Soon I was to travel again through the French countryside but its splendors were to leave me unmoved. The landscape no longer interested me. The birds music no longer cheered my heart. There were no more garlands. Rather than the light-hearted joy of my previous pilgrimage, my veil shielded me from the vanities of nature and beauty. A garment of sackcloth took from me the simple pleasures of my own healthy skin. My eyes swollen from weeping for my lost Cordelia.

Following the night I have described, my love and I awoke early and took the cure with our other pious ladies. We prayed devoutly although the two of us felt secure. We had given each other the miracle. We were to stay another day and head back to the hated castle.

Strangely enough Grimaldus had disappeared.

Our trip back was uneventful but beautiful, colored as it was by our burgeoning love. We could not be as open as we liked, yet we still found the opportunity to steal a thousand kisses and at least a hundred caresses. We held hands wherever we went.

M.'s estates had just come into view. Men on horseback were riding at full speed to greet us.

Without a word these men laid hands on Cordelia and myself, roughly stripping us of our mounts and taking us into custody. Our ladies gasped in shock. What could this mean?

Cordelia was taken away from me in a direction that was wooded as far as the eye could see. I howled in horror but the men stopped my mouth and took me, devastated, through those gloomy corridors, to deposit me at the feet of my Master.

He scowled at me. Amidst his invectives a fleck of spit accompanied the word "tribadism," shooting from between his pursed lips like an oath. It was then I knew all was lost. I knew not why at the time, only that my happiness had been discovered.

Why oh why did we not hide ourselves better? Everyone must have noticed the way we looked at each other on our return trip, the little games we played and tender glances we exchanged.

I only learned later that the treacherous Grimaldus had been enlisted to spy for my master. The carbuncle had followed us and spied as we immersed ourselves in love. I will never forgive him and may God never do so.

I still don't know why Monsieur felt the need to have me watched. I'd never given him cause for suspicion before. Perhaps he sensed that I craved happiness and would slip from him in an instant given the chance to taste it.

I listened to M. but after his first few words I felt faint and could no longer. I pleaded for my Cordelia, I offered my life for hers but this elicited only sneers of contempt and further abuse. The gruesome man beat me, slapped me, kicked me, spat at me, vituperated.

When he tired of this, I was thrown into a cell deep beneath the castle in a murky, dripping dungeon, shoved a piece of mouldy bread and left to rot.

For days, how many in that darkness I know not, I lived on tears. I raged, I shouted, I threatened, then I would relent, plead, apologize, promise to live contritely and to bear Monsieur beautiful children if only my Cordelia might be spared.

One night I was awakened by a familiar voice. It was my father opening the door of my cell. News of my calamity had reached our village and my father, doubtless feeling guilty, had hurried here to save me and succeeded in bribing a guard.

Monsieur was trumping up charges of witchcraft, using my tribadism as evidence to convince the elders of the town to burn me. This was my only chance at life. I would be hidden away in a nunnery, to live a life of fasting prayer and devotion. On no account could I ever see Cordelia again.

We rode all night, my father and I. I could see that he had not believed the charges against me at first but my reaction to the news of having lost her, my one true wife in the eyes of the Lord, my misery, made plain to him the dire news of my sin. Only penitence and mortification, a lifetimes worth, could expiate the crime of our love.

Soon the Order of the Sacred Heart came into view. I wept to consider my fate within its walls.

At first it was difficult, but I soon learned to welcome the convent life and its oppressive boredom. A nun is expected to live her life inwardly in communion with the Holy Spirit. Ostensibly this was so with all of us but none knows the depths of the human soul and where it seeks its real communion. As for me, I brooded over my Cordelia and all my prayers were for her.

I fasted, I prayed, I listened to the Scriptures, I chanted. But pious at heart I was not. Under my coarse habit I felt my warm body glow, desiring more life, more pleasure, not less.

Most of the sisters were and are, dull nondescript devout types. Types whose personalities disappear beneath their habits. They are the real nuns and are necessary for an order like ours which deviates from the norm somewhat.

The real leaders consist of a small coterie. Our leader, abbess Clarissa, a tall voluptuous redhead of a fierce and proud demeanor. Square-jawed and forceful, almost masculine in her beauty.

Sister Genevieve, her right hand, the first Negress I had ever known or seen. From Sierra Leone, she was mistress to a Portuguese trader who brought her here after her parents had been captured for the slave trade.

Strikingly beautiful with a fierce angular face and the lean hard body of a born warrior. She never smiled and she never left the side of the Abbess. The dull white of her habit could never diminish her proud, even regal beauty. The Abbess trusted her implicitly.

Sister Gwendolyn, meek submissive of fair skin and dark hair like myself. Every order the Abbess gave she seemed to take a special delight in executing, no matter how bizarre or irrational.

Sister Mary, meek as Gwendolyn, quiet and passive. Without a single desire but to fulfill the wishes of Abbess Clarissa.

It was only in my imagination at first that Cordelia would visit me. I would invent scenarios, fantasies of how she might sneak into my cell.

Particularly in the wee hours of the night when all was quiet, but my soul was turbulent with visions of her voluptuous form assailing me. Merely to sleep, merely to put an end to my torment, I would give in to my desire for her, touching myself as I imagined renewing our intimacies while letting my fancy roam free to conceive of new games we might invent together. She was my succubus.

As my sex became wet and I smelt the fragrance of my desire, my memories of her gained in vividness. I would put my hand between my legs, rubbing, trying to feel as I felt when her sex slide against mine, when her mouth kissed me there. I would often bite down on a piece of cloth lest the intensity of my lubricity betray me. But my conscience was guilty. I always imagined they all knew and could read my sins on my face and so my eyes were perpetually downcast.

Which of the sisters knew of the cause of my downfall apart from the Abbess who of course knew all, I could not tell at first.

One night my worst fear and my fondest hope materialized into one miraculous phenomenon. I was in my cell, clutching my straw-stuffed pillow as was my wont, clenching my eyes to imagine better my one true love when I heard a voice, sweetly familiar but somehow hazy and even ethereal speak my name. "Agnes." My tallow candle flickered in the windless room.

I started up, terrified. What was this sight before me? It was my Cordelia. I shouted her name, jumped up to embrace her but my arms closed around nothing but a pocket of chillingly cold air. I fell to the ground weeping. My heart broke then for good. I knew what this meant.

"How? Why? Was it my husband?" She understood me although the question was drowned in sobs.

"Yes. Your husbands cronies mocked our love, beat and abused me in ways I cannot describe. Unconscious, they tied me in a sack and threw me into the Seine. There I expired in torment. My last earthly thoughts were of you."

Her pallid form wavered as if tormented by the memory. She spoke in the horrible rattle the dying make. Tears of blood ran down her face.

It was still the face I loved.

I kneeled before her, unable to bear this vision any longer. My tears wet the hard stones of my cell floor, my hands clenched together as if in beseechment.

"I haunt the waters where I perished for eternity now. No matter how far my soul may travel, at the end of my path I find the same neck of the rushing Seine where life was torn from me. I have searched all of the cosmic realms for you my Agnes. It was your ardor and your love that showed me the path to take to you. I want to help you. I have something to reveal. Something that will show you the path to your destiny."

This was the last I remembered. Those ghostly words echoed in my mind as I faded into unconsciousness.

I must have fainted. I woke in the same pose of prostration with my fists clenched, face down on the hard cold floor. Although I slept soundly it was not an easy sleep. The cryptic words of my dead lover rang in my ears and disturbed my mind throughout.

Yet somehow my body did not move. Had I even shifted in my sleep? I felt so many times during the long nightmare of that night that I was running from demons and spectres.

Oppressed by fantasies of damnation, I awoke to early morning Lauds unable to function. The sister of the infirmary, seeing my swollen face and hearing the distress in my voice, excused me from devotions.

I remember little of that dreary day in bed, severe faces in starched white frowning over me.

I longed to see my beloved ghost again. I pined for her to come, even speaking in death-rattles, even with the crimson tears of remorse pouring from her dead eyes.

At night she came again. The wind shifted the willow outside my cell. Rain battered for a furious instant and died. And she came, tinted the blue of cold and death.

She does not speak, only beckons, and I follow. The old oaken door of my cell does not creak as she opens it and guides me through. The tarred branches in their sconces alight one by one as we pass through the dim halls, down to the convent's deepest cell where, so I have heard, naughty nuns are punished.

As the heavy door came into view, Cordelias wraith turned to me and vanished. The torches we had passed blew out leaving me in darkness but for a spot of light issuing from the keyhole. I knelt.