Work Text:
Vigils
The barouche rolled out of Paris, and Mercédès did not look back. Any churl who dared peep through the window would surely have fallen back, muttering apologies, when he saw her: a stark figure, dressed all in black as if she had already known of her impending widowhood, proud even in this, her last misfortune. No tear fell from her black eyes; her face was as pale and as motionless as marble.
At her side, Albert was silent, his head buried in his hands. His mother, brave as she was, did not dare to look at him, afraid of seeing his father within him. She sighed for Fernand: that straight military posture, that frank expression that ought to have proclaimed honesty and instead concealed a lifetime of covetousness and betrayal. She shuddered to think what must become of him now; she had heard the dread report of a firearm, faint against the clamour of the Parisian streets, and she thought with some horror of what that might mean.
Once, long ago, she had threatened to throw herself from the Cap de Morgiou, to seek oblivion upon the vicious rocks beneath, but such escape was no longer hers to take. She must make recompense for her lapse of faith, and no quick death could be sufficient. (In this, at least, she and the Count were agreed.) No: she must live out her life, weary as it might be, haunted as it must be by the ghosts of the past that was and that might have been, and seek to make amends through service.
Albert was as good and as honourable a young man as she could make him, but a man has two parents. The horror that the knowledge of his father's crime had evoked in him at once grieved her, and gave her hope. Brave as he was, Albert had never yet been as courageous as in this, forsaking name, fortune and all that those two implied, and leaving to seek a hard living with a people he had never known. She would pray for him; that was all that she could do.
All night they drove south and west, speaking not one word to each other.
*
They found the little iron box under the fig tree, exactly as described in the Count's letter. Mercédès was moved almost to tears at the sight of this pitiful dowry, but, maintaining her composure, she had its contents changed into unromantic paper and, this task completed, undertook to show her son the town she knew of old, until arrangements were completed for her to be received into a religious establishment. Albert, eager to know all that might be known of any ancestors who were not named Mondego, was an avid pupil, and they passed some days in this fashion.
None recognised her in Les Catalans, and she was glad of it. Indeed, every corner of Marseille and of the Catalan settlement reminded her with exquisite pain of days spent with Edmond, of years spent without Edmond, and of her broken promise. She was not sorry to leave.
Albert would not hear of her travelling alone to the house that had agreed to receive her as a postulant; this, he declared, was one expense that he would not spare, no matter that he lived now as a poor man.
Mercédès looked one last time upon the broad Mediterranean, then sighed and turned away. She would not see her native seas again: those she bequeathed, as it were, to her son.
It was a full day's journey to the abbey of Saint-Étienne. This time mother and son spoke freely of their hopes for the years ahead, treasuring these last hours together more than any emerald in the hoard of the Count of Monte Cristo, and when at last they came to a halt at the door of the abbey Albert stepped down from the carriage and gave his mother his hand.
It was very dark, the kind of thick, velvety darkness that envelops dwellings deep in the countryside on moonless, cloudy nights. No star was visible, no window lit. One light alone shone above the abbey door. Mercédès looked up at it, set her eyes upon it as if it were the true pole star that might lead her to her true haven.
Albert laid a hand on her arm, and she turned back to him. As if for the last time on this earth, mother and son embraced. 'Goodbye, mother!' Albert breathed.
Now, at last, Mercédès wept. 'Goodbye, my son, and God go with you.'
She saw him mount once more up to the coach, and stood staring back down the road from which they had come until she could no longer pretend that she heard the rumble of wheels, or the horse's weary hoofs.
Lauds
'It is not too late,' the Mistress of Novices said. 'If you believe that God has need of you elsewhere, then you may leave here and none will question you.'
'No,' she said, and her own voice was very firm in her own head. 'This is a new life for me.'
All night she stayed there in the chapel, waiting for she knew not what. A sign, perhaps; some sort of divine affirmation. For even now she did not know whether she ought not to follow the Count, to offer her honour, her service, her very life at his feet, to give herself over to him entirely, that he might claim what she owed him.
She, who had all her life understood marriage to be her vocation, could not quite understand what it meant to stand here. She, who had once been a man's fiancée, who had lately been another man's wife, who was yet a mother: must she now revoke all those titles, and stand before God as nobody but herself? She had thought that she had escaped judgement, or, at least, delayed it until the grave, where all must face it, but here in this gloomy chapel the ghastly light of truth shone on her own stained soul, and she was too brave, or too proud, to turn away from it.
'Here I stay,' she said, and the sound rang between the stone walls. 'Here, I make atonement.'
The day lightened, slowly, slowly, until the high windows of the chapel were bright with colour and sunlight.
Mercédès Herrera, Mercédès Mondego, Comtesse de Morcerf, Sister Marie-Jeanne, arrayed once again all in white, walked once more towards the altar, and did not look back.
Prime
'Forgive me, father, for I have sinned...' The catalogue of petty grievances and temptations, anger and greed. And, after all those, the worst, despair; her first sin, and her greatest. 'I did not keep faith.'
'Every week you tell me this; every week I tell you of God's forgiveness, and yet every week you bring me this same burden. My child, you torture yourself with your own past, a past for which reason says you may not reproach yourself.' Her confessor's voice was kind, but he spoke with an authority that it was hard to defy – and harder still for her to accept. 'Why do you still live as if you had not been forgiven?'
This was an old conversation; they had walked these roads many times, and she found the old paths beneath her feet. 'The one whom I have harmed,' she said, 'cannot be mended.'
'Has that one forgiven you?' The priest's face was blank, expectant.
She sighed. 'He said so, but I do not know if that is true. I could not blame him if he had not.'
'It makes no difference. It is for God to forgive. What is in this man's heart, is between him and God; I am more concerned with what is in yours. From what you have told me, you did as much as and more than any other woman would have done.'
She shook her head, dissatisfied. 'Does that excuse me?'
'Very well, then. God sees every corner of your soul, my child. God sees the parts of which you are glad, the parts of which you are ashamed, the parts of which you cannot even bear to think. You and I are but human; we cannot always judge what might be sin, and what might be virtue. You claim that what I call a virtue, you believe to have been a sin. Very well. If you are right, then you have made ample confession, and, very truly, God forgives you; he has claimed double for all your sins. If I am right, then there is no harm done, for God's grace is poured out in great measures, pressed down and running over. There is enough to spare for all of us – aye, and the one you fear to have injured, too.'
'Then what can I do? I pray for him.'
'Pray for him, yes, but only as you pray for all. And this is your penance, my child: forgive yourself, as you have been forgiven, and even though you fear you may not have been.'
Terce
The weeks passed, and the months passed, and the years rolled around through Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter, and Sister Marie-Jeanne found all the world within the abbey walls. Letters came from her son, telling of good catches and hard toil, of a bride from Les Catalans, of a laughing son and a serious daughter, and she found that these precious ones, whom she loved though she would never set eyes upon them, walked in her mind through a land of memories, for surely the world was here.
She was on her knees, pulling up weeds in the kitchen garden, when it came upon her.
A sudden stillness: the breeze had dropped, and, with it, the whole world seemed to fall away. Her hands were still working, shaking soil from the roots of buttercups and dandelions, and she was aware of the hem of her apron pressing into her knees through the coarse fabric of her habit, and the dampness of the earth beneath, but they were insubstantial; she had a sudden sense of a greater, immense, reality underlying and suffusing all of it.
For a long while she knelt, bathed in that divine silence as in the warm sea of her childhood. Any moment the bell must ring, calling her to a prayer in which she was already immersed. The thought did not trouble her; for she knew that she moved within the prayer.
Slowly, slowly, she rose to her feet, half-fearing that her own movement would break the stillness. Only half-knowing why, she slipped off her shoes, and stood barefoot in the warm, wet grass.
'Here I am,' she breathed. 'Here I am.'
Sext
She woke next morning before the bell began to ring, and found a broad, jubilant melody streaming through her mind. At first she thought it an echo from her old life, some parlour song or dance tune that had broken free of the wreckage of her life and floated up to the surface of her memory. She tried to push it out of her head, as behoved such a frivolous intruder from the world outside the walls of the convent, but it bobbed persistently through the austere chant of the offices, the low hum of work, and the lesser and the greater silences.
The next day it still thrummed in her head; it had doubled in length, and yet she was no nearer to identifying it. It had no words that she could remember; and this was odd, for of all the airs that lingered in her mind, there was not one that did not bring its own lyrics with it. This, therefore, must have not have been sung, and yet it seemed to her that it was made for singing.
At last, if only to exorcise it from her mind, she begged paper and ink, and, recalling from that other life the accomplishments that she had learned while Mercédès Mondego became Comtesse de Morcerf, ruled lines and set out the tune in that strange code of lines and roundels that to the initiate denote music.
She brought it to confession, and Father André, who was no musician, laughed and told her to take it to the mistress of the choir. 'Who,' he said, 'will know better what to do with it than I.'
Sister Agnès took the fragment from Marie-Jeanne, and looked it over, the fingers of her right hand moving as if she played an invisible pianoforte. She too laughed. Then she too found a pen, and wrote under the staves.
She handed the manuscript back to Marie-Jeanne, who could not but look. The good sister had written, Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, dominus Deus Sabaoth, and the reluctant composer could not but admit that the words clung to her melody as if it had always been so intended.
Sister Agnès was smiling sternly. 'What God has called holy, do not you call unclean. Go and finish this.'
'Oh – but surely...' Marie-Jeanne was dismayed. 'This was a gift; it was not of me. If it was of God then I am grateful, but I cannot...' But she fell silent. She knew already how pleni sunt coeli must sound.
None
The shadows lengthened; the weary sunlight shone slantwise through the pointed windows, until the pools of light on the floor were long and sharp as swords.
The abbess was propped up with pillows until she sat almost upright. Her voice was very feeble. 'God's blessing be upon you, my child. I am almost sure that you will follow me: your fellows like your manner and respect your wisdom.'
The voice of her successor was almost as soft; it trembled with irrepressible emotion. 'I am not ready for this, Reverend Mother. Stay with us, I beg you.'
The light shone gently on the face of the dying woman, a seeming foretaste of the glory to which she was bound. 'None is ever ready,' she said. 'I was not ready when I knelt, as you kneel now, at the bedside of my mother abbess. You were baptised as an infant: how could you ever have been ready for that? And you have been a wife: tell me, were you ready for that solemn part when first you stood at the side of your bridegroom?'
A shudder. 'No. But -'
Sister Marie-Jeanne did not finish that protest.
The abbess nodded. 'And can you tell me, truly, that you were ready to take the veil, when you took that vow here?'
'Yes!' And then, 'No.'
'Even so was it with all of us. The one who thinks herself ready, will never be so. And you, my child, who have already proved yourself to have gifts beyond your imaginings, or anybody's, you of all people may trust that God will give you what you need to fulfil whatever duty He calls you to perform.' The tired eyes closed.
After a little while Marie-Jeanne, thinking her superior slept, pressed a reverent kiss upon the back of her hand, and, weeping, rose to leave. And the abbess prayed a silent blessing upon her, and did not detain her.
Vespers
The lamps were lighted, and the abbey itself shone like one great beacon across the valley, crying out to the lost, the cold, the hungry: come, and you will find shelter, food, a welcome, in Christ's name. Hospitality, the great virtue of the sisters of Saint-Étienne, became now a legend.
And if the abbess had the lamps kept burning and the hearth swept in the honour of one particular guest, who could protest? She turned no one away, and no waif, no stray, knew that she greeted them with an inward sigh of regret, that once more the expected traveller had failed to arrive.
At long last, he came. In her heart she had always known that he would find her, that his grand scheme of reckoning would sweep around at last to her.
He had come to claim what was once his, and she went herself to meet him at the door of the abbey and tell him that he was too late, that she belonged now to a far greater judge than he.
She would not have known him by sight alone; only the steadfast, treacherous memory of the heart told her that this was the man she had loved, once, in another lifetime. The pallid Count was a mere shadow in his gaunt face, the bluff sailor a memory. He was straight-backed as ever, but very thin, and very frail. But even yet he had that look burning in his eye that she had seen before, that had presaged disaster - disaster, or perhaps only justice. She was glad that she knew mercy now.
It was only as she closed the door behind her that she realised that she did not know what to call him. Was he still the Count of Monte Cristo? Had he adopted some title yet more fantastic? Or could she once more address him as 'Edmond' while he must call her Mother Marie-Jeanne?
He stepped forward, for a moment in that dim light the bold young sailor she had loved. 'Mercédès,' he said. She did not correct him.
'You are most welcome, in Christ's name.' She took great care to make her tone formal, and feared indeed that she had made it cruel.
He laughed. 'I thank you. But I have come for more than simple Christian hospitality.'
'Tell me then what you need, and if it is in my power to give, you shall have it.'
One stride, and he stood beside her. 'Merely this: your own self, as you promised when we were children in Marseille. Your own self, as you almost promised the day that I was taken from you. Your own self, as I had believed I would return to find you.'
She knew that regret was plain in her face. More often than she dared admit to herself had she imagined this day, and it pained her to make the reply that followed: 'It is too late, Edmond. You have been changed beyond all recognition, and I have changed more, perhaps, even than that, and the thing that might have been a blessing fifty years ago could never work now. And besides, I am truly pledged now, and this vow I will not break.'
'Is it your pride? Would you prove to me that you can at last be constant?' He spoke roughly, as if to provoke her.
She would have none of that. 'It ceased to be anything to do with you, long, long ago. As for my constancy, you know what you know, and God knows what God knows.'
'Once, you were promised to me. I can offer you now riches that are infinite by comparison to what we expected; nay, what we rejoiced in, then.'
'I have all that I need,' she said.
For a moment, the long-quenched flame of vengeance flickered in his face. 'I could change that in an hour. Perhaps it is no longer practicable to maintain this abbey... The Church is an institution as susceptible as any other to the persuasions of Mammon.'
She did not trouble to deny that. 'You would not. Though you may hold me guilty, and God knows you have cause enough, my little children here have done nothing to harm you. You would not send them back out into the world, when you know that few of them would last long without the protection of these walls.'
'Perhaps you might be replaced as Mother Superior.' But the heat was gone from his voice.
She would not mind so very much, she thought, even if he had been in a mood to follow through on that threat. She did not say so.
'It has been good to see you, Edmond,' she said.
An ironic smile crossed his thin lips. 'Likewise – Mercédès.'
He rose. She said, almost against her will, and very quietly, 'Forgive me.'
She thought he was not going to answer, but, with one hand on the door handle, he said, as softly, 'You are the only one I ever have forgiven.'
Compline
The sun ebbed from the purple sky, leaving the few long, low clouds streaked underneath with glowing blood-red. All through the abbey the sisters spoke in hushed voices, and in the visitors' room a man stood, listening always for the sound of – he knew not what – some cry, some groan that would herald a change of order within this place in which he did not belong. A tall man he was, skin bronzed by the southern sun and hands roughened with work, broad-shouldered and upright, though he was middle-aged now, and his hair had wholly turned to grey.
He had already been taken (a rare privilege!) up the broad stairs to the room where his mother lay, to receive her final blessing. She had known him, had smiled to see him, had listened with joy to his halting news of her grandchildren, had bade him go in peace. Now, he could only wait.
The door opened; a young sister entered silently, eyes lowered. Albert regarded her with anxiety, and as she looked up to meet his gaze he saw the tears, and knew it was over. 'Reverend Mother – your mother...'
Albert nodded, rather than force her to say the words. 'She is at peace, then,' he said.
'She rests in the Lord. But she always had peace,' the nun replied. 'She carried it within herself.'
She could not have been more than twenty-five years old, this child who was his spiritual sister; she might have known his mother for seven of those at the very most, and yet she spoke as if with an ancient authority.
And the son of Mercédès Herrera thought of all the years that his mother had waited, and suffered, and hoped, and he thought that perhaps it was true, after all.