Holy Fools by Joanne Harris

give peaceful sleep. I recalled a place where thousands of them grew undisturbed, but I was too restless for such work and I only picked a handful. In any case, the flowers were just another excuse to escape the cloister for a few hours.
    As it was, we lost track of time. Beyond the dunes is a little beach of sand, where Fleur likes to play. There are broad white scars on the dune where she and I have worn away the grass, climbing and jumping, climbing and jumping, and the water is clear and shallow and filled with small jeweled pebbles.
    “Can I swim today? Can I?”
    “Why not?”
    She swims like a dog, with shouting and splashing and great enjoyment. Mouche, her doll, watched us from the dune’s edge as I discarded my habit and joined Fleur in the water. Then I dried both of us with the skirt of my habit and picked some small, hard apples from a tree by the side of the road, for I realized that the sun was high, and we had missed lunch. Then at Fleur’s insistence, we dug a great hole, into which we flung pieces of seaweed to make a monster pit, and afterward she slept for half an hour in the shade, Mouche under her arm, while I watched over her from the duneside path and listened to the whisperings of the turning tide.
    It was going to be a dry summer, I thought. Without rain, harvests would be bad; forage meager. The early blackberries were already burnt to a gray fluff on the stems. The vines too were stunted by drought, the grapes hard as dried peas. I pitied those who, like Lazarillo’s players, traveled the road in the wake of such a summer.
    The road. I saw it in my mind’s eye, gilded with sunlight, strewn with the shards of my past. Was it really such a bad road? Had I suffered so much during those traveling years? I knew I had. We had endured cold and hunger, betrayal and persecution. I tried to recall those things, but still the road ahead of me gleamed like a path over quicksand, and I found myself remembering something LeMerle had once told me, in the days when we were friends.
    “We have a natural affinity, you and I,” he had said. “Like air and fire, combustion is our nature. You can’t change the element you are born to. That’s why we’ll never leave the road, my l’Ailée; any more than fire can choose not to burn, or a bird leave the sky.”
    But I had. I had left the sky, and for many years I had barely even raised my eyes to it. I had not forgotten, however. The road had always been there, patiently awaiting my return. And how I wanted it! What might I give to be free, to have a woman’s name once more, a woman’s life? To see the stars from a different place every night, to eat meat cooked over my own campfire, to dance-maybe to fly? I did not need to answer the unspoken question. Joy leaped in me at the thought, and for a moment I might almost have been the old Juliette once more, the one who walked to Paris.
    But it was ridiculous. Leave my life, my comfortable cloister; the friends who had given me refuge? The abbey was hardly the home I had longed for, but it provided the essentials. Food in winter, shelter, work for my idle hands. And leave it for what? For a few dreams? For a hand of cards?
    The path, half-sand beneath my heavy boots, dragged at my feet. I kicked at it angrily. The explanation was simple, I told myself. Simple and rather stupidly obvious. The hot weather, the sleepless nights, the dreams of LeMerle…I needed a man. That was all. L’Ailée had had a different lover every night, choosing as she would-smooth or rough, dark or fair-and her dreams were scented and textured with their bodies. Juliette too was a sensual creature: Giordano scolded her for bathing naked in the rivers, for rolling in the morning grass, and for the secret hours she spent with his Latin poets, struggling with the unfamiliar syntax for the sake of the occasional taut glimpse of Roman buttock…Either of them would have known how to dispel this malaise. But I-Soeur Auguste, a man’s name