Amandine Read Free Page A

especially you, shall never know who this person is. I’ve become something of an expert in espionage over these past few months, a trader in the discreet market of buying and selling confidences. Double confidences. Yes, I’ve prepared thoroughly for the child’s welfare, Mater. At least half her blood is good. Half her blood comes from me and mine, Mater.”

CHAPTER III

    W HEN THE LADY HAS GONE AWAY AND PAUL HAS PLACED THE thick, white sealed packet into the wall safe in her office, where it will stay until the bishop’s emissary comes to retrieve it, she climbs the twisting stone steps to the convent living quarters. To the cells fronted by thick oak doors that face either side of the dark corridor. Always silent, usually empty at this time of day but for the housekeeping nuns, who move about with baskets of rags and brushes and tins of sulfur-smelling wax, brown glass bottles of lemon oil, today blithe laughter seeps from under the last door on the corridor.
    Once the convent storage room, the long reach of the lady with the soft black eyes had brought local artisans to work at polishing the sprawling gray flags of its floor, reglazing long, lead-paned windows, scraping away layer upon layer of
papier peint
—all these the last traces of the epoch when the convent was the courtly villa of a highborn Spanish family from Biarritz.
    Paul throws open the door, waits on the threshold for it to swing wide, sharply claps her hands to gain the attention of a group of twitteringnuns tightly gathered in one part of the room. Their glee unaffected by her command, Paul claps her hands again, shouts
“silence,”
and this time the nuns break ranks, make room for her, flail their hands in a gesture of invitation.
    Plump and tawny as a russet apple, the well-made young woman who sits in their midst wears the coarse, dark dress of a peasant, short leather boots, thick black stockings and, from beneath a black kerchief knotted—perhaps too fetchingly for Paul’s taste—above her forehead, tight blond curls fall. An ex-Benedictine postulant arrived at the convent from her
Champenois
village several months earlier, she is called Solange. In her arms, she holds the infant, her head bent adoringly to it. Behind Solange stands a stout, red-cheeked young woman smelling of starch and soap and wearing a long white pinafore over a much-mended black dress. She will be
nourrice
, wet nurse, to the infant.
    Furnishings and accoutrements packed in unmarked cartons and trunks have been carefully arranged by Solange upon the freshly waxed floors, upon a handsome collection of lush red and yellow Turkey rugs. There is a white iron cradle wrought fine as lace and fitted in hand-embroidered sheets and coverlets and, alongside it, a white-chintz-draped baldachin, a bath table, a tiny antiquated rocking chair with a white velvet cushion, a wide, plush divan with down-filled yellow pillows, an armoire hung with a baby girl’s clothes, a tall gold and white Empire chest, a small library case—still empty and with cartons of children’s books and classics piled near it, a black-lacquered writing desk with crystal-knobbed drawers. There is a little chair, which, when its switch is wound, swings slowly to the melody of “Clair de Lune.” A stately blue leather, chrome-trimmed perambulator sits under the windows. Yellow flames flap in the hearth of a black marble fireplace. All these compose a nursery and bedroom for the child and Solange. Too, there is an alcove where the
nourrice
will occasionally sleep.
    Paul stays apart, shouts, “I believed you’d all understood, you and the rest of your sisters, that, though I’d acquiesced, respectfully acquiesced to the curia’s request that this foundling, that this child, thischild and her nurse, be permitted refuge here, I did not acquiesce to your being party to it. These two are neither guests nor visitors but a homeless pair placed in our beneficent custody who shall be offered a form of patronage