The Cleaner of Chartres Read Online Free

shocking thing to our little Agnès.’
    Frédéric’s posture of denial became more intransigent. He fixed Sister Véronique with a cool grey Norman eye and asserted that he wouldn’t touch a bastard retard if you paid him.
    Sister Véronique lost her temper (a sin she had frequently been advised to overcome), made as if to whop the impertinent boy round the head and, according to Frédéric’s mother, would have done so had he not had the presence of mind to duck. Sister Véronique, the indignant parent continued, had pushed her son out of the room ‘swearing like a trooper’.
    The mother had gone up to the convent to threaten the Sisters over their ‘foul language and disgusting accusations’, about which, she informed them, she was planning to write to ‘the authorities’. Fierce words were exchanged. Frédéric was dismissed from his garden duties, and it was later found that he had expressed his resentment by stealing a pruning knife.
    None of this did anything to help Agnès. In due course, she was packed off to a local nursing home, known to be discreet in such matters, where she gave birth to an underweight boy child who was mercifully removed from her before she could feed him or apparently had a chance to bestow on him a name.
    Agnès returned to the convent from her sojourn at the nursing home quieter and more biddable than ever. The nuns congratulated themselves on their tactful handling of the sad affair. Sister Véronique tried again to interest her protégée in reading. (She herself in her secular days had embarked on her study of Dante as a means of recovering from an unhappy love affair with the History mistress.) Agnès meekly accepted the large-print book describing the life of St Thérèse of Lisieux. But later, burnt fragments were found in the dustbin by the girl who had been recruited to help with the heavy work while Agnès was recuperating.
    About three months after Agnès’ return from the nursing home, a piercing caterwaul issued from the kitchen garden. Several of the Sisters hurried outside to find Agnès screaming and wildly tearing at the bodice of her dress as if it concealed some venomous snake or other deadly creature.
    Nothing was seen or found either on or under her clothing; nor could anyone get the girl to make any kind of sense. She was finally persuaded to come inside and take a calming tisane of lime flowers. The Sisters conferred anxiously but agreed that this was an inevitable nervous reaction to the unfortunate birth.
    Some weeks later, Sister Camille noticed drops of what looked like blood on the floor of the bathroom. It was not the time of the month when those of the Sisters who were still fertile underwent their communal period. Nor had any Sister complained of a wound. Various sharp instruments began to go missing. Several Sisters complained that they couldn’t find their nail scissors. Sister Laurence did not report the loss of her razor, since it was a secret with which she dealt with an embarrassing vestigial moustache. But Sister Camille was open, even cantankerous, about the disappearance of her pinking shears and the cook reported the loss of a new carving knife.
    Agnès continued reticent and hard-working. If anything, she seemed to want to do more for the Sisters than before, even offering to goffer the wimples they wore on certain feast days, a task so skilled that it had hitherto been reserved for the local laundress, who had been trained to the task through an ancient laundering connection to the convent. The girl was often seen in those days walking in the orchard gathering the many windfalls from the apple trees. But this gave no cause for alarm. It merely showed a love of nature, coupled with a proper sense of housewifely thrift. A series of delicious
tartes aux pommes
confirmed this diagnosis. Since her return, Agnès had made friends with the cook, who was giving her culinary instruction.
    There were, however, certain disturbing events. The door to