The Leper of Saint Giles (8 page)

He did not sleep. He sat with head erect and straight back, his hands folded together at rest within his lap, the maimed left one within the sound right. Nothing else in the night was quite so still.

Joscelin had slept for a while in his bed of hay. Simon had brought him bread and meat and wine as he had promised, and his clothes had dried on him; he had lain in less comfort many a time. Only his mind was uncomforted. It was all very well for Simon to speak calmly of being able to make the excuse that the gray needed exercise, and get him from behind locked doors in a day or two, and so help his friend to escape when the hunt slackened, as it must. What use was that? In one more day, let alone two, Iveta would have been sacrificed, and escape without her played no part in Joscelin’s plans. It was good of Simon to provide him this refuge, and sensible, no doubt, to advise him to stay within here until flight was possible. Very well-meant advice, and Joscelin was grateful, but he had no intention of taking it. A respite was most welcome, but would be wasted if it did not lead to action before ten o’clock on the morrow.

And here was he, alone, due to be pursued, if not shot, at sight, without a weapon, without a clear idea in his head, and only a few hours of grace left to him.

It was a simple conclusion, at any rate, that he could do nothing here, and if he was to remove himself elsewhere it would have to be during darkness. Even if he could have been provided with a dagger, and made his way undetected into the house, to Domville’s bedside while he slept, he knew he could not have used his advantage. It was all very fine talking wildly about killing, but Brother Cadfael had been perfectly right, he could not do it, not by stealth. As for an honest challenge in a good quarrel, Domville would laugh in his face before tossing him back to the sheriff. Not out of cowardice, either, Joscelin conceded. There were very few things in this world that Domville was afraid of, and very few antagonists in the lists he need be afraid of. I am no bad swordsman, Joscelin told himself judicially, but for all his years he could carve and eat me for his dinner. No, disdain, not caution, would reject me.

Unless… Unless I could beard him before abbot and canon and guests and all, and strike him in the face, something his dignity would not bear, something done publicly that must be wiped out publicly in blood. For that he might even ride roughshod over the sheriff and the law, for that he might forgo destroying me in slower ways, and want nothing but my heart spitted on his blade. For that he would forget Iveta and wedlock and all, until he had wiped out the insult. And what is more, if I could bring him to that point, he would be meticulous to the last hair, give me breathing-time, provide me a sword the length of his own, kill me punctiliously, honorably. Do him that justice, with weapons he fights fair, even if he sees no reason to extend that scruple to such matters as lying charges backed with forged evidence.

And who knows?… Who knows? With Iveta’s prayers on my side, and all the weight of my grudge into the bargain—for he has dealt foully by me!—who knows but I might prevail? Then, even if they wrung my neck for his lying charge, she would be delivered.

To be honest, he did not think much of that conclusion, and not all for his own sake. For Iveta needed to be delivered not only from this detestable match, but from the guardian who preyed on her and her inheritance like murderous ivy on an oak, and would sell her to the next compliant bidder as nimbly as to this one. But even delay was salvation. Things could change. Picard could die. Only fend off tomorrow!

If he was to accomplish anything he must get out of here, and somehow make his way in hiding back to the abbey, where all must be enacted. No hope at all by the Foregate, the road would be patrolled, the gatehouse and the parish door guarded, so much was certain. On every side but one the abbey grounds were surrounded by a high boundary wall. The remaining side was bordered by the Meole brook, no mean water hemming the gardens, but fordable or swimmable. Waters were no threat to Joscelin. If he could get across the Foregate, he could make his way down into the valley, and so back beyond the brook to the abbey precincts. There were copses and coverts there for shelter. And it was downstream the sheriff would be hunting him first.

He turned, rustling, in his bed of hay, sneezed at the tickling of dust in his nostrils, and hastily smothered the sneeze. A fine object he must look to confront and blaze defiance at a baron of the realm, but it was the only hope he had. And to retain it even as a hope he must get out of here and across the Foregate into the valley while it was still night. With a rueful obeisance in the direction of Simon, who had wished him well, and wanted him to He here like a hare in its form until danger passed.

He had no means of knowing the hour, but when he eased open the door of the hut, and looked out into the garden, the darkness was hearteningly deep. The dead silence was less pleasing; a breeze in the bushes would have covered a chance footstep. And once he was out of the shelter of the high walls even the darkness grew faintly luminous. But it was now or never, and everything seemed still and silent. He lifted the bar of the wicket door and slipped through, and began to make his way by touch of the wall round the bishop’s garden enclosure. A narrow belt of trees and a footpath separated the house from its neighbor, and brought him to the edge of the Foregate. He paused there to listen, and found all still. But by the degree of faint light he now found over the open roadway, it must be nearer dawn than he would have liked. Better make haste.

He made a dash for it across the open, light on his feet for all his size, and was almost into the grass on the further side when a stone rolled under his foot with a brief, grating sound. Somewhere along the Foregate, towards the town, a voice exclaimed aloud, another answered with a muted shout, and feet began to run in his direction. There were guards still patrolling the roads out of the town. Joscelin darted onward, down the steep slope of grass towards the mill stream, and checked and dived into the cover of the bushes as he caught an echoing shout from below him. That way, too, was stopped. Two of the roving pickets between the roads were down there ahead of him, and climbing towards him now in a hurry.

He had not yet been sighted by any of them, but there was only one hope, and that was to put as much space as possible between himself and pursuit as quickly as possible, and that meant by the road, where he could hope to show fleeter than the hunters. He scrambled back in haste and took to the grassy rim of the road, running like a deer towards Saint Giles. Behind him he heard those below in the valley calling to their companions, heard the answering shout: “The thief’s abroad! Come up!”

The two on the road came pounding after, but he had a good start of them, and was confident he could outrun them and find a place to go to earth, short of the guard-post that would certainly be stationed on every road. But the next moment he heard a sound that chilled his blood, the sudden clatter of hooves emerging from grass onto a hard roadway. The two patrols from the valley were mounted.

“After him! He’s for the open, ride him down!” bellowed one of the runners.

And here they came at a canter, and these he could not hope to outrun, nor to evade the four of them for long if he turned from the road here. He reached Saint Giles, running frantically, and looking about him wildly for any hiding-place, and finding none. On his left the slope of grass rose to the wattle fence and the cemetery wall. Behind him the pursuit grew triumphantly vocal, though not yet close. The curve of the road had cut him off from their view.

Out of the darkness along the wall an unexpected voice, low but peremptory, called: “Come! Quickly!”

Joscelin swung towards the invitation instinctively, panting, and half-fell up the grassy slope and into the grasp of a long arm held out to him. A lean, tall figure in a voluminous dark cloak had risen from the ground and was ripping a hasty tunnel open in the stack of drying herbage in the angle of the wall. “Here!” said the voice featureless as the face. “Hide here!”

Joscelin plunged head-first into the heap, and drew it about him frantically. He felt the old man resume his seat on the ground, spread his cloak again, and lean well back against the stack, felt the long spine erect and bony through cloak and gown and grass. Certainly old, certainly a man. The lowered voice might have belonged to either, muffled as it was, but the shoulders pressed well back against him were wide as his own. One hand reached back to grip his knee through the rustling stems, and enjoin stillness, and he froze in instant obedience. The man masking him had a special stillness of his own, a calm that eased Joscelin’s heart and mind by its benevolent contagion.

They were coming. He heard the hoofbeats draw close, heard the foremost horse abruptly pulled up on its haunches, feet sliding on the gravel. He thought that the watcher by the wall had been seen; there was pre-dawn light enough for that, and they had a straight stretch of road ahead of them, and certainly empty. He heard one man dismount, and held his breath in the certainty that he was about to climb the slope.

“Unclean!” called the old man warningly, and clashed the clapper of his dish loudly against the wooden rim. There was wary stillness. The climber had taken heed.

Down the road the second man laughed. “He’d need to be mad to exchange even a gaol for a lazarhouse.” He raised his voice; the old and diseased must also be hard of hearing. “Hark, you, fellow! We’re on the heels of a wretch who’s wanted for thieving. He was headed this way. Have you seen him?”

“No,” said the old man. His voice, besides being muffled behind a veil, was slow in articulation, as if speech gave him trouble; but with labor and patience the words emerged clearly. “I’ve seen no thief.”

“How long have you been sitting there? Have you seen any man pass by here?”

“The night long,” said the arduous voice. “And no one has passed by.”

By the sound of it the two on foot had arrived by this time, out of breath. The four conferred in low tones. “He must have slipped aside into the trees and turned back,” said one. “Turn and take the right of the road. We’ll ride on to the barrier and make sure he’s not wormed his way ahead in cover, and then come back and take the left side.”

The horses stirred and stamped again, and trotted ahead. The two on foot must have turned back to retrace their steps among the trees, beating the bushes for their quarry as they went. There fell a long silence, which Joscelin was afraid to break.

“Stretch out and be easy,” said the old man at last, without turning his head. “We cannot move yet.”

“I have an errand I must do,” said Joscelin, leaning close to the hooded ear to be heard. “For this respite God knows I thank you with all my heart, but I must somehow get to the abbey before daylight, or this liberty you’ve kept for me will not be worth keeping. I have a thing I must do there, for someone else’s sake.”

“What is that thing?” asked the old man equably.

“To prevent, if I can, this marriage they’re making today.”

“Ah!” said the patient, deliberate voice. “Wherefore? And by what means? You may not stir yet, they will be back, and they will look this way and must see all as before. An old leper who has preferred a night under the stars to the cover of a roof—nothing more.” The grass rustled; it might have been the very slight stir of a sigh. “You understood what passed there? Are you afraid of leprosy, boy?”

“No,” said Joscelin, and wavered and reconsidered. “Yes! I was, or I thought I was. I hardly know. I know I am more afraid of failing in what I must do.”

“We have time,” said the old man. “If you are willing to tell me, I am listening.”

Only to such a one, chance met and instantly trusted, could Joscelin have poured out the whole load that weighed on his heart. Suddenly it seemed the most natural thing possible that he should confide without restraint, keep nothing back of his indignant love, the wrong done him, and the greater wrongs done to Iveta. In the middle of his narration the controlling hand pressed his knee for silence and stillness, as the two mounted men passed by again towards the town. And when they were gone, the last echo of hooves lost along the road, he resumed as if the thread had never been broken.

“And you have planned to hide yourself somewhere about the cloister,” mused the old man, at the end of it, “and burst forth to challenge your sometime lord to single combat, and so affront him that he shall not be able to deny you and keep his face?”

“It is the only way I can see,” said Joscelin, though put in such clear terms, he did not think too well of its chances.

“Then be in no haste about it,” said Lazarus, “until daylight comes, for a clapper-dish and a hood and veil can make you faceless and nameless as well as another. One thing I can tell you. Huon de Domville did not lie in his bed this night. He rode out beyond here, turning right from this road, and I have been here every moment since, and unless he knows of another way back, he has not returned. I think he must ride back by the same way he rode out, and until he passes this place, no bridegroom will present himself at the altar. Between us, you and I can make shift to watch for him. If he comes! But how if he never comes?”

It was the strangest night Joscelin had ever passed, and the strangest dawn. Faint mist came with the light, and the rising sun peered through it overhead, while it lay in great swathes in the valley beyond the road. But no Huon de Domville came trotting back towards the bishop’s house.

“Stay in hiding,” said Lazarus at length, “until I come back.” And he rose and went into the hospice, to return presently with a hooded cloak like his own, and a blue linen cloth for a veil. “You may creep out and put them on. If you are not afraid to wear the habit of a dead man? He is in the cemetery there. When they come to die here, they leave such clothing behind, there’s store enough within. The linen they burn, the habits they clean as best they can. A big man he must have been, you’ll find it ample enough.”

Joscelin did all that he was bidden, like a child, or a man in so unpredictable a dream that he must rely on his guide. In such a state it no longer seemed strange that he should open his heart to a leper, accept the protection of the leper cloak, and let himself be led into the hospital where the unfortunates were housed, without conscious fear or revulsion. This was the hand that had been held out to him, and he gripped it warmly and gratefully. He did not even ask how he should pass among the inmates. Surely their number must be known, and he was too large to escape notice. Whether Lazarus had already spoken a word in several ears, or whether the poor know by instinct when one of their fellows is in need, and deploy their movements so subtly as to contain and dissemble him, all those men and women mustered about Joscelin and hid him among them as they assembled in the church for Prime.