Read The Leper of Saint Giles Online
Authors: Ellis Peters
Tags: #Mystery, #Mystery & Detective, #Cadfael; Brother (Fictitious Character), #Herbalists, #Monks, #General, #Shrewsbury (England), #Great Britain, #Historical, #Large type books, #Traditional British, #Fiction
“And if you have divined so much from this day’s deed,” said Lazarus at length, “have not others the same knowledge?”
“No other has seen what I have seen,” said Cadfael simply, “and none will now. The marks will fade. No one wonders. No one questions. And only I know. And only I, and the owner of the hands that did the deed, will ever know that of those hands, the left had but two and a half fingers.”
There was a stir of movement within the mound of dark clothes, and a flash of the ice-clear eyes. Out of the folds of the cloak two hands emerged, and were held to the light of the lamp, the right one whole, long and sinewy, the left lacking index and middle finger and the upper joint of the third, the maimed surfaces showing seamed, whitish and dry.
“Having divined so much from so little, brother,” said the slow, clam voice, “take me with you one step beyond, and divine me his name, for I think you know it.”
“So I think, also,” said Brother Cadfael. “His name is Guimar de Massard.”
The night hung motionless over the Foregate and the valley of the Meole, and the woods through which the sheriff and his men had hunted in vain, plotting clearly, for those longsighted eyes, the passage of Picard’s bright red cap through the trees, and mapping the way by which, later, he must return. Overhead, in contrast to this terrestrial stillness, the sky flowed steadily away, like one man’s floating, fragile life blown across the constant of life itself, to vanish into the unknown.
“Should I know that name?” asked Lazarus, very still.
“My lord, I, too, was at the storming of Jerusalem. Twenty years old I was when the city fell. I saw you breach the gate. I was at the fight at Ascalon, when the Fatimids of Egypt came up against us—and for my part, after the killing that was done in Jerusalem, of so many who held by the Prophet, I say they deserved better luck against us than they had. But there was never brutality or unknightly act charged against Guimar de Massard. Why, why did you vanish after that fight? Why let us, who revered you, and your wife and son here in England, grieve you for dead? Had any of us deserved that of you?”
“Had my wife, had my son, deserved of me that I should lay upon them the load that had fallen upon me?” asked Lazarus, roused and stumbling for once upon the words that tried his mangled mouth. “Brother, I think you ask what you already know.”
Yes, Cadfael knew. Guimar de Massard, wounded and captive after Ascalon, had learned from the doctors who attended him in captivity that he was already a leper.
“They have excellent physicians,” said Lazarus, again calm and still, “wiser than any here. And who should better know and recognize the first bitter signs? They told me truth. They did what I asked of them, sent word of my death from my wounds. They did more. They helped me to a hermitage where I might live with my enemy, as I had died to my friends, and fight that battle as I had fought the commoner kind. My helm and my sword they sent back to Jerusalem, as I asked.”
“She has them,” said Cadfael. “She treasures them. You have not been forgotten in your death. I have always known that the best of the Saracens could out-Christian many of us Christians.”
“Chivalrous and courteous I found my captors. At all points they respected and supported me through the years of my penance.”
One nobility is kin to another, thought Cadfael. There are alliances that cross the blood-line of families, the borders of countries, even the impassable divide of religion, And it was well possible that Guimar de Massard should find himself closer in spirit to the Fatimid caliphs than to Bohemond and Baldwin and Tancred, squabbling like malicious children over their conquests.
“How long,” he asked, “have you been on your way home?” For it was a long, long journey across Europe from the midland sea, on broken feet, with a clapper-dish for baggage, and nothing more.
“Eight years. Ever since they brought word to my hermitage, from the reports of an English prisoner, of my son’s death, and told me there was a child, a girl, left orphaned to her dead mother’s kin, wanting any remaining of my blood.”
So he had left his cell, the refuge of years, and set off with his begging-bowl and cloak and veil to make that endless pilgrimage to England, to see for himself, at the prescribed distance, that his grandchild enjoyed her lands and had her due of happiness. He had found, instead, her affairs gone far awry, and with his own maimed hands he had straightened them, and set her free.
“She has her due now,” said Cadfael. “But for all that, I think she might be happy to exchange her title to all that great honor for one living kinsman.”
The silence was long and cold, as if he trod upon forbidden ground. Nevertheless, he persisted doggedly. “You are a quenched fire. You have been now for years, I judge. Do not deny it, I know the signs. What God imposed, no doubt for his own good reasons, for reasons as good he has lifted away. You know it. You are a peril to no man. And whatever name you have used all these years, you are still Guimar de Massard. If she cherishes your sword, how much more would she revere and delight in you? Why deprive her now of her true shield? Or yourself of the joy of seeing her happy? Of giving her with your own hand to a husband I think you approve?”
“Brother,” said Guimar de Massard, shaking his hooded head, “you speak of what you do not understand. I am a dead man. Let my grave and my bones and my legend alone.”
“Yet there was one Lazarus,” said Cadfael, venturing far and in great awe, “who did rise again out of his tomb, to the joy of his kinswomen.”
There was a long hush while the sailing filaments of cloud were the only things that moved in the visible world. Then the old man’s unblemished right hand flashed from within the folds of the cloak, and rose to thrust back the hood. “And was this,” asked Guimar, “the face that made his sisters glad?”
He plucked away the face-cloth, and uncovered the awful visage left to him, almost lipless, one cheek shrunken away, the nostrils eaten into great, discolored holes, a face in which only the live and brilliant eyes recalled the paladin of Jerusalem and Ascalon. And Cadfael was silenced.
Lazarus again covered the ruin from sight behind the veil. The quietness and serenity came back, almost stealthily. “Never seek to roll that stone away,” said the deep, patient voice gently. “I am content beneath it. Let me lie.”
“I must tell you, then,” said Cadfael after a long silence, “that the boy has been sounding your praises to her, and she is begging him to bring her to you, since you cannot go to her, that she may thank you in person for your goodness to her lover. And since he can refuse her nothing, I think in the morning they will be here.”
“They will understand,” said Lazarus calmly, “that there’s no relying on us wandering lepers, the pilgrim kind. We have minds incorrigibly vagus. The fit comes on us, and the wind blows us away like dust. Relics, we make our way where there are relics to console us. Tell them that all is well with me.”
He put down his feet from the bench, carefully and slowly because of their condition, and courteously shook the skirts of his gown down over them, to hide the deformities. “For with the dead,” he said, “all is very well.” He rose, and Cadfael with him.
“Pray for me, brother, if you will.”
He was gone, turning away and withdrawing without another word or look. The heel of the special shoe he wore tapped sharply on the flags of the floor, and changed its note hollowly on the boards within. Brother Cadfael went out from the porch, under the slow-moving clouds that were not drifting, but proceeding with purpose and deliberation on some predestined course of their own, unhurried and unimpeded, like death.
Yes, with the dead, he thought, making his way back to the abbey in the dark, all is surely well. The child will have to find them work for their gratitude, instead. Their dead has accomplished his own burial, now let them turn rather to the living. Who knows? Who knows but the beggar-woman’s scrofulous waif, fed and tended and taught, may indeed end as page and squire to Sir Joscelin Lucy, some day? Stranger things have happened in this strangest, most harrowing and most wonderful of worlds!
The next morning, after Mass, Iveta and Joscelin came to Saint Giles, with the abbot’s sanction, and hearts full of goodwill to all those within, but seeking two in particular. The child was easily found. But the old leper called Lazarus had gone forth silently in the night, leaving no word where he was bound, and saying no farewells. They sought for him by all the roads from Shrewsbury, and sent to ask at every place of pilgrimage within three counties, but even on crippled feet he outran pursuit, by what secret ways no one ever discovered. Certain it is he came no more to Shrewsbury.
About the Author
ELLIS PETERS is the
nom-de-crime
of English novelist Edith Pargeter, author of scores of books under her own name. She is the recipient of the Silver Dagger Award, conferred by the Crime Writers Association in Britain, as well as the coveted Edgar, awarded by the Mystery Writers of America. Miss Pargeter is also well known as a translator of poetry and prose from the Czech and has been awarded the Gold Medal and Ribbon of the Czechoslovak Society for Foreign Relations for her services to Czech literature. She passed away in 1995, at the age of 82, at home in her beloved Shropshire.