Stigmata

by Colin Falconer

  ‘So that’s what worrying you? Look child, your father’s the only man I’ve ever known. For all his size, he’s a gentle man and I’ve never shrunk from his embraces. You know that.’

  ‘Did you love him from the first then?’

  ‘From the first? The first for me was just like it is for you. My father arranged things and I am grateful for his wisdom. It was never like one of the minstrels’ songs, I suppose, but we grew to like each other and I suppose now I love him as much as anything in the world, except for you.’ She put her arms around her. ‘Everything will be all right, you’ll see. Now get yourself dressed, child, and be off to the market or the best of everything will be gone.’

  V

  SHE COULD HAVE found her way blindfold through the streets to the Saint-Étienne gate, for every day for two years she had gone by the same way to bring her father his dinner. She recognized the tincture of roses from the apothecary; and she knew the inn by the smell of sour wine and fish, for the innkeeper made salted herring to feed his customers and they habitually spat the bones on to the reeds that covered the earthen floor; next came the tapping of a smithy at his furnace, and she felt the blast of heat as she hurried past the smoke-blackened shop.

  She flattened herself against the wall as a Templar knight came along the lane on his great warhorse, the stench of him enough to fell an ox, never a by-your-leave to anyone, a bearded giant with a broadsword on his belt that was bigger than her. She tried to dodge the mud thrown up by its hooves. The size of them! They could pound a bone to splinters and dust.

  Another storm overnight had left the square a sea of mud and rubbish. The fug of the city was made worse by a sticky mist of rain and tempers were short. A troupe of travelling tumblers who had performed every day in the square had moved on, and now there were just a few housewives haggling for eggs and salt with the shivering stallholders. A fight broke out at one: two women come to blows over a short measure.

  Just nearby a spice monger, already convicted of tampering with his weights, stood miserably in the pillory. There were not even any youths out to toss stones at him.

  She ducked aside from an ox and cart, the mud from the wheels spraying up her dress, and ran across the square towards the church. Some men-at-arms, standing by their master’s horse, called out to her with lewd remarks and she hurried away.

  Anselm called out to his daughter, and Father Simon Jorda looked up from where he and the stonemason were mapping out the walls of the priory in the mud. Fabricia Bérenger made her way through the market crowds, a wicker basket on her arm. He saw a blaze of red hair, like a torch carried among the drab and jostling humanity below the cathedral steps.

  For a few heartbeats of time he was not aware of the din of the hawkers inside the Saint-Étienne gate, or the bargaining and the quarrelling in the markets, the barking of dogs, the stink of people. His eyes were drawn only towards the possessor of this mane; a young woman, slim as a reed, with startling green eyes. He realized, with a feeling of something close to dread, that she was heading straight for them.

  ‘There is the question of cost,’ he said, trying to once again concentrate his mind on the problem at hand. But by then the young woman with the red hair had reached them and her father enveloped her in a bear-like embrace. She wore a long tight-sleeved tunic of fine woollen cloth, over a high-necked linen chemise. There were soft calf’s leather shoes on her feet.

  Her startling hair was wild and untamed, and its highlights caught the sun. He detected the scent of lavender on her clothes; she was a delight for all the senses. He stared at her for longer than he should. When she saw the direction of his stare, she did not lower her eyes, but stared back at him in a way that was as inflammatory as it was immodest.

  He tore his eyes from her as eagerly as a starving man might push away a heaped dinner. From that moment he pretended – though with little success – to ignore her. It was as if there were rocks piled on his chest. He was as surprised as he was dismayed. Lust – or love, as the Minnesingers called it – was an old enemy to a monk and Simon thought he had defeated it long ago..

  He hurried through the rest of their business. As Anselm took his dinner from the girl he expanded on his plans for the priory. Simon pretended to listen, and then mumbled a question about the wages for Anselm and his labourers. He paid scant attention to the answer. He agreed on a contract and scurried off.

  Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

  ‘Who was that?’ Fabricia said.

  ‘That’s the priest I was telling your mother about. Father Simon Jorda. A good man, and though it pains me to say it, your mother is right: there are few enough of them in the Church these days.’

  She followed her father into the nave. The Église de Saint-Antoine was just across the square from the great cathedral of Saint-Étienne; ‘crumb to the bread’, as Anselm called it, all but forgotten for almost a century. Anselm had been commissioned to repair it.

  ‘What do you have for our lunch today?’ he said. He looked inside the wicker basket. There was some bread and boiled bacon and a jug of wine. ‘Is there enough for Pèire as well?’ Pèire was working on the scaffold high above their heads. He waved to him and Pèire waved back. ‘Pèire!’ Anselm shouted. ‘Come down! It’s time to eat!’

  Fabricia looked around. The work on the Église de Saint-Antoine proceeded slowly for Anselm had only a handful of labourers and carpenters to help him. It seemed the Bishop would rather spend his money on his own palace in the bourg. Today there was just a carpenter, a glazer, a painter and several serfs or freedmen as barrowmen and labourers. There was also a rough mason who laid and mortared the heavy stones that made up the new wall rising from the southern transept, which was still hidden behind a scaffolding of roped poles. A stone was being hoisted into position by a complex arrangement of ropes and pulleys. It was done in stages, for the men had to haul each goliath almost to the height of the tower.

  Anselm was proud of the commission, for what had once been a dark limestone box was being transformed by his hand into something glorious. The paint on the vault timbers was faded with age, but now there was at least gold leaf on the capitals and new wooden stalls for the monks in the choir. He had enlarged the apse to contain a new chancel, and extended that part of the building sideways to form a transept, thus remaking the whole structure into the form of a cross.

  She stared at the faded frescoes on the wooden ceiling. Anselm came to stand beside her. ‘It’s a poor thing, isn’t it?’

  ‘It would have been beautiful once.’

  He shook his head. ‘These flat ceilings depress the spirit. With the new architecture we can use buttresses and pointed arches to raise the ceilings higher and higher. This is what they are doing at Chartres and at Bourges. How I would love to build a cathedral!’

  ‘But if you worked on a cathedral, you would never live to see it finished.’

  ‘It would not matter to me. I would have my mark on the foundation stone. When I get to heaven I could point down and say, see there, that is what I built. And they would have to let me in!’ He took her by the arm. ‘A church is built to be a parable of our life. Did you know that?’

  He was interrupted by the yapping of a dog that some yokel had brought in with him while he gaped at the tapestries. Nearby, two burghers argued heatedly with each other over the price of a wool bale. He frowned, and led her away from them, to the other end of the aisle.

  Dust motes drifted in a shaft of sunlight. He pointed to the rows of pillars that crowded the nave. ‘These pillars and arches, they are the darkness of the forest from which we have all fled. And up there, just above the altar; imagine one day a great rose window. It will be like the sun, showing us the way forward. And what is the way? He is!’

  Jesus hung suffering on his cross, head bowed and bleeding. ‘Our Lord suffers for each one of us, leading us towards the path of our redemption. The aisle here is the path of our life and he is there at the end of it, waiting to lead the faithful to resurrectio
n.’

  He pointed to the vault. ‘And finally when we arrive here, at the end of our lives, we look up, we see the light of heaven pouring through the windows in the clerestory, and we are reminded of the great and heavenly Jerusalem that awaits us. This is what your father does for his daily bread, Fabricia. A humble stonemason, yet I show each person who comes here his purpose in life and God’s mercy in it.’

  She smiled. She had heard this tale before, of course, but she never grew tired of the passion in his face as he told it, for he seemed never to grow weary of telling it.

  She looked up again, saw Pèire preparing to come down from the scaffold. She knew at once what was going to happen and looked to the lady in blue, there in her niche in the wall. Please, no.

  Pèire screamed as he lost his grip on the wooden scaffold. His arms cartwheeled at the air in that piercing moment when he realized he was lost and he yelled out once more, this time a groan of despair. The sound he made as he hit the stone flagging sickened her. She thought she felt the floor shake but that was just her imagination, the horror of it.

  Anselm did not see him fall. He turned around only at the last moment to see Pèire crumpled in the nave, his skull split like an over-ripe tomato, his limbs splayed at an unnatural angle from his body.

  He ran over and cradled the young man in his arms; oblivious to the gore on his hands and in his lap. ‘Pèire! Pèire, my son. What have you done?’

  His brains were everywhere. She thought she might vomit. Anselm stared at her, his mouth open and she could read the question in his eyes.

  I cannot marry Pèire. He will die soon.

  ‘How did you know?’

  Fabricia could not answer. She looked around at the lady in blue, who only smiled back at her, kindly as a mother. A form of madness it might be, but not one she could just wish away.

  She sank to her knees beside her father, placed a white hand on the big, lifeless body in his arms, as if she was herself responsible for his death, just by foreseeing it.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

  VI

  THERE WERE DAYS when Anselm did not utter a word. He started work in the church soon after the angelus bell at dawn, was still there long after vespers. He took both his dinner and supper there, and with the days growing shorter, often worked by candlelight. Without his journeyman apprentice, there was twice the workload, for now Anselm was the only mason to do the work.

  But Fabricia knew that was not the reason he worked himself so; what was it that he cried out in the cathedral the day that Pèire died? Pèire, my son. His grief was hard for her to watch, and she felt herself somehow accountable.

  One afternoon she brought him his supper in the church. Winter was drawing in, the feast of St Simon and St Jude had passed, and the mornings were cold. The new stone laid in the church was packed with straw so that the mortar did not crack from the frosts. The scaffolding on the new work made it appear like the decaying bones of some giant beast. Soon the barrowmen would be paid off and her father would withdraw to work in the chapter house. He would spend the winter cutting and ornamenting the stones for the niches and the windows.

  Anselm wore a tunic and apron and the little round cap that distinguished him as the freemason, the one who carved the ‘free’ stone, the ornamentation in the vaultings and narthex and in the traceries of the clerestory windows. He was at work with hammer and chisel on a block that would take its place on the tympanum over the south portal.

  She watched him work. His breath made little clouds of vapour in the air. It was gloomy and frigid inside the church, but he wore fingerless gloves, for he needed the nimbleness of his fingertips for this work. His hands were thickly calloused so that he might as well have been wearing leather gloves, and his forearms were thick as an executioner’s; yet he could tease flowers and vine leaves from capitals as if they were moulded from clay.

  He looked up and saw her and his face creased into a grin. ‘Fabricia! Good. The cold has made me hungry. I hope you have some of your mother’s warm bread there in that basket.’ He tucked his hammer and bradawl into his apron.

  ‘And some ewe’s cheese I bought at the market and a flask of spiced wine to warm you.’

  He took a knife from his apron and cut into the cheese. Then he upended the wine flask and poured the wine into his throat, his head tipped back.

  She studied the work he had left on his bench. He was sculpting the stone to the shape of a devil, worked into a pattern of vine leaves. The work was so fine it did not look like a carving at all, but life wrought from raw stone. It was eerily lovely. Who would have thought such a gruff man kept visions in his soul?

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said.

  ‘It’s just stone, Fabricia. Now you, you are beautiful. Your mother is beautiful. This is just imitation of it, for God’s holy purpose.’ He shook his head. ‘Though I confess I do not always understand His purpose. Why did he take Pèire? All that boy ever wanted to do was build churches for His greater glory and now he is gone.’

  Fabricia laid her hand on his. She could feel the warmth of him even through her glove. So much pent-up energy in him, he radiated heat like a furnace, even on the coldest days.

  ‘How did you know?’ He looked up at her and she saw fear in his face. ‘You said he was going to die. How did you know?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Why didn’t you stop it?’ he said.

  ‘How, Papa? How do you tell someone something that has not happened and make them believe you? How could I stop Pèire climbing the scaffold and doing his work because I had a dream?’

  ‘You still should have said something.’

  ‘I did.’

  Anselm closed his eyes, nodded. ‘But who dreams such things?’

  ‘A witch?’

  ‘Be still! You are not a witch! It was that storm, wasn’t it? The lightning? You have not been the same since.’

  ‘No, Papa. I was never the same as everyone else, ever. There were things before that. After the storm, they just got worse, that’s all.’

  ‘What things?’ She did not answer him. Anselm hung his head. ‘My little rabbit,’ he said. ‘What are we going to do with you?’

  She took a breath. She knew he would not want to hear this. ‘Papa, please, help me. I wish to take orders.’

  ‘No. I will not speak of this now.’

  ‘It’s the only way for me. We both know this.’

  ‘Not now,’ he said, and tore his hand from hers and went back to his work.

  *

  Instead of returning directly home Fabricia went to visit the shrine of Our Lady in Saint-Étienne. In the street by the side of the great church there was a locked door that led to the sacristy. Something made her turn as she passed the doorway; she saw a couple in there, the boy with his hose around his knees, the girl with her ankles around his hips. Fabricia stopped and stared.

  She could not take her eyes from the woman’s face. She had seen bawdiness in the street before, Toulouse was a crowded place and people took their vices where they could, but this was no penny whore. Her head was thrown back, her mouth open in a silent scream. This was passion, not street commerce. Could any physical experience be so intense? The woman clung to her lover so tightly her fingers were white. This is what joy looks like, Fabricia thought.

  The woman’s eyes blinked open and for a moment the two women stared at each other. Then Fabricia turned away and hurried inside the church, shaking.

  She lit a taper by the feet of the Madonna and kissed the cold marble hem of her robe. She closed her eyes and tried, by force of will, to persuade her to speak, as she had before.

  ‘Move for me,’ she implored her. ‘Talk to me! Tell me what to do!’

  She pressed her hands hard, painfully, against her forehead and waited for the saint to speak. But there was only silence.

  That night she lay on her straw pallet beside the fire, listening to the watchman in the square rattle his iron-shod staff and cry out the ‘All�
��s well!’ But all is not well, she thought.

  She had long feared a slow descent into madness, ending her days in the gutters, foam on her mouth, covered in ordure, bearing the stinging stones of jeering little boys. She had decided that if she were instead secluded in a monastery, her mother and father would be spared her shame, and would not be outcast along with her.

  ‘Please, Blessed Mother, make this stop,’ she murmured. Exhausted, she closed her eyes, dreading sleep for what dreams might come.

  And what she dreamed was a knight with steel-blue eyes. She was riding a pony and he was walking beside her, leading it by its halter. He was smiling at her. Suddenly he fell, an arrow in the centre of his chest. He disappeared into a chasm that fell away from the mountain beside them. She woke in the night, screaming his name.

  Philip.

  VII

  Vercy, fifteen leagues from Troyes

  Burgundy, France

  ‘ALEZAÏS, MY HEART.’

  She was straddling him, hands behind her head, fixing the curls that fell loose about her shoulders. He cupped her breasts, like small fruit, dusky and ripe. Her eyes were like a cat’s in the dark.

  The blue night curtains were tied back on the wooden canopy. It was late summer and the soft copper wash of the sunset retreated through the window, and a scribble of smoke tumbled towards the draught. There was the aroma of freshly burned rosemary.

  His wife, so delicate, so pale by daylight but with the snuffing of the candles she was transformed. You get energy from the moon, he said to her once.

  She arched her back and her hips writhed, serpentine, each uncoiling drew another groan from his lips. She had all the skill of the King’s tormenter, teasing him slowly to his little death.

  She bit gently at the lobe of his ear: Take me to the tilt, my warrior. Bury your lance as deep as it will go.

  He took her face in his hands. Alezaïs, my sweet, my darling. He felt her breath on his face, sour wine and strawberries, chased the golden shadow of her soul in the cloister of her eye. You are my hope.