IN AN OLD HOUSE in Paris that is covered with vines live twelve little girls in two straight lines.
Madeleine is the twelfth girl. The smallest and the wickedest. Sister Clavel has been instructed to take special care of her.
How the sisters wept when they first saw her! Her hands swaddled in snowy strips of muslin, Mother picking absently at the invisible insects that she feared were infesting the poultices. The sisters gave Madeleine a brand new prayer book and a straw hat strangled by a broad brown ribbon. She went with them happily.
The other little girls stroke her bandages as if they were touching the hem of Christ. Their eyes grow enormous and glassy and she can hear the prayers escaping beneath their breaths, a slow hiss of perforated air. At night, as they lie in their two rows, the moon rises and she shadows it from her cot, her arms arcing like a ballerinas, her milky fists rising like two false moons, like two spectral dollops of meringue.
She takes pleasure in her helplessness. Everyone must wait on her. She cannot even pee by herself. Bernadette, the eleventh girl, would like eventually to become a saint, so now she is practicing on Madeleine. She has made it her special duty to clean her when she menstruates, her little holy hands becoming sticky with the blood.
Bernadette's fingertips are warm when she parts Madeleine's knees and passes a damp rag between her legs. From her cot, Madeleine can hear the plash of water against the bowl, the trickling of fluids as Bernadette wrings the cloth. She waits for the firm hands that will pat her dry, tuck a clean rag against her wound, press together her splayed thighs. She wonders if the abbot at Rievaulx, when ministering to the bloodied Saint Michel, was as unflinching as Bernadette.