A Provençal Mystery (16 page)

“Yet couldn’t a nun have sneaked into the archives to lie in wait in the bathroom?” Roger asked.

“Unlikely,” I said. “But I guess it could have happened like that.” I didn't mention that I had already considered it.

Roger paused a moment, then said, “There is something else. The police were not sure if you knew about it or not, since you did straighten Agatha’s habit. She had a yellow star attached to her underwear."

"A what?" A shock ran through me. I could imagine the star, though I hadn’t seen it. A violation. The murderer lifting the habit and attaching a nasty little message. It explained why Agatha’s skirt was awry. The killer hadn't straightened it all the way. All I had done was pull the skirt down.

"It was quite strange," Roger said.

“A Jewish star?”

“It had six points.”

"What was it made of?” I asked, resorting to the collecting of facts as I often did when shocked by something.

“Paper.”

“And how was it attached?”

“With a needle, like the one in her tongue. That was one of the reasons we have been relatively sure that she had not mortified herself before her death, that it was the murderer who put the needle in her tongue.”

I imagined it: the killer shoving the needle through one edge of the star, down through the cloth and up again, into the other edge of the star. In my mind's eye, the hands I saw were female. I remembered my mother sewing a button on my coat while I still had it on. I remembered Rachel jabbing her needlepoint. Then I saw the hands moving up, pulling out Agatha's tongue, trying to push the needle into the spongy flesh, meeting resistance—I could not continue watching the picture in my mind.

“A woman must have done it,” I said.

“Now you’re being a sexist,” he said, leaning back with his arms on the back of the booth. “Men know how to sew.”

I was embarrassed. “Of course, of course. Anyone whose mother believes a child needs to know how to sew, or has been in the military, or lived alone.” Then perplexed and angry all over again, I said, “Why would someone do those things?”

“It has to be an anti-Semite. A neo-Nazi.”

“But Agatha was a Catholic nun!”

“Somewhere back in our ancestry is a converted Jew,” Roger said. “Perhaps that has something to do with it.”

“Seems like a red herring,” I said. “I don’t want to believe that Agatha was a target of that kind of hatred.”

“And what reason for her murder suffices then?” His voice was angry, his thick brows lowered.

“Oh, none,” I replied, shaking my head. “None at all.”

"You know, my dear Dory, we French have a penchant for anti-Semitism,” he said.

“As do Americans. Though we’re more secretive about it,” I replied. I arranged the few grains of sugar on the table in a pattern with my finger. Finally I asked the question that had been on my mind from the moment he had approached me at the archive. “Why are you confiding in me?”

“You aren’t the killer,” he replied.

“But why do you have to confide in anyone at all?” I brushed the sugar grains onto the floor.

“Perhaps the murder has something to do with convent politics,” he said. “You’ve been there, I know. Just today. Inside. You could find out what was going on there. I can’t. I’m a man.”

“True, men are not allowed within the convent interior.”

“And you’ve studied the convent’s history.”

“I study only the seventeenth century,” I said, watching his face fall. "But I think an answer might lie there.”

His face did not brighten; I was not surprised. Only a historian could seriously consider three-hundred-year-old documents as evidence for a modern-day crime. He sighed and asked without much enthusiasm in his voice, “And just how could that be?”

“Someone put a seventeenth-century nun’s diary at my place. It is not an archive document. At least it isn’t cataloged. This has to be a message to me, but I can’t figure out its meaning. Not yet." I proceeded to tell Rose’s story.

He listened, but I could see skepticism on his face. “It could be a false trail," he said.

"I thought of that,” I said.

“And what had you so excited today?” he asked. “Was it related to the diary?”

“Yes. Rose tells about the arrival of a fallen woman, a woman named Isabelle des Moulins, to Our Lady of Mercy. I went to the municipal library to find this woman’s records—they filled an entire folder—and they tell an astounding story.”

Chapter 15

“The documents describe her as a widow who led a ‘libertine’ life—they even call her a prostitute. In 1657, when she was pushing thirty, she met a noble and began an affair with him.”

“What do you think?
Was
she a prostitute?” asked Roger.

“Who knows? Widows were fair game for gossip. Anyhow, the noble paid for her board and room in a baker’s house. He kept coming around. Here, I’ve got a copy of a deposition by the baker’s wife, which tells what the neighbors thought of it all.”

I handed him the deposition, and he read it aloud in a low voice as darkness fell outside and the lights came on in the café:

* * * * *

The widow des Moulins has lived up above our shop for five months. Nearly every day, to the great scandal of the neighborhood, a man, dressed like a rich bourgeois, climbs the stairs to her apartment. He carries his shoes in his hand, so as not to make noise, but the stairs creak, and I hear him. My husband looks to see who it is, because it could be a thief or someone up to no good. But it is almost always this man. He stays up there for hours, on into the night. Sometimes I hear the two laughing together.

The widow is a young woman, quite pretty and large with child. She dresses herself in proper clothes, though she flips her skirts in a flirtatious way and does not carry herself as a widow should, but is immodest, putting herself forward.

Often the boy from the café goes up to her room carrying food—perhaps a chicken with some vegetables and a little cake. The man brings wine. And of course her bread comes from our bakery.

* * * * *

Roger looked up at me. “They ate well,” he said.

“Like rich bourgeois — or nobles,” I replied.

“Why don’t they identify him as a noble?” he asked.

“I think he wanted to keep his identity secret. Read on.”

He turned the page of the sheaf of paper on which I had copied the document.

* * * * *

The neighbors are talking. Some of them have nothing better to do, great lazy layabouts! Lucie Blanc, the locksmith’s mother-in-law, and Pierre Neveu, the chair-maker, and a few other people took it upon themselves to talk to her about her scandalous life. They wanted me to join them, but I refused. I don't stick my nose in other people's business.

They went up and knocked on her door, but she didn't open it. Instead she spoke to them from the other side of it.

“You cause scandal in the street with your goings-on, madam,” Pierre said, standing big and talking big.

“What goings-on?’” came the little voice.

“Your commerce with that bourgeois!’” shouted Lucie, who can inform the neighborhood with her noise, even though she is a small woman. She should sell fish!

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” replied the widow, but she sounded frightened. They continued to accuse her. Pierre called her a prostitute and shouted,”Open up!” But the door stayed shut. When they tried to break the door down, my husband went upstairs and made them stop. He believes in public order. Besides, doors cost money.

The next day the bourgeois came down, approached Pierre, who has that belligerent manner about him with anyone, king or peasant, and said, “How dare you talk to Madame des Moulins like that! She is a respectable woman!”

“Respectable, my eye!” answered Pierre, shaking his fist. “What are you doing up there, the two of you? Hours on end, eating, laughing, who knows what else!”

Lucie had heard the commotion from her house, three houses down, and came up the street to find out what was going on. “Up to no good,” she said. “This is a respectable street!”

Who would talk to an important man in that way, except Pierre and Lucie? They don’t know when to keep their mouths shut! The bourgeois raised his stick and shook it at them, red in the face. He was beside himself, I could see. “I will report you to the police! You cannot address me like that! I am the son of a seigneur.”

“We know who you are,” said Pierre, though he didn't. He made a rude noise. We expected him to be dragged away by the police to the jail within hours, but nothing happened.

In a way it is a shame that the woman could not be left alone, for from what I can tell she gives herself only to the bourgeois—or noble if indeed he is one—no one else. She is not a public woman, not a woman of the streets. But women who leave themselves open to talk of scandal deserve whatever they get. They say that the bourgeois locks her in. I wouldn’t know. It is not my business. Her rent is paid on time, paid up for six months, in fact.

* * * * *

“They weren't subtle,” Roger said.

“No. The rest of the documents go on to tell how when des Moulins started to ‘become very large with child,’ the noble sent her off to live in a house he owned in a little village, St. Jean. He sent her a bed. He also slept with her in it—they say he ‘enjoyed the pleasure of her body.’ The peasants saw them walking together on the edge of the woods. Big scandal—she rode behind him on his horse to Mass.”

“At least they went to Mass, whatever good it did them,” said Roger.

”You're being sarcastic,” I said.

“I always am about the Faith,” he replied.

I continued the story: “The child was born there in St. Jean. In 1658.”

“What was his name?”

“It doesn't say. The documents say that he was taken to the Hospital of the Holy Spirit.”

I looked out the window into the street. Office workers carrying briefcases were heading home. A young couple, high-school age, walked hand in hand. They could have been among the crowd of teenagers who stood on the steps of the lycée listening to Agatha’s lecture. The café was filling up with people, with talk and low laughter.

I told him the rest of the story. “Two police guards took Des Moulins to the Refuge at Our Lady of Mercy. It wasn’t the noble’s idea. The depositions don’t mention an accuser. Whoever it was waited until the noble was away in Aix to avoid embarrassing him.”

“Why is it significant that the accuser’s name doesn’t appear in the documents?”

“Because it almost always does appear in such documents—at least in my experience. Only a relative or an official had the right to put a woman in the Refuge. What had happened was illegal, or at least against the rules. Women could be jailed by the police, yes, but that was a different story. They were usually prostitutes, and they were sent to prison.”

“I see no real connection to Agatha’s death,” Roger said flatly, “though this is an interesting story.”

“I don’t either. Not yet. But I think Agatha knew there was one. She was evasive when I asked about the diary, and she encouraged me to continue reading and studying it. She might even have been the one who arranged for me to find it. And maybe she was killed because of it. So I am not giving up the idea that the diary is connected to her death. I'm going to search for answers to the questions the documents suggest. The child, for instance? What happened to it?”

“How could you possibly find that out?” Roger asked.

“I'll try to find the child's record in the files for the Hospital of the Holy Spirit. I’ll probably have to inhale nosefuls of dust in the process. Griset seems to stick the most important documents in the dustiest corners. But I’m going to find that child. I know there’s a connection.”

“You historians are always trying to make connections,” Roger said. “Some of them are flimsy.”

“Perhaps, but some are not,” I replied. I thought of how I was drawn to him now even more than before. Of all the people I knew in Avignon, he was the one I wanted to trust. Because he was Agatha’s nephew and I could see Agatha in him. Because he was a big, hairy man. I am attracted to men who look like that. But. . . Josh was a big hairy man, and look what happened with him, I thought. What was I doing? Before I could pursue the thought further, Madeleine, Rachel, and Griset came in the door of the café.

Griset grinned, ready to make some embarrassing remark, so I spoke first: “Tell me, Griset. Chateaublanc seems even more preoccupied than he has been. Why is that?”

Madeleine broke in: “He’s been after the convent to sell him a reliquary he says we have.”

“A reliquary?” asked Roger. “I’m very interested in reliquaries. What kind?”

“He says it is head-shaped.”

“Whose head is in it?” I asked, thinking of Rose's description of the reliquary holding Mother Catherine's head.

“He didn't say,” replied Madeleine.

“Can convents sell reliquaries?” Rachel asked.

“They certainly did in the past,” I said. This had to be the same reliquary. Had Chateaublanc found out about it by reading the diary? Was that what he and Agatha met to talk about the day he nearly ran Foxy and me over with his Cadillac?