When Sister Xavier walked in at the end of the week, I winced, trying to sink back into the bedding and disappear. I waited for her to clap her hands, to shout and force me out of bed. Awake up, my glory! Awake, psaltery and harp!
But for once, she wasn’t too loud. She didn’t call me weak or slovenly, didn’t chide me that I would end up like my mother. Instead, she told me she’d talked to the Mother Superior and convinced her not to give away my savings to the starving children in China.
“It was wise of you to save your money,” she said. “To not be wasteful like Gabrielle. I’ll hold your savings for you, Antoinette, until it’s time for you to leave here, when you’ll really need it. Starving children in China? The poor and the needy, we have enough of that here in France. When you and your sisters first came to us four years ago, you were so thin and dirty. You only spoke in patois. You didn’t even know the Apostle’s Creed. And now, you recite it by memory.”
She rested a hand on my head, and I swallowed hard. All the bad thoughts I’d had of Sister Xavier, and now she’d done this kindness for me.
I’d always believed the nuns meant only to torment us. But the picture of what we’d been when we came to Aubazine and what we were now materialized before me. The nuns had shaped us like the streams carving the Massif Central. They’d given us the only home we’d known and prepared us for the world outside the convent walls, and we were better for it. Even in Decourcelle, a prince didn’t marry a girl who spoke only in patois.
EIGHT
We felt sure our time was coming to leave Aubazine and start lives of our own. Julia-Berthe was almost eighteen, Gabrielle almost seventeen, and I thirteen. Our forays in the outside world with Adrienne made us all the more eager.
For the third year in a row, we celebrated le quatorze juillet in Clermont-Ferrand. But I no longer saved the money Pépère gave us. Despite Sister Xavier’s assurances, I worried that the Mother Superior would change her mind and send my savings to China. But also, I didn’t save it because I found another use for it. While Julia-Berthe helped Mémère at her market stall, Gabrielle, Adrienne, and I visited the gypsy who lurked around the fringes. Julia-Berthe, the rule follower, thought it was all blasphemy and sin. But I was guided by the verse from Jeremiah: “For I know the plans I have for you.” Maybe God etched these plans on our palms. It seemed like a good way for Him to keep track. Or maybe in the placement of a gypsy’s cards the divine let itself be shown.
Superstition came from our father, who always carried wheat in his pocket. “For prosperity,” he’d say. When he’d come home after being away, he’d make a dramatic scene, putting a hand on each of our heads in turn, Julia-Berthe, Gabrielle, Alphonse, me, and Lucien, and then counting us. “One, two, three, four, five. Five. My lucky number.” I knew now it was all talk. He never believed anything about us was lucky. But Gabrielle had adopted the number five as her number too, drawing it in the dirt with a stick when we were little. At Aubazine, she etched five-pointed stars and crescent moons like the ones in the mysterious mosaics that we always thought were lucky, stepping on each one whenever we passed through the corridor as if it would give us some celestial power.
The gypsy wore a purple-and-gold headscarf, her thick hair long and wild as she shuffled Lenormand cards with mysterious pictures, then spread them out. There was a ship card, cloud card, tree card, cross card, coffin card, and they meant different things in different combinations that only the gypsies could interpret. Clouds meant trouble. But clouds already sat on the hills of the Massif Central like sacks of flour. We were used to them. Money, love, that was what we wanted to know about.
“You will have great riches one day,” the gypsy said, reading Gabrielle’s fortune.
“She says that so I’ll spend my money now, on her,” Gabrielle whispered under her breath.
“You will have a great love affair,” she said to Adrienne when it was her turn.
Adrienne leaned forward. “But who will I marry?”
To get more answers, she and Gabrielle went off to the palm reader while the gypsy read my fortune.
The rings on her fingers clacked together as she shuffled the cards. She spread them out, revealing a coffin stacked on top of a cross. I waited for her to tell me what that meant, but she stared at me without speaking as if she could read my face, her eyes, dark and limitless, peering out from beneath the headscarf pulled low on her forehead.
“I know the coffin can be good,” I said hopefully. “The end of something bad, for instance. Or the death of something unwanted...”
She took the cards away without giving me a full reading.
“What was it? What did it mean?”
“Sometimes it’s better not to know,” she said with a warning look.
It felt like everything inside me stopped. My heart, my lungs, even the blood in my veins. Was something terrible going to happen? “Please, tell me.”
She studied me. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Her voice was hushed. “An early death.”
She wouldn’t say any more. Instead, she slipped a small ring off her pinky finger and held it out. “Take this.”
It had a thick gold band with a round yellow stone, beautiful and opulent looking, something I imagined an élégante might wear. I’d never held anything so magnificent.
“The stone holds the power of the sun,” the gypsy said. “It brings warmth and light to the darkest places.” She said something else in a language I didn’t recognize, then her eyes went flat like curtains drawn over a window, and she turned away.
An early death. Someone would die young. Someone would die before their time. Then, with relief, it dawned on me. Our mother. The cards were about Jeanne.
When I showed the ring to Gabrielle and Adrienne, Gabrielle examined it as if she were an expert on gems. “It’s not real,” she said.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Because it came from a gypsy.”
Adrienne jumped in. “But that means it really could be real. Gypsies have a way of getting their hands on things. Oh, Ninette, just think, it might have once belonged to a queen!”
Gabrielle shook her head. “Queens have fat fingers. The band is too small. It would never fit a queen.”
“Well then,” I said, refusing to let her ruin this. “It’s just the right size for a princess.”
NINE
Gabrielle and I had our shared secret: the mélos beneath the floorboards, Decourcelle’s pages hidden in books. And I had my gypsy ring, tied to a piece of string around my neck, resting beneath my shirtwaist.