Alfonsine shifted beneath his gaze. “It’s what Soeur Auguste said. She’s too young. She’s only a child. She won’t know what to do.”

“Soeur Auguste seems rather free with her opinions,” said LeMerle.

I stared into my lap and would not look up.

“I shouldn’t have listened,” said Alfonsine.

LeMerle said nothing, but I knew he was smiling.

The rest soon followed Alfonsine’s lead, initial hesitation giving way to a kind of eagerness. Yes, we were confessing our sins, and sin was shameful; but it was also the first time many of us had ever received such undivided attention. It was painfully compelling, like scratching at a nettle rash, and it was contagious.

“I went to sleep during Vigils,” said Soeur Piété, a colorless nun who rarely spoke to anyone. “I said a bad word when I bit my tongue.”

Soeur Clémente: “I looked at myself when I was washing. I looked at myself and I had a wicked thought.”

“I stole a p-pasty from the winter cellar.” That was Antoine, red-faced and stammering. “It was p-pork and onion, with water crust p-pastry. I ate it in secret behind the gatehouse wall, and it gave me a b-bellyache.”

Germaine was next, intoning her list-Gluttony. Lust. Covetousness-apparently at random. She, at least, had not been dazzled by LeMerle-her face wore a careful, colorless expression I recognized as scorn. Then came Soeur Bénédicte, with a tearful tale of shirked duties, and Soeur Pierre, with a stolen orange. At each new confession there came an increased murmur from the crowd, as if to urge the speaker onward. Soeur Tomasine wept as she confessed lewd thoughts; several other nuns wept in sympathy, and Soeur Alfonsine eyed LeMerle while Mère Isabelle looked sullen and increasingly bored. Clearly she had expected more of us. Obediently, we gave it.

As the hour passed, the confessions grew more elaborate, more detailed. Every scrap of material was brought out for the occasion; tattered remnants of past transgressions, filched piecrusts, erotic dreams. The ones who had been first to make their confessions now found their performance overshadowed; resentful looks were exchanged; the murmuring grew to a low roar.

Now it was Marguerite’s turn to step forward; she exchanged glances with Alfonsine as she passed, and I knew then that there would be trouble. I forked the sign against evil into my palm; around me, the anticipation was so thick that I could barely breathe. Marguerite looked fearfully into LeMerle’s face, twitching like a snared rabbit.

“Well?” said Isabelle impatiently.

Marguerite opened her mouth and closed it again without speaking. Alfonsine looked at her with barely concealed hostility. Then, haltingly, and without taking her eyes away from LeMerle’s face, she began.

“I dream of demons,” she said in a low voice. “They infest my dreams. They speak to me when I lie in bed. They touch me with their fiery fingers. Soeur Auguste gives me medicines to make me sleep, but still the demons come!”

“Medicines?” There was a pause, during which I felt Isabelle’s eyes flick sharply at my averted face.

“A sleeping draught, that’s all,” I said as the other sisters turned toward me. “Lavender, and valerian, to calm her nerves. That’s all it is.” Too late, I heard the edge in my voice.

Mère Isabelle put her hand on Marguerite’s forehead and gave a small, chilly smile. “Well, I don’t think you’ll be needing any of Soeur Auguste’s potions anymore. Père Colombin and I are here to take care of you now. In penance and humility we will expel all trace of the evil that plagues you.”

Then at last, turning to me, she said: “So, Soeur Auguste. You seem to have something to say on almost every other subject. Have you no testimony to make here?”

I could see the danger but was at a loss at how to avoid it. “I-I don’t think so, ma mère.”

“What? Not one? Not a transgression, not a weakness, an act of unkindness, a wicked thought? Not even a dream?”

I suppose I should have made something up, like the rest of them. But LeMerle’s eyes were still on me, and I felt my face grow hot in revolt. “I-forgive me, ma mère. I don’t remember. I-I’m not used to public confession.”

Mère Isabelle gave a smile of singularly adult unpleasantness. “I see,” she said. “Soeur Auguste has a right to her privacy. Public testimony is beneath her. Her sins are between herself and the Almighty. Soeur Auguste speaks directly to God.”

Alfonsine sniggered. Clémente and Germaine grinned at each other. Marguerite piously raised her eyes to the ceiling. Even Antoine, who had blushed beet red during her own confession, was smirking. At that moment I knew that every nun in the chapel felt the same guilty twist of pleasure at the humiliation of one of their own. And behind Mère Isabelle, LeMerle gave his angel’s smile, as if none of this had anything to do with him.

My penance was silence. Two days’ enforced silence, with instructions to the other sisters to report immediately any breach of this command. It was no punishment to me. In fact I welcomed the respite. Besides if my suspicions were correct, Fleur and I might soon be gone. See me in the confessional after Vespers tomorrow, LeMerle had said. I can help you.

He was going to give me Fleur. What else could he have meant? Why else would he risk a meeting? My heart leapt at the thought, all my caution swept aside. To hell with strategy. I wanted my daughter. No penance, however severe, could begin to compare with the pain of her absence. Whatever LeMerle wanted from me, he was welcome to it.

Alfonsine, the perpetual gossip, who had been given the same penance as I, was far more troubled, assuming a look of deep contrition which no one-to her chagrin-appeared to notice. Her cough had worsened in recent days, and yesterday she refused her food; I recognized the signs and hoped that this renewal of zeal would not provoke one of her attacks. Marguerite was put in charge of the clock for a month to cure her nightly visitations; henceforth she would be the one to ring the bell for Vigils, sleeping alone on a box bed suspended by ropes in the belfry and waking every hour to ring the time. I doubted that it would work; but Marguerite seemed exalted by her punishment-although her tic had worsened, and there was a new stiffness down her left side that made her limp when she walked.

Never had there been so many penances. It seemed as if half the sisters or more were under some kind of discipline, from Antoine’s fasting-penance enough for her-and relocation to the overheated bakehouse, to Germaine’s work digging the new latrines.

It created a strange climate of segregation between the virtuous and the penitent. I caught Soeur Tomasine looking at me with a kind of contempt as I passed her in the slype, and Clémente did her best to taunt me into speech, though without success.

Today passed with terrible slowness. Between services, I spent two hours in the refectory, whitewashing the faded walls and scrubbing a floor slick with built-up grease. Then I helped with the repairs to the chapel, silently passing buckets of mortar to the cheery, bare-chested workmen on the roof. Then came prayers over the potato patch, with LeMerle intoning with incense and solemnity the Last Rites, which the poor Reverend Mother had never received, whilst I, Germaine, Tomasine, and Berthe performed the unpleasant task of opening the grave.

It was not yet noon, but already the sun was hot, the air sizzling with heat as we made our way with shovels and spades toward the burial mound. Soon we were sweating. The earth is dry and sandy here, whitish on the surface but becoming red at greater depth. Barely moist earth clung to the shroud and to our robes as we cleared away the sand from the body. It was a simple enough task, if one had the stomach for it; the earth had not had a great deal of time to settle and was still light enough to clear with a shovel. The body had been sewn into a sheet, now blackened where the corpse had rested against it so that the marks of head, ribs, elbows, and feet were clearly visible against the creamy linen. Soeur Tomasine wavered as she saw this, but I have seen enough bodies to be unmoved and I reached for it myself, carefully and with as much reverence as I could muster. Mère Marie was heavier than she had been in life, weighted by the earth that clung to her, and I struggled to raise her with dignity, gripping her by the shoulders, though her weight seemed strangely brittle, like that of a piece of driftwood washed onto the shore and half buried in sand. The shroud was badly stained on the reverse side, with the outline of the spine and ribs clearly defined, and as I heaved her from her unconsecrated resting place I uncovered a mass of brown beetles that boiled away into the sand like hot lead as soon as the sunlight reached them. At the sight of the creatures, Berthe gave a big, loose cry and almost dropped her end of the corpse. More of the beetles scattered along her sleeve and into the pit. I saw Alfonsine watching in appalled fascination. Only Germaine seemed unmoved, and she helped me hoist the body out of the hole, her scarred face impassive, her athlete’s shoulders straining. There was a light, dry smell of earth and ash, not too unpleasant at first, and then we turned Reverend Mother onto her back and the rankness struck us-a terrible midday blast of spoiled pork and excrement.