Leper of Saint Giles Read online

  He had drawn close enough now to observe what manner of creatures they were who bobbed and peered and pointed excitedly about the little church, and along the churchyard wall. It did not please him. The black eyes, like small plums embedded in the hard dough of his face, turned dusky red, like smouldering coals. Deliberately he wheeled his horse to their side of the road, leaving the opposite verge, which was wider, and mounting the grass on the near side, and that solely in order to wave the miserable rabble back to their kennels. And his manner of waving was with the full lash of the riding-whip he carried. Doubtful if he ever used it on his horse, blood-stock of this quality being valuable and appreciated, but for clearing his path of lepers it would serve. The tight mouth opened wide to order imperiously: “Out of the way, vermin! Take your contagion out of sight!”

  They shrank and drew back in humble haste out of reach, if not out of sight. All but one. Half a head taller than his fellows, one lean, cloaked figure stood his ground, whether out of inability to move quickly, or want of understanding, or in mute defiance. He remained erect, intently gazing through the eye-slot in the veil that covered his face. When he did take a pace back, without turning his head, he went heavily upon one foot, and was too slow to avoid the lash of the whip, if indeed he had intended to avoid it. The blow took him on shoulder and breast. His maimed foot turned under him, and he fell heavily in the grass.

  Cadfael had started forward, but Mark was before him, darting down with an indignant cry to drop to his knees and spread an arm over the gaunt figure, putting his own braced body between the fallen man and the next blow. But Domville was already past, disdainful of further noticing the dregs of the world. He neither hastened nor slowed his pace, but rode on without a glance aside, and all his train after him, though holding rather to the roadway, and some with averted faces. The three young squires passed, embarrassed and uneasy. The big, tow-headed youngster in the middle actually turned full-face to the two on the ground, flashed them a dismayed stare from eyes as blue as cornflowers, and rode with his chin on his shoulder until both his fellows elbowed him back to caution and his duty.

  The whole cortege passed while Mark was helping the gaunt old man to his feet. The servants followed woodenly, armored against the world by their servitude. Certain more lordly figures, guests or minor relatives, passed blandly, as though nothing whatever had occurred. In their midst a demure cleric fingered his beads, faintly smiling, and ignored all. Rumor said that one Eudo de Domville, a canon of Salisbury, was to perform the marriage ceremony; a man in good odor with the church and the papal legate, and in line for advancement, and probably eager to remain so blessed. He passed with the rest. The grooms, the pages, the deerhounds followed, and all the little bells on bridles and jesses tinkled their way past, and dwindled slowly along the first reach of the Foregate.

  Brother Mark came up the incline of grass with his arm about the old leper. Cadfael had drawn back and left them to each other. Mark had no fear of contagion, since he never gave a thought to the peril, all his energy being absorbed into the need. Nor would he ever be surprised, or complain, if at last contagion did seize upon him and draw him even closer to the people he served. He was talking to his companion as they came, mildly and cheerfully, for they were both used to spurning, they did not pay it overmuch notice. Cadfael watched them come, marked the one-sided but steady and forceful gait of the old man, and the breadth of the gesture with which his left hand, emerging momentarily from the shrouding sleeve, put off Mark’s embracing arm, and set a space between them. Mark accepted the dismissal with simplicity and respect, and turned to leave him. Cadfael had seen, moreover, that the left hand, once long and shapely, lacked both index and middle fingers, and had but two joints of the third, and the texture of the maimed parts was whitish, wrinkled and dry.

  “No very noble proceeding,” said Mark with rueful resignation, shaking the debris of grass from his skirts. “But fear makes men cruel.”

  Brother Cadfael doubted whether fear had played any part. Huon de Domville did not look the man to be afraid of anything short of hellfire, though it was true that the outcasts’ disease did not fall far short of hellfire.

  “You have a new man there?” he asked, gazing after the tall leper, who had moved along the bank to regain a good view of the road. “I do not think I have seen him before.”

  “No, he came in a week or more ago. He is a wanderer, he goes on perpetual pilgrimage, from shrine to shrine as close as in his condition he may. Seventy years old, he says he is, and I believe him. He will not stay long, I think. He makes a stay here because Saint Winifred’s bones rested here in the church before being received into the abbey. There, so close to the town, he may not go. Here he may.”

  Cadfael, who had knowledge of that renowned virgin’s whereabouts which he could never confide to his innocent friend, scrubbed thoughtfully at his blunt brown nose, and reflected tranquilly that even from her far-distant grave in Gwytherin, Saint Winifred would bestir herself to hear the prayers of a poor, afflicted man.

  His eyes followed the tall, erect figure. In the shrouded anonymity of dark cloak and hood, and the cloth veil that hid even the faces of those worst disfigured, men and women, old and young, seemed to go secretly and alone through the remnant of life left to them. No gender, no age, no coloring, no country, no creed: all living ghosts, known only to their maker. But no, it was not so. By gait, by voice, by stature, by a thousand infinitesimal foibles of character and kind that pierced through the disguise, they emerged every one unique. This one in his silence had a dominating presence, and in his stillness even under threat a rare and daunting dignity.

  “You have talked with him?”

  “Yes, but he says little. From his manner of speaking,” said Mark, “I think lips or tongue must be corrupted. Words come slowly, a little mangled, and he tires soon. But his voice is quiet and deep.”

  “What remedies are you using on him?”

  “None, for he says he needs none, he carries his own balm. No one here has seen his face. That is why I think he must be sadly maimed. You’ll have noticed one foot is crippled? He has lost all toes on that one, but for the stump of the great toe. He has a special shoe built to give him support, a stable sole to walk on. I think the other foot may also be affected, but not so badly.”

  “I saw his left hand,” said Cadfael. Such hands he had seen before, the fingers rotted away until they fell like dead leaves, the corrosion of the flesh gnawing slowly until even the wrist shed its bones. Yet it seemed to him that this devouring demon had died of its own greed. There was no ulcerous crust remaining; the seamed white flesh where the lost fingers had once been was dry and healed, however ugly to the view. Firm muscles had moved in the back of the hand when he gestured.

  “Has he given you a name?”

  “He says his name is Lazarus.” Brother Mark smiled. “I think it is a name he gave himself at a late christening—perhaps when he cut himself off from family and home, according to law. It is a second birth, lamentable though it may be. He was godfather at his own second baptism. I don’t enquire. But I wish he would use our help, and not rely only on his own tending. He must surely have some sores or ulcers that could benefit by your ointments, before he leaves us as he came.”

  Cadfael mused, watching the withdrawn figure, motionless at the head of the slope of grass. “Yet he is not numbed! He has his powers of body still, in all such members as are left to him? He feels heat and cold? And pain? If he strikes his hand against a nail, or a splinter in the fence, he knows it?”

  Mark was at a loss; he knew the disease only as he had encountered it, unsightly, ulcerated, full of sores. “He felt the sting of the whip, I know, even through the armour of his cloak. Yes, surely he feels, like other men.”

  But those who have the true leprosy, thought Cadfael, recalling many he had seen in his crusading days, very long ago, those who whiten like ash, those whose skin powders away in gray patches, in the extreme of their disease do not feel, like o
ther men. They injure themselves, bleed, and are unaware of the injury. They let a foot stray into the fire, sleeping, and only awake to the stench of their own flesh burning. They touch and cannot be sure they touch, hold and cannot lift what they would take up. Without sensation, without purpose, fingers, toes, hands, feet, drop away and rot. As Lazarus had lost fingers and toes. But such victims do not walk, however lamely, as Lazarus walked, do not prise themselves up from the ground with active, effective energy, or grasp a support as Lazarus had grasped the arm Mark offered in his aid, and that with the maimed hand. Not unless, not until, the devil that devoured them has died of his own corruption.

  “Are you thinking,” asked Mark hopefully, “that this may not be leprosy, after all?”

  “Oh, yes!” Cadfael shook his head at once. “Yes, no question of it, this was certainly leprosy.”

  He did not add that in his opinion many of the ills they treated here, though they carried the same banishment and were called by the same name, were not true leprosy. Any man who broke out in nodes that turned to ulcers, or pallid, scaly eruptions of the skin, or running sores, was set down as a leper, though Cadfael had his suspicions that many such cases arose from uncleanliness, and many others from too little and too wretched food. He was sorry to see Brother Mark’s hopeful face fall. No doubt he dreamed of curing all who came.

  Along the road came the first distant murmur of another company approaching the town. The whisperings of the watchers, subdued since Domville’s inauspicious passing, took on the cheerful chirping of sparrows again, and they crept a little way down the slope of grass, peering and craning for the first glimpse of the bride. The bridegroom had brought little but dismay with him. The lady might do better.

  Brother Mark shook off his small disappointment, and took Cadfael by the sleeve. “Come, you may as well wait and see the rest of it now. I know you have everything in order there in the herbarium, even without me. Why should you hurry back?”

  Remembering the particular gifts of Brother Oswin, Cadfael could think of many reasons why he should not leave his workshop for too long, but also of at least one good reason for remaining. “I daresay another half-hour will do no harm,” he agreed. “Let us go and take our stand by this Lazarus of yours, where I may observe him without offending.”

  The old man did not stir as he heard them approaching, and they halted somewhat aside, not to disturb his remote contemplation. He had, thought Cadfael, the self-sufficient tranquility of a desert hermit; as those early fathers had sought out their austere solitudes, so he created his about him, even among men. He towered over both of them by a head, and stood straight as a lance, and almost as meager, but for the lean, wide shoulders under the shrouding cloak. Only when the sound of the approaching company blew suddenly closer on a stirring wind, and he turned his head to look intently towards the sound, did Cadfael glimpse the face beneath the hood. The hood itself covered the brow, which by the form of the head should be lofty and broad, and the coarse blue cloth of the veil was drawn up to the cheekbones. In the slit between, only the eyes showed, but they were arresting enough, large, unblemished, of a clear, pale but brilliant blue-gray. Whatever deformities he hid, his eyes saw clearly and far, and were accustomed to looking on distances. He paid no heed to the two who stood near to him. His gaze swept beyond them, to where the approaching party showed as a shimmer of colors and a shifting of light.

  There was less ceremony here than with Huon de Domville’s retinue, and the numbers were smaller. Nor was there a single dominant figure in the lead, but a flurry of mounted grooms as outriders, and within their circle, as though within an armed guard, three came riding abreast. On one side a dark, sinewy, olive-faced man perhaps five and forty years old, very splendidly dressed in somber, glowing colors, and well mounted on a light, fast gray, surely part Arab, thought Cadfael. The man had plenteous black hair coiling under a plumed cap, and a clipped black beard framing a long-lipped mouth. It was a narrow, closed face, subtle and suspicious. On the other side rode a lady of about the same years, thin and neat and sharply handsome, dark like her lord, and mounted on a roan mare. She had a pursed, calculating mouth and shrewd eyes, beneath brows tending to a frown even when the mouth smiled. Her head-dress was of the most fashionable, her riding habit had the London cut, and she rode with grace and style, but the very look of her struck with a coldness.

  And in between these two, dwarfed and overshadowed, there paced a tiny, childlike creature on a palfrey too large for her. Her touch on the rein was light, her seat in the saddle listless but graceful. She was sumptuously arrayed in cloth of gold and dark blue silks, and within the burden of her finery her slight form seemed cramped and straitened, like a body coffined. Her face gazed ahead, beneath a gilded net heavy with dark-gold hair, into emptiness. A softly rounded face, with delicate features and great iris-gray eyes, but so pale and subdued that she might have been a pretty doll rather than a living woman. Cadfael heard Mark draw in startled breath. It was a shame to see youth and freshness so muted and bereft of joy.

  This lord, too, had noted the nature of this place, and of those who had come out from it to see his niece go by. He did not, like Domville, spur deliberately at the offense, but swung his mount the other way, to give the infected a wider berth, and turned his head away to avoid even seeing them. The girl might have passed by without so much as noticing them, so deep was she drowned in her submissive sadness, if the child Bran, all shining eyes, had not so far forgotten himself as to run halfway down the hillock for a nearer view. The flash of movement in the corner of her eye caused her to start and look round, and seeing him, she came suddenly to life in the piteous contemplation of an innocent even more wretched than herself. For an instant she stared at him with nothing but horrified compassion, and then, seeing that she mistook him, seeing that he looked up at her smiling, she smiled too. It lasted only the twinkling of an eye, but for that while she shone with a warm, bright, grieving kindness; and before the clear sky clouded again she had leaned across her aunt’s saddle-bow, and tossed a handful of small coins into the grass at the child’s feet. Bran was so enchanted that he could not even stoop to pick them up, but followed her progress wide-eyed and open-mouthed as she passed by.

  No one else in the company offered largesse here. No doubt it was being reserved to make a greater impression at the abbey gatehouse, where there would certainly be a crowd of hopeful beggars waiting.

  For no very sound reason, Cadfael turned from the child to look at the old man Lazarus. Bran could afford to take candid delight in the bright colors and pretty clothes of those more fortunate than himself, without envy or greed, but the old in experience might well find a bitter flavor in viewing impossible fruit. The old man had not moved, except that as the riders passed by his head turned to hold those three in sight, with never a glance to spare for the gentlewomen and servants who followed. The eyes staring between hood and veil glittered pale, brilliant and blue as ice, unblinking, as long as the bride remained in sight. When even the last pack-pony had vanished round the curve of the Foregate, he still stood motionless, as though the intentness of his stare could follow them as far as the gatehouse, and pierce the walls to keep unbroken watch on them within.

  Brother Mark drew long and rueful breath, and turned to gaze wonderingly at Cadfael. “And that is she? And they mean to marry her to that man? He could be her grandsire—and no gentle or kindly one, either. How can such things be?” He stared along the road as the old man was staring. “So small, and so young! And did you see her face—how sad! This is not with her will!”

  Cadfael said nothing; there was nothing reassuring or consoling to be said. Such things were the commonplace of marriage where there were lands and wealth and powerful alliances to be gained, and small say the brides—or often enough the young bridegrooms—had in the disposal of their persons. There might even be brides who could see shrewdly enough the advantages of marrying men old enough to be their grandsires, where there was material good to be gain
ed, since death might very soon relieve them of their husbands but leave them their dower and the status of their widowhood, and with some luck and a deal of cleverness they might manage to make a second match more to their liking. But by her face, Iveta de Massard saw the fate that awaited her rather as her own death than her bridegroom’s.

  “I pray God help her!” said Mark fervently.

  “It may be,” said Brother Cadfael, rather to himself than to his friend, “that he intends to. But it may also be that he has a right to expect a little support from men in setting about it.”

  *

  In the courtyard of the bishop’s house in the Foregate, Huon de Domville’s servants were unloading the pack-horses, and running about with bedding and hangings, and the finery that would grace the marriage service and the bridal bed. Domville’s butler already had wine decanted for his master and Canon Eudo, who was a distant cousin, and the chamberlain had seen to it that there was firing and comfort waiting in the best chamber, a loose, warm gown after the rigor of riding clothes, furred slippers after the long, elegant boots had been drawn off. The baron sprawled in his cushioned chair, spread his thick legs, and nursed his mulled wine, well content. It was nothing to him that his bride’s procession was drawing near from Saint Giles. He had no need and no desire to waste his time standing to watch his purchase go by; he was already sure of her, and he would be seeing enough of her after the marriage. He was here to conclude a bargain highly satisfactory to himself and to the girl’s uncle and guardian, and though it was an agreeable bonus that the child happened to be young, beautiful and appetizing, it was of no very great importance.

  Joscelin Lucy turned over his horse to a groom, kicked a bale of napery out of his way, and was making off back to the gate and the road when his fellow Simon Aguilon, the oldest of the three squires in Domville’s service, caught him by the arm.