The Priest's Madonna (19 page)

Reading further, though, I was heartened to learn of the discovery of a Merovingian tomb during the restoration of a church in Tournai, Belgium. The mason who’d made the discovery found a startling array of treasure, including, strangely enough, a purple silk cloak embroidered with three hundred gold and garnet bees. Also in the tomb were a leather purse full of gold coins; four weapons—a sword, a saber, a lance, and a throwing hatchet, all ornamented in gold and cloisonné; a golden bull’s head, also in gold and garnet; and a gold seal ring, emblazoned with the name
Childerici Regis.
King Childeric, the father—as I learned from the book—of Clovis.

This was promising news: a tomb found during the restoration of a church.
And
it had contained a collection of coins, perhaps like the ones we had found in the valise. Good omens, I felt. I was certain now that my knight’s stone was a gravestone, and while it might not be the tomb of Dagobert or Childeric, it might very well contain some other ancient king’s corpse, along with his own catalogue of jewel-encrusted weaponry and artifacts. Perhaps the priest who hid the flask had been the first to discover this tomb, and because he didn’t want its wealth to be plundered by revolutionaries, he turned the stone over, burying its engraved face in the dirt. Maybe he hid the flask in the capital of the baluster for a trusted friend, someone who might be able to smuggle the tomb’s treasure into more peaceful territory, to reserve its wealth for the Church or for France—or for himself.

Though I had answered some questions by reading, there was still the matter of what more I might learn from Mme Laporte. It was my choice: I could continue to pretend that Michelle had found the stone or I could trust in Madame’s discretion.

I returned to Madame’s early the next morning. No one answered my knock, which surprised me because I knew Madame to be an early riser. I wandered around the castle grounds, heading toward the wall that abutted the church cemetery, where I knew I might get a glimpse of her window. I did not intend to spy; I had only the vague notion of looking for a light in the room, some evidence of whether or not she was awake. I was in a strange state of mind, having spent a sleepless night squinting at the small print of the Merovingian history by candlelight.

Leaning over the château wall, I looked out over the
garrigues.
Sunlight flashed from the bits of mica in the stone wall. The sky trumpeted its brilliance. I wondered at the crisp teeth of a Kermes oak leaf, watched a butterfly alight on a cyclamen and marveled at the perfect fluting of its wing. Dagobert II himself might have marveled at the same sight. How near the past was! A thousand years was a breath, the turn of a head.

A footfall broke my reverie. M. Laporte, his cap pulled low over his forehead, was peering quizzically at me.

I stood at once, brushing dust from the breast of my frock. “Pardon me, monsieur. I came to visit Madame. When do you expect her to be at home?”

“Mme Laporte is away, Marie,” the mayor replied uneasily. He must have wondered why I had come to see his wife at such an odd hour of the day. “I’ve just left her at the train station.”

“Where’s she gone?” I asked, stunned.

“To Paris.”

“Paris? Why? When will she be back?”

“Not for some time. Her aunt has just passed, Marie. She’s gone to see to her affairs.”

“Oh,” I said, dumbfounded. She had mentioned nothing of a sick aunt. Why hadn’t she told me she would be leaving? Or had she only just found out, yesterday afternoon after our visit—received a telegram, perhaps, and decided to take the first train out this morning?

“Excuse me, please, Marie,” the mayor said, when I failed to say anything further. “I haven’t yet eaten my breakfast.”

“Yes, of course, monsieur,” I responded, then walked slowly home.

B
Y THE END of that summer, renovation came to a halt. The roof was repaired, the new altar installed, the windows in the nave replaced by a glazier from Bordeaux. There was more to be done—the structure of the church needed buttressing and we had not yet begun to refurnish the interior—but Bérenger had run out of money. He had still not heard from the Austrian, despite a second letter informing the archduke of the knight’s stone and the items we’d found beneath it.

Bérenger took to traveling. He told us that he was visiting his mother in Montazels or his brother in Narbonne, and, carrying his satchel, he would set off before dawn to make the hike down the hill. He would leave for one day or occasionally as many as six. He continued to avoid me. Despite my resolution, I could not leave him alone. I brooded when he was gone and confronted him when he returned, asking where he’d been, what he’d been doing. I tried to keep my questions lighthearted and polite, but I am afraid I could not fully disguise the undertone of need. I longed for him to confide in me. But he would tell me nothing, only that he had had family business to attend to.

When he was home, Bérenger spent a good deal of time in his office with the door closed. His correspondence increased substantially. It seemed each morning he had a few new letters to post, and he began to receive numerous letters daily, from all corners of France: Alençon, Montpellier, Amiens, Bayonne, as well as many from Narbonne. Some envelopes boasted an array of colorful stamps and were marked with such exotic addresses as Perugia, Barcelona, Prague, and Budapest. M. Déramon grumbled about the increase in volume. “I’m not a pack mule, you know,” he would say, dropping the letters on the kitchen table.

One afternoon as I was going to change the linen in Bérenger’s bedroom, I noticed him in his office, sitting before a pile of letters, perturbedly slicing open each one. I stood at the threshold.

“When did you get to be so famous?” I asked.

To my relief, he smiled, then lifted the stack of letters, demonstrating the weight of the load. “All of this, just today.”

“Who are they from?”

He shook his head. “It’s my own fault. I posted a few advertisements in the weeklies for Mass requests, thinking it might help our financial situation. Now I can hardly keep up with the receipts.”

I nodded sympathetically, pleased that he was sharing this information. In the past, he had received occasional requests for Mass intentions—Masses said for a particular person or institution. Enclosed with each request would be a small honorarium of one or two francs. It was a common practice among country priests, whose meager salaries required some sort of augmentation. “Maybe I can help,” I suggested. “At least with the receipts.”

“Oh, Marie,” he said, and his voice sounded genuinely appreciative. “You’re a godsend.”

As I entered the requests in Bérenger’s notebook of Masses—noting the number of intentions requested, the name of the correspondent, and the amount of the honorarium, and leaving a column open where Bérenger could mark the date on which he had fulfilled the request—I was startled to see that he had received hundreds of requests for Mass intentions in the past few months alone. The accumulated honoraria amounted, then, to several hundreds of francs. And as the Church prohibited priests from fulfilling more than three requests a day, Bérenger had begun to fall behind.

Once the list of unfulfilled requests had swelled to fill five pages (each of which took about two weeks to get through), I brought the notebook to Bérenger, suggesting that it might be wise to send some of the intentions, honoraria included, to his brother David or the curé in Rennes-les-Bains. “Otherwise, I can’t see how you’ll be able to fulfill all of these,” I said.

His face darkened momentarily. “I’d rather not just yet,” he said. “They’ll taper off eventually, and then I’ll be able to catch up.”

Though Bérenger had granted me his attention once more, he had grown more studied in his propriety, not as freely affectionate as he once had been. Rather than sit beside me and marvel at my writing or my bookkeeping skills, he left me alone in the office. He did not seek me out for company, only if he had a task he wanted me to complete. His eyes no longer lingered on my face over dinner. In fact, he had begun to request more frequently that he take his dinner alone in the presbytery. He always treated me with civility and even kindness—holding doors for me, praising my work on occasion—but he no longer singled me out. I began to wonder if I had misunderstood, if perhaps I had taken the smiles, the affectionate comments, the looks to be specific to me, when they were only his way with all women.

It occurred to me in my more compassionate moments that Bérenger’s aloofness might have stemmed from his efforts to resist temptation. Still, I longed for him. All the pores of my skin seemed to open when he stood near me. My vision seemed to sharpen in his presence: colors intensified, edges grew more defined. With him, I was alert, engaged; without him, my senses dulled. The lust was physical, yes, but it went deeper than the skin—it lived within me like chronic pain.

I invoked an old fantasy: Bérenger and I, living side by side in a chaste marriage, sure of our mutual affection. What would the harm be in that? It was customary for a priest’s housekeeper to live in the presbytery. And how could the Church keep us from loving each other? The law prohibited only fornication, and I felt sure we could avoid that.

I grew merciless. Knowing Bérenger to be a creature of his appetites, I decided I would court him with cuisine. He had told me once that he preferred my cooking to my mother’s. “Your mother’s dishes are very good,” he said, “but yours are temptations.” So I tempted him: I made cassoulet with ample meat—bacon rind, pork loin, and sausage—and prepared the goose confit myself. I insisted that M. Gautier, the butcher, sell me only the freshest cuts he had. At home, I chose only the most perfect vegetables for Bérenger’s meals. He liked to hunt and would sometimes bring home a pheasant or a hare for us to prepare. I would roast it long and slow in a stew of wine, blood, and rosemary. I stuffed sheep’s tripe for him with ham, eggs, thyme, and garlic, and sliced it thin as paper. I splurged on bottles of Côtes du Roussillon and Blanquette de Limoux instead of buying the cheaper carafes from the Verdiés’ vineyard.

My mother scolded me for being wasteful. “Monsieur
le curé
does not pay us enough for all this,” she said, “and your father’s pockets are not lined with gold.” But as long as Bérenger enjoyed my meals, I kept on. Claude and my father were pleased. Claude even suggested I go to work as a chef for one of the bistros in Espéraza. “The owner is my friend’s father,” he said proudly. “He’ll get you a job.” My parents seemed to like the idea—perhaps they thought it might be an opportunity for me to meet a prospective husband, someone who wasn’t already discouraged by my reputation for eccentricity. But Claude did not pursue it, and it was soon forgotten, to my relief.

Bérenger noticed my efforts. “You’ve outdone yourself, Marie,” he said on more than one occasion, and even though he did not grace me with his roguish grin, he spoke with genuine warmth. My attention—selfishly motivated as it was—seemed to touch him.

One evening, as I entered the presbytery to deliver his supper, I found an unopened envelope on the kitchen table. The paper was creamy and fragrant with lavender water, the handwriting unmistakably feminine. The return address displayed no name, only the city of origin: Narbonne. I gave it to Bérenger at supper. He sliced it open, then read hungrily.

“Who is it from?” I asked, affecting a thoroughly unconvincing nonchalance.

He acted as if he hadn’t heard and read the letter through once more, shaking his head in amused disbelief, then scoffed and tossed it into the fire.

But the next morning, as I was sweeping the hearth, I noticed the same creamy paper tucked into a protected ledge behind the andirons. Its bottom edge had been burned, obliterating the final lines of the letter. I hastily plucked it up and began to read.

I took the letter upstairs to Bérenger’s bedroom, where he was dressing for Mass. I knocked once, then opened the door. He stood at his wardrobe in his undershirt. A hollow the size of a thumbprint nestled between his collarbones.

“So this is your secret,” I snarled, tossing the letter at his bare feet. He glanced at it, but did not yet pick it up. “How pathetic.”

He pulled on his cassock and buttoned it, neck to feet, as if I weren’t there. He did this to inform me of the inappropriateness of my behavior—his raised chin and haughty eyes told me as much—but I was unapologetic.

“This is who you visit when you go to see your ‘family,’ then. This pitiful woman.”

He bent down to pick the letter up and inspected it. “Fire is not what it used to be,” he quipped.

How I longed to swat him! If I’d been a man, I would have swung him a punch without hesitation. But I knew how ludicrous it would be, my puny fists falling on his chest, like the paws of a cat. Instead, I funneled my anger into a beastly roar that filled the room and the presbytery, and undoubtedly penetrated the exterior walls.

“Marie!” he said sharply. “Enough.” He stepped past me, walking through my fury as if it did not crackle in the air around me, and continued downstairs. I could only follow him, my rage making me cling to him as if I had been soldered there, a bracket of iron fixed to his indomitable back. I stood behind him as he sat at the table. When he asked for his tea and bread, I did not move. He laughed, to my further consternation. “You’re jealous, Marie?”