Read Amandine for Free Online Page A

Montpellier?”
    “More than that. Fabrice is his name. Our ecclesiastical paths have been crossing since we were very young men. We’ve always admired one another. But this Paul, this Carmelite abbess, surely you met with her during Andzelika’s residence.”
    “Actually I never did. I never once visited Andzelika at the convent. All that was during the epoch of my ‘mourning.’ I traveled very little. It was my sister and her husband—Yolanda and Casimir—who performed the parental duties as far as the school was concerned
.
They accompanied little Andzelika there, brought her home twice a year for visits, went to fetch her when I could no longer abide her absence. Yes, it’s this Paul to whom I’ll take the child. And if Solange, your Solange, could be installed there to care for her until she is of school age, perhaps take on the role of guardian after that … until she was grown, until she married or—”
    “Uproot a French farm girl who has just run away from convent life, you will bid her reenter another order—what is it, a thousand kilometers distant from her home?—so she may devote herself to your responsibilities—”
    “As a lay sister, Józef, as a lay sister. With a lay sister’s rights and freedoms. I would make it worth her while. I would help the family, too.”
    “How deeply dyed is that margravine in you, Valeska. My telling you the story of Janka and Laurent, of their family, it was meant to demonstrate the otherness of them. They cannot be bought.”
    “Everyone knows that everyone else has a price. It wants cunning to divine the price and a greater cunning to offer it so that the one being bought saves face. The Carmelites shall be even more pliant than your Janka and her kin. A check-strewn path through the curia. Yes, I’m certain that you,—that I—could place the child at Montpellier.”

CHAPTER VI

    W
HO COULDN’T LOVE YOU? WHOEVER YOU ARE. PERHAPS I LOVED YOU
even before today, perhaps I’ve loved you from that moment, that first moment when Grand-mère told me about a child without a home. Surrounded as I was by all my family, I was a child without a home. I began to think about you, about what you’d be like, how it would feel to hold you. Who are you, from where do you come? And what shall I tell you when you begin to ask those questions of me? I shall tell you what Paul has told me, that you were left as a newborn, an unidentified newborn, at the doors of the convent, your date of birth estimated, your parentage unknown. You were registered, then, as a ward of the curia. All of it true, of course. As far as I know
.
    Women are often left alone to bear their children. Was that how it was with your mother? And if it was? So be it. You were hers. Why did she leave you, Amandine? Was she sick, was she poor? It should be she who holds you now rather than I. Sweet child, I am sorry for you that I am not she. And if not she, why is it I who holds you? Why
was I invited here? I still don’t know. The woman with the eyes like a deer, the woman who came to the farm late last spring? Was it she? Is she your mother? Even though Grand-mère said she was not, I wonder
.
    That afternoon. How I wish I could recall more of it. More of her. Everyone gone to school or to the fields; there was no one in the house when she came, no one save Grand-mère, me, and the little ones napping up in the attic rooms. Grand-mère said I must stay in the kitchen. At all costs, I must stay in the kitchen. “Prepare tea, but don’t bring it out until I come to knock on the kitchen door. Don’t come into the parlor,” she warned
.
    The wind shuddered the window where I stood wiping the mist from one small pane with the elbow of my sweater, lightning flashed in the dull yellow sky, and I saw her totter daintily up the road wearing a man’s coat and pretty shoes, pointed shoes with double straps and high heels. I strained to see her face, but she was looking down, her kerchief pulled low so that