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groaned; she was coming around. “I will go,” said Sister Claire; “but this one,” and she pulled me to her, roughly, “this one comes with me.”

4
The Passion
    I PASSED THAT long, punitive afternoon in the smithy, planing the boards of rough-hewn pine that were to be installed in the pantry, my former room. Shortly after being discovered, and after being dragged rather indelicately to my sentence by a seething Sister Claire, a storm settled over C——, persistent and at times severe.
    The work was difficult, as it involved heavy planks and chisels and blades of varying thickness. The slow-burning fire of the smithy and the heavy humidity occasioned by the storm made the tiny outbuilding grossly uncomfortable. Yet I remained; I had to. I grew slick with sweat; droplets fell from the tip of my nose onto the pine, as if to mock the rain slanting down in silver cords beyond the open half-door, falling from a leaden sky hanging suffocatingly low.
    Those hours I had but two visitors; three, if one counts Sister Claire, who came twice to threaten me with more and varied labor. Marie-Edith came, at great risk, to offer me an apple—unaccountably delicious, it was—and a dry shift. And Mother Marie came, very late in the day; it seemed she’d come to apologize, though of course I did not yet know what for.
    â€œIt was unwise,” said she, “to indulge my niece. Did I not warn you?”
    â€œYou did,” said I. Where was Peronette? Was she among the girls? Did she too stand accused? Was our ruse known? Had Sister Claire meted out to her punishment such as I…But the Mother Superior answered none of my questions. Finally she raised her hand to still me, saying only, “I fear things may not, cannot be as they were. The balance of the House is upset.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?” I asked, though I understood her too well.
    â€œClaire is the Head, and it is within her purview to do so…. Sister Claire has declared the Great Silence, and I dare not rescind it.” Mother Marie added, absently, “Perhaps it is wise. Perhaps order and discipline are our only hope.” (Only twice in my years at C——had the Great Silence been declared: once when a group of monks came to us for shelter, and once to quell the hysteria occasioned by three girls suffering the simultaneous onset of their first blood.) “But what scares me,” continued the Mother Superior, “is that she is using the Silence to stir the girls, to rile them and win them to her ways.”
    â€œWhat are ‘her ways’?” I asked.
    Mother Marie looked at me. “You were there, were you not? You heard her: she has long coveted the rule of this House. How did she put it? Oh yes—she is ‘attendant upon my ruin.’”
    â€œBut can you not…?”
    â€œI cannot order the girls not to pray; neither can I order Claire to desist from her prayerful talk of Darkness and such.”
    â€œThen they do not know? They do not know that it was Peronette upon the sill, that it was I who—”
    Mother Marie fairly shouted at me then: “Did I not tell you,” she asked, “that she was wild, that it was dangerous to indulge her? I did. I did! Silly of me to have thought you might control her. No one can control her. And now, the danger has come. I could lose this House! What then for me? Indeed, mark my words: danger has come.”
    Mother Marie then directed me to follow her back to the house proper. “You must not remain apart. Go among them as though nothing has happened,” she advised, or commanded. I said I would—did I not owe her that much?—and the two of us, huddling beneath her umbrella, made our way back to the house with nothing but a cloud-occluded moon to light the muddy way.
    It was in the kitchen gardens that my resolve began to break, and by the time I stood inside I wondered how, how would I find the