7

ANNUNCIATION

THE COACH CROSSED OVER the cobbles of a bridge with a great clattering of hooves and wheels. The racket was as nothing to the noise inside Minnie’s head.

“A nun,” Minnie said, as they passed onto a dirt road and the noise decreased. She sounded as blank as she felt. “My mother…was a nun?”

Mrs. Simpson—her aunt, Aunt Simpson, Aunt Miriam…she must get used to thinking of her that way—took a deep breath and nodded. With that bit of news out of the way, she had regained some of her composure.

“Yes. A sister of the Order of Divine Mercy, in Paris. You know of them?”

Minnie shook her head. She had thought she was prepared to hear anything, but she hadn’t been, by a long chalk.

“What—what do they look like?” It was the first thing to come into her head. “Black, gray, white…?”

Mrs. Simpson relaxed a little, bracing her back against the blue cushions to counter the jolting of the coach.

“Their habit is white, with a gray veil. They are a contemplative order but not cloistered.”

“What does that mean, contemplative?” Minnie burst out. “What are they contemplating? Not their vows of chastity, apparently.”

Her aunt looked startled, but her mouth twitched a little.

“Apparently not,” she said. “Their chief occupation is prayer. Contemplation of God’s mercy and His divine nature.”

The day was cool enough, but Minnie felt hot blood rise from her chest to her ears.

“I see. So she—my mother—had an encounter with the Holy Spirit during a particularly intense prayer, did she?” She’d meant it sarcastically, but perhaps…“Wait a moment. My father is my father, isn’t he?”

Her aunt overlooked the gibe.

“You are the daughter of Raphael Wattiswade, I assure you,” she said dryly, with a glance at Minnie’s face.

One of the small knots of doubt in Minnie’s chest loosened. The possibility of this all being a hoax—if nothing more sinister—receded. Very few people knew her father’s real name. If this woman did, then perhaps…

She sat back, crossed her arms, and fixed Mrs. Simpson with a hard look.

“So. What happened? And where are we going?” she added belatedly.

“To your mother,” her aunt said tersely. “As to what happened…it was a book.”

“Of course it was.” Minnie’s confidence in the woman’s story moved up another small notch. “What book?”

“A Book of Hours.” Mrs. Simpson waved away an inquisitive wasp that had flown in through the window. “I said that the order’s chief occupation is prayer. They have others. Some of the nuns are scribes; some are artists. Soeur Emmanuelle—that’s the name Hélène took when she entered the convent—was both,” she explained, seeing Minnie’s momentary confusion. “The order produces very beautiful books—things of a religious nature, of course, Bibles, devotionals—and sells them in order to support the community.”

“And my father learned about this?”

Her aunt shrugged. “It’s no secret. The order’s books are well known, as are their skills. I imagine Raphael had dealt with the convent before. He—”

“He’s never dealt with them, so far as I know, or I would have heard of them.”

“Do you think he would risk your finding out?” her aunt said bluntly. “Whatever his defects of character, I will say the man knows how to keep a secret. He severed all connection with the order, after…” Her mouth pressed tight and she made a flicking gesture with one hand that had nothing to do with the wasp.

Minnie’s teeth were clenched, but she managed to get a few words out.

“Bloody tell me what happened!”

Her aunt looked at her searchingly, the frills on her cap trembling with the vibration of the coach, then shrugged.

“Bon,” she said.

What had happened (“in brief,” said Mrs. Simpson) was that Raphael Wattiswade had acquired a very rare Book of Hours, made more than a century before. It was beautiful but in poor condition. The cover could be repaired, its missing jewels replaced—but some of the illustrations had suffered badly from the effects of time and use.

“And so Raphael came to the abbess of the order—a woman he knew well, in the course of business—and asked whether one of their more talented scribes might be able to restore the illustrations. For a price, of course.”

Normally the book would simply be taken away to the scriptorium for examination and work, but in this case, some pages had been completely obliterated. Raphael, however, had discovered several letters from the original owner, rhapsodizing to a friend about his new acquisition and giving detailed descriptions of the more important illustrations.

“And he couldn’t just give the letters to the abbess?” Minnie asked skeptically. Not that she could think why her father would purposely set out to seduce a nun he’d never heard of or set eyes on…

Mrs. Simpson shook her head.

“I said the book was from a previous age? The letters were written in German, and a very archaic form of that barbarous language. No one in the order was able to translate it.”

Given that and the fragile state of the book, Soeur Emmanuelle was allowed to travel to Raphael’s workshop—“With a proper chaperon, to be sure,” Mrs. Simpson added, with a fresh pressing of the lips.

“To be sure.”

Her aunt gave a very Gallic shrug. “But things happen, don’t they?”

“Evidently they do.” She eyed Mrs. Simpson, who, she thought, seemed tolerably free with her father’s Christian name.

“C’est vrai. And what happened, of course, was you.”

There was no good response to that, and Minnie didn’t try to find one.

“She was only nineteen,” her aunt finally said, looking down at her clasped hands, and speaking in a voice so soft that Minnie hardly heard it over the rumble of the coach. And how old had her father been? she wondered. He was forty-five now…twenty-eight. Maybe twenty-seven, allowing for the length of a pregnancy.

“Bloody old enough to know better,” Minnie muttered, but under her breath. “I suppose she—my mother”—she forced herself to say the words, which now felt shocking in her mouth— “was obliged to leave the order? I mean, you can’t be pregnant in a convent, surely.”

“You might be surprised,” her aunt observed cynically. “But in this case, you’re right. They sent her away, to a sort of asylum in Rouen—a terrible place.” A flush had begun to burn on Mrs. Simpson’s high cheekbones. “I heard nothing of it until Raphael appeared at my door one night, very distraught, to tell me she was gone.”

“What did you do?”

“We went and got her,” her aunt said simply. “What else?”

“You said ‘we.’ Do you mean you and…my father?”

Her aunt blinked, shocked.

“No, of course not. My husband and myself.” She breathed deep, clearly trying to calm herself. “It—she—it was most distressing.”

Soeur Emmanuelle, torn from the community that had been her home since she entered the convent as a twelve-year-old novice, treated as an object of shame, having no knowledge or experience of pregnancy, without friend or family, and locked up in an establishment that sounded very like a prison, had been first hysterical, then had gradually withdrawn into a state of despair and finally of stone-like silence, sitting and staring all day at the blank wall, taking no notice even of food.

“She was skin and bones when I found her,” Mrs. Simpson said, her voice shaking with remembered fury. “She didn’t even know me!”

Soeur Emmanuelle had very gradually been brought back to a cognizance of the world—but not the world she had left.

“I don’t know whether it was leaving her order—they were her family!—or the shock of being with child, but…” She shook her head, desolation draining the color from her face. “She lost her reason entirely. Took no notice of her state and believed herself to be back in the convent, going about her usual work.”

They had humored her, given her a habit, provided her with paint and brushes, vellum and parchment, and she had shown some signs of being aware of her surroundings—would talk sometimes and knew her sister. But then the birth had come, inexorable.

“She had refused to think about it,” Mrs. Simpson said, with a sigh. “But there you were…pink and slimy and loud.” Soeur Emmanuelle, unable to cope with the situation, lost her tentative grip on sanity and reverted to her earlier state of blank detachment.

So I drove my own mother to insanity and destroyed her life. Her heart had risen into her throat, a hard, pulsing lump that hurt with each beat. Still, she had to speak.

“The shock, you said.” She licked dry lips. “Was it just…me? I mean, was it rape, do you think?”

To Minnie’s infinite relief, Mrs. Simpson looked aghast at the word.

“Nom de Dieu! No. No, certainly not.” Her mouth twisted a little as she recovered from the brief shock. “Say what you will about Raphael, I’m sure he’s never taken a woman who wasn’t willing. Mind, he can make them willing in very short order.”

Minnie didn’t want to hear one word about willing women and her father.

“Where, exactly, are we going?” she asked in a firm voice. “Where is my mother?”

“In her own world, ma chère.”

IT WAS A modest farm cottage, standing by itself at the edge of a broad, sunny field, though the house itself was sheltered by well-grown oaks and beeches. Perhaps a quarter mile farther on was a small village that boasted a surprisingly large stone church, with a tall spire.

“I wanted her to be close enough to hear the bells,” Mrs. Simpson explained, nodding toward the distant church as their coach came to a halt outside the cottage. “They don’t keep the hours of praise as a Catholic abbey would, of course, but she doesn’t usually realize that, and the sound gives her comfort.”

She looked at Minnie for a long moment, biting her lip, doubt plain in her eyes. Minnie touched her aunt’s hand, as gently as she could, though the pulse beating in her ears nearly deafened her.

“I won’t hurt her,” she whispered in French. “I promise you.”

The look of doubt didn’t leave her aunt’s eyes, but her face relaxed a little and she nodded to the groom outside, who opened the door and offered his arm to help her down.

An anchorite, her aunt had said; Sister Emmanuelle believed herself to be an anchorite. A hermitess, fixed in place, her only duty that of prayer. “She feels…secure, I think,” Mrs. Simpson had said, though the creases in her brow showed the shadow of long worry. “Safe, you know?”

“Safe from the world?” Minnie had asked. Her aunt had given her a very direct look, and the creases in her brow grew deeper.

“Safe from everything,” she had said. “And everyone.”

And so Minerva now followed her aunt to the door, filled with a mixture of anxiety, astonishment, sorrow, and—unavoidably—hope.

She’d heard of anchorites, of course; they were mentioned frequently in religious histories—of saints, monasteries, persecutions, reformations—but at the moment the word conjured up only a ridiculous vision of St. Simeon Stylites, who had lived on top of a pillar for thirty years—and, when his niece was orphaned, generously set her up with her very own pillar, next to his. After a few years of this life, the niece had reportedly climbed down and decamped with a man, much to the disapproval of the history’s author.

The door of the cottage opened, revealing a large, cheerful-looking woman who greeted Miriam Simpson warmly and looked with pleasant inquiry at Minnie.

“This is Miss Rennie,” Mrs. Simpson said, gesturing toward Minnie. “I’ve brought her to see my sister, Mrs. Budger.”

Mrs. Budger’s sparse gray brows rose toward her cap, but she made a brief bob in Minnie’s direction.

“Your servant, mum,” she said, and flapped her apron at a large calico cat. “Shoo, cat. The lady’s none o’ your business. He knows it’s nearly time for Sister’s tea,” she explained. “Come in, ladies, the kettle’s a-boiling already.”

Minnie was in a fever of impatience, this interrupted by stabs of icy terror.

“Soeur Emmanuelle, she still calls herself,” Mrs. Simpson had explained on the way. “She spends her days—and often her nights”—her wide brow had creased at the words—“in prayer, but she does have visitors. People who’ve heard of her, who come to ask her prayers for one thing or another.

“At first, I was afraid,” she’d said, and turned to look out the coach window at a passing farm wagon, “that they’d upset her, telling her their troubles. But she seems…better when she’s listened to someone.”

“Does she…talk to them?” Minnie had asked. Her aunt had glanced at her, then paused for a few seconds too long before saying, “Sometimes,” and turning toward the window again.

It doesn’t matter, she told herself, clenching her fists in the folds of her skirt to avoid strangling Mrs. Budger, who was slowly, slowly puttering around the hearth, assembling a few slices of buttered bread, a wedge of cheese, and a mug on a tray, at the same time fetching down a chipped teapot and three more stone mugs, a dented tin tea caddy, and a small, sticky blue pot of honey. It doesn’t matter if she won’t speak to me. It doesn’t even matter if she can’t hear me. I just want to see her!