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knew about them, save the ones of poaching wild rabbits or the rights to a certain chestnut grove. Or so I believed back then. In any case, my dear, I tell
you all this because of Magda’s daughter. Magda’s Solange. Just past seventeen, she’s come home some weeks ago after a novitiate year and one as a postulant at Beaune. Says she’s not meant to be a nun, that she would rather live and work on the farm with her family. Janka is now the clan’s old matriarch, and she would lovingly take in and care for your child. With the help of her daughter and her granddaughter. With the help of Magda and Solange. They would take her as their own.”
    “What would you tell them? Would they take her knowing nothing about her?”
    “They would need know only that she is without a home.”
    “Had I forgotten there were such people, Józef, or is it that I never knew there were?” From a thin silver case in her purse, Valeska takes a cigarette and—as a man might—holds it between thumb and forefinger. The bishop pulls a long match from a box on the desk, strikes it once on the roughened patch of a marble ashtray, lights Valeska’s cigarette without rising from his chair. She does not thank him but says, “As much as you are offering, I want more, Józef. I want the child to be educated.”
    “Children are educated very well in rural France, my dear.”
    “No, no, I don’t intend her to be schooled at home or in a public lycée. A convent education, the niceties, the advantages of a fine Catholic boarding school, just as I had, as Andzelika had.”
    “Valeska, Valeska, listen to yourself. Will you even choose the stuff of her dresses, dictate—from some stifled place behind the drapes—how she’ll arrange her hair? She is congenitally ill, mortally ill, yet you imagine her reading Virgil. Hold her to you or surrender her. You cannot do both. Not even you can do both.”
    “Hush, Józef. Why must you always speak like a priest? Like a good priest. What about Montpellier?”
    “What about it? You are mad if you’re thinking to send her where Andzelika herself was schooled.”
    “Why? Andzelika’s, mine, our names will never be spoken. Through your connections with the curia there, you shall ask a favor. A paid-for favor. Your wish is to place an infant in the care of the
good Carmelites there. You’ll say that the infant’s identity and place of birth are to remain unrevealed, that, in exchange for a certain donation, the infant and its nurse are to be given refuge in the convent under the auspices of the curia. Something like that. You could accomplish all that quite easily, Józef. I know you could.”
    “And who is to be the child’s nurse?”
    “Why your Solange, of course. Don’t you see? If what you’ve told me is true, Solange would be devoted to the infant, and if this devotion were to be carried out within the very convent where Andzelika herself was so content for six years … Was it six? Yes, aged six through twelve she was, and how she cried when I insisted that she transfer to the Carmelites in Krakow. A selfish move on my part because I’d missed her so. I’d only sent her away because I believed that if she stayed far from our ‘society,’ if she remained distant from people who knew about our ‘misfortunes,’ then we, she and I could pretend to retrieve her childhood. Unstained, unburdened. Yes, with Solange as her nurse and the curia her protectorate, that’s how I shall walk away from the child.”
    “Do you truly think that no one among the good Carmelites of Montpellier will remember you? Or will you simply send the child by messenger?”
    “The abbess in Andzelika’s time was a virago called Paul. Do you know her?”
    “Not personally. I know of her. Know that she has been the bishop’s champion and servant since his ordination. And before that I would guess. A lifetime of collaboration, shall we say.”
    “So then you are acquainted with this bishop at