Sister Lemoine glided down the corridor, her nostrils flaring with rapid, indignant snorts. She was as furious as a hornet whose nest had been disturbed. With every distant rumble of thunder, swelling into an ominous roar, she flinched, shielding her eyes with one hand.
She loathed the sight of the storm churning behind the tall, soaring windows. A tempest was approaching. Suddenly, one of the windows let out a strained creak, as though it might buckle under the force of the gusting wind, which was whistling ever louder.
The wind was soon joined by a sudden, heavy downpour, draping the world in a dull, dismal curtain of rain. Sister Lemoine, sweating profusely, alternated between panting and dabbing at her damp forehead with the sleeve of her habit. The clatter of her ugly leather heels against the stone floor was so loud that the youngest children scurried beneath their beds in fright.
St. Lazarus Orphanage was run by nuns. It was not a particularly warm or welcoming place, though this was not merely the fault of the fickle weather on Scotland's north-eastern coast. Such places were always overcrowded, and there were never enough hands to share the work. Strict discipline reigned here, and punishment for disobedience was commonplace. One child in particular drove Sister Lemoine to the brink of madness. Not a day passed without her making the journey to Sister Superior Forsyth's quarters to lodge yet another complaint about a certain red-haired girl.
"Sister Forsyth! Again! Again, in the middle of my lesson! That's the sixth habit this month! That child is evil incarnate!"
"But..."
"You saw it with your own eyes last week, Sister! She burnt a hole through my habit with her bare hands! If that isn't reason enough to send her away, then what is? She's the devil's own!" shrieked Sister Lemoine, thrusting the scorched fabric—shaped like a small child's hand—right under the Mother Superior's nose.
"And what, exactly, am I supposed to do with her?" asked Sister Forsyth, throwing her hands up in despair.
"Send her away!" Sister Lemoine's voice teetered on hysteria.
"Where?!"
"Anywhere!"
"The orphanages and workhouses are overflowing! No one wants another mouth to feed. Poverty and destitution prowl the streets, and the number of orphans grows by the day. Just yesterday, I received a telegram—an admiralty ships returning from India capsized in the storm. They're sending us five more children!" Sister Forsyth pressed her fingers to her temples and shook her head. "We've no room left…"
"Ever since that child arrived, we've had neither spring nor summer! It's mid-May and we've nothing but October rain every day! Don't tell me this is merely the weather—Aberdeen lies by the sea, not in the Arctic!"
"We've never had spring or summer here," replied Sister Forsyth grimly.
"I was told that much when I was first posted to this place. No one knows why the sun avoids this stretch of coastline. It's simply the nature of things."
"A cursed nature! And it didn't come from nowhere!" Sister Lemoine's voice trembled with fury. "In twelve years, I have not seen a single clear and bright day here. Nowhere else in this world does a man feel such a cold shiver down his spine, such unease and helplessness as he does here, when those sudden, unnatural storms break. How can it be that there is but one place in the entire country, cloaked forever in mist and tormented by tempests?!" She raised her voice.
"As we say here," Sister Forsyth muttered darkly, "if you don't like the weather, wait a minute."
She always said that whenever Sister Lemoine came to her with complaints. And Lemoine, for all her piety, could never understand how the Mother Superior remained so unmoved by her warnings. Sister Forsyth often seemed distracted, as if her thoughts wandered far from Aberdeen.
Placing one's faith in time was no wisdom at all in such a grim place. Waiting a minute, as the Scottish proverb advised, changed nothing. Instead, new afflictions continued to arise—each one tied to Erie, the girl who filled Sister Lemoine with unspeakable dread.
Saint Lazarus stood far from the city, perched upon the steep cliffs of Cove Bay, its foundations mere inches from the relentless grasp of the North Sea.
The orphanage had once been a citadel, raised during the early days of "the empire upon which the sun never sets," but it had survived less than a decade in that role before being converted into an orphanage. The centuries that followed had brought war, plague, and famine—and with them, an endless tide of orphaned children. To be abandoned or illegitimate in eighteenth-century England was to be marked by hardship.
Sister Lemoine could not shake the feeling that the telegram and the ever-swelling ranks of the orphanage were not the only burdens weighing upon the Sister Superior. She was always a grave and pensive woman, shut away in her office—but today, something was different.
She was troubled. Deeply.
A glint of paper caught Sister Lemoine's eye—the sharp edge of a folded newspaper, barely visible beneath the sleeve of the Sister Superior's habit.
"What were you reading, Sister?" she asked.
Sister Forsyth looked up slowly, then revealed the paper she had tried to keep hidden. It was that morning's edition, and across the front page stretched the ominous headline:"Another Incarnation of Trithemius"
Beneath it, against the backdrop of a blazing pyre, stood a local magistrate—renowned for his zealous persecution of those accused of witchcraft and for presiding over the most infamous trials of the past decade, trials that had claimed the lives of hundreds.
Sister Lemoine snatched up the paper in an instant, her fingers crumpling its edges as she seethed with fury.
"Who still listens to that deluded tick?! That blaspheming fool! That—"
"Scoundrel," finished Sister Forsyth flatly, rising from her chair.
She moved to the tall, arched window and stared out at the thick, black cloud coiling above the sea.
"If word of our troubles with Erie were to reach anyone—especially that, as you called him, lunatic—our misfortunes would far surpass the mere absence of spring and summer."
"I thought the witch hunts would come to an end..." Sister Lemoine sighed.
"They will not end so long as fanatics like Spall have a voice. The Great Hunts in France, the burning pyres in Germany, the persecutions in Switzerland, the blindness and ignorance in the Netherlands, the madness in America. And here as well. In five days, another trial in Edinburgh—ten accused of witchcraft, including two children. And charlatans like Spall..."
Her voice grew sharp."They'll be the ones judging them! Do you know what that means?"
"More senseless deaths," murmured Sister Lemoine, tossing the crumpled paper onto the coal pile beside the small wall stove.
"That fool, blinded by delusions and ignorance, is welcomed at every court. At the papal court… in the bishops' palaces… at Catholic courts… Protestant courts… in the castles of feudal lords. The arcane knowledge of old tomes, to the likes of him, is the purest science—greater than all reason. I thought the natural sciences would cast this superstition of witchcraft onto the rubbish heap of history, yet… it seems not."
"If all those fanatics knew how many of the accused were hidden within the walls of this orphanage, and in so many places like ours, they would long since have burned every nun in the country at the stake."
"The last crop failure and those storms above Cove—according to that rabble—are the work of witchcraft. I fear it will not be long before we are once again forced to shelter in these cellars and underground chambers those condemned to die for sorcery."
At that moment, from the blackened clouds, a wide, luminous bolt of lightning struck the churning waters of the North Sea. The deafening crack resounded through the air, which seemed to tremble in response.
"A word spoken in an ill hour may prove prophetic," said Sister Lemoine, and at once she crossed herself before hurrying out of the Mother Superior's office.
She had managed to calm herself during the midday break, yet soon she was once more hurrying down the corridor, her shoes clattering unbearably as she went to teach her Latin lesson. By the time she reached the third floor she was exhausted—her girth bore heavily upon her.
From the far end of the corridor she already heard the sounds of a quarrel within the classroom, designated for mathematics lessons. For a moment she paused to listen, but when the shrill cry of one of the girls pierced through into the hall, she rushed forward. When she reached the doorway, she was so out of breath that her lungs gave her no air to bellow over the chaos.
In the middle of the classroom, two girls were locked in a fierce struggle, clutching at each other's heads and yanking at handfuls of hair. The rest of the children had retreated towards the back of the room, their frightened eyes fixed on the brawl.
" Sister Lemoine! Erie threatened Susan yesterday!" cried one girl, pointing accusingly at the red–haired girl, who seemed to be gaining the upper hand.
" Stop this at once!" roared Sister Lemoine, striding towards them.
Yet her words went unheeded—the girls continued their fight. Sister Lemoine rolled up the sleeves of her habit to the elbows and seized each by the wide straps of her black frock. She met fierce resistance. She had not expected such ferocity from ten-year-old girls. She grappled with them for some time before finally planting herself squarely between them.