Now Thomas laughed and the priest relaxed.
“I know how the story ends,” the girl said.
“Oh?”
“Father used to tell it.”
“Well, let’s hear it,” said Thomas.
“The knight went into the woods as a beast,” Delphine said, and here she made the sound of a beast. “And one day the king and his hunting party found him. They were about to slay him, but then the big wolf bowed to the king.”
“I like it better already,” Thomas said, nudging the priest.
“Now the king decided to make a pet of him, and he took him home to the castle. Everyone came to marvel at the beast, who was so tame and courtly. Until one day the wife and the knight came…wait, I forgot something.”
“Are you sure you know this story?” the priest said, but Thomas nudged him again, a bit harder.
“Yes,” she said gravely, looking at Père Matthieu until he held his palms up in acquiescence. She sneezed, and started again.
“When the king found the beast, the knight who had married his wife was there, and the beast growled at him.”
She growled and gnashed her teeth, causing both men to laugh.
“They wanted to kill it, and that’s when it went up and licked the king’s hand. So, now we are back at the castle. And when the wife and the bad knight come in, the beast bites her nose…”
Delphine trailed off and the priest knew what she was beginning to remember, so he clapped his hands twice, startling her.
“The story, the story,” he said. She nodded and blinked her tears away, wiping at them with her sleeve and snuffling.
“It bites her. He bites her. The knight.”
“Yes, I think we have it.”
“And they want to kill it again, but the king’s wise counselor says not to.”
“Where do they find these wise counselors in stories?” Thomas said, “for I’ve never met a king who let one speak.”
“So they make the wife tell them why it bit her.”
“I definitely like this version better. Whore wife bitten and tortured,” Thomas said.
“And the king commands the bad knight to bring the good knight’s clothes. Wait…he’s wearing them. So he just takes them off.”
“Now he’s naked.”
“I guess so. Yes.”
“Is it cold in this castle?”
“Of course,” she said, very seriously. “All castles are cold.”
“Exactly how many castles have you been in?”
“I haven’t been in boats, but I know they have sails.”
“Ha! There’s your lawyer father. I knew he’d come visit.”
She sighed sharply in exasperation.
“Do you want to hear this?” she said.
“So we have a shivering knight with a shrinking bitte.”
Both of them looked reproachfully at Thomas.
“Do you want me to finish? Because I can’t when you keep interrupting me to show how clever you are.”
“Ooooooh,” Thomas said. “I stand rebuked. So the naked knight.”
“They give him a robe.”
“So the knight with the robe.”
“The knight is not important now.”
“So the unimportant knight.”
Delphine got up and walked away, folding her arms. Both men, giggling like boys at her irritation, now implored her to come back.
“Sweet Delphine, tell us the story!”
“Don’t take on so! The story, the story!”
At length she took her place again but pointed her small finger at Thomas. He put his hand over his mouth.
“So the king laid out the clothes for the beast, but it just sniffed them and sat down.”
Thomas removed his hand and said, “Did it…?” but she cut him off with a “Ssst!” and pointed her finger again. He replaced his hand.
“The wise counselor said that the knight was ashamed to change in front of them. So they put the beast in a bedroom with the clothes. He went in on four legs and came out on two.”
They both looked at her expectantly.
“What?” she said.
“Finish it,” Thomas said.
“I did. He became a man again.”
“What about the bastard knight and the whore wife? Were they killed?”
“If you like.”
“What do you mean, ‘if I like’? It happened or it didn’t.”
“It’s just a story.”
“Yes, and it has an ending.”
“I told you the ending.”
“But we still have loose ends.”
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll finish it to your tastes. The knight takes his sword and cuts the heads off both of them. Blood goes everywhere. Blood, blood, blood. Then he cuts the head off the king, too. Bloody blood-blood. And he puts the crown on his own head, so he’s king. And the wise counselor gives him his pretty daughter to marry, even though she’s only fifteen years old, and they have lots of babies, and then die and go to Heaven. How do you like that, Sir Thomas?”
He clapped his hands and hooted.
“Now that’s a cunting story!” he said.
“Uh…I think we have a visitor,” the priest said, pointing at the barn window, where a pair of eyes peeked at them below a mane of tangled, wet hair knotted with grass.
Thomas threw a log from the fire, and it hit the wall next to the window, showering sparks.
“Go on!” he shouted, reaching for his sword, but the eyes just blinked at him. He got up, and the face disappeared; they saw the naked old man run by the door, looking wildly in at them.
“This is MY BARN!” he said, outraged, and ran into the rain again.
There was no question of Thomas catching him.
* * *
The knight slept poorly.
He woke panting in darkness from a dream about riding his horse through a field of brambles, and tried to remember where he was. When he did, he noticed that the rain had stopped, and he walked outside to look up at the sky. The half-moon flirted with him through gouges in slow-moving clouds that still held water, but he would not be able to look for his comet. He thought it might be out of sight now, having murdered its stellar swan, but he had no doubt that others had come; this had been a promiscuous summer for comets.
Only it wasn’t summer anymore. His breath plumed out in front of him. It was nearing mid-September, but it was cold like October.
He heard movement behind him, and then a sound of mild displeasure; he turned to see the priest stooping to drink from the bowl he had set out.
“It’s musty,” he said. “My bowl could do with a scrubbing.”
Thomas looked at the sky again.
“Couldn’t sleep?” the priest asked.
Thomas didn’t answer.
“I know. Stupid question. Hardly worthy of William of Ockham. I should have asked if you had bad dreams. I did. Would you like to know what about?”
Thomas didn’t speak.
“I was being led around the countryside by a little girl. There were horrid things in rivers, and statues crawled off churches, and a great sickness had killed most everybody. I was starving, to boot.”
Silence.
“My only other companion was a moody, excommunicate knight who rarely spoke and didn’t have the slightest interest in hearing about my nightmares. And, of course, a mule.”
Thomas sighed.
“I liked the mule.”
“What did you really dream?”
“I dreamed my brother had no legs.”
“The one in Avignon? The catamite?”
“I have only one brother. He walked about with crutches, like a stilt man, but drab and sad. I fed him from my hand as if he were a bird, but he was not grateful. He hated me for my legs.”
“That sounds better than the other one. Perhaps you should go back to sleep.”
Now the priest looked at the sky.
“What’s up there?”
“If a priest doesn
’t know, how should I?”
“Huh. Maybe a better priest would.”
He stooped now and took rainwater from the knight’s thigh-piece. Thomas took a long look at Père Matthieu.
“You haven’t been defrocked or anything, have you?”
“Should have been, perhaps. But, no.”
“You just don’t always seem quite like a priest.”
“Funny. I’ve felt the same way ever since the day I took orders.”
“Why did you, then?”
“Like most of the others. My father sent me.”
“Why didn’t you follow him into his trade?”
The priest didn’t say anything.
“Well?”
“He was a soldier.”
“And?”
“Do I seem like a soldier to you?”
“Not even a little.”
“And yet I am heroic compared with my brother.”
Thomas grunted, imagining how he might look upon his son if he proved too weak for arms. He imagined himself beating it out of him and making a man of him. It occurred to him that the priest’s father had probably tried.
“Our father used to say, ‘Since God has sent me only daughters, I shall send the bearded ones to take orders, and the others to fetch back sons.’”
Thomas chuckled.
“Yes, I suppose it is funny,” the priest said, “the first dozen times.”
Thomas drank out of his helm.
Thunder rumbled in the distance.
“We’re in for more of it,” Thomas said.
The priest nodded.
“May I tell you?”
“What?” Thomas said.
“What I did.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“I know.”
“Then why ask?”
The priest folded his arms around himself against the cold.
“I don’t have anyone else to confess to.”
FOURTEEN
Of the Stained Priest and the Widow’s Revenge
Two months before the plague came to St. Martin-le-Preux, Père Matthieu Hanicotte was in love. His hands shook as he put on his chasuble and prepared the candles and the incense, and when he preached his sermon, his left armpit ran cold with sweat, even though the mornings were still cool that May. It seemed curious to him that only the left armpit was affected; perhaps, he thought, because the heart was supposed to sit just a little to the left. And his sin, as of this morning, was still only in his heart.
The sweat would run from the moment he approached the altar; even with his back to his flock, he thought about where the object of his affection would be standing; three or four rows back, always closest to the aisle, at the level of the stained-glass window portraying the brides with their lanterns.
He could even distinguish the young man’s cough from the rest of his congregation.
On this particular day, the object was wearing his best gray cotehardie buttoned snugly up his trunk, and standing with one leg in the aisle, which the others took for rascality, but which was in fact to better display his bright red stocking and the long, well-calved leg in it.
As Père Matthieu lifted the Eucharist, he tried to keep his thoughts on the words he was pronouncing; but then he felt the cold sweat running, and knew it was making him stink. This new love-sweat hit high in the nose with a sharp note like cheese, or salt, or metal, or the miscarriage of all three. His inner cassock was so ripe with infatuation that he sweated again when he brought it to the laundresses and blushed when he gathered it back.
The boy’s father was the village reeve, whose job it was to act as liaison between the farmers and their seigneur. As was often the case with reeves, Samuel Hébert was mistrusted by each side. The seigneur believed he let the villagers off too early when they worked his manor farm their customary two days per week. This was true. But many of the villagers believed Hébert was too scrupulous in counting and weighing the shares of livestock and harvests they owed their lord. In fact, this was not true; he often let the best cow stay with the inheritors after a peasant died and brought a slightly less meaty one up the river as heriot. Nonetheless, it was Samuel Hébert who took from them, and these proud Norman farmers better perceived slights than kindnesses.
And, by peasant standards, he was rich.
Michel Hébert, his second son, was going to Paris to study law. At twenty, he would be a bit older than most of his colleagues; but a tidy bribe had been administered, and a bursar from the university had met the boy and declared him good enough in Latin that something might be made of him. Soon, Père Matthieu thought, with great sadness and resignation, those red legs would not be standing in the aisle near the window. He was right, of course, but not because the boy was going to Paris.
The Great Death was coming.
It had already begun devouring Avignon, where it was said the pope heard audiences between two fires to burn off pestilential air, and nibbling at Paris, where the first afflicted households were trying to hide their sick so they would not be shunned by their neighbors.
The priest knew his congregation was hungry for news about the disease and its progress; he knew they craved some reassurance that St. Martin-le-Preux would be spared, whether for its holiness or because they had suffered enough under the hand of their greedy seigneur, but he could not summon up the words. The truth was that he knew nothing. He did not know how it was spread, what had caused it, where it would go, or what could be done for the ill. What troubled him most was his feeling that God could see into his heart and knew that his love was twisted. God would weigh his most secret thoughts and, finding them repulsive, would take an even heavier toll on the villeins of his flock. He would have thrown himself into the river, but a suicide priest might be worse in God’s eyes than a would-be sodomite.
He had never felt so ignorant, useless, or doubtful in his life.
His homily addressed the sin of wrath, and how much it displeased the Lord when neighbors bickered over the placement of fences or insults spoken in the alehouse.
“What do you think will happen in the alehouse? Will you make peace there? Or will you quarrel? I tell you, a devil loves no better hiding place than a bowl of beer.” He knew as soon as he said the words that he had stepped on dangerous ground; the whole village knew him for a tippler. He had more to say about alcohol making people fight, but decided to cut that short and get on to something about angels. People liked angels. But he was too late. As he cleared his throat to buy himself a moment, his most frequent sparring partner took advantage of his slip.
“If devils hide in beer, is that why you drink so much wine?” said Sylvan Bertier, the drover. Not everyone laughed, but enough of them so that he forced himself to smile rather than trying to rebuke the popular Bertier.
A drop of that awful, cold sweat ran down his left side.
“Yes. I know that I take more comfort than I should in wine; even God’s shepherds are not without sin. But which of you has seen it make me quarrelsome? Our drover here often has blacker eyes than his oxen.”
He glanced at the object, who was smiling now at his skillful riposte, then cut his eyes quickly away to make it look as though he were surveying all of them. For every time he sneaked a glance at Michel Hébert, he made himself look ten more parishioners in the face.
The rest of the homily went smoothly, if blandly, until the water clock told him half an hour had gone by and he began to wrap things up.
When Mass was over and he saw his congregation out, he made sure to turn his right side toward those who came to speak to him, especially Michel.
“You’re a clever man,” the younger Hébert said, and looked at Père Matthieu just long enough for him to notice the boy had a sort of black freckle in the hazel of his eye. His left eye.
“There are greater virtues,” the priest said, wishing Michel would clasp hands with him before he turned and left. He did not. Rather, he hurried on his pretty red legs to walk beside Mélisande Arnaut, a plump girl
whose pretty face, just the color of cream, turned the heads of even those who liked their women lean.
He knew from the confessional that Michel had already fornicated with several girls, including his own half-sister, and fully expected Mélisande to be inventoried soon. He had also lately confessed to having impure thoughts about men. Whatever demon oversaw lust had his hooks deep in Michel Hébert and used him now to ensnare others.
If there were demons at all.
If that boy is Satan’s instrument, God, show me some sign. Let him look back at me.
But he wanted that backward glance so much that he couldn’t bear to attach wickedness to it, so he confounded himself.
Rather, let him look back at me if there are no devils in him.
The boy did look back over his shoulder at him. Just once, and only for an instant, but it was enough.
He would always think of it as having started that day.
* * *
Each night became a battle for Matthieu Hanicotte. He was in danger of losing his belief, if not his soul. Were there souls at all? Was there really a naked, invisible little version of himself hiding under his skin, so valuable to Heaven and Hell that each would send emissaries down to fight for it?
He started by telling himself he would not drink more than one cup of wine, then two, and then three, lest he should become drunk and give himself up to thinking about those red legs. In the end his head was reeling, he was spent, dry-mouthed from spitting in his hand, and he lay in his shame and guilt until the small hours of the morning.
The days were better; even though his parishioners began to ask after his health because he had lost weight and had bags under his eyes, he was far less miserable ministering to them than lying alone with his thoughts. It was better to counsel fat, bearded Sanson Bertier to apologize to his wife for menacing her with his billhook, and to smell the farts Bertier would gravely fan away with his straw hat; it was better to walk with his box of holies out to give last rites to Clement Fougière three times in one week only to have him get well; it was even better to be bitten by Fougière’s dog on the last visit and hear the old man laugh from his sickbed.
One night near the end of May, he went down to the river and walked along its banks, enjoying the pleasantly cool air and getting lost in the beauty of the sky, where the moon was veiling herself with gauzy, fast-moving clouds. She was not full, but she was bright enough to illuminate the river, sending cloud shadows racing over the water and the willows near this part of the bank.
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