Free Stigmata by Colin Falconer Page A

the street, shaking a rattle to warn of his approach; but who shall taint whom? he thought. He went down a street of butchers, the blood from their
slaughterhouses running through the sea of mud and rubbish. Flies swarmed around the banquet. There lies my soul.
    He wandered blindly for hours before returning to the priory, where he went direct to his cell and fell to his prayers. He knew that he must now confess what he had done to the prior.
    If only he might have the morning again, to undo what had been irrevocably done. He wanted to weep and could not. Each time he closed his eyes he saw again his loathsome sin.
    But he did confess to the prior and within a day a curious thing happened. He began to want her again.
    His desire began as a perverse whisper inside his head, at first scarcely heard among the screams of self-loathing. But before the second day was out she had already begun her haunting of him,
even as he tried to exorcize her. As he prayed abjectly for forgiveness, a part of him wished to sin again.
    He kept to his cell, feigning sickness. The prior, concerned, sent the infirmarian, who prescribed a potion of herbs and, of course, a bleeding. Simon accepted his medicines without complaint
and with not a little disdain. He knew he must take action against his importunate desires if he was to save his soul, and when the way and means of it finally suggested itself, he was so low in
spirit and in mind that there was in him no resistance to the terrible cure.

 
XV
    T HE BRIEF SUMMER must be paid for. The weather passed from June to midwinter in just a day, the wind turned to the north
and now there was ice in its breath and the sky was the colour of a dead man’s shroud.
    Simon turned up the hood on his cloak as a flurry of rain soaked him. Outside the common round of the Toulousains were crowded in the streets before the monastery of Saint-Sernin, in all their
stinking ardour for commerce and congress, no matter what the weather. Life must go on. Simon’s pony shied from an ox-cart, skittish on the frost-hard cobbles. He was hemmed in by the
water-carriers and onion-sellers.
    A hand caught the reins. Blessed Jesus, save us; he must have been waiting outside the gates all morning. Should he feign impatience or outrage?
    ‘Anselm! What is the meaning of this? I have business to attend to. Release the halter, if you please.’
    ‘Father, a moment of your time.’
    ‘I have pressing affairs this morning. Should you not be at your work?’
    ‘I am told my services are no longer required. Another mason is to be contracted to finish the work.’
    ‘What business is this of mine?’
    ‘I thought I might begin my work at the monastery all the sooner.’
    ‘Impossible. The prior has changed his mind. He has asked me to contract another man for the work.’
    Simon tried to jerk the reins away from him but they were bunched in the stonemason’s fist and it would take a troop of the Count’s yeomanry to release them. ‘What is it that I
have done to offend the Church?’
    ‘I do not take your meaning.’
    ‘Father, please, tell me what it is that I have done so that I might make amends.’
    ‘I do as my prior commands me. You should ask him these questions. Now please, remove yourself.’ He jerked at the reins but Anselm held fast, and his right hand closed on
Simon’s wrist. Simon cried out in pain and Anselm stepped back, as if he had put a hand in a fire.
    ‘I am sorry, Father.’
    ‘You would assault me in the street?’
    ‘A thousand pardons. It’s just that . . . I felt sure you could aid me with this. I am at a loss.’
    Above them, on the corbels of the Porte des Comptes, devils were devouring the private members of the damned. My repudiation from heaven, he thought, in God’s eloquent calligraphy. But I
am too far gone in this now to turn back.
    ‘I am sorry for your misfortune, Anselm. But I know nothing of this business. Now good day to you.’
    Anselm gaped at him, but then his