‘I cannot say whether I have the temperament for it, Father. I just believe that it is what God wishes me to do.’
‘How might a girl such as yourself know the mind of God? Only the Holy Father in Rome is truly allowed to understand the divine, and even His Holiness professes puzzlement on occasion.’
Fabricia did not answer him. She stared at the rushes on the floor. Such insolence!
‘Speak up, child,’ he said, though he ought not to have called her child, perhaps, for he was only a few years her elder. ‘Why should you think such a thing?’
She raised her eyes from the floor and the blazing look she gave him took his breath away and set stirring in his loins an ache he thought years of prayer and diligence had banished. She bit her lip; his first thought was that it was a device to entrap him but then he allowed that it might simply be an effort to stop herself from speaking about certain private things in his presence.
At last she said: ‘Do you think it is wrong then for a humble woman such as myself to wish to dedicate my life to His service?’
There was an easy riposte to this; but her earnest expression disconcerted him. When he finally found his voice he reminded her that it was not enough to love God, that a chosen servant must also have a disposition sufficiently robust to serve him properly.
‘You mean like the Bishop?’ This caught him off balance, for the Bishop’s worldliness was well known, if not much discussed, by the town in general.
At least he had wit enough for a rejoinder. ‘But you do not intend to become bishop, surely?’
‘I do not think I should have the strength for it. After a week I should be exhausted from drink and fornication.’
Simon did not know what to say. Already the direction of the interview was slipping from his control. She might be merely the daughter of a stonemason but her tongue was as sharp as an executioner’s knife.
She dropped her gaze again to the floor. ‘I am sorry, Father. Sometimes my tongue is a little too free.’
‘Indeed. It is quite plain to me already that you have none of the attributes necessary for the monastic life. Obedience and humility are the foundation stones of the Rule. If you are unable to hold your tongue, I fail to see what service you might be able to render to God.’
Feeling that he was once again in control of the situation, he warmed his legs before the hearth and told her stories of Augustine and of Benedict of Norcia, to illustrate to her what a true love of God entailed. He was approaching the topic of St Agnes’s martyrdom when she suddenly looked directly into his face, and said: ‘I have visions, Father. I see things I should not.’
It was as if she had dashed a pail of cold water in his face. She was not listening to him at all.
‘What manner of visions?’
She shook her head. ‘I cannot tell you that.’
‘Why not?’
‘You will take it as a blasphemy.’
‘I shall be the judge of that.’
She stared at the floor. Outside the tinkers clattered past in their wooden shoes and a priest, with his hand bell, was summoning all to pray for the souls of the dead. Finally, she said: ‘I have seen a woman, very much like Our Lady. Only I do not think she can be real.’
He watched the firelight play in her hair. ‘Because you see things, Fabricia, it does not mean they are there. Young girls of your age before they are . . . wed . . . are famed for such notions.’
‘So a monk or a priest or even a nun might see God and know it is real but if it is a young girl then it is a kind of madness? Is that what you are saying, Father?’
‘Where did you see such things?’
‘Once, in Saint-Étienne, while I prayed at her shrine. She descended from her pedestal.’
‘She moved?’
‘Yes, Father.’
Simon sighed and affected forbearance. This was the source of her supposed devotion to God? ‘You give too much weight to mere flights of fancy, Fabricia Bérenger .’
‘You think so, Father?’ she said, and then looked at him with such directness that he averted his own eyes. He wanted desperately to touch her.
‘You must confess,’ he said.
‘Confess? Have I sinned?’
‘Of course you have sinned!’
‘But I have no control over such things.’
‘That does not matter. In this . . . fancy . . . did she speak to you?’
‘She did.’ She lifted her right hand and laid it on her breast. ‘I felt the words here, in my heart.’ His eyes followed the ecstatic passage of her fingers from her shoulder to her bosom. He imagined the porcelain softness of her breast beneath the crisp linen, the pale vein that succoured the swollen bud of her nipple.
Her skin would smell like lavender and musk, and there would be a sprinkling of the finest red-gold hair below the dimple of her navel, visible only in the golden splash of sunlight that fell across her bed in the late afternoon.
Her back was sinuous and slender, like the wriggling of a snake as she slid between his thighs . . .
He jumped to his feet, spilling both his stool and his mead on to the floor. The Devil threw back his head and roared with laughter. Fabricia stared up at him, startled.
‘There is nothing to be done with you!’ he shouted and fled the house without another word.
X
SIMON KNEW HE must never again return to the stonecutter’s house, for that was utter folly and would invite disaster. But he had to know what Fabricia had told Anselm about his visit with her and he approached him on some pretext one day in the Église de Saint-Antoine. As he was leaving he said, as if an afterthought: ‘Has your daughter spoken to you more about this notion to take up the Rule?’ He feigned no more than a casual interest.
‘No, Father, she has not, though she has been greatly preoccupied. She is not herself at all. She hardly speaks.’
There was something in him that found this news deeply gratifying. ‘I believe I made some progress with her,’ he heard himself say. ‘But I shall need to speak to her again.’
‘Of course, Father. When?’
‘This Sunday,’ he said, and left the mason to his work.
He walked away, both astonished and appalled at what he had done. I do not do this for personal profit, he persuaded himself, I do not seek to gain advantage over her. I have set myself a test, that is all, as God has designed, and I shall prove my mettle this time. I shall triumph over my own carnality and lead this girl to proper understanding of herself, as her father wishes.
That was all.
*
Simon accepted Anselm’s mumbled obeisance and a sullen greeting from the wife. Then he and the girl were again left alone by the fire, so that he might continue his instruction of her.
‘So, Fabricia, have you given consideration to our last conversation?’
‘Indeed, Father, I have thought of nothing else.’
‘And you have prayed?’
‘With all my heart.’
‘As have I, for the right way to instruct you in this matter. Have you experienced any more of these visions?’
‘No, Father.’
‘That is well. Such visions as you describe may be many things: a shadow moving on the wall perhaps, or a flash of sunlight reflected for a moment on a stained glass window. An imagination fuelled by a great love of God, which I am sure you possess, is prone to such fancies. But a lifetime’s service to the Holy Church, this is about dedication and discipline, not bewilderment or ecstasy. Living by the Rule is not the simple thing you may imagine. And you have a duty also to your father.’
‘But does the Church not teach that we should honour God above even our own parents?’
‘There are many ways to honour God. You do not have to enter an abbey to do it. And your vows, should you submit to them, bind you to a life of discipline unimaginable to you now. Easily foresworn, harder kept.’
‘You mean the vow of chastity?’
He blushed then, and stared into the fire, d
iscomfited by her directness. ‘You are young. I do not think you fully understand what chastity means.’
‘You are young too.’
Simon got up and paced the floor. ‘We all struggle with our humanity.’
‘You have overcome your demons, Father. Could I not overcome mine?’
‘It is harder for Woman. She is more wanton than Man.’
‘If you heard what is said behind my back in the markets you would not say so.’
Simon embarked on a long speech, drawing inspiration from the works of Jerome and Paul, and quoting also from the lives of the virgin martyrs. He explained to her how love of the divine was so much greater than the love of mortals for each other.
She quickly grew weary of it, but he did not seem to notice.
*
‘You seem agitated, Father,’ she said, interrupting him as he attempted a discourse on the nature of love from St Augustine.
He gaped at her; that the daughter of a stonecutter – or any woman – should pass comment on a monk’s behaviour showed a breath-taking presumption.
‘You are not an easy pupil to instruct.’
‘And you are surely young to have attained such a position in the Church. My father says you are spoken of as a future bishop.’
‘I shall serve God in any capacity I am best able.’
‘So you have already considered this possibility?’
This one remark disarmed him utterly. He was a Cistercian monk, a man of God, and she should show him absolute deference. Instead, she now claimed to read his thoughts.
‘I think you would make a good bishop,’ she said, but before he could summon a proper reply, she posed her next impertinent question. ‘Why does a man such as yourself come to live in a monastery? Were you found at the gate?’
A man such as myself?
‘Is that what you think?’ It was true that several of his brother monks had been abandoned at the monastery steps as infants. Why did she think he was one of them?
‘Were you, Father?’
His pride got the better of him. He looked at her down the length of his nose. ‘My father is a burgher of no little reputation. I was the youngest of his sons and he rightly saw an opportunity for me in the ranks of the Church.’
‘You have never regretted his choice?’
This was the moment, Simon thought later, when he made his great mistake. He should have scolded her for asking such scandalous questions and reminded her of her station. But he did not. He allowed himself a moment’s intimacy with a woman and what followed later issued inevitably from the decision to share his heart.
Why did I do it? His daily communion with God should have been sufficient balm for his heart’s bruises. His real betrayal of the divine was that in succumbing to her questioning he allowed that a life with only the divine for solace was not enough.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there are times when I have wondered what man I might have been in other circumstances.’
‘What kind of man is that?’
A flutter of a smile, a childhood habit awkwardly retrieved from his memory. ‘I would doubtless have been a sinner.’
‘We are all sinners, are we not?’
‘Some of us hope for redemption.’
Their eyes locked and he felt his loneliness as he never had before. He longed in that instant to be keeper of her heart as well as her body. He knew he must retreat or be lost. ‘I do not regret those choices made for me, Fabricia. When I look at the world, at its falsehoods and futilities, at the evil I see every day around us, I know that seeking only God’s goodness is the right path.’
‘Did you never love a woman before you became a monk, then?’
She grew more impudent by the minute. Yet he was overcome by a desperate need to unburden himself, even though he knew where this ache in his treacherous heart might lead him. He sat down again. ‘Fabricia, you must understand. I was just a boy when my father offered me to the Church. My father had five sons, and I was the youngest. He was – is – a wool merchant in Carcassonne, a man of some wealth, but not enough to secure an income for so many sons, so he used his influence to gain a place for me in the abbey.’
‘You look sad,’ Fabricia said.
‘I am not sad.’
‘You miss your brothers.’
Such a hard truth and so frankly spoken. He remembered his first few months as a novice, how he cried himself to sleep every night on his hard wooden pallet. ‘My father gave me an opportunity to prosper. It was difficult at first but I am grateful to him now for what he did, for it led me to God and a blessed life.’
‘And yet you long for a life not quite so blessed. Is that not true?’
She might as well have hit him with the soup kettle; it would have shocked him less. He felt suddenly naked in her presence. She had disarmed him utterly.
She had astonished even herself by speaking in such a way. She thought he would upbraid her for it but instead his shoulders seemed to sag under the weight of some great burden.
His hands shook. Such beautiful hands! They were smooth and soft and white, so unlike her father’s, which were calloused and criss-crossed with scores of small cuts that evidenced his daily travails; but these, these were hands that turned the pages of books, delicate hands that came together for prayer.
When he finally spoke, his voice was so low she could scarce hear him. ‘I took a vow of constancy to God, yet I am still a man. It is an oath of no small consequence for I struggle with it every day.’
His frankness disarmed her. She was sorry now she had been so blunt.
‘This vow may seem trifling to you now,’ he went on, ‘but with each year it grows heavier on the shoulders. You should think of this before you take up the veil.’
‘But you are a man of God. Do you think it is wrong for me to dedicate my life to His service, simply because I might find the life difficult?’
He was just a young man who wanted to be good, she thought, and to listen to her mother talk, there were few enough of those in Toulouse. She found him both endearing and sad and for a moment she felt an unexpected stirring in her heart.
It was growing dark in the square; the grey light that seeped through the oiled linen on the windows was almost gone. The fire leaped and danced in his eyes. He said suddenly and without preamble: ‘You are so very beautiful, Fabricia.’
Perhaps he did not mean to speak this thought aloud. He seemed as shocked as she.
He got to his feet. ‘I must go,’ he said.
After he left her mother and father crept back down the stairs holding a smoking tallow candle. They seemed puzzled, but said nothing. Her mother seemed to have divined what had happened.
All churchmen were alike. She said it often enough.
*
SIMON HURRIED ALONG an alleyway of wine shops, bawdy houses and tinker’s stalls. Evening was drawing on, the Devil’s hour. An ox cart creaked past and he shrank into a doorway. The whores took this as an invitation to mistake him for the Bishop and one of them bared her breasts at him and offered him congress against the wall for three deniers.
He pushed away from her with an angry shout. She had foul breath and bad teeth like a demon. I have made of myself a common joke; a monk transfixed by a woman, he thought wildly. I have dedicated my life to contemplation of the divine; instead I am fixed on cunny like a bawd.
What was it that St Augustine said of woman? The gate by which the Devil enters. She is a temptress set by Lucifer to lure a man from his perfect state. Fabricia was then a perfect demon: fire-haired, slender and ripe as bruised fruit.
He passed a man lying in the street who had been blinded as punishment for some crime. His empty sockets were horrible to look at, and he sat in the filth of the gutter, with his arm outstretched, begging for coins. Some small boys were tormenting him for their own amusement; they pinched him and slapped him while he raged at them and tried in vain to catch hold of them, which of course only made the game even better.
Simon sa
w himself there: blind, grovelling, wretched, tormented by the Evil One for jest. I must stop this.
He caught one of the wretch’s tormentors by the ear and reproved the lad in the name of the Church. He found a few coins in his purse and gave them to the beggar. He was no doubt a thief – or had once been – but had paid his terrible price, and Simon had no stomach to see him suffer more. He would not survive much longer in the street anyway.
He returned late to the monastery, as the bells rang for vespers. He was tardy and received the reproving glances of his brothers.
The Devil remained his companion all that night both in the chapel and in his bed. He weaved moist dreams of Fabricia and unclothed her in his sleep. He felt her breath on his face, sweet as strawberry wine; her hair smelled of summer, and his arm was around her waist, which was soft and yielding. Finally, in some ragged scrap of dream, he saw her lying naked in a cornflower field, and tried to go to her. But someone pulled him away. A man’s voice called his name.
It was Brother Griffus shaking him awake to attend matins and lauds. His hand went guiltily to his groin. He pulled on his robe in the darkness, desperate and aching and ashamed.
The candles wavered in the draughts of the dark choir, illuminating the sacristan’s bible, throwing long shadows of his cowled brother monks and the carved saints above their heads. The ranks of the holy stood against him in the gloom.
His lips moved with the words of the psalms and responses while he felt her warm breath even in that cold, dark chapel, tasted the salt of the sweat at the nape of her neck. It was just a dream but his memories of it were as vivid as if it were real; so real that he believed that at that very moment she, too, was sitting upright on her pallet bed, seeing his face as clearly as he saw hers. Impossible to imagine that he could conjure such an intimate moment and that she had not felt it also.
After the service he returned eagerly to his cell, hoping a swift return to his moist and salty dream, and to Fabricia Bérenger. But a dream is not a place; he could not go back. Instead, he lay awake through the long night and begged God to take away his temptation, then reminded himself that every soul is forged in the fire. How could he be spared what every man must endure if he is to save himself?
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