Colin Falconer was born in North London. He has been a novelist for twenty seven years, and his nineteen novels have been translated into over twenty languages. You can find him at https://colinfalconer.wordpress.com
Published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2012 by Corvus,
an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Colin Falconer 2012
The moral right of Colin Falconer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Trade paperback ISBN: 978 0 85789 112 9
E-book ISBN: 978 0 85789 118 1
Printed in Great Britain
Corvus
An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
Ormond House
26–27 Boswell Street
London
WC1N 3JZ
www.corvus-books.co.uk
This book is for Norman and Janet. Who always had a bed and a whisky for their wayward brother after his missteps.
Thank you.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
PART ONE
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
PART TWO
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
XXVI
XXVII
XXVIII
XXIX
XXX
XXXI
XXXII
XXXIII
XXXIV
XXXV
XXXVI
XXXVII
XXXVIII
XXXIX
XL
XLI
XLII
XLIII
XLIV
XLV
XLVI
XLVII
XLVIII
XLIX
L
LI
LII
LIII
LIV
LV
LVI
LVII
LVIII
LIX
LX
LXI
LXII
LXIII
LXIV
LXV
LXVI
LXVII
LXVIII
LXIX
LXX
LXXI
LXXII
LXXIII
LXXIV
LXXV
LXXVI
LXXVII
LXXVIII
LXXIX
LXXX
LXXXI
LXXXII
LXXXIII
LXXXIV
LXXXV
LXXXVI
LXXXVII
LXXXVIII
LXXXIX
XC
XCI
XCII
XCIII
XCIV
XCV
XCVI
XCVII
XCVIII
XCIX
C
CI
CII
CIII
CIV
CV
CVI
CVII
CVIII
CIX
CX
CXI
PROLOGUE
Five leagues west of Acre,
year of Our Lord, 1205
HOPE.
A man cannot live without hope, Philip thought. It is the one thing that makes death appear unattractive. My wife is my hope now, God and honour have played me for a fool.
They sailed with the tide on Sunday, the Lord’s Day. It would be his last glimpse of Acre and the Holy Land where Jesus had walked, and his eyes did not linger. He was leaving his best friend in a shallow grave on the hillside just outside the castle walls; the other liegemen who had travelled with him had no Christian burial at all, except that offered by the vultures and desert hyenas.
Mist clung to the water, which was flat and sluggish as oil.
He could still picture her face. Alezaïs, my sweet, my darling.
One of the sailors was looking at him. ‘What was that you said?’
Philip glared at him. ‘Were you addressing me?’
The man touched his forelock. ‘Sorry, seigneur. You took me by surprise. You said a woman’s name.’
‘Yes, my wife,’ he said. ‘I imagined her here.’
It was an insolence, of course, for a common sailor to ask such a question of someone of his birth. But he wanted to talk, and telling this man what was on his mind seemed better than wandering around the deck, muttering to himself. ‘My uncle arranged the match. I was his ward. My father had died in a joust when I was ten years old. When I was eighteen he gave me land and a fortified manor and a wife. She was fifteen years old and she wore her veil right through the churching. My cousins told me she had a wart on the end of her nose the size of a walnut, so when she drew back the veil I could not believe the sweet face that looked back at me. I have been smitten ever since. Some think me unmanly but she is the only woman I have ever known.’
‘My lord, I should not think you unmanly, I should think you fortunate. Not many men would attest to loving their wives. It is a rare conjunction of a man’s stars.’
‘I swear, if you saw her, you would despise me for leaving her to come to this wasteland.’
The man crossed himself and turned away at this blasphemy.
Some friars gathered on the deck under a banner of the holy cross and began to sing a hymn. They believed that through prayer and piety they could banish the Mohammedan from the Holy Land. He supposed he had believed it too, once, but he did not believe in miracles any more.
He leaned on the wooden rail, and when he closed his eyes it was the stone parapet of his castle at Troyes. The women were down at the river for the great wash, the bed linens spread out on rocks to bleach them in the sun. The gate to the castle was open and the masons were repairing broken corbels and attending to crumbling mortar. Below him the courtyard was full of servants and horses, the groomsmen were mucking out the stables with buckets and black streams of water poured across the courtyard carrying bits of black straw. Chickens clucked and ranged on the cobblestones and the air smelled of horse and wet manure and spring.
Not long now. It waited just beyond the bright horizon, and he had the breeze at his back. Soon he would be returned to his wife and his land, where he could rest and repair the wounds to his soul.
The mist burned away and it was as if he was roasting under a brazier. He sought shade on the deck under a narrow sail. His face had turned nut-brown after twelve months in Outremer, but there were patches of livid pink where the skin had peeled in strips. He longed for rain and dew-wet mornings.
He closed his eyes, and in his reverie he stepped over a serving boy slumped asleep against the wall near the hearth as a scullion staggered towards him struggling with a ma
ssive half-barrel of water he had drawn from the well. He plunged his face into it and drank deep, then breathed in the morning smell of the castle: burned wax, sweat, cold food, old ale.
There was a fire in the great hearth. He ducked behind a stone pillar to observe his wife at supper, unseen. She was accompanied by her ladies and her chaplain, and pages hurried in carrying finger bowls so she might wash the grease from her fingers. At her signal her minstrels came to the table to finish the remains of the supper, then grace was sung and the trestles were set aside.
She withdrew to take her ease by the window, her ladies around her on benches or seated on cushions on the floor. He watched a small crease form between her eyebrows as she stared from the window to the uncoiled river and the grey-slated roofs of the manor. She wore a close-fitting gown of blue velvet, the colour of her eyes. Her ladies teased her to join in their game of knucklebones, and she squealed like a child each time she won.
He had tormented himself each day in Outremer: I wonder if she has taken a lover, some troubadour, some envious duke. Has she thought of me as often as I have thought of her?
*
No sooner were they out of sight of land than they were becalmed. They spent four days and nights baking under the sun and shivering with cold at night. Another of God’s little jokes. He wondered now if he would ever get home.
As their ship wallowed in the calm, five hundred men sweated and cursed and moaned. The stench of animals and soldiers in the dead air was suffocating. Sailors whistled for the wind, a low moaning sound that he thought would send him mad. He crouched miserably on the deck and thought about his wife and what he would say to her when finally he saw her again.
It had only been a year but it felt like a hundred. He had been spurred to display his fidelity to God, give Him the duty of his service. He was such a different man then; he thought he would be fighting to restore Jerusalem. Instead he was hostage to endless bitter disputes between barons and Templars over who runs what, sent to fight a few lonely skirmishes in the desert that achieved nothing except the death of a few good men.
He could taste the salt on his cracked lips. Every time he tried to moisten them with his tongue they cracked and bled. It was worse than being back in the desert. The sun was relentless. There was shade below decks but he would not venture down there because of the heat and the stench and the rats.
Wait for me, my heart. I am coming home.
PART ONE
I
Toulouse, 1205
GOD CHOSE FABRICIA BÉRENGER in the middle of Toulouse during a lightning storm. With one thunderous touch of his finger, he sent her reeling.
The day had been mild, unseasonably so. The storm appeared suddenly, ink-black clouds broiling up the sky in the north, just as the bells of Saint-Étienne were ringing for vespers. A blast of icy wind hit her like a slap as she ran across the marketplace, a blow so violent and unexpected that it almost knocked her off her feet.
The rain exploded on the cobbles like a barrage of copper nails and in moments her skirts were soaked through. She had no warning of the jagged spark that arced from the heavens. There was a moment of blinding illumination and then nothing.
The lightning strike, someone later said, sounded as if the sky itself had rent in two pieces. But Fabricia did not hear it; she was already lying senseless on the ground.
Even her father, on the other side of the square, tumbled on to his haunches from the shock of it as the cobblestones trembled underneath him. They said every dog in Toulouse went mad that day.
Anselm Bérenger waited for either God or the Devil himself to appear in the sky. But neither of these things happened. After a few moments, when his wits returned, he reached for the support of a stone pillar and pulled himself to his feet. It was then he saw his only daughter lying in the middle of the flooded square and thought she must be dead.
He let out a wail, stumbled across the cobblestones and rolled her over on to her back, screaming her name. She was white. Her eyes were half-lidded, and rolled back in her head, giving her the look of a demon. He scooped her up in his arms and ran blindly with her through the streets, cursing aloud the name of God as he ran, for there was no doubt in his mind who had murdered her. The sky shimmered and flashed and the sound of the thunder drowned out his agony and his blasphemies.
*
When Fabricia opened her eyes, there were three people in the room, and only one of them was smiling. Her mother and father crowded above her, Anselm’s face twisted in a rictus of dread.
‘She’s alive!’ he gasped.
‘I told you she would be all right,’ her mother said.
‘She was dead, Elionor! It’s a miracle. God has spared us! He has given my little girl back to me.’
Fabricia shuddered with cold. ‘Fetch another blanket,’ she heard her mother say. ‘She’s frozen. How long did you leave her lying there in the rain, you old goat?’
Fabricia rolled on to her side, wrapping her arms around herself and curling her knees up to her chest. Her skin felt as cold as marble. She was naked. How did that happen? She tried to remember. She was more puzzled by the woman standing in the corner. She wore a long blue gown, with a hood, and her skin was made luminous by the guttering candles. She knew she had seen her before, somewhere.
‘Mon petit chou. Are you all right? Say something.’
‘Who’s that?’ Fabricia said.
‘She can speak,’ Anselm said. ‘Thank God!’
Elionor wiped tears from her face. She clambered on to the bed and spooned her daughter into her breasts. Fabricia felt her warm breath on her neck.
‘Who are you?’ Fabricia said to the emptiness in the corner of the room.
Anselm looked around. For the second time that day he was very, very afraid. ‘Fabricia?’ he said, ‘who are you talking to?’
‘What happened, Papa?’
‘Don’t you remember? A thunderbolt struck you as you were crossing the square before Saint-Étienne.’
‘I should never have sent her,’ Elionor sobbed. ‘I should have brought your supper myself.’
‘I don’t remember,’ Fabricia said.
‘I thought we had lost you!’
‘You are chosen,’ the woman in blue told her.
‘But why choose me?’
Her mother sat up and shook her. ‘Fabricia? Who are you talking to?’
‘There’s no one,’ Anselm said. He took her face in both his hands, forcing her to look at him. ‘Fabricia? What is it? Who is here, who are you talking to?’ His eyes went wide. ‘Something has happened to her,’ he said to his wife. ‘She has gone mad.’
Elionor eased her daughter’s head back on to the pillow and covered her to the chin with bearskins. She smoothed back her hair and kissed her forehead. ‘Just rest now,’ she whispered. Then she cuffed her husband smartly around the head. ‘She’s not mad! What are you talking about? She just needs to sleep. Can’t you see that?’
There was a fire lit in the hearth and Fabricia watched them retreat there, huddling together on two stools. Anselm pulled off his wet smock and hung it to dry, steaming, in front of the flames. He and Elionor whispered to each other, but she could not make out what they were saying.
The woman in blue had vanished. ‘Now I remember who you are,’ she said aloud. The remembrance made her wonder if she really was still living. She placed a hand between her breasts and felt for her own heartbeat; it was different, somehow, every now and then it gave a little kick, like a baby in a womb.
The woman was not real, she decided. It was just the shock of having death brush past so close, a fever of the brain. She would sleep now and in the morning it would all be forgotten.
II
PÈIRE DE FARGON was a stoop-shouldered giant just a year or two older than Fabricia. He reminded her of one of the sculptures her father made for the capitals in the church, fashioned over-large for the sake of effect. He had chestnut hair that fell over his dark brown eyes, one wider and darker than th
e other. He could not see as well out of it, which made his skill with hammer and chisel the more remarkable.
He stood over her, his face creased with concern. Anselm stood at his shoulder.
‘Pèire? What are you doing here?’ she said.
He seemed stricken. Her father nudged him hard with his shoulder. ‘Your father told me what happened,’ he said. ‘I was worried about you.’
‘It was nothing. I’m all right.’ She tried to get out of bed but she could not. Her legs felt too weak to support her. Her mother pushed the two men aside and made her lie down again. ‘I told these two oafs not to disturb you.’
Fabricia remembered what had happened the last evening, how she had been crossing the square and then the next thing she had woken soaking wet here in her bed, with her mother and father standing over her. Not a dream then.
Elionor shooed the two men out of the door, scolding them for disturbing her daughter’s rest. She brought her a hunk of bread and some broth from the stove for her breakfast. ‘You have to rest today,’ she said.
Fabricia discovered she was ravenously hungry and tore at the bread with her teeth. Her mother sat and watched her, as if she could not believe Fabricia was really there. ‘What was Pèire doing here?’ Fabricia asked her as she drank the broth.
‘You know he likes you,’ Elionor said. ‘Your father wants to arrange the match for you.’
Fabricia managed a weak smile. At that moment marriage to Pèire seemed just as real to her as the lady in blue. The only thing to do right now was to forget about both of them, and pretend she had imagined them.
‘There is a fair in the square tomorrow, for St Jude’s day. If you are feeling stronger, Pèire is going to take you.’
‘I should like that,’ she said. She meant of course that she would like to go to the fair; how she felt about Pèire was a different matter.
III
THE BELLS OF Saint-Étienne rang for terce, muffled by the mist that hung white and heavy on the river. The sun would be hot today, and already the air was thick and damp. Steam rose from the cobblestones. The big storm had clogged all the drains and left the city stinking, the mud in the marketplace thick as porridge.
As on any feast day the streets and squares were full of people. The toll gates were busy, and there was scarcely space in the market square for all the ox and donkey carts that had been brought into the town. She smelled dung and the hawkers’ pies. The main square was clamorous from the sounds of the bear-baiting, and the raucous songs of the minstrels.
Stigmata Page 1