Amandine Read Online Free

last as long as that.”
    “Don’t say that, Mater, you mustn’t ever say that again. I’ll take the best care of her, and Jean-Baptiste will see her weekly. Come to bless her, Mater. Come to pray over her, to welcome her home.”
    “No. I shall not welcome her. I shall tolerate her. And you. And, if I must, that toothless cow who’ll suckle her. That’s all I shall do.”
    “I shall ask for an audience with the curia myself, inform them of your, pardon me, Mater, your uncharitableness. I shall ask that another convent be found for us. I shall …”
    Solange turns her back to Paul, moves the sleeping baby from her arms up onto her shoulder, and begins unwittingly to jostle and rock her. As though she thinks the baby has understood Paul. As though she would comfort her.
    “You shall do no such thing. And if you did, you’d not be heard.”
    “Mater, perhaps you forget, I am a lay sister here. The rules governing my life are not those of the others. I intend to follow, to the letter, those rules that pertain to me. Beyond my adherence to those, I am free. I assure you that if and when I am convinced that your treatment of the child—or of me—is cruel, I shall not stay quiet. Neither I nor Amandine shall be your prisoner, Mater.”
    “Amandine?”
    “Yes, I’ve named her.”
    The only sound is the baby’s sucking upon the place between Solange’s neck and shoulder.
    Without lifting her head from where it rests on the baby’s back, Solange asks, “Why do you fear her, Mater? What can make a woman of God, a bride of Jesus, what can make you fear a baby?”
    “Why do you mistake a simple lack of interest for fear?”
    “It can be nothing else but fear, Mater. Fear with a mask of anger. A common-enough device. My father taught me something of that when we would see a
sanglier
or a wild dog on our walks through the woods. ‘They’re growling and baring their teeth because they’re frightened of you,’ he’d say. Isn’t it true that you growl and bare your teeth today because you are frightened of this baby?”
    Solange places the sleeping Amandine in the cradle, makes a long business of covering her, patting her, bending to touch her lips to thebaby’s head, and all the while Paul looks on. Hands trembling, the nun adjusts her cincture, once again takes her handkerchief from under the sleeve of her habit and, once again, presses it to her upper lip. She prepares for battle. Solange stands then, turns to look at Paul. Both search to parry. Both know the contest has begun.
    “Since my arrival here three months ago, I have thought you cold, inaccessible, bitter toward me, but I was certain that, once the baby arrived, once you saw her, held her, you would, you would
soften
. I believed that instinctual affection, if nothing else, would take over. And if not that, your calling, your vows, your Christian love, surely those would prevail. I’ve never known anyone made like you, Mater. I’ve never known anyone who couldn’t look into the face of a baby.”
    “You don’t know anything of me, of my life and my work. You’re nothing but a child yourself. A brazen child. I’d rather expected you to be more docile.”
    “I think one of the reasons that it was I who was brought here is that I am
not
docile, Mater.”

CHAPTER IV

    I
S IT NOT ENOUGH THAT I MUST TAKE IN THE BASTARD CHILD OR GRANDCHILD or whomever it may be to that aging demimondaine but, too, the bishop, His Eminence Fabrice, asks me to extend my tolerance to include a lapsed postulant, freshly fallen from grace? Why couldn’t I have been privy to the child’s parentage? Could it be his? I think not. Had he sired the thing, he’d have arranged for its disposal in some farther away post. And so whose is she? Who is this child? The ostentation of its trappings, the ceremony of its arrival, the saber rattling over its care, all these are made of mockery. And who is the little farm girl? Perhaps it’s she who is his. His daughter. His