Stigmata (16 page)

‘This will cure him?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘I will not let him die.’

‘Even a prince cannot argue with Death.’

He took the bag from her and handed her some silver coins. She passed them back. ‘I’m not a quack, or a priest, thank God. Only pay me when he is well.’

‘That is just for your time. Make him well and there will be ten times that.’

As he was leaving she called him back. ‘I wasn’t always a hag,’ she said. ‘I once had a son, and a husband too. They both died. And I could not help them, though to
others I give my herbs and they rise from their beds like Lazarus. I am not a witch, seigneur. I cannot do magic for you. I wish I could.’

‘My son is not going to die,’ he said.

She watched him ride away. A good man, they said.

But too proud by half.

P
HILIP WENT DOWN
to the scullery to prepare the infusion himself. He poured warm water into a kettle and hung it over the
fire.

As he was bent there he felt his wife’s hand on his shoulder, the warmth of it; he was so startled that he turned his head to look for her. But the dead do not come back to life.

Alezaïs, my heart, help me. I am doing all I can.

When the water on the herbs had boiled down, he swung out the crane and filled a pewter mug with the bubbling mess. The smell was sickening. He wrapped the handle in a towel and went back to his
son’s bedchamber.

He tried to make Renaut drink some of the witch’s magic tea but he could not keep it down. Again and again he vomited, retching with such violence that he thought he must tear his stomach
out. The vomit was streaked with bright red blood. Finally he pushed the mug away. When Philip persisted Renaut struck out violently and sent the mug and the precious contents crashing on to the
flagstones. Philip yelled in frustration and kicked the mug across the floor. It landed in the fire.

Renaut twitched and kicked, muttering words he could not understand. Philip wrung a cloth in cold water and laid it across his forehead. ‘I will not let you die,’ he promised
him.

A few chinks of light found a way through the shutters, fading as the afternoon wore on. He lit a taper and continued his vigil.

He had found Alezaïs’s comb, silver and tortoiseshell. He had taken to carrying it with him everywhere, inside his tunic. He rolled it over and over in his hands like a puzzle. It
still had her hairs in it. He unravelled one, held the fine strand towards the light. He put the comb back inside his shirt. She is gone, he reminded himself. She is gone and she is not coming
back.

There was a tapestry on the wall, above his son’s bed, of a battle between a Christian knight and a Saracen. Once it had hung above his own bed, when he was a child. He had dreamed of
being that knight, of the glory he would win himself, capturing Jerusalem from the infidel single-handed, hailed as Christendom’s greatest-ever warrior. The reality had been so different.
What should I put in my tapestry now?

He heard the bell in the chapel strike for compline. He felt tired to his very bones. He called for a servant girl.
Watch him, fetch me if he wakes, even if he just cries out. Do you
understand?

His men-at-arms were drinking ale by the dying fire in the great hall; some dogs were sniffing around the rushes, looking for scraps left over from supper. Some of the other men were already on
the floor, asleep. He stopped for a moment to stare at one of the stable boys, curled up under his cloak with one of the laundry maids, his head on her breast.
I will exchange your place there
for my warm bed and cold love, if you like.

He went up the narrow stone steps to his bedroom at the top of the
donjon
. He imagined he was greatly envied, for the seigneur and his wife had the one thing denied everyone else; they
could sleep and love and bathe without being seen or heard.

Tonight he just wanted to sleep.

Moonlight angled across the bed from the window. By the sound of her breathing Giselle was asleep, thanks be to God. He groped towards the bed. His bed! One of the greatest luxuries of
privilege: a feather mattress, a bolster filled with down. For the last three nights he had dozed fitfully in a hard wooden chair beside his son’s bed.

There was a curtain to keep out the draughts. He pulled it aside and felt for the wooden pole that kept their clothes from the rats and mice, hung his breeches and tunic on it, then folded his
shirt and placed it under the bolster. A long time now since he had come to bed without his clothes. He pulled back the linen sheet.

Suddenly she sat up. ‘Well. A strange man in my bed.’

‘Expect little. I am too exhausted even to speak.’

As he reclined on to the bolster she swung her leg across him, so that her breasts were level with his face. Fine breasts, too, pert, ivory in the silver moonlight. If he had loved her it would
not have mattered if he had just walked a hundred miles across the desert.

‘Let me comfort you,’ she said, and reached down and cupped him in her hand.

‘I am beyond comfort.’

‘I can make you another son.’

Did she really say that? He was tired; perhaps he had only imagined she said it. But wasn’t that the reason for marriage? Children, politics, money; especially children. For a man of noble
birth it was just good husbandry to have a wife and produce heirs, it should have nothing to do with love. An heir to lands is never his own master, his father had told him.

Yet something in him rebelled. Lose a son, make another; lose a wife, marry another. He had made all the necessary compromises with life and now he despised himself for them.

‘My son is dying, woman,’ he whispered and pushed her away. After a while he felt her crying, though she was too proud to weep out loud. What did you think, Philip, that you could
reject her and she would not mind it? Married a year and you have bedded her just twice. Is she really such a vixen or did you make her into one? He got out of bed, left the feather mattress and
the bolster filled with down, and dressed. Then he went back downstairs to sleep in a wooden chair and listen to his son whimper in his sleep.

Old Marguerite sat on the palfrey as if perched on the edge of a cliff. The servants watched from the windows; the stable hands stood around, staring. Well, he knew this would
excite talk. Enough that they gossiped about his relations with his wife, or lack of them, now here he was bringing a sorceress to the castle.

Where would it end?

‘Thank you for coming,’ he said.

‘I did not have a choice when these ruffians showed up,’ she said, indicating Renaut and his sergeant-at-arms.

‘These men would not hurt you. They look terrifying but you would slay them both in a fair fight.’

The men lounging by the gate laughed. For all that he was half-mad at least the seigneur had not lost his sense of humour.

He helped her down from the horse and led her inside the
donjon
. His son’s bedroom was just below the great hall. He was awake, the great blue eyes sunken yet further into his head,
the blue veins livid against his skin, which had turned a ghastly grey colour. No flesh on his skull. This is how he will look when he is dead, Philip thought. Except he will no longer blink.

The old woman knelt beside his bed and put a hand to his forehead, but tenderly as a mother would do. He guessed his son wanted to ask her name and who she was but did not have the strength.

‘Poor child,’ Marguerite said.

‘Please,’ Philip said. ‘Do something.’

‘Did you give him the infusion?’

‘I did. But he could not keep it down.’

‘Something is eating him from the inside. I told you, for everyone that I cure, another dies. I can heal what might be healed. I cannot do magic.’

‘There must be something. I will give everything I have to save him, just tell me what to do.’

The old woman hesitated. ‘Do you mean this?’

‘I never say anything I do not mean.’

‘Well, then, there is one way. I have heard travellers talk of a woman in the south who does miracles. It may be just rumour for I have never seen this woman myself. And the chances that
you will find her, that you might even bring her here . . .’

‘Where does she live? I will find her.’

‘She lives in the Albigeois. In the village of Saint-Ybars in the Comté de Foix. People say of her that she can even raise the dead. She is your only hope, for nothing apart from a
miracle will save your son, seigneur.’

‘Tell me her name,’ Philip said.

‘Her name is Fabricia Bérenger. She is the daughter of a stonemason.’

‘Thank you,’ Philip said.

T
HE AIR IN
the great hall was acrid, for there was too much green wood on the fire. Trestle tables were piled against the
wall, ready to be brought out for dinner. Several of his sergeants lounged, playing dice; the hunting dogs whined and grizzled in the straw, dozing, stretching, playing. He glanced at the heraldic
shields above the great doors, symbols of his proud Burgundian ancestry and the source of his privilege and his chains.

Ah, his chains. There she stood, in the midst of his private domain, in her robe of raspberry velvet, lined with fur, looking sumptuous, anxious and furious at once.

‘Are you quite mad?’ she shouted, startling the dogs. The men looked up from their dice game, thinking there was sport to be had.

‘Leave us,’ he said, and waited until their audience had left before he responded. ‘You heard what the old woman said then?’

‘Some old witch tells you to go to the Pays d’Oc and you saddle your horse? You would not go at the Pope’s command but you would listen to some crone?’

‘I am going for my own purposes, not for Rome’s.’

‘And what do you hope to find there? You think some woman will put her hands on your son and he will be cured? Is that what you think?’

‘I won’t let him die.’

‘Children die all the time.’

‘So we will just toss him away with no more thought than hurling a chicken bone to the dogs at dinner? Is that all a life is worth to you?’

‘You cannot sacrifice everything you have for one sickly boy.’

‘He was never sickly before this.’

‘He is going to die no matter what you do or how much you love him. This is God’s will.’

Philip shook his head. ‘I am leaving in the morning. My squire Renaut is coming with me. I shall take my men-at-arms and be back within one moon.’

‘Who will protect us here?’

‘Protect you? You need a porter for the gate and another to stop the stable boys stealing the chickens. If you feel threatened you have three brothers within ten leagues of here who will
ride to your aid, but I cannot see the eventuality. You are quite as capable of running affairs as I. I shall be returned by Midsummer Eve.’

It was at that moment that Renaut strode in, come to rescue him no doubt, as he did that day in the forest. He wore a blue tunic over leathers, ready for the morning’s hunt. He had
delegated to a sergeant the duty of escorting Marguerite home.

Giselle decided to enlist him to her side. ‘Can you talk some sense into the seigneur?’ she said. ‘You have heard what he plans to do?’

Renaut hesitated, his eyes moving between them as if he were assessing two enemy combatants before a fight. But it is to me he owes his allegiance, so he must be politic, no matter what he
thinks. I imagine now he regrets sending the sergeant to Poissy in his stead.

‘The seigneur must do what he thinks best,’ he said carefully.

‘Don’t toady to him! Do you actually want me to believe that what he proposes makes any sense to you, or to anyone here in the château but him?’

‘It is not for me to say.’

‘You are both mad!’ Giselle screamed. She picked up her skirts and fled up the stairs to her bedchamber.

Renaut let out a breath. Poor lad. Only eighteen years old and this is his first combat. He acquitted himself rather well.

‘Thank you, Renaut. That was bravely done. Now you may speak openly.’

‘With respect, seigneur – are you quite mad?’

‘With respect, Squire Renaut, you were the one who told me to visit the old woman.’

‘She lives in Poissy, not the Pays d’Oc.’

‘I am not going to wait and let him die. You heard what the crone said. She says there is a woman there who can heal with her hands.’

‘Even if it’s true, we would be riding into the middle of a war. The northern army is headed towards Béziers and has laid waste to much of the Midi already. There are brigands
on the road and the Count of Toulouse’s soldiers ambush any northerners without proper escort. And if we do not wear the crusader cross we would be in danger from both sides.’

‘I have been to war before. I will get us there and back.’

‘I should never doubt either your courage or your skill, just the reason you would put them to such a test. And you know, even if we find this woman, even if everything the crone says
about her is true, which cannot be proven, even then . . . how would we persuade her to return with us here to Vercy?’

‘I will pay her. And if that is not sufficient persuasion, then we might kidnap her with all gentleness, as you did this morning with the witch. There is always a way to do
things.’

‘And what of your duties here?’

‘You think Lady Giselle cannot manage the day-to-day running of this château and the estate? She is easily bored with music and her weaving. She will enjoy assuming the mantle of
justice for Vercy; in a few weeks there will not be a vagabond within five leagues who is not in the stocks. She will be stricter with the servants than I, the cooks and the serving girls will soon
be in terror of their lives.’

Renaut took off his riding gauntlets and slapped them against the andirons before the fire. ‘May I speak freely?’

‘I thought you were.’

‘It is just that . . . I think you go too far. Death is certain for each of us. This is beyond all reason.’

‘You’re eighteen, are you not, Renaut?’

‘Yes, seigneur.’