Miss Garnet's Angel

by Salley Vickers

  Professor Jones, had he been aware of it, would have been able to date Agnès’s arrival quite precisely, since it was the same summer that his second wife left him. The weather had been uncharacteristically inclement, even for central France, which does not enjoy the dependable climate of the South. Professor Jones had taken a sabbatical year in order to embark on a long-cherished research project of documenting each of the supposedly four thousand, five hundred sculptures which embellish the nine great portals of Notre-Dame in Chartres. The work was to be definitive in the field and he had dared to hope that it would make his name. But the parochialism of the small town, the depressing steady drizzle and her husband’s preoccupation with insensate figures of the long past had lowered Marion Jones’s spirits, the very spirits which her husband had hoped to raise by bringing her to the famed medieval town.

  This mismatch in taste and comprehension was only one of a long list of incompatibilities between Marion Jones and her husband. That summer, a renowned Japanese cellist visited from Paris to play Bach’s Suites for unaccompanied cello at one of the cathedral’s prestigious summer concerts. Marion, bored to tears by the life she was leading, wandered into the cathedral while the cellist was practising, and it was noted by Madame Beck that he was not unaccompanied when, a while later, he left the cathedral to return to his hotel. Not long after the concert, Marion took to making shopping trips to Paris, which is barely an hour’s train ride from Chartres. The trips became longer, and more frequent; one day she left with a larger than usual bag and never returned.

  Professor Jones waited mournfully, long after his sabbatical year had come to an end. Finally, giving in to despair, he resigned his university position and made a permanent home in Chartres, but not before a small parcel containing a wedding ring had arrived with a note telling him where he could ‘stick his bloody sculptures’.

  The current dean, the Abbé Paul, might have remembered Agnès’s arrival since he too, at that far date, had only lately come from his seminary to serve as a curate at the cathedral. He had found Agnès under a man’s coat, asleep in a convenient niche in the North Porch. Although the dean at the time, Monsignor André, a stern administrator, had let it be known that tramps should not misconstrue the nature of Christian charity by taking the cathedral for ‘a doss house’, the young priest found himself turning a blind eye to the intruder.

  Paul’s father was a Highland Scot who could trace his family line directly back to Lord George Murray, the general who had led the ill-fated Jacobite rebellion against the English in the rising of 1745. The general’s descendant had met his future wife when she had gone with a friend to visit the festival at Edinburgh, where he had held a research fellowship at the university. The marriage was a successful one: but Charles Murray had succumbed, after a short fight, to his French wife’s pressure to return to her native land in search of the light she bitterly missed in the long Scottish winters.

  The strain of rebellion in him succumbed to his greater fondness for his wife and concern for her happiness. He gave up his study of Ovid’s metaphors and became a respected Classics master at a school in Toulon.

  But a measure of his father’s dissident heritage salted the young Paul’s character. The sleeper in the cathedral porch was a young woman; she looked peaceful. For all Dean André’s strictures the young Paul could not bear to awaken her to what he guessed was a grim reality.

  Quite how Agnès had managed since those days was a subject of nobody’s speculation. She had made herself useful in the small ways that help to oil the wheels of daily life. She was an accomplished ironer, a reliable babysitter and was known to ‘sit’ naked for Robert Clément (the last activity making her less desirable to some in the first two capacities). She made a reputation as a conscientious cleaner, and Professor Jones, after a more than usually bad attack of moth had made lace of his slender wardrobe, discovered that she could also darn.

  Agnès no longer had need of the shelter of the cathedral when the subject of her cleaning it came up. The weather, which twenty years ago had witnessed her arrival, was repeating itself. Streams of sodden visitors—in coach parties, families and couples, as well as those travelling by choice or necessity alone, not to mention the troupes of those seeking enlightenment, historical or spiritual—were playing havoc with the cathedral floor. The once pale paving stones, quarried from nearby Berchères-les-Pierres, after hundreds of years of footfalls had darkened and pitted, which made them, as the current cleaner Bernadette often remarked, ‘hell to keep clean’.

  Agnès was weeding the flower-beds before the Royal Portal when the Abbé Paul encountered her. A summer of steady rain had brought on both the weeds and Thomas the gardener’s rheumatism. His wife had put her foot down and insisted he go to a spa for a cure. And, as was often the case when a temporary replacement was needed, it was Agnès who had come to mind.

  Enclosed in wicker borders, which gave the impression of large square florist’s panniers, the flowers, mainly white, had been chosen to enhance the summer evenings. Had Robert Clément been there, he might have observed that they also enhanced Agnès’s dark skin as she bent to root out the weeds. But the Abbé Paul was a man of the cloth and no doubt it was simply friendly courtesy that made him stop to greet her.

  ‘Good day, Agnès. I must say we are most grateful for your help.’

  Agnès straightened a back blessedly free of Thomas’s rheumatism. Although she was unaware that the Abbé had let her sleep undisturbed that first night she had come to Chartres, she nevertheless felt safe with him.

  ‘I like them best at night.’

  The Abbé Paul agreed. ‘The scent is stronger then.’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘The weather has brought on the weeds, though?’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  It was one of Agnès’s virtues that she didn’t say much. It made the Abbé Paul more inclined to be chatty himself though as a rule he was not a talkative man. ‘I’m afraid it’s making a filthy mess of the cathedral floor. All those wet muddy feet. And now, God help us, we seem to have lost our cleaner as well as our gardener. It’s too much for Bernadette’s knees, she says.’

  Agnès stood, a trowel in one hand, an earthy-rooted dandelion, which she planned to add to her evening salad, dangling from the other. The green leaves against her long red skirt and her impassive brown oval face gave an impression, the Abbé Paul fleetingly thought, of a figure from a parable portrayed in one of the cathedral’s stained-glass windows. A labourer in a vineyard, perhaps.

  It seemed Agnès was pondering, for as Paul was about to utter further pleasantries and move on, she spoke. ‘I will clean it if you like.’

  ‘Oh, but I didn’t mean…’ Now he was concerned that she might imagine that he was approaching her as a skivvy rather than for the pleasure of conversation.

  ‘I would like to, Father,’ Agnès said.

  The Abbé Paul paused. It would certainly help. The bishop was exercised about the state of the cathedral, which meant that he was being harassed too. And Agnès was known to be reliable.

  ‘I would like to,’ she repeated, with emphasis.

  ‘Well, if you felt you could…’

  ‘I do,’ Agnès said.

  So it was agreed she should start that same week.

  2

  Evreux

  Agnès Morel was born neither Agnès nor Morel. So far as names go she was not born anything at all. She was found wrapped in a white tablecloth in a straw shopping basket on January 21, St Agnès’s Day, with nothing to indicate her parentage except a single turquoise earring lying in the bottom of the basket, which might well have been dropped there by accident.

  Agnès is the saint to whom young women pray for husbands, and, since Jean Dupère, who had found the baby, presumed the foundling’s mother had none, he named the anonymous woman’s daughter after the saint. In the way of those who unexpectedly find themselves doing a good turn, he felt a touch of pride in the poetry of his choice.

 
; ‘Morel’ was an afterthought—Jean’s small way of passing on something of his own. He had a taste for morel mushrooms, and the child was discovered, a frozen scrap of a thing, in the logging area of the wood where he was gathering fuel for his fire and where in spring he was in the habit of going in search of this culinary prize.

  Jean was a bachelor. His romantic propensities, though stimulated by this unusual event, stopped short of envisaging raising a girl child on his own. But he was a farmer and fairly practised at rearing blighted orphaned creatures. He took the baby home and fed her in the old shepherds’ way, by dipping a knot of a boiled cloth in warm watered milk. When, the next day, he reported the find to the local police, they suggested that the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy at Evreux would no doubt care for the child while the necessary inquiries about her parentage were being made.

  The inquiries came to nothing. No local midwife or hospital reported anything untoward. No lone young woman was believed to have lately been delivered of a child. Jean was no longer a practising Catholic but he had been brought up in the Church and nuns struck him as a better bet than a state orphanage.

  A shared faith need not entail a uniform character. The Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy were, variously, strict, stupid, sadistic, well-meaning, intelligent and kindly—the three former traits slightly outweighing the latter qualities, as is generally the case in any human group. To be fair, as a community they were tolerant of illegitimacy. After all, the man whose life to which they had dedicated their own also came of ambiguous parentage.

  As Agnès grew older, and teachable, Sister Laurence, who often regretted that she had not married her cousin and had a child herself (the parents were dead set against this for genetic reasons and in the end the young lovers lost heart and capitulated), enjoyed telling the young Agnès Bible stories. An alert listener might have noticed a slightly subversive note in Sister Laurence’s voice when it came to the story of Moses found in a basket, a tone which hinted that his discovery by Pharaoh’s daughter was not entirely an accident. But, for all Agnès’s appetite for stories, she appeared quite incapable of mastering the ability to read or write.

  The nuns were, on the whole, as tolerant of this as they were of her illegitimacy. Sister Laurence put Agnès’s deficiency down to her unlucky start. It was Sister Véronique, who was writing a commentary on Dante, who tried her hardest to teach the girl, for, as she was fond of saying, ‘She is plainly bright’, adding somewhat tartly, ‘She laps up those tales.’ (Try as she might, Sister Véronique had never been able to rid herself of a certain scepticism over the factual accuracy of biblical stories.) But, as for helping Agnès to read the tales herself, it seemed to be a hopeless task.

  It was not that she was stubborn. She was an unusually industrious child and apparently willing to learn where she could. Everyone agreed she was first-rate at washing, ironing, embroidery and darning. The Sisters gave her their black woollen socks and stockings to darn with some relief. Sister Céleste, who had been in charge of the mending before, merely cobbled over the holes in their hosiery in an ugly mess.

  In time, Agnès began to work in the orchards and in the vegetable garden, where a local boy helped out. And that was when her troubles began again.