by James Reese
When finally she lifted the crucifix from me I saw by candlelight, or by the light of the moon or the rising sun, by whatever light shone faintly in the dormitory, that the silvered body of Christ was slick, dark with my blood. “Ah!” proclaimed Sister Claire to those assembled, “See how the Lord’s Cross marks her forehead, as it does all demons in league with Lucifer!” Blood stung my eyes. The wound itself was oddly cold. Satisfied, Sister Claire regained her breath, steadied herself from the exertion; still, she did not relax her hold on me…not yet.
Sister Claire came at me again with that cross. I felt it strike the side of my head, cutting me near the ear. And again, like a hammer just under my right eye. Had she brought the crucifix down an inch higher, surely she’d have blinded that eye. As it was, a gash opened in the soft flesh there and blood ran from both wounds to pool in the crook of my ear.
I gave in then to a simple impulse: I screamed with all my soul. Screamed for Peronette, for Mother Marie-des-Anges, for Christ Himself to come save me; of course, I named none of them; I simply screamed and screamed until…Until I saw a way open before me.
When Sister Claire shifted, and the vise of her knees went slack, I reacted, reflexively. I wriggled an arm out from under the nun, and I fairly flew up at her, striking her full and hard across the face. It was a backhanded slap that sent her reeling.
One shove and Sister Claire de Sazilly toppled from the cot, fell to the floor. I could sit up; doing so, I saw her prostrated at the slippered feet of her lieutenants, who stood staring down at her. I rose and broke that human chain at its weakest link: two younger girls who fell back easily; from one of them I took, roughly, the large (very large!) cypress crucifix that she or someone else had drawn down from above the novitiate’s bed at the end of the dormitory. She’d had to hold it with both hands, her tiny fists wound tightly round its base.
With a resolve that came from I don’t know where, I threw back my broad shoulders, squared them to the doors, sucked up my breath, and, raising up the cross before me—the bastard child of Jeanne d’Arc and Moses!—I parted the mob. I did not want to hurt anyone else, though I would if need be; I let this be known with a few strategic and well-swung arcs of the cross. There was spittle and prayer and screams. Some of the more industrious and superstitious girls must have harvested branches of hazel and elm the afternoon prior; these they worked like whips; one of them caught my face. Still I walked on, resolute; I wanted to run, but didn’t. And then, as though that gash from the witches’ whip (hazel and elm ward off witches, or so it is said)…as though that witches’ whip had cut the bloody question into my flesh, I wondered where I was going. I’d best decide quickly, for Sister Claire would soon rise, and already the girls were coming together in my wake.
Outside. I would go outside. Out into the corridor and down the central stairway, down to the door giving on to the bricked gallery and…
Only when the low but rising sun fell on me, only when the rain- and sea-scented air washed over me, only then did I break my steely stride and run. Yes, I ran. Through the yard, past the pedestaled Christ with His outstretched arms, around the kitchen gardens and up the drive: away. I could not see clearly for the tears; and again, I tasted blood. (The witch’s whip had caught that soft flesh above the lip and below the nose, which bleeds and bleeds and bleeds!)
…I turned back to see a ragged band of girls coming on. This lot was comprised of the very youngest girls, those too young to grasp the scene’s severity, those who’d not yet had the pure fun of running bred out of them. As I rounded St. Ursula’s Hall and the kitchen door, as I disappeared around the building’s edge, I heard these girls recalled by my peers, whose terrible, high-pitched cries roused rooks from their nests and sent squirrels scampering, causing nuts and twigs to fall clatteringly down through the tall dark trees.
I ran up the drive, along a line of hedges that bordered our neighboring fields. I bore through a narrow opening, into the hedge, full and green in its summer dress. I pushed thorned branches aside, incurring more scrapes and cuts, like those from a cat…. Ah, but what of a bit more spilled blood?
I sank into the lower branches of the hedge. A sort of rude pallet was formed of an exposed web of roots, the muddy soil, the matted leaves blown there by the winds. I’d disturbed the soil: pale and belted worms writhed blindly up from the coffee-dark earth. A branch too near my face bore the slick, sticky trail of a snail.
It was then, hidden—safe?—that tears truly overtook me. I trembled. And panic settled over me like a cloak. Panic and other strange desires—to fight, to flee, to die, to kill.
Eventually, reason prevailed:
What would I do? I could not run away. I hadn’t the means…. Ah, but there was money in my trunk, was there not? (Enough to hire a horse and driver? Enough to buy a crust of bread? I did not know.) Perhaps, if only….
Pushing branches aside with the cross, I opened a window in the far side of the hedge. There sat our tenanted fields of harvested wheat sloping away toward the sea. The sun gilded the thick cones of hay. The storm had passed; the sky was cloudless and pale. A large raven wheeled overhead, claimed the sky with its scrawled black X. Alert as I was, I took in the greens and golds of the trees and the leaves, the browns of the branches, and the textures of it all. And this stilled me. Calmed me. For a short, very short while, till reason again demanded, What will you do?
I slipped from the hedge, cross in hand. Moving along its far side, I’d be obscured from sight. My wounds, certain of them, still ran red. To anyone seeing me, I would have appeared a terrible, feral thing crawling from the scene of a fresh kill. Or my own birth. Keeping close to the hedgerow, pulling myself along by its heartier branches, I made slow, very slow progress. Back to the house.
Then a seed of…of stupidity bloomed suddenly, a horrid black-petaled flower in my mind, and yes, I resolved to make my way back to the house. To gather my things and go. Escape.
Whatever was I thinking? Was I thinking at all?
6
Maluenda
MY REASONING, as best I can recollect it, was this: I would wait for the girls to gather, in the chapel or elsewhere, allowing me to move through the house unmolested, gather my things, and somehow effect an escape. I had that stash of money in my trunk, for Marie-Edith had insisted on paying me for our months of clandestine tutorials. I knew not how much money I had; for, embarassed to accept it, afraid to be caught with it, I stuffed it away without further thought. Too, I’d no idea of its value. What was money to me, then? With this money and my very few effects, including a change of clothes, I might make my way to the crossroads on the far side of the village of C——, where the southbound hirondelle stopped on alternate days. Perhaps I’d go to Mother Marie?…Thought? Planned? No; to say I did either of those things is inaccurate. I merely moved, fearing that an excess of stillness might cause my fears to rise up, strong as the Breton tides, and overtake me.
I sprang from the bank of hedges to the kitchen door, and there saw that room empty—blessed be!—save for the turned back of Sister Brigid. Two quick corners and I gained my former room, the pantry, where the pine I’d worked stood against the wall and tools lay scattered on the packed-dirt floor. My cot had been disassembled, the thin mattress rolled. There I would wait: I had no plan.
It was not long before I heard the outer door open—my breath caught!—and then there came the welcome voice of Marie-Edith. “Bonjour,” said she, quite happily, to Sister Brigid, whose face must have been set with deep concern. “Mais, what is it, ma soeur?” asked Marie-Edith. “Are the geese still aflutter?” (She referred to the girls thusly.) “All because of that innocent prank of yesterday? C’est fou!”
“Things turned worse in the night,” said Sister Brigid; and I heard the two take their habitual spots at the table, with their blue and white bowls of coffee, no doubt. “I fear for our friend.”
“Herculine? No! What has happened? Tell me!” And I might have stepped from the pantry then to go among th
ese friends, to solicit their help—surely they would have helped me; but just then I heard the pinched voice of the cellarer, and I retreated deeper into the pantry’s shadows.
“Whatever might these be?” asked the cellarer, referring to I knew not what.
“You do not know an oyster when you see it?” asked Marie-Edith, rather sourly.
“Indeed I do,” replied the cellarer, hearing no insult in the extern’s words. “But this bushel comes here at what cost? Whose coin has—”
“You have no memory for kindnesses, Sister,” interrupted Sister Brigid. “Marie-Edith’s brother tends the beds at Cancale, and for months now we have profited from his generosity.”
“Hmph!” came the snorted reply; and in the ensuing silence Sister Margarethe took her leave, freeing Sister Brigid to speak:
“I tell you it’s profane and absurd, if innocent. Someone—and we need not wonder who, I think—has graced the stricken Elizaveta with…with signs of the stigmata.”
“Mais non! Ce n’est pas possible!”
“Well,” said Sister Brigid, “it may be possible—or so say the Church Fathers—but it is unlikely. Indeed, I’ve seen these ‘signs’ on the child, and they are but a poor imitation of blood; and there is no wound proper.”
“A prank?…Not another, non!”
Presumably the older woman nodded in assent. “But Sister Claire stokes the hysteria with her fiery talk, and she is intent on putting it to purpose. What started in mischievous innocence will end we know not where…. Oh! that one, I’ve never known the like; and I say she knows nothing of our Lord but his ambition.”
“But, Mother Marie,” said the extern, “surely she—”
“Blood and water, my dear; blood and water,” said the nun. “She has retreated to her rooms with that niece of hers. I’m afraid the Head’s hour has come, for it seems she has won the girls. Oh, patient as the serpent she’s been, and now she’s arranged these silly circumstances to suit her end! I fear for our friend.”
“This…this cannot be!” said Marie-Edith. “Where is Elizaveta? The infirmary? And where is Herculine?” When Sister Brigid made no reply, the extern went on: “I must see this…must see this foolishness for myself,” and she quit the kitchen, leaving Sister Brigid to fall into the mumbled reading of her rosary beads. And as the door to the dining hall opened, I could hear the barely bridled hysteria of the girls. No Silence had been declared this morning.
I dared not risk discovery. I would hide; to stand in the pantry’s shadows would not do.
And so, with great reluctance, I lifted the rug sewn of rags, which sat on the pantry floor, uncovering the trap that led down to the shallow cellar. There, amid sweaty and cobwebbed jugs of fermented cider and wine, long-forgotten, I settled myself on the cold dirt of the cellar’s bottom step; and discovered that I could, quietly, carefully, lift the trap, just so, and spy a sliver of the kitchen.
There, in that dank and muddied hole, I waited. And waited. Growing ever more certain that the distant hysteria of the house—surely they were searching for me—and the stillness of the kitchen did not bode well.
Finally—and I was crying when I heard this, for I had been utterly reduced by recent events, reduced to tears and abject fear and…Finally I heard the sound of oncoming thunder. But no—the skies had cleared, the storm had passed. This I’d seen.
If not quick-coming thunder, then what? Instantly I knew: what I heard were the wheels of a carriage. A cry rose up from the house. One voice, then many. The carriage came closer, closer still, rounding out past the kitchen toward the drive down which I’d crept. I could not see it, of course, but through the earth I could feel the horse’s hooves. Two horses. The earth trembled at their approach. The stoneware jugs at my feet chattered like teeth. Only one conveyance at C——harnessed two horses, and that was the barouche kept by the Mother Superior.
My heart stopped, was mocked by the beating-on of the horses’ hooves. I listened to that carriage, listened to the sound of escape. It faded fast; and there was silence, and nothing to see. I let fall the trap, and I sank into the dark cellar. Earlier tears were nothing to what fell now.
Surely it was she and Peronette, flying fast from the house at C——.
I wanted to die, but what would take me? I thought to pray, but who would hear me?
I was drawn from this dark reverie by the voice of Sister Claire de Sazilly, in argument with Marie-Edith; so heated was their exchange, neither seemed to have heard the running coach. “I’ll wager there’s proof here in this very kitchen of that godly blood!” Marie-Edith spoke to the Head as no one else dared. Now she further challenged her. “I’m no idiot, woman!” (Marie-Edith was a nonbeliever.) “And I’m no longer an impressionable girl,” she added with a great and almost bawdy laugh, “so you’ll not convince me that some devil has sent this sign to us.”
I could not believe what I heard! To judge by her great exhalation and uttered cries to God, neither could Sister Brigid, no doubt as shocked as I by the arguing party that tumbled then into the kitchen, comprised of the extern, the cellarer, and the Head—or presumptive Mother Superior—who now warned Marie-Edith, hissing, “Scullion, your words will see you shown from this house if you do not—”
“Ach!” Marie-Edith dismissed the threat. “You’ve finally spoiled, turned like bad cream, you have. Well, I’m not afraid…. It’s you, you who should be afraid, for you’re not fooling me, and you’re not fooling that God you claim to believe in, that God you torture yourself for.” I heard, heard the tacit shock that came from those present when Marie-Edith spoke thusly.
“Marie-Edith, stop,” counseled Sister Brigid; for she knew, as did I, that the widowed, red-tempered Marie-Edith, with her dim-witted daughter with child for a second time, was in dire need of work. But the extern ignored her, and I saw her push past Sister Claire to the washbasin. “I knew it…. And so here it is,” and she raised from the cold suds of the large basin a mortar and pestle, the smooth wood of which still showed a deep red stain. Having shown the pestle, she then touched it to her tongue. “Ground cranberry, I suspect,” came the verdict. “Mixed with molasses…. As well-suited to white bread as to the imitation of your Lord’s Passion.” I could see her staring at the Head. Finally, she let the heavy evidence sink back into the tub.
“Ah, but the passion at issue here is not passion as you know it,” said Sister Claire, leaning nearer the extern to add in a whispered hiss, “nor as your daughter knows it.”
“Foul woman,” said the extern, shaking her head in scornful disbelief. “It is your evildoing that will see me quit this place, not my words!”
“But what does that prove?” asked the cellarer, still mulling over the cold contents of the sink. “Perhaps our Lord in His infinite—”
“Hold your tongue!” said Sister Claire, turning on Sister Margarethe, whose wimpled face went pale. And she paced once around the large table, lost in thought. No one spoke. As Sister Claire passed the crying cellarer I heard her say, “Calm yourself, dear,” and coming around again to face Marie-Edith, who would not meet the nun’s gaze, I heard what it was I’d dreaded: “Go,” said Sister Claire.
“No!” said Sister Brigid. “Forgive her, Sister, for she has only spoken her mind in a moment of—”
“Ah,” said Sister Claire, turning now to the older sister, seated out of my sight, “speak if you will in her defense, please do. But remember, my Sister,” and her voice fell, menacingly, “you are an old woman, and when I rise here—as I will—it is I who will determine how your days are passed. But please, go ahead: speak. Speak!”
“I am an old woman, it is true; and perhaps I cannot interfere in your plans. But heed this: the Lord marks well your depravity, and it is His interference that you should fear.” This set Sister Margarethe to verily blubbering; but Sister Claire silenced her with a single look, and said to Sister Brigid, “Read your beads, and know that your silence will keep you safe.”
“Wretch!” said Marie-Edith, who,
burning with indignation and shame and anger, set to gathering up her overcoat and bag; she would take with her too the bushel of oysters. “I’ve spoken my mind today, yes; and I’ll speak my mind to the bishop too when I—”
“Do! Oh yes, do!” Sister Claire let go a great laugh. “And when you,” said she, leaning so near the extern she’d only to whisper, “…and when you, a heathen, an impoverished and illiterate whore’s mother—when you win your audience with His Holiness, as surely you will, give him my best. Ah, but I beg pardon: you are not illiterate, are you? Not wholly, no; for you’ve had your little lessons with our resident…” and Sister Claire hesitated, not knowing what to call me, not deigning to use my name. “But tell me,” she went on, for all to hear, “for I’ve long wondered, just how have you managed to pay for your tutorials?…Quite coincidental, it has seemed to me, that money goes missing weekly from the cellarer’s account. Perhaps you’ll tell the biship that, should he allow such filth as you to see the inside of his confessional. I say again: Go.”
And I heard not long after the slamming of the door, and then the distant song of our hinged gate as Marie-Edith crossed the yard and disappeared from our precincts with not another word. I knew she’d not come again; and neither would she seek out the bishop. Had she truly stolen to pay me for our lessons? And this when I tried, repeatedly, to refuse her coin? I heard the familiar shuffling away of Sister Brigid; and now only the two, Sisters Claire and Margarethe, remained, standing quite near the pantry door.
They came nearer the pantry. They were not three paces from me. Sister Claire leaned on the door’s jamb, and said to the cellarer, “You shall have your pantry, my dear. And I…I shall have my House.”