“Marie,” Father Jean said, “it was a cooked carrot. You cannot plant a cooked carrot. Do you add lying to your sins?”
I gasped. I had forgotten. “I did not know it would not grow, Father. I swear it.”
Sister Marta, who supervised the kitchen work, decided I would be of more use in the weavers’ barn.
The weaving barn, the grange de tissage, was a mass of confusion. Baskets overflowing with wads of yet-to-be-spun wool hung from walls at one end. Similar ones running off with flaxen tow clung to the other end as if they were bats in a ceiling. Cloth bolts filled bins and shelves in complete abandon. Coloring and dyes filled another room, and outside, great vats filled with horrific-smelling concoctions, far worse than anything I had known sleeping with goats, awaited processes I had yet to witness.
The sister in charge of the beginners there, which included two other children, a boy and a girl, and me, put us all to carding wool. Her name was Sister Joseph, which I found quite confusing. I did not ask her why she had a man’s name. I decided to ask Donatienne when I got a chance. Sister Joseph asked me how old I was. Eleven, I knew. I wondered what would be the better answer for sympathy. “Nine,” I said.
I still went to chapel first thing in the morning, took French lessons, and had meals. All afternoon I worked in the barn. I left every day covered in lint and fell asleep in my cot next to Donatienne. I needed her to translate what Sister Joseph said to me, but every time my compagne entered the wool room she began such sneezing and coughing it was as if she were breathing in poison. Her eyes swelled shut and her nose ran, and she grew faint of heart until they insisted she leave.
The two children were French but a third girl spoke English, and therefore had a compagne, an older nun named Sister évangélique. Sister évangélique was not patient, and she had no teeth at all, so all her words in either language were slurred and full of sounds that did not belong in them. I stayed close to Sister Joseph rather than asking for a translation. Both Sister Joseph and Sister évangélique bowed their heads, their eyes wide, lips sealed, when Sister Agathe approached. I did not lower my head before her but stared straight at her when she crossed the room.
One time, right after morning chapel, Sister Agathe tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Your eyes are so hard. Your soul is far away, is it not? You must accept your life. So much sadness you have seen.” She carried a large basket covered with a towel.
I smiled and said, “Not at all. I will carry that to the rectory for you.”
“This is a bushel of laundry. Why do you want to go to the rectory? Every day you ask me to go there for something or other.”
“I hoped—” I stopped in mid-sentence, trying to think up a believable ploy. “To find Reverend Johansen. I was sure he was with the Brothers.” I smiled my most convincing smile. “He is my uncle.”
“I will ask if you may visit him, since he is your uncle.”
“Will you? Thank you, Sister,” I said, and went skipping off to class. I stopped in mid-step so abruptly that my shoe left a mark on the cobble. It was not what she said that stopped me, but the sudden realization that I could not distinguish in which language I had heard it. Was I becoming French? “Oh, la, non!” I said.
After lessons, Sister Agathe took me to the rectory door, knocked, asked through the spy window for Reverend Johansen. She spoke in whispers to the voice on the other side so that I could not understand. Afterward, Sister Agathe said he worked in the vineyard with other men. I was not allowed near those men and they were not to come near the girls. “You are allowed to pray for him,” she said. “Not to see him. We protect our girls from all contact with men.” I did not have to pretend my disappointment at her words. One friend, no matter that he was old Reverend Johansen, made such a difference in my hopes for escape. As I walked away, I felt as if someone had hung a boulder about my neck.
The girls from the grange got potato soup with leeks at noon. If weather permitted we sat outside under a tree as if it were a picnic, always under the watchful eyes of les bonnes soeurs. Sister évangélique knew English, and could tell Sister Joseph what we said. Christine came to my side one day, asking, “Have you turned Catholic?”
“I am only learning to comb wool, waiting until I can go home,” I replied. “I have written to the king of England to notify my mother where I am. She will be here soon.”
Christine’s face registered her scorn. “Pah. King of England. I say you were always Catholic and destined for hell.”
I shrugged and asked, “Have you seen Patience? Princess Patience?”
“She’s in the sick ward with Rachael.”
“What is wrong with them?”