But as summer turned to fall, Julia-Berthe surprised us with the biggest secret of all. Gabrielle and I, so caught up in the world of Decourcelle, had missed it. Everyone had. Until the day Sister Geneviève finally went in the garden shed for a rope to tie up the gate and keep it from clanging.
Hélène, Pierrette, Gabrielle, and I were huddled around the warming stove in the sewing room, practicing our stitching for the ten thousandth time as Hélène went on and on about a boy who worked at a produce stand in the town she visited on holidays with her great aunt. His fingers had touched hers when handing her a plum, which Hélène claimed meant he was in love with her. As Hélène droned on, a loud wail from somewhere inside the convent rang out, startling all of us.
My needle and thread slipped from my hand and dropped to the floor. It sounded like Julia-Berthe. In the past she’d been inconsolable when a hawk sailed down from the mountains, snatched up a baby rabbit, and soared off with the poor creature between its claws. And there was the time she found a bird’s nest on the ground, cracked eggs, pieces of shells, two unhatched babies, pink and wrinkled, never to grow feathers or fly.
But this felt different.
I jumped up in a panic, headed toward the source of what were now loud sobs, Gabrielle close behind. We hurried along the corridors and down the worn stone steps of the broad staircase to the hallway that led into the Mother Superior’s office, stopping outside the closed door. We could hear the low murmurings of the nuns. Julia-Berthe crying, repeating over and over again, “But he says he loves me.”
He?
Gabrielle and I exchanged glances, catching only bits and pieces of what Sister Bernadette was saying.
“...it was the old blacksmith’s son...the one who was supposed to fix the gate...no wonder it hasn’t been fixed...if I hadn’t walked in the garden shed right then...on the verge of carnal knowledge.”
Then, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph” and the sound of rosary beads clacking.
For a moment I didn’t breathe. Julia-Berthe, the rule follower. Julia-Berthe, who saw the world in right and wrong, good and bad. Julia-Berthe had been sneaking off with a man?
“But he told me he loves me,” she sobbed again to the nuns. “He loves me, and he wants to marry me.”
The Mother Superior’s voice cut through the air. “Marry you? He already is married. His wife just had a child, baptized right here in the sanctuary.”
Behind the door, there was a deep silence, heavy with Julia-Berthe’s misery.
“No,” she said, her voice weak. “No. It can’t be true. He wants to marry me. Why would he say he wants to marry me if he’s already married?”
I went stiff, the words echoing in my head. A married man. A man who lied to her. A man with a wife and child at home. A séducteur. Not unlike our father.
Here at the convent, right under our noses, Julia-Berthe had been tricked by a man.
The door opened, and Gabrielle and I flew back. Julia-Berthe exited, her eyes to the ground, her face glossy with tears, a nun at each side moving her along. Sister Bernadette followed, proclaiming that they must find a priest, they must find one immediately, there was no time to waste.
They disappeared down the hall as more nuns fluttered out of the Mother Superior’s office, too distracted to shoo us away. Then came Sister Xavier.
“What are you doing here?” she said. “Go back to the workroom.”
“Is Julia-Berthe going to be all right?” I asked.
“What’s going to happen to her?” said Gabrielle.
The Mother Superior gave us a stern look. “The eternal rest of her soul is in peril. Your sister has committed a grave sin against modesty.” She made the sign of the cross, then rushed off.
I looked to Gabrielle, but she just shook her head and muttered beneath her breath, a perplexed expression on her face. “If you’re going to sin against modesty,” she said, “you should at least do it with someone who’s rich.”
* * *
We knew from an early age about relations between men and women. We’d lived in small rooms with thin walls or no walls at all. We saw cats in alleys, goats in their pens, livestock in the fields. We knew babies didn’t come from cabbages.
Did Julia-Berthe remember what our father did with our mother when he came back from his wanderings? Did she remember his grunts at night, the shadows on the walls? Our mother called it faire l’amour. Making love. Julia-Berthe, who saw only the plain meaning of words, must have thought she could “make love” like she could knit a sweater. There would be something afterward, tangible, to keep.
Around the convent, the other orphelines talked about Julia-Berthe’s rendezvous with the old blacksmith’s son as a great scandal. The nuns often repeated a warning from Saint Jerome: You carry a large sum of gold about you, take care not to meet any highwaymen. When they’d said this in the past, I’d wanted to laugh. The nuns knew we had no gold, large sums or small. But now it made sense. Julia-Berthe had met a highwayman. He’d almost gotten her gold.
Poor Julia-Berthe. She was overcome. Not because she almost lost her gold or because at Mass she was forbidden from taking Holy Communion and had to stay seated while the rest of us lined up. Not because at mealtimes and during the day, she was made to fast and spend extra time in prayer or at stations of the cross.
But because whenever she could, she would glance out the window in the direction of the broken gate, looking for the old blacksmith’s son in the yard. And he was never there. The nuns had banished him.
“We have to protect her,” I said to Gabrielle as we left Mass one morning. Julia-Berthe was older than me, but she was more tenderhearted, more trusting. “She’s just turned eighteen. The nuns won’t let her stay here much longer. They’ll send her to be someone’s maid or laundress, with no one to watch over her.”
“Look what happened when she was being watched over,” Gabrielle said. “How did we not realize she was sneaking out?”
We who knew Julia-Berthe best had had no idea. I’d assumed she was out feeding bread crumbs to the birds or scraps to the feral cats. I should have been paying more attention.
“But don’t worry,” Gabrielle said. “The nuns aren’t going to send her away yet, not when they can use her as an example of what not to do for the rest of us.”
Gabrielle was right. The nuns now spent endless hours catechizing against sins of the flesh. Sister Geneviève had us stand and recite in unison from Galatians: “The works of the flesh are manifest, which are these: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness...they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.”
The nuns also used the examples of the martyrs, reading from Lives of the Saints, planting the grim acts of those holy ghosts forever in the dark corners of our minds: