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in her hands and, with the sea-wet edge of her shift, clean my wounds.
    â€œNothing too serious,” was her assessment. She pulled that fabric through the deepest gashes; the pain was indescribable. She set my ruined feet upon her knees. “We’ll let the air get at these scrapes a moment. They say the sea air is a curative…. That’s why I was sent here, I think.” And she kissed lightly my sandy instep.
    Further unnerved by seeing that the tide had slipped over our rock, had covered it completely, I wanted to leave the shore. I said so; and surprisingly, Peronette obliged.
    I would have liked to run, but pain prevented it. My feet were sore inside my boots. Peronette had replaced her shoes without caring for her own cuts; when I offered to tend her wounds, she declined and…and expressed a fondness for pain. “Stare at the pain,” she counseled, “stare at it as though it were the sun, and something magical happens.”
    â€œIndeed,” said I, “you go blind. What’s magical in that ?” I had already set to wondering how I’d secure the salve and bandages I’d need to tend properly to my wounds without having to undergo an examination from the infirmarian.
    As we walked, the pain did lessen. Rather, it was replaced by all that I would feel in the weeks to come when Peronette would overwhelm me similarly, cause me to feel things I could not name, cause me to forget things easily named: prudence, pride, discretion…the list is long.
    It had grown late; the sun had begun its descent. The clouds ran quick and thin. Striate bands of orange and red spread across the sky.
    Fortunately, no one had remarked our long absence. Peronette and I entered C——through separate entrances. Her parting words were these: “I shall ask for you.” And in a shadowed doorway, she, on tiptoe, leaned in to kiss me on the lips; and then she was gone. I stood stunned. It was as though I’d been…as though I’d been beaten. Some months earlier, not wanting to peel, dice, boil, and mash yet another bowl of turnips, I’d stashed them in a cupboard; had Sister Brigid discovered them, I’d have been chastised, sent off to ask forgiveness of the Virgin. But it was the cellarer who found me out, and she went straight to Sister Claire, who deemed my crime worthy of punishment involving my palms and a thin whip carved of birch. Yes, stunned I was by Peronette’s kiss, stunned as I’d been beneath that birch rod. And stunned I would be each time she kissed me.
    That night I sat alone in the small library above the sisters’ chapel, trying to study but unable to concentrate. The wounds to my feet were reminders that the day had happened, that I had not descended into a dream world. And Peronette’s mysterious good-bye resounded in my head, overwhelmed every word I read.
    I was roused by a rap at the library door. One of the sisters—no matter which—came into the library, chided me for “secreting” myself behind a closed door, said she’d searched for me everywhere. Mother Marie-des-Anges wished to see me in her chambers, immediately.
    I rose and followed the nun. I was certain Peronette and I had been found out, and that I was headed toward punishment: a month’s chores, perhaps two. Always, too, there was the threat of banishment: I could be sent from C——as quietly and unceremoniously as I’d arrived. I was resigned; still, I wished it were not Mother Marie who’d mete out my punishment. Why couldn’t it be Sister Claire, the Head, or another nun who meant nothing to me? Not far from Mother Marie’s rooms, near our dormitory, with windows giving out on to the yard, my escort gestured that I should go on alone. She handed me her stub of candle, and I proceeded, guided by its weak light.
    â€œYes, come in,” was the response to my tapping at the door. “Come in,