The Legend of Provence

A foundling, swaddled in moonlight and left on the abbey stones, grows into a novice whose every breath seems perfumed with incense and renunciation; her days pass in a hush of psalms, her nights in candle-pale vigils until a battered dragoon, uniform still smelling of gunpowder and thyme, is carried through the cloister gate. Fever unspools his secrets, desire slips between bandages, and the convent’s chill marble can no longer contain the drumbeat under her ribs. She flees before dawn, veil snagged on rosemary hedges, only to meet herself—impossibly—still chanting vespers, because the stone Virgin has stepped down, assumed the oval of her face, and keeps the abbey’s lamps trimmed in an eternal masquerade.