Free Stigmata by Colin Falconer Page B

confusion changed to outrage. Ah, he understands now, Simon thought. What was it that betrayed me? My own intransigence perhaps? My indifference to his plight?
For the mason had lauded me as a good man and it had not, until this moment, occurred to him that he might be wrong. He worked with the hard certainties of stone and a man like that could never
truly appreciate the ever-pliable, ever-shifting nature of the soul.
    What would Anselm do now?
    But he never had to find out; he slapped at his pony’s rump with his stick and urged it in the direction of the Capitole. Anselm went after him but was hemmed in by the passing of a
mounted knight and his retinue, on their way to the castle. He looked back just once, saw Anselm standing outside the porte , a figure of despair as Toulouse jostled and shouted and laughed
about him. He turned a full circle as if he was lost, put his head in his hands and then struck his knees with his fists. People stared at him, thinking him mad, stepping warily around this big man
with the fingerless gloves and fists like hams.
    Simon passed a beggar in the street, crumpled in the gutter with bandages on his bleeding sores. Not all these supplicants suffered, some only feigned their wounds, applying rags stained with
mulberry juice to healthy limbs in order to beg alms and make their way through deceit. By day they cried out like the lost but at night they waited in alleyways to slit an honest man’s
throat for his silver coins.
    Look at his broken teeth, his lying eyes. It was like looking in a mirror.
    *
    When Anselm arrived home the first thing he did was put his fist through the door, splintering the wood and sending a spray of blood over his knuckles. Elionor gasped and ran to
him, but he pushed her away. He turned to his daughter.
    ‘What did he do to you?’
    Fabricia backed against the wall, terrified.
    Elionor stepped between them. She had never seen her husband this way. ‘What is wrong with you, husband? Speak up. You’re scaring us.’
    His eyes were wild. ‘I have been dismissed from my employment by the Bishop’s order. No reason was given. When I spoke to the priest from Saint-Sernin he said that the prior had
hired someone else for the commission that he had promised to me.’
    ‘What has this to do with Fabricia?’ Elionor said, but even as the words were out of her mouth, she knew. ‘The priest!’ She slapped her fists against her husband’s
great barrel chest. ‘What did I tell you? Why didn’t you listen to me?’
    Anselm caught her hands and looked at Fabricia. ‘Is it true? Did he violate you, then?’
    She could not find her voice; Elionor had no such impediment. ‘You said he was a good man! There are no good men, not in the Church!’
    Anselm picked up his bradawl and headed for the door. ‘I’ll kill this bastard,’ he said, but immediately the two women were on him, one at each arm.
    ‘No!’ Elionor screamed at him. ‘Think about us! What will we do without our breadwinner? Have you thought of that? Kill a priest and they will show us no mercy!’
    Anselm hesitated, let them pull him back into the house. He knew Elionor was right. There was nothing they could do, not against the Church.
    They made up their minds that very day. He discussed it through the long afternoon with his wife and they concluded there was no other choice. Simon must have persuaded the prior who had
persuaded the Bishop and with the Bishop against him he would find no employment on any church in Toulouse.
    ‘We’ll head south, into the Albigeois,’ he told his wife. ‘They haven’t any time for the Bishop down there. We’ll start again.’ He looked at Fabricia
and fought back rage and pity. He would have liked to have crushed the priest’s skull like a nut. ‘Why didn’t she tell us?’ he asked his wife.
    ‘She was trying to protect you,’ she said and he knew straight away that she was right.
    ‘We’ll leave at the end of the week,’ he said. ‘This