could see it now: a mite, about two millimeters long, with a pale white abdomen. Until I placed it under a microscope I would not be able to identify it with objective certainty, but in my mind there was no doubt.
Pneumonyssus
, and the same species as the ones we had found on Father Abigore and Cecile.

The sadness that seized me had no place. Even though I immediately understood that the wolf’s life had to end, it ought not to have touched me in this way—more strongly than Cecile’s death, more strongly than Abigore’s. Where did that pain come from?

“You have found something, have you not?” whispered Mother Filippa. “You are now going to tell me that he has been infected by the parasite you are seeking.”

“I am afraid so.”

“What will happen now?”

“I must examine it under a microscope to be certain, but . . .”

Mother Filippa bent her head and hid her face in the wolf’s bushy neck for a moment. “He has had a long life,” she said without looking up. “But what about the others?”

“How long has he been separated from them?”

“For a few months. We lost a wolf in the fall, and that unsettled the pack. It was only then that the new pack leader began to bully him.”

“Lost? How?”

“It was not sickness, so it probably has nothing to do with this. But at feeding time, one of the females was missing. Emile found her all the way up the hill, at the far end of the pen, with one hind leg in a fox trap. We had to put her down, she had gnawed her leg almost all the way through in an attempt to break free. Poor Emile. He had nightmares for several days. It has been a long time since we were bothered by poachers, but a wolf pelt brings in a tempting sum for people of limited means.”