Four months later she became a novice at the Cistercian abbey at Fervaques,7 founded in 1140 by Sénéchal de Vermandois.
Annelette wept, gasping for breath, wiping her nose on her sleeve, smothering her mournful sobs with her hand for fear a sister or novice might pass the herbarium and hear her.
Stop. Stop this instant, you big gangling fool! Pull yourself together at once. They didn’t love you, not even your mother, whose only desire was to leave the world as soon as possible and join the angels in heaven. And what of it! Nearly thirty years have passed. They may all be dead. Will you carry these absurd regrets with you to your grave? Will you continue making a fool of yourself by trying to show them how wrong they were not to love you? They didn’t care about you and it is time you stopped battling ghosts. Death is stalking you. Fight. Fight for your quest, for yourself, for Éleusie de Beaufort, for Madame Agnès. Stop fighting a memory, people whose faces have become faded images in your mind’s eye.
She sat down on the small stone bench beneath the herbarium window and remained motionless for a long while, her mind drifting. Gradually, her sadness ebbed away and was replaced by a familiar weariness.
How long did she sit there? She could not say. When she finally stood up she thought she heard the bell for vespers.+
Figures, gestures, voices that she had seen, observed, heard a thousand times flashed through her mind. Blanche de Blinot, the senior nun and prioress as well as the Abbess’s second in command. Blanche, whose deafness and senility had always grated on her nerves. Curiously, the warm compassion she had felt for the old woman had gradually been replaced by a feeling of contempt. Blanche’s obsessive fear of being poisoned made her seem even more like a dying woman clinging pathetically to life. Annelette wondered whether the old nun’s hysteria when she learned of the deaths of Hedwige du Thilay and above all of Yolande de Fleury didn’t reflect her fear of being the next victim rather than her attachment to the treasurer nun8 or the kindly sister in charge of the granary. Jeanne d’Amblin who sipped her soup so slowly that it felt as if she would be there all night. The dreadful events that had taken place at the abbey in the last few months had brought Annelette closer to the extern sister, whom she had hitherto unfairly resented. It was Jeanne’s task to collect donations from charitable souls or those ordered by law to give alms as a penance for minor misdemeanours. As such, she was not subjected to the cloister – unlike, among others, the apothecary – and was allowed to savour the outside world each time she left the abbey. Berthe de Marchiennes. It was true that Berthe had lost some of her pompous arrogance and no longer wore that perpetually pious expression. Annelette had to admit that the cellarer nun9 had shown some measure of bravery when she confessed to having joined the nunnery because her family had rejected her, and she had no prospects of marriage or any future. And yet she was still suspicious of Berthe and was not entirely convinced by her willingness to help find the murderess. And what of Thibaude de Gartempe, the guest mistress? Thibaude bustled about between her beds and wore herself out sluicing the blackened walls as though in an effort to prove to them all that she was not to blame for the fire. Thibaude, whose madness lay dangerously close to the surface. Annelette could still picture the woman shortly before Hedwige’s demise, screaming hysterically and demanding to leave the abbey at once, digging her nails into the apothecary’s arm until she was forced to slap her. What if her extreme behaviour was merely a clever ploy, an act? And the stout, sullen Emma de Pathus, who Annelette suspected took out her perpetual ill temper too readily on the novices and on her students, since as schoolmistress she alone had the authority to raise her hand to them. Annelette had noticed many a tearful eye and reddened cheek bearing the mark of Emma’s hand. What had she and the infamous Grand Inquisitor been talking about when the Abbess had discovered them in conversation? And the doe-eyed sister in charge of the fishponds and henhouses, Geneviève Fournier? With whom might she have discussed her missing eggs? Geneviève, who could no longer be heard singing canticles at the top of her voice to encourage her hens to lay. Her joy had been silenced for ever, it seemed. And Sylvine Taulier, the sister in charge of the bread ovens, the tiny, stout, tireless woman who churned out loaves as if her life depended on it? And the others? What a woeful inventory. Whom could she trust? Jeanne, perhaps, or more probably Elisaba Ferron who had, at the apothecary’s insistence, replaced Adélaïde Condeau as the sister in charge of meals and the kitchens. This middle-aged widow of a wealthy merchant from the Nogent region had recently taken her final vows. Elisaba was big enough to knock out any villain attempting to meddle with her pots and pans. As for her hardened character, it befitted a strong woman who concealed a compassionate nature beneath her stentorian voice and no-nonsense shop owner’s manner.
Who? Who, then?
Annelette had started off on the assumption that the murderess was intent on stealing the Abbess’s seal. She must think again. All the same, she was not to blame for her mistakes, which were born of the Abbess’s mistrust!
Annelette gave a faint smile. Good. She was becoming angry and bellicose again.
She must now reconstruct the various elements, starting with the killer’s true motive: the secret library and its precious works. Annelette walked over to the tall cabinet and took down a bag of Ricinus communis10 whose oil she only occasionally used as a depurative, on account of its toxicity. She spread the grey seeds streaked with reddish-brown on the table she used for weighing and making up her preparations, and sat down on the little stool. She slid one seed to the left: Adélaïde Condeau, their good-natured, if rather witless, cook, who had been fatally poisoned with aconite in a cup of lavender-and-honey tea meant for Blanche de Blinot, the prioress and guardian of the Abbess’s seal. She placed a second seed beside the first: Blanche, who scarcely left the steam room and spent so much of her time snoozing that the sisters would occasionally look in on her to make sure she hadn’t died in her sleep. Curiously, the aconite used in the tea had not been taken from the cabinet in the herbarium, as Annelette had first feared. The apothecary placed a third seed above the other two: Hedwige du Thilay, the treasurer nun. Next to it she placed a fourth: Jeanne d’Amblin, whose intelligence Annelette deemed worthy of that name. Admittedly, Jeanne had been one of her main suspects up until she herself was poisoned. The fact that she had been on one of her rounds when the yew powder was stolen from the herbarium was further proof of her innocence. Had both friends been targeted or had either Jeanne or Hedwige partaken of the poisoned drink meant for only one of them? In this case Annelette was certain that the murderess had used yew powder stolen from her store in the herbarium. Hedwige’s symptoms proved it, as did the convulsions, shaking and vomiting Jeanne had suffered before falling into a semi-permanent slumber. Annelette felt a vague sense of sorrow as she placed a fifth seed beside the others: Yolande de Fleury – sweet-natured, jolly Yolande who had lived only for her dream that little Thibaut enjoyed health and happiness. Who had been lying to her for two long years by bringing her good news of the dead child? Why?
Annelette then made a little mound out of several castor-oil seeds to represent herself, Éleusie, Madame de Souarcy, the Pope’s emissary and the contaminated rye discovered by Adélaïde in the herbarium shortly before her death. She contemplated it at length then demolished it with a flick of her finger before forming it again. No. She had left out at least three seeds: Emma de Pathus, the schoolmistress who had been seen talking to the fiend Florin; Thibaude de Gartempe, for who was better placed than the guest mistress to create a diversion by setting fire to the guest house? And finally, the shard of glass which had become embedded in her shoe next to Jeanne’s bed. Glass was a precious commodity, and its presence in the dormitory was puzzling to say the least.
She fingered the seed representing Yolande. Strangely, the death of the sister in charge of the granary had affected Annelette more than she could have imagined. She missed the plump young woman’s joviality. And yet she had always considered her permanent good spirits a sign of shallowness. Most of all, she regretted her attempt to use Yolande’s dead son in order to force her to tell them who had been bringing her news of him. The bright-red streaks on Yolande’s deathly pale corpse resembled