Belle's Song (20 page)

“Break your promise!” I urged. “Stay with me!”

He shook his head. “No, Belle. I won’t be a promise breaker. What kind of person would that make me? A
charlatan, like my father. Just the sort of person I don’t want to be.”

“I wouldn’t care,” I said.

“Yes, you would,” he said flatly. “You’d not break a promise. You’re like the Master. You may make things up for stories, but I’d trust you with my life.”

“Oh, Luke …” I was half crying for his perfect faith. “Don’t! The Master and I, we’re just like everybody else. We do what we must to get by.” He wasn’t listening. He was fighting something in himself. “What is it?” I asked, half-hopeful, half-fearful.

“I want to kiss you right this moment,” he said without any confusion at all. “I want it more than anything I’ve ever wanted in my life. I want to kiss you and for you to kiss me. I’ve been thinking about nothing else for hours.”

“Don’t think about it, Luke, just do it,” I whispered.

He put both hands on my shoulders. I could feel each finger pressing tight. He hurt me, though he never knew it. He was trembling. Then he let go, one finger at a time.

“I can’t!” The words dragged themselves out. “If I kiss you, I’ll be lost. Don’t you see that?” The last finger pressed, then rose.

“I wish I’d never met you,” I sobbed.

He let go of me entirely. “I don’t wish the same,” he said, his voice hard and tense. “When I’m lonely in my
cell, I’ll recall every conversation, every swing of your waist, every tint in your hair. I’ll forget nothing.”

“I hope it’s torture!”

“Torture?” His smile was a grimace as he stepped back too far for his arms to reach me or mine to reach him. “It’ll certainly be that. But I know—I’ll always know—that it was worth it.”

I only just caught the last bit, and I don’t think I was meant to. “Luke!”

I raised my hand, palm out, just as in the dance. He raised his hand, palm out. Then he made it into a fist, spun around, and strode quite violently away.

12

Blessed St. Thomas answer to your need!

The worst of it now, far worse than wondering how Walter and I would get to the king, was that I didn’t know whether Luke would say a proper good-bye to me or whether that meeting by the well was the last time I’d see him. To some people, it must seem selfish and even silly that something so personal could be more important than the future of a monarch or even a nation. I can’t apologize for that. The lives of monarchs and the fates of nations are the concern of many. My life is of concern only, or at least mainly, to me. Of course I would be sorry if Richard was deposed or murdered, but another Richard would be along directly. There would never be another Luke, though, so it was he who was still uppermost in my mind when, toward evening the following day, we saw the outskirts of Canterbury.

Most of the pilgrims raised a cheer, though when we got closer the cheers turned to groans at the dreadful state of the road. Soon, the horses were fetlock-deep in mud. Closer still, we could see that the great cathedral was caged by thick bars of scaffolding swarming with workmen. “Why do cathedrals always have to be
bigger and taller?” Dame Alison complained. “Can God really be impressed?”

“Everything’s so very dirty.” Madam Prioress sighed, and Dulcie, splashed all the way to her tummy, snorted her agreement.

Despite knowing it would upset Luke, I was riding with Walter. How could I not? Walter needed me. And anyway, Luke and the Master were a long way behind, with the summoner, naturally, behind them. As soon as we saw the cathedral I tried to reorganize my thoughts so that at least until we’d visited St. Thomas’s tomb my father, and only my father, would be in my head. But my thoughts were slippery as a bog in the rain.

Mistress Midwife, because she knew it would upset people, bellowed a new concern. “Perhaps St. Thomas’s body has been removed because of all the work, in which case our journey will be quite wasted.” The prioress began to cry and I almost joined her. If St. Thomas’s body wasn’t in the cathedral, what sort of a sign was that? But Dame Alison was having none of it. “St. Thomas hasn’t moved for nearly two hundred years. Why on earth would he move now?”

The mud got worse as we entered the town proper, and I could hear the mother in the wagon shrieking as she and her children were hurled from side to side. It couldn’t be helped, particularly as it wasn’t only the mud the wagoner had to contend with, it was the sheer
volume of traffic. I know it was the time of year for pilgrimage, but it was hard to believe that a town could hold so many people, let alone so many sick and disfigured. The whole place limped and groaned, even the physically intact crippled by their burden of sin. Men whose complexion and girth declared them professional people of means adopted rough sackcloth, some rendered deliberately ragged. And overlying all the sweaty stink, the cloying stench of competitive piety.

My heart missed a beat when I saw a huddle of young monks under the direction of a novice master pushing their way through the crowds. A vision of Luke, tonsured and tripping over the hem of a shapeless habit, burned itself onto my brain. I knew then that however much I was tempted, I would never visit him at St. Denys. It would kill me.

After some unsuccessful forays, we found, set right on the river, a hostel from which a group of similar size to ours was departing. We were glad to have found it, despite the lice-ridden fleeces that were to serve as blankets. And we wouldn’t be here long, since, just as Dame Alison predicted, Mistress Midwife’s fears about the removal of St. Thomas’s bones were entirely unfounded, and it was arranged that we should file into the cathedral at noon the following day to make our offerings.

Once settled, we were at the mercy of the priest and the friar, praying and confessing. Naturally, since my
sins would include lust and deceit, I couldn’t confess to a priest I knew, so I rather shamefacedly asked Walter for three pennies and found a very elderly priest hearing confessions under an awning on a side street. Not only was he more interested in the pennies than me, but he was deaf, so it was quite easy to confess honestly.

At supper, as things turned out, Walter sat next to Luke and I sat next to Walter. The summoner seated himself opposite Master Chaucer, and after we’d eaten what passed for food, he followed the Master and Luke out. This, for once, was more relief than worry. If the Master had decided to remove the ring from Dobs, he couldn’t do it with the summoner watching.

“We’ll get the ring when Luke’s setting off,” I said to Walter as he redid my bandages.

“Perhaps I could offer to hold Dobs?”

“Best not. He already thinks you’re just waiting for him to go to sweep me up,” I said, blushing a little.

Walter gave a bleak smile. “I wish it were true.”

“So do I,” I said impulsively.

“Dearest Belle,” Walter said. “You’ll fall in love with somebody else eventually, and even if you don’t, you’ll want to marry a man who’ll love you properly. Anyway,” he shook himself, “now’s not the time for all that. You must concentrate on your father.”

After supper, we were given rolled-up mattresses of thin and moth-eaten horsehair for which, so Dame
Alison grumbled, we’d paid as handsomely as for greater comforts in other towns. Austerity, not luxury, carried a premium here.

I folded my pendant into my palm. Luke was just behind the wall at which I was staring. Perhaps he was staring at it too, thinking about me. I became very angry with myself. There would be plenty of time to mope. Tonight was my father’s night and I must make my preparations for tomorrow properly. There’d be no second chance for a miracle. I shifted onto my side and forced myself back in time until I was once again in that bell tower, once again dizzy, once again making that fateful sideways dip, once again hearing the boom of the bell and the crunch of the bone, once again seeing the stunned shock on my father’s face and, worst of all, watching him confront each day utterly dependent on a widow he didn’t like. I tried to pray for some abatement of the pain and despair my father suffered. I reiterated my promise that if God would restore my father’s legs, I would make bells of which both God and my father could be proud.

Once I got going, I did quite well, but as the night dragged sleeplessly on, not so well. The desire to slip away from my father and into dreams of Luke was irresistible, and by the time a peal summoned the monks to Matins, I was in the kind of fever of temptation and torment that I knew only a pumice could
assuage. I got up more than once, thinking to search for one, and each time I forced myself back down. Several times I touched my legs with my nails. The urge to scratch was overwhelming but I lay rigid. This was my penance. I must bear it. I did.

We gathered midmorning, shoeless and wearing no adornment of any kind. I still held my father’s pendant in my palm and had Poppet hidden up my sleeve. Sir Knight and Walter carried small boxes of coins. The mother carried one daughter and held the other by the hand. She had no other offering. Getting here was enough. Summoner Seekum swung a heavy purse bearing the archdeacon’s crest, the pardoner something he swore was St. Joseph’s toe, and the old reeve a vine. Master Chaucer carried a small framed icon of his wife, though, when I admired it, he said it looked nothing like her, so he hoped God would not mistake her for somebody else. I wasn’t sure if he joked or not. Luke carried nothing because the bandits had left him nothing, though his gift was actually the greatest of them all: he was giving himself.

We were delayed by Dame Alison, who wanted to offer up her wedding rings but found them vanished. Muttering about witches and thieves, she fetched a large pearl instead. I thought I’d tell her afterward where I suspected the rings were.

It was hard to get a proper view of the cathedral
through the masses and we were in it before I’d taken stock of it. Despite the throng, once under the portals, I shivered. I couldn’t forget that murder had been done in here.

The day was cloudy, so we couldn’t appreciate the glories of light streaming through the colored windows. In the glow of the sconces, however, I could see how diminished we all looked in our shifts. Even Summoner Seekum’s coarse self-congratulation had shrunk to faltering smugness. Without his belt and pouch, his stomach sagged like an old sack, and Dame Alison, unbolstered and flat-footed, was just an elderly lady searching for forgiveness and peace.

Luke’s voice made me jump. “After you’ve prayed for your father, will you pray for me?”

I wanted to say no, that I wouldn’t pray for him, not here, not anywhere, because he was going to leave me. But he was so nervous and sad that I couldn’t be cruel. I nodded. “Will you pray for me too?”

“Always,” he said.

We moved forward. A sudden draft around our ankles had us huddling together and I knew that Luke was also remembering the draft Archbishop Thomas Becket must have felt before he heard the scrape of the swords that sliced into his head and elevated him to sainthood. I pressed against Luke’s side. He didn’t move away. Had Archbishop Becket been frightened at
the end, I wondered, as we inched toward the Chapel of the Trinity. Or had he braced himself and met immortality without blinking? Had he imagined that, two centuries later, his bodily remains would be venerated by silly girls like me? I pressed harder against Luke. “I’m not thinking of my father! I can’t keep my mind where it should be!” I panicked.

He took my hand. In the crush, nobody could see. We reached the chapel and stepped inside.

Then we gasped in unison. I don’t know what I’d expected, but the chapel containing the bones of the saintly archbishop and martyr was no gloomy charnel house. Rather, it was a dazzling treasury more suited to one of the Master’s exotic tales of the East. There must have been a king’s ransom of jewels piled up, topped with a golden crown an emperor would have coveted. Nor was this a place of quiet contemplation. An army of deacons, all armed with steel-tipped sticks, prodded us into line. To them, we were not pilgrims but potential thieves and to be treated as such. When I finally reached the bank of prie-dieux, though I was ordered to kneel in a most peremptory fashion, I stood stupidly and gawked. If Luke hadn’t pressed me down, I’d have missed my chance to kneel at all.

The casket, long as an armor chest and with one hinged side open, was set high. The sconces were all smoking badly, but it was possible to see half a dozen
gray bones within. To tell the truth, after more than two centuries, the bones could have been gnarled bits of wood for all I could tell, but I wanted so hard to believe in them that had the casket been completely empty I could have seen in it whatever anybody suggested. Though my lips prayed for my father, I couldn’t help thinking of my mother. She was buried in a casket too. Was this what was left of her? Perhaps, since she’d only been buried five years before, there would be other parts, horrible parts,
soft parts
, still decaying. Would I recognize her? My skin grew cold.

I began to pray properly just before I was forced by the prodders to rise, so my prayer was completely garbled. “Dear St. Thomas, intercede with God for me and make my father’s legs like new. If that’s not possible, could he live without pain? I mean, please let him walk without pain.”