Chapter One

Upstate New York.

August 1906.

Half-moon and a wrack of gray clouds.

Church windows and thirty nuns singing the Night Office in Gregorian chant. Matins. Lauds. And then silence.

Wind, and a nighthawk teetering on it and yawing away into woods.

Wallowing beetles in green pond water.

Toads.

Cattails sway and unsway.

Grape leaves rattle and settle again.

Workhorses sleeping in horse manes of pasture.

Wooden reaper. Walking plow. Hayrick.
 

Limestone pebbles on the paths in the garth. Jasmine. Lilac. Narcissus.

Mother Céline gracefully walking, head down.

Crickets.

Mooncreep and spire.

Ears are flattened to the head of a stone panther waterspout.

OUR LADY OF SORROWS ERECTED 1856 CHURCH AND PRIORY OF THE SISTERS OF THE CRUCIFIXION

Tallow candles in red glass jars shudder on a high altar.

White hallway and dark mahogany joists. Wide plank floors walked soft and smooth as soap.

Sister Dominique says a prayer to Saint Peregrine for her Canadian nephew's cancer as she dashes flour on a kitchen table and turns over a great slab of dough that rolls as slowly as a white pig.

Sister Emmanuelle hunches over a pink sewing cushion, her quick hands tying off bobbins and pins as she creates lace periwinkles for the white corporal that the holy chalice will rest on.

* * *

On the prioress's great pecan desk, a red Latin missal is shut upon a five-dollar bill. Tasks are written on a paper held down with a jar of India ink and a green fountain pen. Envelopes from patrons have been neatly slit open and are shuffled up in a blond wicker basket.

Sister Sabine is in a jean apron as she strolls toward the milking barn between Guernsey cows, her hands riding their caramel hides. She smells her palms and smiles.

Wings batter and bluster. Tree branches nod and subside.

East and the night sky gradually deteriorating. A nickel light is just above the horizon.

Sister Hermance waits in the hallway outside the sisters' cells. In her right hand are wooden castanets. She peers at a silver chatelaine watch that is attached to a waist-deep necklace of black satin ribbon. She pauses until the hour is precisely five. She then hoists her hand high, clicks the castanets twice, and cleaves the Great Silence by shouting, "In Jesus Christ, my sisters, let us rise!"

She hears six or seven sitting up and sleepily responding, "His holy name be praised!" and she walks down to the hallway's turning.

Sister Aimée stays lying on her palliasse just one more moment. She then gets up and hates the morning before achingly getting to her knees on the floor in order to pray an Ave Maria.

Mother Saint-Raphaël tugs her plain white nightgown up over her head. She is hugely overweight but her legs are slight as a goat's. Tightly sashed around her stomach just below the great green-veined bowls of her breasts are cuttings from the French garden's rosebushes, the dark thorns sticking into skin that is scarlet with infection. She gets into a gray habit, tying it with a sudden jerk. She winces and shuts her eyes.

Waterdrops from the night's dew haltingly creep down green reeds.

A rabbit skitters forward in the priest's garden and twitches a radish leaf with its nose before tearing it loose. Ears tilt as it hastily chews and settles over its paws.

Eighty years old and shrinking with age, his wrists as thin as pine kindling, Reverend Henri Marriott is sleeping in his house just outside the sisters' cloister, twisted up in his nightshirt, a hissing kerosene lamp still lit, a book of philosophy skewed beneath his left arm. His soft white hair is harrowed and wild and his week-old white beard is stained faintly with food. Teetering against his neck is a gold cross botonnée that he got at his first Mass in Louvain, Belgium, fifty-five years ago. When the porter raps twice on the house door, the priest wakes up with a sudden inhalation, a "huh" of astonishment., and then he hears Sister Anne trespass inside the house and sidle up to his bedroom door and pause and ask him, "Are you truly up, Père Marriott?"

"Yes. Completely-"

"You have High Mass today, too. You should shave."

She is just four years a widow. She wifes him out of habit. Henri Marriott says a prayer, as always, for Sister Anne's late husband, then sits up and tests his feet on the floor planks.

She asks, "Will you need our help getting dressed?"

With pain in his joints, he stands up and totters to his dresser, putting his hands flat upon it before saying, "Your priest is much better today, Sister Anne."

"We are so pleased," she says, and goes away.

Sisters who are still in their nightgowns and gray flannel robes are bent over the great tin washing bowls, rinsing their mouths and spitting, or soaping their hands and faces. Just to their left are sisters standing next to the indoor privies with demurely lowered eyes. Here alone there is one mercuryplated looking glass, which is no larger than a windowpane and hanging in a plain wooden frame. Sister Pauline is peering at herself in it as she tucks her hair and pins on the soft white veil of a novice, and then she sees Sister Saint-Léon just behind her shoulder signing Too long, here, you. Sister Pauline shrugs her regret and Sister Saint-Léon jots a note on her hand pad.

Reverend Mother Céline stands patiently in the vestibule just beside a sixteenth-century painting of the Annunciation. While the sisters get into their positions for the solemn entrance into the oratory for the canonical hour of Prime, the prioress does not speak but smiles or raises her hand slightly in greeting, and then she goes to her place next to Mother Saint-Raphaël and the great brass bell in the campanile rings...