came from but somehow it fit and she stopped putting up a fuss.
I rejoined the girls only to find Marguerite standing piously next to Mavis with her chin jutting into the air. She straightened the bodice of her blue postulant’s dress, seemingly unaware I had come back and was standing in line, but then turned her head and looked me up and down with the coldest of cold stares.
‘Are you all right?’ Claire said.
I opened my mouth but no words came out, looking at Claire and then to Marguerite. A man walked out onto the platform and a cheer erupted from the crowd, rescuing me from Marguerite’s horrid look and from answering Claire.
‘It’s him!’ Claire shouted. ‘Pétain!’
He stepped up to the podium and paused briefly before tipping his French kepi. Then he shocked everyone with an announcement.
‘My fellow Frenchmen.’ He cleared his throat before continuing, and supporters waved their hand flags. ‘I am Marcel Moreau, a friend of our beloved leader, Marshal Philippe Pétain.’ The excitement building in the crowd fizzled when they realized Pétain had sent his lookalike. ‘He regrets to inform you that he is unable to speak to you fine people today.’ He carefully unfolded a piece of paper and then squinted, tilting the page into the sunlight as if he had trouble reading the words. An aide rushed onto the stage and handed him a pair of wire-framed spectacles. Dogs barked behind the podium. Chatter wondering where Pétain had gone to swept through the crowd, and he seemed nervous, wiping sweat from his forehead, face and neck. ‘That is all.’ He turned on his heel and walked swiftly off the stage.
The Saint-Pierre nuns stood like statues, looking quite confused. Others lingered as if not sure what to do after all that waiting. A delayed applause crept up from the back of the crowd, but faded away once it reached the front where people had already started making their way to the parade. The gendarmes had left, but to where I didn’t know.
Mavis tugged on my sleeve, shrugging her shoulders like a little girl. She started to talk, her dove mouth opening and closing, but I couldn’t hear anything that came out of her. When she spoke again, I only caught a few of her words. ‘Quick… speech.’
A haggard old woman pointed her finger at the empty stage. ‘Coward!’ she shouted. ‘Pétain tucked his tail and ran—the Résistance breathing down his neck.’ A wry, crackled laugh burst from her lips before she started wheezing and holding her chest with her free hand.
I didn’t want to be caught looking, and turned my back to gather up the girls who had started to wander like cats, but bumped right into Marguerite. She had a scowl on her face that turned so cold I felt a chill brush against my skin.
‘Where were you earlier?’ She crossed her arms. ‘I saw you leave when the gendarmes arrived.’
I looked at her blankly. ‘When the gendarmes arrived?’
‘You’re repeating my words.’ She squinted. ‘You defied a sister’s direct orders. You could have ruined things for the convent, leaving the girls unsupervised.’
‘I was only gone for a second.’
‘You have a habit of ruining things.’
I looked into her beady eyes, suddenly realizing she was still angry with me for what happened on her arrival day. The girls swarmed around us, asking when we were leaving, dividing my attention between Marguerite’s pointed stare and their whining cries.
‘Marguerite… I…’
Without further comment, Marguerite turned on her heel and walked away, leaving me with a handful of complaining girls in a near-deserted square.
4
As instructed, we didn’t go to the sewing centre after the speech, but took reflection in the cloister with our devotional journals near the convent’s nave. I sat on the ground, my journal unopened, staring off in the distance at a stone wall, thinking about what I saw in the crypt, and wondering if they knew who’d seen them. Of all the places I could have picked, a convent with ties to the Résistance? My fingers shook a little from the excitement, remembering the dragging sound of the rugs moving across the floor.
Mavis touched my shoulder, and I jumped, clutching my chest.
‘Oh my,’ she said, sitting on the ground in front of me. ‘Thinking about something important?’
It took a moment for me to recover. ‘I didn’t hear you walk up,’ I finally said. ‘That’s all.’
Mavis’s face looked smooth as porcelain, white and matte, and she smelled of menthol. Had I not known the nuns washed only on Sundays,