JULY 27TH, 1610
We returned to find the abbey in turmoil. M`ere Isabelle was waiting at the gatehouse, looking ill and impatient. There had been an incident, she said.
LeMerle looked concerned. “What kind of incident?”
“A visitation.” She swallowed painfully. “A damnable visitation! Soeur Marguerite was in the church, praying. For the soul of my p-predecessor. For the soul of S-M`ere Marie!”
LeMerle watched her in silence as she stammered out her tale. She spoke in short, bitten-off sentences with much repetition, as if trying to make the business clear in her mind.
Marguerite, still greatly troubled by the events of the morning, had gone to the chapel alone to pray. She went to the closed gate of the crypt and knelt on the little prie-dieu which had been placed there. Then she shut her eyes. A few moments later she was roused by a metallic sound. Opening her eyes she saw at the mouth of the crypt a figure in a Bernardine nun’s brown habit with its linen tucker, the face hidden inside a starched white quichenotte.
Standing up in alarm, Marguerite called out, demanding that the strange nun name herself. But her legs were weak with terror and she sank to the ground.
“Why this dread?” asked LeMerle. “It might have been any of our older sisters. Soeur Rosamonde, perhaps, or M`ere Marie-Madeleine. All have occasionally worn the quichenotte, especially in this hot weather.”
M`ere Isabelle turned on him. “No one wears it now! No one!”
Besides, there was more. The lappets of the strange nun’s white bonnet, the tucker, even the hands of the apparition, were stained with red. Worse still-here M`ere Isabelle’s voice dropped to a whisper-the cross stitched onto the breast of every Bernardine nun had been torn off, the stitches still faintly visible against the bloody cambric.
“It was M`ere Marie,” said Isabelle flatly. “M`ere Marie, back from the dead.”
I had to intervene. “That isn’t possible,” I said crisply. “You know what Marguerite is like. She’s always seeing things. Last year she thought she saw demons coming out of the bakehouse chimney, but it was only a nest of jackdaws under the eaves. People don’t come back from the dead.”
Isabelle cut me short. “Oh, but they do.” The little voice was hard. “My uncle, the bishop, dealt with a similar case in Aquitaine years ago.”
“What case?” Impossible for me to keep the scorn from my voice. She looked at me, no doubt concocting some penance to inflict upon me at a later time.
“A case of witchcraft,” she said.
I stared at her. “I don’t understand,” I said at last. “M`ere Marie was the kindest, most gentle woman alive. How could you possibly believe-”
“The devil may take a pleasing countenance if he chooses.” Her tone was cold and final. “The signs-the curse of blood, my dreams, and now this damnable visitation…How can anyone doubt it? What other explanation can there be?”
I had to stop this. “A person given to fanciful imaginings may see things which are not,” I told her. “If anyone else had seen this-apparition…”
“But they did.” The small voice was triumphant. “We all did. All of us.”
Her pronouncement was not strictly true. When Marguerite screamed, maybe half a dozen nuns were within earshot, M`ere Isabelle among them. Running from the dazzling sunshine into the dark church, their vision unused to the gloom, what they saw was little enough. A shape, a white bonnet…The vision turned at their approach and seemed to flee into the crypt. By then more nuns had arrived. Later each claimed to have seen the same apparition-even the latecomers who could only have witnessed the ensuing disturbance. I even found so-called witnesses to the incident who had been working in the fields all afternoon. But M`ere Isabelle, armed with crucifix and lantern, flanked by Marguerite and Tomasine, entered the crypt to search for evidence of human interference, having first unlocked the gate through which no mortal could have passed. Their search was in vain. No sign of the ghostly nun was found. But by M`ere Marie’s tomb, its seal unbroken and the mortar still fresh, they found traces of the same sweet-smelling red ichor that had tainted the abbey water, a dribble of the stuff having seemingly leaked from the stone cell containing M`ere Marie’s coffin…
LeMerle looked concerned and insisted upon going to inspect the scene of the incident at once. I returned to my duties. It was clear M`ere Isabelle was annoyed that I had accompanied LeMerle to Barb^atre-though she grudgingly accepted his assurance that I was needed to carry food and medicines to a poor family there-and I was put to work in the kitchens, peeling vegetables for the evening meal. There I had plenty of time to think over what had happened.
It seems too much of a coincidence. Last week I went to Barb^atre and Perette vanished for three days. This week, Marguerite saw visions, once more in my absence. Both times I was with LeMerle. Had he engineered this purposely to have me out of the way? Certainly I would have tried to intervene in both cases if I had been there. But what reason can he have for such action? A practical joke, he told me when he gave me the tablets of dye for the well. And a fake vision of a hooded nun might as easily be another. I can easily envisage Cl'emente accepting to take part. But what reason can he have for such a cruel succession of practical jokes? Surely the last thing he wants is to attract notice to the abbey or to himself. And yet LeMerle is subtle, cunning. If he planned it so, it must have been for a reason. But what that reason may be eludes me. If only I could somehow find out who played the ghost and how she managed to escape seemingly into midair…But the frenzy of interest that this prank has already ignited must be enough to still the most voluble of tongues. Did he plan that too? And how many other trifling favors has he granted, payment to be deferred? And who are his acolytes here? Alfonsine? Cl'emente? Antoine? Myself?