– must-

– not-

– fall-

I see it happen with a dreamlike clarity. A series of tableaux, each fixed by the lightning as it strikes nearby-several times, in rapid succession. She slips, kicks out against the swing of the rope, and loses it-for an instant I see her arms flung wide, embracing the dark. Strike. Thunder, louder than ever before, so close overhead that for a moment I almost believe the strike has hit the tower itself…And in the brief interval of darkness that follows, I hear the rope give way.

I know I should run now, while their attention is elsewhere. But I cannot; I have to see for myself. Soeur Antoine is guarding the door; there is a dangerous expression on her face, but she is surely too slow to hinder me. As I glance at her, she begins to move toward me; her face is set in stone, and now I remember the strength in her big red arms, the size of her meaty fists. Nevertheless, she is only a woman. Even if she has turned against me now, what can she do?

The sisters crowd round, no doubt to see the body on the floor. At any moment there will come the cries, the confusion; and in that confusion I will make my escape. Soeur Virginie is looking at me, her small fists clenched; beside her, Soeur Tomasine’s eyes are narrowed into crescents. I step forward once again, and the nuns cluck like frightened hens, too stupid even to move aside. My sudden fear is absurd, I know. Ridiculous, to think that they might try to stop me: you might as well expect barnyard geese to attack the fox.

But something has gone wrong; the eyes that should have been gazing at the body on the floor are turning instead toward me. Even geese, I recall from my abbey days, can be savage when driven. And now they dare to block my way, to peck at me, to surround me with their stink and their reproaches…As I push forward into the space, Soeur Antoine raises a fist, which I could deflect with my arms behind my back, but already I am felled with astonishment, stumbling even before her blow lands. What witchcraft is this? I drop to my knees, my head ringing from a vicious punch to the back of the neck, but all I feel is a remote and silent amazement.

There is no body on the floor.

Strike.

And the tower is empty.

SEPTEMBER 7TH, 1611THÉÂTRE AMBULANT DUGROSJEAN CARÊMES

Some memories never fade. Even in the warmth of this good autumn, this good town, some part of me remains there, at the abbey, in the rain. Perhaps some part of me died there-died, or was reborn, I am not sure which. In any case I, who did not believe in miracles, witnessed something that changed me-only a little, but forever. Maybe, in that moment, Sainte Marie-de-la-mer was with us, sitting here now, a twelvemonth later. I can almost believe even that.

I felt the rope go. A muscular spasm, perhaps, or the slackness of the cord, or the rotten wood of the scaffolding as it gave way. I knew a moment of utter calm, frozen in the lightning flash like a fly in amber. Then reaching for nothing in a last gesture of desperation, my mind a blank but for the thought-if only I were a bird-my fingers splayed but finding nothing, nothing.

And then there was something in front of my face-a cobweb, a figment, a rope. I did not question its miraculous presence; falling, it was almost out of my hands before I had the wit to catch it. I missed it altogether with the right hand, but my reflexes were still good and I caught fast with the left, dangling for a second in midair with nothing in my mind but stupid disbelief-then I saw a pale face, twisted now in an urgent grimace as she mouthed at me from the hole in the roof, and I understood.

Perette had not failed me. She must have climbed up the scaffolding left by the workmen and watched everything through the gaps in the slate. I hoisted myself up-the ability to climb a rope, like that of balancing upon a line, is not easily lost-and dragged myself like a wet fish onto the slippery roof.

I lay there for a while, exhausted, whilst Perette embraced me, hooting with joy. Below us I could hear a surge of sound, incomprehensible as the tides. I think I lost consciousness; for a moment I drifted, washed by the rain, the smell of the sea in my nostrils. I would never fly again. I knew it; this had been l’Ailée’s final appearance.

But now Perette put out her small hand and shook me urgently. I opened my eyes; saw her sketch one of her quick hand-mimes. A horse; the sign for “haste”; the gesture she had always used to indicate Fleur. And again Fleur; riding; haste. I sat up, my head swimming. The wild girl was right; whatever the outcome of LeMerle’s drama, it would not be wise to remain. Soeur Auguste too had given her final performance, and I found that, after all, I did not regret it.

Perette took my hand, guiding me deftly toward the ladder, still in place some fifteen feet down the steep slope below us. She seemed quite unafraid of the danger but climbed with catlike ease, balancing delicately upon a ridge of broken guttering as she moved to let me pass. Rain stung our faces and hammered on our heads; thunder rolled over us like rocks; a lightning-struck tree was ablaze a hundred yards away, touching everything with a dim, apocalyptic light. And in the middle of it all we laughed, Perette and I, like mad things; laughed with the sheer joy of the rain and the storm; at the relief of my escape, and most of all, at the look on his face, the look on LeMerle’s face as he prepared to receive the pounding of his life from a gaggle of angry nuns…

I heard later that he went without a fight and with only a token protestation of innocence, still gazing in puzzlement at the place where I had been. It was as if the ground had been cut from under him, I heard, his words losing their witchcraft in the face of this new, greater sorcery. Certainly it must have seemed to them as if I disappeared into thin air. A miracle, came the cry, a miracle, and surely this floating lady was indeed Sainte Marie-de-la-mer, come to rescue her own, as in the old legends.

The discovery of a lightning-struck tree not a hundred yards from the church also sparked rumors of miraculous delivery. I hear that today there is a small shrine to the Holy Mother of the Sea, that the new Marie has returned to the mainland, and that a new Mermaid, so like the old one as to be almost identical, has reappeared in the abbey church. Already she is said to have healing powers, and pilgrims come from as far as Paris to see the place where she appeared to more than sixty witnesses.

The Bishop of Évreux was quick to corroborate the Apparition’s tale, revealing LeMerle as an impostor in a catalog of deceit and corruption. The miraculous appearance of the fleur-de-lis, emblem of the Holy Virgin, on the arm of the accused man was interpreted as definitive proof of the Apparition’s authenticity and of his own alliance with dark powers, and he was taken, dazed and unprotesting, into the custody of the secular court.

I cannot help but grieve a little. I have hated him in the past, but since then I think I came to know him better, and if not to forgive, at least to understand. He was taken to the mainland, I heard, to be examined by the judge in Rennes. I was in Rennes myself for a time, and saw the roundhouse in which he was being kept, and read the notices upon its doors telling of his arrest. These announced his forthcoming execution-I thought I detected the vindictive hand of the bishop in some of the details, which rivaled the execution of Ravillac, the king’s murderer, in their ingeniousness and brutality.

The bishop and his niece returned to Montauban, the ancestral home of the Arnaults. Apparently Isabelle had expressed the wish for a simpler life, far from the coast, and had joined a reflective order-this time as an ordinary sister, where, I hope, she learned to live in peace and forgetfulness.