Chapter 2
Chapter two
Claire
Claire was not a pious woman, and she never pretended to be. She was neither holy nor silent, and certainly not obedient. In her own mind, she was a disgrace, condemned to the church’s servitude not by divine will but by poverty.
Born to devout yet poor parents, Claire had grown up without luxuries, only endless prayers. Her parents went to church with bowed heads and empty hands, begging for fertile soil and mercy that never came.
Their crops weren’t as fruitful as past years, and as they noticed the lack of coin flowing, desperation set in.
Her brothers had served as altar boys, one after another.
Mateo, the eldest, had worn the title like a badge of honor until he came of age and turned to the plow.
Lyam, the younger, lasted a month before refusing to return. He never said why. Claire had seen the fear in his eyes, and the bruises her father ignored. Whatever haunted him at that altar, he chose his father’s scorn over the priest’s touch.
When both sons were lost to piety, all eyes turned to the daughter.
It came as a whisper, hushed exchanges about how it would’ve been better if they didn’t have a daughter, how it wasn’t profitable to keep her around. How would they pay for the dowry? Who would want a daughter like Claire? A disobedient girl who cared only about herself.
That was where they were wrong. Claire cared about others a little too much for her own liking.
Enough to allow herself to see that her parents needed her for their own salvation.
If her very existence stopped them from having a comfortable life, then she would become the sacrificial lamb if it meant their happiness.
Claire still remembered that night at the kitchen table. She remembered the flicker of a dying candle, her mother’s apron stiff with flour, her tears running down her cheeks as a subtle reminder that maybe—just maybe—her mother cared about her.
“We have no money, Claire. Nothing to offer your future husband,” her mother had said. Her father sat in silence, the smell of earth and sweat clinging to his fists on the table, his eyes unable to meet hers. “And I don’t think any man wants a woman without a dowry…”
As if Claire had ever wanted to belong to any man.
She had seen what marriage meant in her household. Marriage was her father’s temper, her mother’s quiet resignation, the bruises passed off as accidents. She had seen Mateo’s cruelty toward his “beloved.” If that was love, she wanted none of it.
To her, love was soft and tender, a loving caress to a broken soul, a promise of companionship through anything. Love was freedom, pleasure, warmth…
Love was to be seen, understood, and wanted regardless of what the other person saw.
That was the love she wanted, not the aberration she had seen in her home with her parents and her brothers.
But her opinion mattered little, since they had already decided her fate.
The convent.
She was to serve God, since no man would have her.
Yet sometimes, late at night, Claire wondered if there hadn’t been another reason for their decision. She had always loved to sing and dance in a way that defied her parents.
Once, they had caught her in the village square, dancing barefoot to the music of passing travelers. Nomads, her father had called them while spitting on the ground. Where her father saw evildoers, thieves, and harlots, Claire saw freedom.
Their tambourines clattered, their laughter rang through the air, and one woman with golden bangles had wrapped a scarf around Claire’s hips as she spun.
For a heartbeat, she felt free. She felt like she belonged.
She would’ve dropped everything she ever knew to chase that feeling once more and to be surrounded by it.
But when her father found her, the joy on her face had turned to fear.
The scarf was torn from her body. The shame on his face had been worse than any beating.
From that day on, she knew they feared not for her soul, but for her freedom.
They would rather bury her behind convent walls than see her become one of them.
Sometimes she wondered if her parents had ever loved her at all, or only the idea of her soul as another offering to buy Heaven’s favor.
Her mother’s nightly kisses had stopped after the announcement of her parting.
Her loving ‘good nights’ had been replaced by silence.
Claire liked to imagine it was an act of mercy to make leaving easier, so she wouldn’t miss her at all.
But it wasn’t easy. Not for her.
She remembered kissing her parents goodbye at the gate of the Convent of the Paraclete.
The walls of the building were high. It had broken windows, which Claire knew would filter in the coldness when winter came.
The halls reeked of mildew and although the food wasn’t that bad, she felt out of place.
If the outside was bad, inside was worse. There were so many women discarded by the world. They were unwanted daughters, mistresses caught and punished, women who had loved other women in secret and now prayed for forgiveness that would never come.
It was not holiness that kept them there. It was survival.
Days blurred into one another, silent and airless.
Claire found herself suffocating more than once, woken up in the middle of the night by the night terrors of darkness engulfing her, of ropes wrapping around her so tightly she could not move an inch…
She needed solace, anything that would pull her away from her new holy jail, away from the women who were scared to speak out—just like her.
She didn’t know who to trust. They all acted as if they were pious, as if their connection to God was the real one, that anything else was fake, an act to stay alive.
Each day, Claire looked at the convent’s door with longing that gnawed her insides.
She wanted to leave. She wanted to run, but where would she go?
Back to her parents? So they could rub in her face every day until her last breath, what a disappointment of a daughter she was? Would she join the travelers?
Each passing day, Claire swore she would go insane if they didn’t leave the confinement of the convent, but then came an announcement.
Mother Beatrice said they would visit Notre-Dame.
For the first time in months, Claire looked up toward Heaven with gratitude. She was so tired of the misery inside Paraclete. Anything other than the convent would be a breath of fresh air.
She could barely sleep the night before. She had wanted to see what it was like inside the holy building. She remembered when she arrived in Paris, walking in front of it on her way to the convent.
She had noted how the two large towers rose like sentinels over Paris. It was already beautiful outside, but nothing could’ve prepared her for the inside.
Sunlight fractured through the stained glass, scattering light across the stone. The air smelled of wax and incense. It was rich, suffocating, and of course, holy.
She had never seen the inside in person.
She only heard the stories some travelers offered when they passed her village and what she had read of Notre-Dame in a few borrowed books.
Words had become her escape. She had wanted to write to her parents, to tell them she still thought of them, that she still loved them despite her better judgment, but she never did.
She didn’t know how she would react if she ever wrote to them and they never sent a letter back.
The visits to the cathedral became weekly pilgrimages. For most of the sisters, it was devotion. For Claire, it was oxygen. It wasn’t long before they decided to start a choir, and Claire was more than willing to be part of it.
When Claire sang, her voice carried through the cathedral. She sang not for God, but to fill the hollow ache of her solitude. She sang because silence and loneliness had become unbearable.
The other nuns praised her tone; even the stern Sister Margaret permitted her a small solo each week. When Claire sang, the world seemed to still. The walls in the cathedral listened.
To anyone else, the idea of a building listening would’ve sounded like crazy talk, but every time Claire finished a song, and she lifted her gaze toward the arches, she caught a flicker of movements and shadows shifting where no one should be.
More than once, a soft shuffling above made her lose her place, until Sister Margaret tugged sharply at her habit to refocus her attention. Still, she could not shake the feeling of being watched.
She tried to pay it no mind. Maybe it was an animal. A rat or a dove that had found its way into the church. But one day, when the choir’s final notes faded, she saw red hair disappearing behind a column high above.
Claire’s breath caught.
Sister Margaret was talking about something she couldn’t catch. She wasn’t paying attention to what was being said but to the movement above her.
“Sister Margaret,” she interrupted, cutting the other nun off. “Is anyone else here today?”
The old woman gave her a withering look before glancing toward the altar. “Yes, Sister Claire. Of course there is someone with us. He is always with us.”
Claire clicked her tongue in annoyance and shook her head. “I mean someone real!” Claire blurted, then regretted it instantly.
The other nuns gasped, their habits rustling, looking at her as if she had conjured Satan himself.
Claire forced a shaky laugh. “I only meant a worker... perhaps in the rafters?”
Sister Margaret’s brow furrowed deeper, her eyes cold. “No one else is here,” she said sharply.
Claire exhaled, relieved that Sister Margaret didn’t push further. She was known to be a tattletale, so she hoped she wouldn’t report back what she had said to the superior Mother Beatrice. Yet, the weight of unseen eyes still lingered, and Claire looked up out of the corner of her eye.
As the sisters filed out, Claire turned once more toward the heights of the cathedral. She would find a way to climb those stairs, to see who—or what—was watching her.
Because whatever it was, Claire was certain of one thing: it was not God.