The leper's return ktm-6

by Michael Jecks

  She rode out every day for her exercise, no matter what the weather, and her routine had only been changed on the day after her father’s death. Now she insisted that she must carry on as before. The usual route was to avoid the town itself, and today the groom saw she was intending to keep to it. She led the way, turning right from the hall’s entrance, and leading up the hill toward the woods at the top. This was the road that went past John of Irelaunde’s place, and she glanced at it in some surprise. The gates were open.

  Having ridden this way since before John had built his little place, she knew that he always kept his gates shut against the inquisitive. Not so today. As her mare took her closer, she saw that they stood wide open, and she stared in with interest. It was the first time she had been able to. She had almost gone past, when with a gasp she recognized what she had seen.

  Wrenching her mare’s head around, she rode in, and hurtled herself from the saddle, throwing herself at the little bundle of rags the stableman had already noticed and disregarded.

  “Quick!” she screamed. “To the church! Ride as though the Devil’s wish-hounds were at your heels! Bring a monk trained in nursing. Don’t sit there gaping, fool! Go!”

  They rode into the smith’s yard at full tilt, and Baldwin’s horse reared as he came to a halt. “Smith? Come out here, I want to talk to you!”

  Simon, who knew most of the knight’s moods, was surprised to hear him bellow in so strident a tone. To the bailiff, lepers were a source of disgust and loathing, and although they deserved sympathy, perhaps, and compassion as well, their repulsive appearance was reason enough, he felt, for them to be victimized. It wasn’t due to any cruelty on his part. Simon was generally an easygoing man, comfortable with himself and his life, and he was happy to see others enjoy their own lives as best they might. He was not driven by an inane compulsion to bully those he didn’t understand, but he was fearful of leprosy; not only because it might clutch him in its hideous grip, taking away his freedom and his health, but because it could similarly strike down his wife, or his precious daughter. That another might attack lepers as dangerous, he could not condone, but neither could he find it in his heart to condemn. Their feelings were simply a little more guided by hatred than his, which leaned rather toward pity.

  The matter was not so difficult for Baldwin. He had an enduring revulsion of anything that smacked of victimization. His friends, the members of the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon-the Knights Templar-had been accused of heinous crimes by an avaricious French King who lusted after their property and money, and were hounded throughout France. Arrested, jailed, and convicted without an opportunity of defense, they had been guilty only of believing the word of the King and the Pope. Their faith and integrity led to their death in the fires.

  That, Baldwin knew, was the result of intolerance mixed with the twin spices of repression and propaganda. He had seen it before. He was determined not to see it here.

  “Smith! Come out!”

  Simon dropped from his horse and passed the reins to Edgar. Striding to the door, he hammered on it with his fist. “It’s strange he’s not open yet,” he noted. “You’d expect him to have the forge going by now.”

  As he spoke, there was the sound of a heavy bar being lifted from its sockets. A moment later the doors swung open, and they found themselves faced with the smith.

  Jack had evidently enjoyed his ale the night before. His eyes were red-rimmed, and his complexion, under its layer of charcoal dust and ashes, looked almost transparent. He shivered, although whether from the cold or a reaction to alcohol Baldwin wasn’t sure. Blearily looking from one to the other, he wiped a hand over his mouth as if to remove a foul taste. “What is it?” he asked sullenly. “Can’t a man take a rest without being woken?”

  “Your appearance explains a little your behavior last night,” Baldwin said harshly, and shoved the confused smith from his path. The others followed him inside.

  “What’s all this about?”

  “Shut up! Last night you and your friends chose to attack a pair of lepers, and then you had the bad judgment to put the fear of God into a young woman whose only guilt was that she has devoted her time to caring for those who are worse off than herself. Today I hear you threatened her family.”

  “That’s not true,” Jack muttered. “Why’d I want to do that?”

  “That is what I want to know, and the explanation had better be good.”

  Jack shrugged and walked to his forge, raking the ashes and clearing the old fire out. As he worked, setting out tinder and striking a spark from flint and knife-blade, he spoke as though he was talking to himself. “I don’t see what cause there is for anyone to take upset at trying to get rid of the likes of them. Who wants lepers in the town? They’re defiled by their disease, and they defile the town itself by being here. It’s not like they’re normal. They’re marked out by God-they’d only get that if they were specially evil. They must have committed the most horrible sins.”

  “I doubt that’s true,” said Baldwin, and a certain tone in his voice made Simon glance at him.

  It was clear to the bailiff that the knight was holding his anger at bay with only the greatest difficulty. It was natural, Simon thought, that his friend should wish to defend the girl-Mary had done nothing that merited the persecution she had received-but he felt at best ambivalent toward lepers. All he had heard said that they had been marked out by God for punishment, as the smith claimed, and their hideous deformities bore it out.

  “No one can doubt it,” said the smith, and bent to blow his tinder into flame. When he was satisfied, he set twigs about the little fire, and soon had a cheerful blaze. Only then did he surround it with charcoal, creating a small mountain, and throw himself on the bellows. Soon the cone was glowing red-hot, and the smith lifted the whole sack of coals and upended it, giving the bellows a couple of experimental squeezes to ensure the fire would catch, and then wiping his hands while he waited for the forge to build up its heat. “It’d be heresy to suggest otherwise.”

  “It would be heresy to throw them out of their own camp when God Himself caused them to be allowed to live here,” said the knight. “Do you think yourself above God? If they are marked out by God for His own divine justice, you can have no right to execute your justice on them. It is not for you to decide who should live here, and who should not.”

  “I am a free man of Crediton. I have-”

  “No right in this, smith!” Baldwin suddenly bellowed. He crossed the floor in a couple of steps and grabbed the smith by the neck of his linen shirt. Holding the man close to his face, the knight glared at him. “You have no right to decide on divine or secular justice, understand? I speak for the King in this town, and Peter Clifford speaks for God. We don’t need you sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong! If you so much as speak to a leper in this town again, I will have you amerced for swearing; if I hear you have tried to harm them, I will have you thrown into jail; if a leper is harmed because of your vile and ridiculous slanders, I will have every ounce of pain reflected on your own body! Is that clear?”

  The smith met his angry gaze resolutely. “And what if they kill us in the meantime? That’s what they want, you know, to kill us all off so that they can take over our town. They’re going to poison all the wells except their own.”

  “What?” the knight expostulated. “Are you so moronic that you believe there is a conspiracy of lepers to kill you off?”

  “It’s happening all over Europe, haven’t you heard? The Jews have put them up to it. When they’ve killed us all, they’ll be rewarded by the Jews, and then they’ll take our daughters and wives for their own. It’s down to the clean-living, God-fearing folk like us to stop them.”

  Baldwin stared deep into the eyes before him. There was no reason there, and he suddenly felt a gut-churning disgust that was close to retching. “You cretin! You know nothing except what your bigotry wants to believe, no matter what the truth may be. You think they
’ll poison the wells with something that’ll just kill off the menfolk but leave all the women all right? You’re too stupid to take seriously!” Contemptuously, he threw the man from him.

  Jack tripped on a bolt of iron and collapsed. Before he could rise, Baldwin was kneeling on his chest. As the smith made to get up, he stopped, and his eyes for the first time registered fear.

  “Yes,” hissed Baldwin quietly. “I have a dagger at your throat. It would take just a small push to shove it into your brain, if I could find something so small. You listen to me, you fool, and listen very carefully: you will not spread any more stories about lepers, and if you hear anybody else talking such rubbish, you’ll tell them to stop. Is that clear? I will not have them made even more miserable because of a moron like you.”

  “Baldwin, you shouldn’t hurt him,” said Simon quietly. He had got to his feet, and now stood a short way from the two men.

  The knight slowly released the smith, who lay still, his eyes glittering with rage. “You say you are ”God-fearing,“ so go to Peter Clifford and ask him what God thinks of those who spread lies about others and incite the mob to murder. I will speak to him and tell him to expect you. But for now, don’t forget I’ll be listening to every rumor with a view to hearing what you’ve been saying, and if there’s anything malicious about lepers, you’ll suffer for it.”

  He shoved his dagger back in its sheath and left the room. Edgar hurried after him, but Simon paused a moment, staring down at the smith.

  “He’s mad,” said Jack with disgust, bringing himself up to a sitting position and brushing dirt from his shirt.

  Simon kicked his elbow, and the smith fell back, striking his head on the ground, and cursing.

  “Mad he may be, but so help me, if I hear you’ve been slandering that sweet girl Mary,” said Simon pleasantly, “I shall come back here and roast you over your own forge.”

  “You couldn’t. You’re an officer of the law yourself, Bailiff.”

  Simon gave him a lazy smile. “Don’t try me, Jack. The Keeper always sticks within the law. Me, I’m used to issuing my own justice. So listen carefully. If I hear that Mary has been insulted or hurt by anything you do, I’ll be back here, and I’ll impose my own vengeance on you. You are to be congratulated. In a matter of a few short hours, you’ve managed to make two new enemies, and both are officers, one of the King, one of the Warden of the Stannaries. Don’t make us have to return.” 20

  C ecily mopped the sweat from John’s brow. He was deathly pale, and his breathing was irregular, panting one moment and taking long, slow breaths the next. His rudimentary first aid was unravelling. She had removed his headband already, and the splints he had so carefully constructed and bound to his leg were loose, and coming free.

  Hearing the mad rattle of hooves and iron on the stones of the roadway, she was tempted to leave him and rush to the gate to urge the men on faster, but she swallowed hard and remained. The hand clutching at her own was enough to convince her that she was of more use here, holding onto the injured man, than outside getting in the way of the riders.

  First through the gateway was her stableman, and he was off his mount as soon as he was through it, leaping to her side. Then the wagon came in at a gallop, and the driver had to haul on the reins to stop the two beasts before they compounded John’s hurts.

  “Mistress, let me help you up.”

  Cecily shook her head. She had no intention of letting go of the man’s hand while John gripped it. A monk came to her side, and gently felt John’s head before studying his posture and coloring. “The diagnosis isn’t difficult, at any rate,” he murmured. “It’s the prognosis that will be more complicated.”

  “How is he?”

  “How?” He was an older monk, with a fringe of whitening hair all round his head that only served to emphasize the lines of worry and confusion on his brow. “Why, with a beating like this, it’s hard to say. I should think he’s concussed, which means he would have been better employed lying in his bed, rather than getting up to these antics. The only effect of his moving around will be a severe headache.”

  “But his leg!”

  “Yes. It’s obvious he had to try to fetch help. The leg is in a dreadful state, but at least his pulse seems stable. Sometimes you find that a man will slide away quickly when he has had a bad accident. The pneuma, the life force which is manufactured in the heart from the air collected in the lungs, and carried about the body with the blood until it-”

  “Can you cure him?” snapped Cecily.

  “Why yes-I suppose so. I think that-”

  “Where will you cure him?”

  “At the hospital attached to the church, of course, so-”

  “So you should hold your lectures until he’s installed there, shouldn’t you?”

  She quickly had the men take John’s door off its hinges, and they carefully lifted him onto it, suffering the lash of Cecily’s tongue when she thought they might have failed in any way or made him uncomfortable. Soon John was on the back of the wagon, and Cecily rode in it with him, still holding his hand.

  They set off down the hill, the driver standing warily, talking to his two charges as they began the descent, for this was a steep hill in places, and he didn’t want to be called to Cecily’s attention for careless driving. As they went, Cecily was surprised to feel her hand squeezed by the injured Irishman. She looked down and smiled at him.

  At that moment, with the sun above lighting her head like a halo, John of Irelaunde was blinded. “Have I died? Are you an angel?” he asked querulously. Before she could answer, the cart hit a stone and jolted, beating his bruised skull against the boarded walls. “Jesus’ Blood!” he swore, and when he glanced upward again and saw her smile, he gave a pale grin in return. “Ah, Mistress Cecily. You must be an angel-almost the best angel I could have hoped to meet this morning. I hope you won’t mind taking a message to my sweet girl?”

  “Poor John. Was this all because of me?”

  “Well now, I think it was, but don’t speak of it to anyone, or he might be taken-and then all this would have been in vain. Just keep quiet!”

  Simon rode slumped on his horse, grinning. “You must be losing your touch, Baldwin. This town used to be quite a calm and quiet place, and now you’ve got a nutter of a smith trying to rouse the rabble.”

  “You think it is because of me?”

  Simon smiled at the knight and Baldwin gradually relaxed, even giving a self-conscious grin. “All right, so I am a little prickly. But that idiot got under my skin.”

  “It’s not just him, it’s the murder. We still appear to have little to go on.”

  “No. We know so much, but none of it makes any sense. For example, I am not sure why the smith was at Godfrey’s house.”

  “You want to go back and ask him?”

  “Thank you for the thought, Simon, but I don’t think it would be productive. Still, I wonder if there is anything that could link the smith to Godfrey.”

  “He was ugly enough-do you think he might be the killer?”

  “Who, Jack?” Baldwin laughed. “Oh, who knows? He’s repellent, certainly, but I don’t like to judge everyone by their outer appearance. That is what people like Jack are guilty of when they look at lepers. I don’t want to commit the same crime as them.” Baldwin mused quietly a moment. “The difficulty I have is, Godfrey used him on the afternoon he died…”

  “Yes. For a horse that had cast a shoe.”

  “And they had kept the shoe so it could be refitted.”

  “A sign of real tightfistedness.”

  “True,” said Baldwin, but there was a faraway look in his eye. “Many would have thrown the old shoe away, surely, and had a new one made.”

  Simon put his head to one side, considering. “And then come to the smithy to get a new one the right size.”

  “Precisely what I was thinking. If they had asked for a fresh one, it would have meant they would have had to bring the horse here. But they kept the old one,
and that meant they could have the smith go to the house. All he needed was a rasp, some nails and a hammer.”

  “But why should they want him there?”

  “Let me finish: taking a horseshoe off is easy enough. All you have to do is lever it. It could well be that someone wanted the smith out of here, so they took off the shoe and pretended that it had fallen off just so that Jack would go to the house.”

  “That’s one explanation, Baldwin, but don’t forget there’s another possibility. What if someone wanted the smith there, at the house? It could easily have been done to make sure that he was in Godfrey’s hall.”

  “True, but why? Why would they want Jack there? And again I come back to Putthe: he could have levered off the old horseshoe in order to give an excuse for Jack’s presence at Godfrey’s.”

  “You’re thinking that they could both have been involved in the killing? But that doesn’t make sense! All they achieved in having Jack at the house was to make him a suspect. There was no witness to his departure, no witness to his return, no gain for him whatever. Effectively all he did was point to himself with a large sign saying, ”Look at me! I was there on the night Godfrey died!“ It only served to bring him to our attention.”

  “Perhaps it also tied him to his accomplice? If he and Putthe were partners in this felony, perhaps Putthe didn’t trust his confederate enough, and wanted to ensure that equal risk was enjoyed by both?” He threw his hands in the air with disgust. “It’s no good, it’s all guesswork. All we really know is that this man was at the hall for some reason. Whether he was there for his own purposes or for someone else’s entirely we may never know.”

  “There’s another factor, though. What if the victimization of the lepers has something to do with it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not sure, but it seems an odd coincidence that Jack should start fomenting trouble so soon after the murder. I assume this was new to you? You’re not aware that there’s been a load of trouble brewing over lepers recently?”