by James Reese
The gallery led to the lesser library, so-called as it was a smallish room walled with shelves burdened by the records of the Order. It was situated above the chapel, and was commonly accessed by a stairwell on its far side, rising up from beside the ex voto, near the altar proper. I was familiar with this near-purposeless gallery, with its three large windows, arched, their sills deep enough to sit in, which gave out onto the yard, the gardens, and, beyond, the sea. These windows were the sole breaks in the gallery’s interior, shuttered wall; the opposite wall had long ago been bricked over, for the northern winds were ruinous.
I took my favored seat in the third window, the one farthest from the dormitory and some twenty, perhaps thirty paces from the library. I found no reason to proceed—discounting, of course, the imminent danger to my person should I be discovered! In truth, I think I was resisting the presence, or perhaps waiting for its return. Too, I was waiting for the girls to move, en masse; under cover of their distraction, I would effect my escape. I sat on the sill, closed my eyes and offered my bruised face to the sun. Maluenda nuzzled at my neck. Her weight on my chest was welcome. The bottle of wine sat beside me, its blue glass reflecting sunlight as does the sea.
Silence save for the distant din, the droning of the girls in the chapel below. But then I wondered: could they still be gathered in commemoration of the Incarnation? Surely not. Had I lost track of time, or had the orderly clocks of C——ticked to a stop, stilled by all the strangeness?
I expected the first of the girls to come from the chapel at any moment; the line of them would then pass beneath me, along the crosshatched bricks of the open gallery below. They’d crowd into the dormitory’s first floor, with its hive-like cells belonging to the oldest nuns—the dying, the addlebrained—and its cramped classrooms. They’d crawl down the airless cold corridor, its windowless walls hung with dark art in ornate frames, or set deep with undusted statuary of a plaster so white it glowed…. Or perhaps—for I didn’t know the hour—they’d cross the interior yard on a diagonal and move toward St. Ursula’s, into the dining hall beyond the kitchen. Lest they take the latter route, I was ready to slip from the sill and hide, spy them from behind the bank of cracked shutters further on.
No sign of that presence…. Had it simply been my fear, manifested?
Maluenda looked up at me with eyes orange and large as harvest moons; she stretched, the picture of indolence, and settled fat and happy in my lap. I took another drink from the bottle whose wine seemed to issue up from a well, a deep, deep well.
Waiting to escape—that was what I waited for, no?—waiting, I watched the cat curled in my lap and I saw…No. Impossible! Had I looked too directly at the sun, were sunspots spinning in my eyes? I blinked, kept my eyes closed; but when I opened them again, there was no denying it:
The black slits, the pupils at the center of the cat’s orange eyes, were twisting. Transshaping. At first their mere motion stunned me, but now…were they truly taking shape? I couldn’t be sure. It seemed that yes, yes they were. But what shapes? I couldn’t have said, not then. Distinct shapes they were; moving, each pupil in time with the other. They’d go still, and then the twisting would begin again and the eyes would take another, different shape.
I quickly stood, nearly sending the bottle tumbling down into the yard. Maluenda leapt from my lap. I watched her pass through the shafting sunlight into the shadows nearer the gallery’s end. I snatched the bottle off the sill—one sip, two—and followed her.
My eyes adjusted to the deeper darkness and I saw Maluenda, or what I assumed was she: the sole mobile shadow, the gray within the black. I moved farther down the hallway to where there hung a triptych of threadbare tapestries, all but discarded, left to the play of the seasons and the ravenous mouths of moths. Every girl at C——had been reminded more than once that our tapestries—excepting, apparently, these of the chapel gallery—were not playthings to be hidden behind. The largest and most valuable of the lot at C——hung in the dining hall, insulating the coldest room, dampening the sound in the loudest. This was Boucher’s “The Audience of the Emperor of China,” from the works at Beauvais. Its cartoon—the oil painting on which it was based—had hung in the Pupil’s Parlor until Mother Marie had arrived and ordered it removed to her rooms—and now that I recall, that had caused something of a stir among the sisters….
My favorite of the three tapestries—and again, I knew them well; this was my gallery, as surely as the pantry had been my home—my favorite of the tapestries, each depicting a saint in ecstasy, was that of St. Francis. It hung farthest down the hall. I’d often come with a torch or oil lamp to study the stupefied face of the Saint, who knelt in receipt of Christ’s Five Wounds, shooting as golden threads from the heart of a hovering angel to Francis’s hands, feet, and bared torso. So skilled was the workmanship that the Saint’s flesh seemed to pucker around the wounds. Indeed, so skillfully was the carnality of the Saint rendered in thread, the artist had earned the work’s banishment to that far and dark corner of the house.
I caught up to Maluenda at the base of the Franciscan tapestry. I could not see her eyes, yet somehow I knew they were still. And I knew too that she stared up at me: she wanted me to see something, she wanted me to know something.
I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to see or know anything more.
The bottle. Yes. Two quick sips.
Faint sunlight floated over my shoulder from the bank of windows behind me. Light slid charily through the cracks in the closed shutters nearer the Saint. The silken threads shimmered in the inadequate light as the tapestry, draped from an iron rod, moved on a breeze I could not feel.
And again, just then, that presence: I was not alone. I looked long and hard into the striate shadows, plumbed their depths ahead. “Who is it? Show yourself. Be seen!” Nothing. No one.
A votive candle sat on the floor at the foot of the tapestried Saint. Who, I thought, who would have lit such a thing, and in this untrafficked place? The white stub of wax lit the whole tapestry, impossibly. Its blue flame rose several times higher than the candle itself and threatened to catch the corner of the canvas frame. The flame was steady, did not waver as a natural flame will. It was by the blue light of that votive that I saw the tapestry. Seemingly for the first time.
Maluenda sat beneath the canvas, beside the uncanny flame. She nuzzled its frame. She mewled, plaintively. I knelt down beside her—one knee: a genuflection—and I chucked the point of her chin. “What is it?” I asked in a whisper.
Maluenda rose on her hind legs and pushed with her forepaws against the tapestry and…
…I’ve come this far, and there is much farther to go. I will simply say it:
The tapestry bled, plain as day. Blood rose from the wounds in Francis’s feet, blood pooled in his open palms, and trickled from his palms down his thin wrists. Not for an instant did I doubt it was blood I saw. It was of a different texture than the threadwork; indeed, its liquescence obscured the very texture of the tapestry.
I saw this! I swear it now as I would have sworn it then.
I stood, fell back from the tapestry against the shuttered wall. What was happening here? Who or what was showing me this, and why? Was it to make known the truth of the Franciscan stigmata, and in so doing mock Sister Claire’s dark charade? Or was this the work of the wine? I held the heavy bottle up to the votive’s flame and saw that it was nearly full, fuller than when last I’d looked. But of course that was impossible, no? I drank again. Perhaps my mind, perhaps my senses had been loosed by the beating I’d suffered under Sister Claire. Too, I had never drunk so much wine; and surely I’d never drunk wine as rich and delicious as this.
But I knew that what I saw was real. This was no illusion. No trick of shadow and light.
The flow of blood was steady, yet it did not run from the sewn frame, did not drip. Maluenda wound herself around my ankles. As I bent to her she sprang up into my arms. I cupped her belly in my left hand; her heart beat so strongly it was as thoug
h I held it directly, as though I’d slipped my hand inside her, between the fur and flesh.
I stood staring into the Saint’s pale face, half-expecting the wide-open eyes to turn toward me, the thin lips to twist with speech…. Yes, the sewn Saint seemed real enough to speak.
It was all I could do to hold the straining, stretching cat from the tapestry. When finally she succeeded in slipping my grip, I let her fall and brought the bottle to my lips.
But I could not avert my eyes. Beautiful St. Francis. And with the strange grace of the somnambulist, slowly, deliberately, I raised my arm. There were my splayed fingers before me. My hand glowed impossibly white in the blue light, as though gloved. Something urged me on. Yes, it was that: an urge. Maluenda? That presence?
Mine was the long Sistine finger of life, reaching, reaching…. I touched…I touched the tapestry. The Saint’s open palm. His wound. His blood.
Nothing. I could see the blood, flowing from the wounds, but I could not feel it. My finger came away clean. Again, I touched it: the other hand, each foot, the lash marks and spear wounds in his side. I scratched at the threaded wounds with my thumbnail. Nothing.
As though struck, I fell to my knees. Prayer flowed from me, as surely as blood flowed from the Saint. I do not know how long I held that familiar stance; nor can I say definitively that it was prayer I offered. Questions, perhaps. Or did I simply open to the indisputable, strange truth before me? All that’s certain is that I would have kept on had it not been for the voices.
Yes, voices.
I rose fast to my feet. My breath was ragged, my heart wild. At first it seemed I’d heard a lone voice. Faraway, yet nearing. “Show yourself!” I said again. But no. There were many voices, speaking as one, a chorus, growing ever louder.
Spinning to scan the shadows, I kicked the votive over. As I moved to right it, I saw that the blue flame shot straight out from the fallen candle, pointed down along the floor into the deeper darkness, sure as a finger, when it ought to have reached up, as any flame will. It spilled an excess of wax in that same direction, wax that flowed fast, and as sure as the Saint’s blood, toward the door of the lesser library.
Maluenda had already moved into the darkness nearer the door. I followed, followed the directives of the candle and cat.
The voices, again…. They were real, quite real; and coming from within the library.
I stole nearer the gallery’s end, nearer the voices. There, to my left, was the arched and covered stairwell that gave on to a path leading to the stables. So that was how Peronette and Mother Marie escaped. Another door, straight ahead, opened directly into the lesser library. This secondary door was rarely used. I myself had used this door but once, and recently: I’d slipped from it to escape a tutorial on Horace, which seems now to have taken place in another life. As indeed it did.
The voices grew more distinct as I neared the door. A mix of voices, some panicked (the girls, perhaps) and others deeper, demanding (Sister Claire?). I might have run then, down the outer stairwell to the stables. But I did not. Instead, I crept up to the library’s thick oak door and listened. And what I heard astounded me: men! The voices of men. And then, stranger still, I heard the voice of Mother Marie-des-Anges; and it was my name she spoke!
8
My Accusers, Convened
THERE’D BEEN SOME commotion moments earlier; this accounted for the raised voices I’d heard. A man was struggling still to restore order. From his voice, frail but full, self-important, bloated with bombast, I concluded that he was a man of some position. Perhaps a priest of a higher rank, for it seemed everyone quieted when he spoke; but few such men ever came to C——. Who could it be? Nearing, I listened to the words that fell so slowly, so deliberately from his mouth; and I observed that his speech was flabby with tautologies—that is, he said everything twice, thus gaining time for the slow wheels of his mind to grind. I could not clearly hear his questions, for Monsieur Le Maire (it was, of course, the Mayor of C——) stood far across the crowded library.
How many people were crowded into the lesser library? It was not a large room; indeed, it had but one bank of windows, a single large table, several chairs, and not many books besides those unread histories of the Order. I assumed many of those gathered with the girls and nuns had come from the village of C——in the company of Monsieur Le Maire; surely they’d all been summoned in the hours just passed. How had they all descended on C——without my hearing them? Perhaps they’d come up the back path from the village, warned away from the main drive where I’d last been seen. Or perhaps they’d climbed to the lesser library from the chapel while I lay secreted in the cellar, or busied myself in the dormitory, bathing and dressing. I wondered, had the sorority even observed the Angelus, or had the bell I’d heard been a call to assembly?…Regardless, here they were. Men, men had come to C——. Their voices, the more familiar female voices too, they all bore tones of excess: hysteria or flat, spiritless inquiry. A council, a jury of sorts; this proceeding was a trial.
But who stood accused? Peronette? Was she even present? Mother Marie? Me? At that thought I very nearly took to the outer stairwell, but I had to hear what was going on, for I suspected—rightly—that whatever happened in that room would decide my fate.
I spied slivers of the room through the door where its wood had warped over time. I could not see much in this way, just the bustling of bodies, many bodies, gathered in groups. I squatted, rose on my toes, bobbed left and right. But I’d learn more from listening.
I was so close to the door I feared detection. Like all the doors at C——, that of the lesser library was constructed of thick boards of oak banded by hammered iron. I practically pressed myself against that door. Maluenda sat at my foot, perfectly still, as intent as I on the words we heard.
A question. I couldn’t quite make it out…something about the Prince of This World…something about a pact…. A pause, and then the tremulous response of—
—of Mother Marie! It was she who stood accused. How I felt for her! What I wouldn’t have done to rescue her, save her.
And then I heard her say my name, again.
By the tone of her response, which I could hear quite clearly, as she was separated from me by the door and fewer than five paces, I knew her to be defeated, and resignedly so.
Mother Marie repeated my name when the Mayor repeated his question, which I heard all too well. “Who is the seducer here?” he asked. “Who has brought all this about?”
I had. So said Mother Marie-des-Anges. It was I who’d set all this in motion. I clasped my hand to my mouth and fell back from the door. Maluenda rose up to pull with bared claws at the lacy hem of the dress.
Absurd, to think that I was then capable of seduction. I knew nothing of…of sex, let alone seduction. I was completely without wiles, guileless. Yes, there’d been the milk of the dreams, but I had never initiated that, not consciously. In waking life I knew nothing of my own body, neither its nature nor its ways nor its…its name. Had you asked me about mystical theology or Trajan’s legacy, had you asked me to decline a noun in any of the languages I’d learned, yes, but I avow it: I knew nothing, nothing, of self-satisfaction or sex. Or seduction.
I heard the Mayor ask where Peronette had gone—it was she who’d ridden away—but Mother Marie swore she’d known nothing of her niece’s plans; Peronette had harnessed the horses and effected her escape alone. At this the sorority dissented as one. And even I knew Mother Marie was lying; bedeviled as she was by her niece, there was nothing she would not have done for her. The loudest of the protesters was, of course, Sister Claire de Sazilly:
“Liar!” said she. “How then do you explain your niece’s absence when all the Order searched for her? You hid her away, till such time as she could descend to the stables, to your fine carriage and two steeds and—”
“I do not know,” mumbled Mother Marie.
“Answer!” countered Sister Claire, whose cry overrode some words of the Mayor’s. “Do not lie bef
ore your Christ!”
“I do not know!” said Mother Marie; these words she would repeat often in the course of her interrogation. “Surely you, Sister, believe my niece capable of executing her escape from you and your scheming ways!”
Sister Claire appealed to the Mayor, for it served her ends to do so. “Can you not silence the accused, Monsieur Le Maire?” she asked.
But Mother Marie spoke on: “Why,” she asked of Sister Claire, “why wouldn’t I have gone with her? Why wouldn’t I have joined her in the barouche and escaped if I’d known of her plans, for I’ve long known of yours, you godless, usurping—?” Mother Marie hesitated; and then, her voice cracking like thin ice, added, “She has forsaken me.” Here was the painful admission.
“You admit it then,” chimed in the cellarer. “You admit it: the accused has escaped. She’s escaped.”
“No!” said Mother Marie. “She is gone, yes. It is true. But she had no reason ‘to escape,’ as you say.” Mother Marie appealed then to the Mayor, in whom resided the Law: “I remind you, Monsieur Le Maire, neither my niece nor I stand accused of any crime.”
“Witch!” came the cry, echoed by others. A townswoman observed that as Satan did not stand on formalities, neither should the Soldiers of Christ. Others assented, roundly.
Above the accusatory din rose Mother Marie’s voice: “What am I accused of? Speak! If this is a trial there must be a crime as well as a criminal.”
The Mayor averred that this was not a formal trial. “My good man,” countered Mother Marie, “formal or no, this is a trial. You and all present know it.”
The Mayor somehow quieted the girls. “Mother,” said he, his words at a low simmer, “indeed you are not accused, at present, of any crime.” At present.