Stigmata
Authors: Colin Falconer
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.
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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
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This book is for Norman and Janet. Who always had a bed and a whisky for their wayward brother after his missteps.
Thank you.
Five leagues west of Acre,
year of Our Lord, 1205
H
OPE.
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 massive 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.
Toulouse, 1205
G
OD CHOSE
F
ABRICIA
B
ÉRENGER
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.