Clever, the little minx. LeMerle was teaching her well. Anything I said now would seem like envy. I smiled, conceding a point, even though my heart seethed. “I’m sure we all will, ma mère,” I said, and was pleased to see her lips tighten.

Well, that was the end of my attempt at rescue. As it was, I had almost overstepped the mark; Mère Isabelle looked at me askance throughout the rest of Chapter and I narrowly escaped another penance. Instead I accepted a turn of duty in the bakehouse-a hot, filthy, disagreeable task in this sultry weather-and she seemed satisfied. For the present, anyway.

The bakehouse is a round, squat building on the far side of the cloister. Its windows are glassless slits, most of the light coming from the huge ovens in the center of the single room. We bake in clay ovens as the black monks did, on flat stones heated red by the heaped faggots beneath. The smoke from the ovens escapes through a chimney so wide that the sky is visible through its mouth, and when it rains the droplets of water fall onto the domed ovens and turn to hissing steam. Two young novices were making dough as I arrived, one picking out the weevils from a stone jar of flour, the other mixing yeast in a basin, preparing to make the mixture. The ovens were stoked and ready, and the heat was like a shimmering wall. Behind the wall was Soeur Antoine, sleeves rolled up over her thick red forearms, hair tied into a rag that she had rolled about her head.

“Ma soeur.” Antoine looked different somehow, her usually kind, vacuous look replaced by something harder and more purposeful. She looked almost dangerous in the red light, the muscles of her wide shoulders rolling beneath her fat as she kneaded the dough.

I set to work, kneading the bread in the huge pans and placing the loaves on the oven shelves to bake. It is a tricky business; the stones need to be heated perfectly even, for too high a heat will scorch the dough whilst leaving the inside raw, and too low a heat will bake flat, sad loaves as dense as stones. We worked in silence for a time. The wood in the oven crackled and snickered; someone had stoked it with green wood, and the smoke was acrid and foul. Twice I burned my hands on the heated bake stones and cursed under my breath. Antoine pretended not to notice, but I’m sure she was smiling.

We finished the first batch of loaves and began the second. An abbey needs to do at least three batches of baking a day, each batch making twenty-five white or thirty black loaves. Plus the hard biscuit for winter when fuel is less abundant, and cakes for storing and special occasions. The smell from the loaves was good and rich in spite of the smoke that made my eyes sting, and I felt my stomach growl. I realized that since Fleur’s disappearance I had hardly eaten. Sweat trickled through my hair, soaking the rags that bound it. My face was bearded with sweat. My vision doubled momentarily; I put out my hand to steady myself and touched the hot bread pan instead. The metal was cooling but still hot enough to sear the tender webbing between my finger and thumb, and I gave a sharp cry of pain. Antoine looked at me again. This time there could be no doubt about it; she was smiling.

“It’s hard at first.” She spoke softly enough for me to hear her: no more. The young novices were sitting near the open door, too far to catch her words. “But you get used to it eventually.” Her mouth was very red, too ripe for a nun’s, and her eyes reflected the fire. “You get used to anything eventually.”

I shook my burned hand to cool it and said nothing.

“It would be a pity if someone found out about you,” Antoine went on. “You’d probably be here for good then. Like me.”

“Found out about what?”

Antoine’s lips curled wolfishly, and I wondered how I could ever have thought her stupid. There was mean intelligence behind the small, bright eyes, and in that moment I almost feared her. “Your secret visits to Fleur, of course. Or did you think I hadn’t noticed?” Now there was bitterness in her voice too. “No one expects fat Soeur Antoine to notice anything. Fat Soeur Antoine thinks of nothing but her belly. I had a child once, but I wasn’t allowed to keep it,” she said. “Why should you keep yours? What makes you any different to the rest of us?” She lowered her voice, the little red light still dancing in her eyes from the oven. “If Mère Isabelle finds out, that will be the end of it, whatever Père Saint-Amand says. You’ll never see Fleur again.”

I looked at her. She seemed a thousand leagues away from the fat soft woman of last month who wept when I pinched her arm. It was as if some of the saint’s black stone had entered her. “Don’t tell, Antoine,” I whispered. “I’ll give you-”

“Syrups? Sweetmeats?” Her voice was harsh and the young novices looked up curiously to see what was happening. Antoine snapped a sharp command at them and they dropped their heads at once. “You owe me, Auguste,” she said in a low voice. “Just remember that. You owe me a favor.”

Then, turning, she went back to check her loaves as if nothing had passed between us, and I saw nothing but the stolid curve of her back for the rest of that long morning.

Perhaps I should have felt reassured. It was clear Antoine did not intend to disclose my secret. And yet her unwillingness to be bought was unnerving; more so was the phrase she had used-you owe me a favor- the Blackbird’s habitual coin.

This evening I went to the well after Compline to collect a jug of washing water. The sun had set and the sky was a dark and brooding violet, striated with red. The courtyard was deserted, as most of the nuns had already retired to the warming room or the dorter in preparation for sleep, and I could see the warm yellow lights shining from the unprotected windows of the cloister. The well is still incomplete, awaiting a stone finish to its rough earthen walls and a protective wall around; today it is almost invisible in the shadows, a primitive wooden fence erected in haste around the hole to prevent anyone from falling in by accident. A crossbar, furnished with a bucket, rope, and pulley, looks like a thin figure standing against the purple ground. Twelve paces. Six. Four. The thin figure detached itself from the well side with a sudden start. I saw a small, pale face made violet in the reflected sky, eyes wide with surprise and-I could have sworn-guilt.

“What are you doing here?” Her voice was suspicious. “You should be with the others. Why are you following me?”

There was something in her hands, a bundle like wet rags. My eyes fell to it and she tried to hide the bundle in the folds of her skirt. In the shadows I thought I saw staining on the linen, dark blotches that in the poor light looked black. I held out my jug.

“I needed some water, ma mère.” I made my voice toneless. “I didn’t see you.” Now I could see the bucket of water at her feet, its contents slopping over to form a puddle on the trodden earth of the courtyard. The bucket also seemed to contain rags or clothing. Isabelle saw the direction of my gaze and seized the rags. They slapped against her skirt, but she made no attempt even to wring them dry.

“Get your water, then,” she said curtly, pushing the bucket with a clumsy foot. It overturned, spreading a dark stain on the darker ground.

I would have done as she asked, but I could feel the tension coming from her. Her eyes were huge and strangely brilliant, and in a stray sliver of light I noticed her face was sheened with moisture. There was a smell too, a bland and sweetish scent I recognized.

Blood.

“Is anything wrong?”

For a second she stared me out, her face rigid with the effort of maintaining her dignity. Her chest hitched once. The front of her skirt was dark with water from the dripping rags.

Then she began to sob, the raking, pitiful tears of a confused child, a child who has wept so bitterly and for so long that she no longer cares who hears her. For an instant I forgot with whom I was dealing. This was no longer Mère Isabelle, formerly of the house of Arnault and latterly, Abbess of Sainte Marie-la-Mère. As I stepped forward she clung to me and for a second it might have been Fleur in my arms, or Perette, in despair over some real or imagined sorrow such as only children endure. I stroked her hair. “There, little one. It’s all right. Don’t be afraid.”