Yet her behavior irked the abbess. Rosamonde ate noisily at table, smacking her gums. Sometimes she forgot to observe silence or mistook the words of prayers. She dressed carelessly, often going to church without some necessary item of clothing until the novice was charged with her supervision.

The wimple was an especial burden to an old woman who had worn the quichenotte for sixty years and could not understand why it was suddenly to be forbidden. Even more irksome to the new abbess was her refusal to acknowledge her authority and her querulous calls for Mère Marie. True, Angélique Saint-Hervé Désirée Arnault had not had much exposure to senility. Her life-what there had been of it-was a nursery where mechanical toys replaced playmates and servants replaced family. For her there had been no clear window onto the world, her only view a procession of priests and doctors. The poor were kept safely out of sight. The old, the sick, the infirm, were not a part of Mère Isabelle’s Creation.

Soeur Tomasine said grace. We ate in a silence punctuated occasionally by slurping sounds from Rosamonde. Mère Isabelle looked up once, then her wrathful gaze returned to her plate. I could see her mouth tightened almost to invisibility as she ate in small, delicate jabs of her spoon.

An unusually loud smacking noise caused a ripple to move down the novices’ bench, perilously close to laughter. The abbess seemed about to say something, but her lips tightened once more and she was silent.

It was to be the last time Rosamonde took a meal with the rest of us.

I went to LeMerle’s cottage again that night. I am not certain why I went except that I could not sleep and that my need drew me, like a barb through the heart. Need for what, I cannot say. I knocked softly, but there was no reply. Looking in through the window I saw a soft glow from a dying fire, and on the rug a shape-no, two shapes-illuminated in the firelight.

The man was LeMerle. I saw on his arm the black scarf that hid the old brand. The girl was young, slender as a boy, face averted, cropped hair the color of raw silk beneath his hands, beneath his mouth.

Clémente.

I crept softly back to the dorter then, and silently I returned to my bed. Everyone sounded asleep. Even so a phantom mutter of laughter pursued me as I fled, burning with shame, to my place by the wall, past Clémente’s cubicle…I froze in midstep. Germaine was sitting bolt upright and motionless in Clémente’s bed. A stray strand of moonlight bisected her scarred face and I could see her eyes shining. She did not seem to see me, and I passed by without a word.

Perette returned this morning as if nothing had happened. It was a disturbing fact of the new regimen that no one had mentioned her absence, not even in Chapter. If it had been any other than she, then perhaps someone would have spoken…But the wild girl was no true sister-or even a novice-of Sainte Marie-de-la-mer. A strangeness clung to her, an aloofness that no one had yet managed to penetrate. Even I had been too absorbed in my own affairs to pay any real attention to the absence of my friend. It was as if Perette had never been there at all, her disappearance from collective memory as complete as her removal from every aspect of our daily life. This morning, however, she was back: demure as a marble saint, she took her place as usual without a glance at anyone.

But there was something about her manner that disturbed me. She was too quiet, her face expressionless as only Perette’s can be, her gold-ringed eyes as flat and bright as the gilt on our altarpiece. I wanted to speak to her, to find out where she had been for the past three days-but Soeur Marguerite had already rung the bell for Vigils, and there was no time for questions, even if Perette had been inclined to reply.

Le Merle made no appearance until Prime. He never was an early riser, not even in the old days, preferring to roll out of bed at eight or nine, then stay reading until midnight, squandering candles-good wax ones, not tallow-while the rest of us had barely enough food to keep body and soul together. It was always his way, accepted by all as if it were his due, as if he were the master and we his servants. The worst thing was we liked it; served him willingly and for the most part without resentment; lied for him, stole for him, made excuses for his most outrageous behavior. “It’s the way he is,” Le Borgne once told me, one day when my exasperation had been too much to contain. “Some people have it, and some don’t, that’s all.”

“Have what?”

The dwarf gave his crooked smile. “Grace, my dear, or what passes for it these days. That gilding that some of us receive at birth. That special gilding that sets his kind apart from mine.”

I didn’t understand, and I said so.

“Oh yes you do,” said Le Borgne with unusual patience. “You know he’s worthless, you know he doesn’t give a damn, and that he’ll betray you some day or another. But you want to believe in him all the same. He’s like those statues you see in churches, all gold and glitter on the outside, plaster on the inside. We know what they’re made of really, but we pretend we don’t, because it’s better to believe in a false god than in no god at all.”

“And yet you follow him,” I said. “Don’t you?”

He looked at me with his one eye. “I do,” he said, “but then I’m a fool. Every circus has one.”

Well, LeMerle, I thought as all eyes turned hungrily to watch him make his entrance, you can certainly take your pick of fools this morning. Late nights and privations had taken no toll on him, I noticed; he looked rested and well in his ceremonial robes, his hair tied back neatly with a piece of ribbon. The embroidered scapular of his office had been flung over his black soutane, and as always he wore the silver crucifix, upon which his pale hands rested. As if by chance, he had chosen to stand just beneath the single stained-glass window, through which reached the first rose-gold fingers of dawn. I guessed immediately that something was afoot.

With him was Alfonsine. Since her attack there had been a number of rumors, though most of us knew Alfonsine well enough to discount the wildest of these. Even so, her presence at LeMerle’s side attracted no little attention, and she played it for all she was worth, affecting a haunted look and a faltering step, and coughing repeatedly into her fist. She behaved as if her fit of hysterics in the crypt had elevated, rather than disgraced her, and her adoring eyes never left LeMerle.

Others were watching him too with varying expressions of hope, fear, and admiration; I caught Antoine staring, and Clémente, and Marguerite, and Piété. Not all looks were adoring, however. Germaine’s face was set in a look of dogged indifference, but I read a clearer message from her eyes. I knew that look: and LeMerle was a fool if he failed to recognize the threat. If Germaine had the chance, she would do him harm.

Then silence fell, and LeMerle began to speak. “My children,” he said. “It has been a testing time for us, these past few days. The contamination of our well by means unknown; the disruption to our services; the uncertainty of change.” A murmur of acquiescence passed through the crowd. Soeur Alfonsine seemed close to swooning. “But the testing times are over,” said LeMerle, beginning to move from the pulpitum to the altar. “We have survived them, and must be strengthened thereby. And as a token of our strength, our hope, our faith…”-he paused, and I could sense the expectation in the air-“we shall now take Communion, a sacrament that has been neglected here for all too long. Quam oblationem, tu Deus, in omnibus quaesumus, benedictam-”