Holy Fools Read Free Page A

assassination. As if the name itself might lift the curse and blind the people to the corruptions of Church and Court and the ever-growing ambitions of the Régente Marie. The old king was a soldier, a seasoned man of government. With Henri, we knew where we stood. But this little Louis is only nine years old. Already, barely two months after his father’s death, the rumors have begun: de Sully, the king’s adviser, has been replaced by a favorite of the Médicis woman. The Condés have returned. I need no oracle to foresee uneasy times ahead. Normally, these things do not concern us, here at Noirs Moustiers. But, like France, we need the security of leadership. Like France, we fear the unknown.
    Without the Reverend Mother we remain in flux, left to our own devices, while a message is sent to the bishop in Rennes. But our holiday atmosphere is tainted by uncertainty. The corpse lies in the chapel with candles burning and myrrh in a censer, for it is high summer and the air is foul and ripe. We hear nothing from the mainland, but we know the journey to Rennes should take four days at least. Meanwhile, we drift anchorless. And we need our anchor: the laxity of our former regime has become stretched still further until it is shapeless and without meaning. We barely worship. Duties are forgotten. Each nun turns to what gives her most comfort, Antoine to food, Marguerite to drink, Alfonsine to the scrubbing of the cloisters over and over on her knees until her skin breaks and she has to be carried to her cell with the scrubbing brush still clutched in her trembling hand. Some weep without knowing why. Some have sought out the players, who have remained in the village, two miles away. I heard them coming back late to the dorter last night and caught laughter and a hot reek of wine and sex from the opened window.
    Outwardly, little has changed. I carry on much as usual. I tend my herbs; I write my journal, I walk to the harbor with Fleur, I change the candles by the poor corpse in the chapel. This morning I said a prayer of my own, without recourse to the gilded saints in their niches, alone and in silence. But the trouble within me grows daily. I have not forgotten my premonition on the day of the players.
    Last night in
the silence of my cubicle, I read the cards. But there was no comfort for me there. As Fleur slept, heedless, in her cot at my bedside, again and again I drew the same combination. The Tower. The Hermit. Death. And my dreams were uneasy.

4
    JULY 8TH, 1610
     
    The Abbey
of Sainte Marie-de-la-mer stands in a piece of reclaimed marshland some two miles from the sea. To the left, marshes that flood regularly in winter, bringing the brackish waters less than a stone’s throw from our doorway and occasionally seeping through into the cellarium where our food is stored. To the right, the road leading into town, where carts and horses pass and every Thursday a procession of vendors moving from one market to another with their assortments of cloths, baskets, leather, and foodstuffs. It is an old abbey, founded some two hundred years ago by a community of black friars and paid for in the only true coin the Church accepts: the fear of damnation.
    In those days of indulgences and corruption a noble family ensured its succession to the Kingdom by giving its name to an abbey; but the friars were dogged by misfortune from the start. Plague wiped them out sixty years after the abbey’s completion, and the buildings were abandoned until two generations later, when the Bernardines took them over.
    There must have been far more of them than there are of us, however, for the abbey could house twice as many as we have here, but time and the weather have done their work on the once-fine architecture.
    Yet there must have been wealth enough lavished upon it once, for there is good marble flooring in the church and the one unbroken window is of marvelous design, but since then, the winds across the flats have eroded the stone and