Stigmata (15 page)

‘Warring for Rome is not always the same thing as fighting for God.’

‘That’s a blasphemy!’

‘They are pitting Christian against Christian.’

‘The Albigensians are not Christians! Heretics, all of them. If you wore the cross, you would earn remission of all your sins and, by my counting, they are plenty. And an assured place in
heaven! Is that not worth fighting for? Instead your son is sick, and all because you will not fight.’

‘I have never shirked a fight if there is just cause in it. And I wore the cross in the Holy Land for the Pope for one full year, so it baffles me to hear you talk this way. Why would God
seek to punish me now?’

‘What if one of your servants expected you to feed him for his entire life because he once saddled your horse? You ride every day.’

‘The promise of heaven was for one crusade against the Saracen, not to fight all Christendom for the rest of my life!’

He eased his head against the edge of the wooden tub and took a calming breath. The scent of the dried rose petals that perfumed the water eased his frayed nerves. But not for long. The second
bucket of water went over his head. Praise God, this one was cold and not scalding.

‘God’s blood, woman!’

‘If you don’t care for your soul or for the Pope you might at least give thought to bringing back some silver to pay off your debts.’

‘Debts that were accrued fighting for the Pope the last time! Heresy is the Church’s business, not mine. Raymond of Toulouse may be an inveterate liar but he does not worship the
Devil and he is brother-in-law to the King of England. How can a war against such a man be a holy war?’ He swung his legs out of the bath. There was no ease to be found here. Giselle took her
time handing him a cloth to dry himself.

‘What are you staring at?’

‘Reminding myself what it looked like.’

Philip dressed quickly. A quilted tunic instead of a woollen one, a fashion he had brought back with him from the Orient. He put on rich hose of royal blue velvet; he could not afford them but
was damned if he would advertise his penury.

‘He was sickening before the Pope called this crusade.’

‘God knew what you would do.’

‘You have an answer for everything.’

Giselle stood, hands on hips, by the window. He closed his eyes, imagined Alezaïs with him, tried to conjure the comfort she once gave him when he was troubled.

‘Every day he gets sicker,’ he murmured. ‘I have watched him waste to a skeleton in front of my eyes. At Epiphany he was a normal boy chasing the dogs around the hall and
eating more than the Bishop. Now . . . if it were not for the bearskin rugs on him I swear he would float away. He cannot keep anything down. I beat every day at the gates of heaven for a miracle
but I get no answer.’

‘He’s dying, husband. Everyone but you knows it.’

‘He is not going to die!’

‘It is God’s will.’

‘Then God will have to think again, because I am not going to let him die!’

Giselle folded her arms. ‘There is nothing you can do about it.’ What was this? Gloating?

‘He is not going to die!’ he repeated and stormed out. They had heard the yelling in the great hall below and when he came down the stairs all the servants ran to get out of his
way.

P
HILIP STORMED ACROSS
the courtyard, shouting for someone to bring his horse. When he reached the stables, a boy leaped
from the straw where he had been dozing, only for Philip to push him back down again. ‘Don’t bother, lad, I’ll do it myself.’

Leyla, his six-year-old Arab, pricked up her ears at his approach. She was a handsome high-stepper, a chestnut with white tail and white mane, with white spots on her forefeet. He fetched an
undercloth from the rail and a bridle and riding saddle.

The stable boy hovered.

‘Just stay out of my way,’ Philip told him.

He galloped out of the gate, rode her hard for over a league at full tilt. Instead of crossing the ford he headed blindly into the forest, splashing through the shallows and up on to the bank
into a meadow of buttercups. Leyla’s flanks heaved; sweat foamed around her bridle.

He released the reins and dropped from the saddle. He raised his face to the sky and shook his fist at heaven. ‘Damn you, God! Damn you!’

He closed his eyes and waited for God to strike him. Nothing. An eel splashed in the river shallows; a mosquito, drawn by his sweat, buzzed around his face. He heard Leyla cropping the grass,
then walking slowly to the water’s edge.

The starlings and linnets in the pines, stunned to silence, returned to the bushes to fuss and chatter.

And then, something else, the snap of a twig, a rustling of fern. Leyla gave a little whinny of alarm. Philip looked around. A squirrel darted across the meadow with a hazelnut in its jaws.

Leyla laid back her ears. Her flanks twitched, and she stamped a hoof.

Then he smelled it. Wild boar had a rank smell of their own, unmistakable to any man that had hunted them. Good game from the saddle when you had a pack of
raches
at your command, enough
meat to feed the entire household.

But this was different. Here he was, rash and unarmed, and a good thirty paces from his horse. He clicked his tongue and Leyla’s ears pricked again and she started to walk towards him,
wary, the stink of the hog making her nervous.

Too late. The boar burst out of the thicket fifty paces to his left, a hideous brute with slitted eyes and tusks that could disembowel a horse. Hadn’t he seen it happen enough times?

It stopped, watching him, trying to understand what he was, what threat he posed.

If I stand quite still, he thought, it will perhaps move on. It can’t put me on a spit and eat me, as I would do to him. And he isn’t sure of the danger. The presence of the horse
has confused him.

If I stand quite still . . .

He yelled and ran towards it. The boar put its head down and charged.

The arrow struck the animal in the neck and sent it reeling away, squealing in pain. Its blood steamed as it made contact with the air. It staggered sideways, then dropped.

‘Renaut,’ he said.

His squire stepped his horse out of the shallows. One arrow, through the jugular at forty paces. He had taught him well.

‘How did you find me?’

‘I didn’t. I followed you. You almost lost me though; your Arab is too fast for my little mare. I almost kept going at the ford but then I heard a man shouting. I thought you were
dead.’

‘And so I would have been if you had not spent so much time at the archery butts.’

He got down from his horse. ‘You left the château so fast, I thought the Devil himself was after you.’

‘Worse. Giselle.’

They walked over to the boar. It had bled out and the huge mountain of flesh still twitched even though it was dead. Renaut pulled out his arrow and then ran his hand over the tusk to the razor
tip. ‘I’m glad I found you. I should not like to die this way. Nor should you.’

Did he see me rise and run towards my death? Philip wondered. What was I thinking? He was right. Not a good way to die.

‘What did the lady Giselle say to you that you preferred the company of this razor-tooth?’

‘She wishes me to join the Pope’s crusade against the Midi. She thinks that is why my boy is sick.’

‘He sickened before the crusade was called.’ Philip shrugged. ‘God’s ways are mysterious, they say.’

‘I still do not understand why you took another wife.’

‘Renaut, ours is a normal marriage. I have her rather modest dowry, which I needed to pay off some of my debts. She has a husband with a château and a fief and her family has a
useful political alliance. It was what I had with Alezaïs that was not . . . usual. We loved each other. It is something that a man more often only finds with his mistress or another
man’s wife. For a while I was fortunate. Now . . . not so much.’

‘How is your son?’

Philip tested the pig’s belly with his boot. ‘Some good meat there.’ He walked back to his horse.

‘You know, there is a crone in Poissy, just ten leagues from here. Her name is Marguerite.’

‘Yes, I have heard of her. She makes love spells and delivers babies.’

‘More than that, she can make a poultice to draw the poisons from wounds and brews potions that cure the ague and the flux and ward off the pestilence. She collects every kind of herb and
bark and plant to make her salves.’

‘A sorceress and a heretic. She makes incantations to the moon.’

‘Does it matter what she is if she can heal your son?’

Philip picked up Leyla’s reins from the grass. ‘If you stand guard here on your kill, I will fetch some men and horses to drag the carcass back to the château.’

‘You have tried everything else. These butchers who call themselves doctors have bled him and purged him and done every foul thing and still he sickens.’

‘Thank you for saving my life. Come the next Easter, you will be more than a squire.’

‘Marguerite. At Poissy. Think about it.’

‘The woman is unholy.’

‘God has not been faithful to you in this. Do what you need to do, seigneur.’

‘You’re a good man, Renaut,’ Philip said and turned Leyla’s head and headed back down the stream through the shallows to the ford.

M
ARGUERITE LIVED HALF
a league from Poissy, in a wild place where no trees grew and rushes disputed the marshy ground with
ferns and young willows. The forest they passed through was dank, with impenetrable thickets of bracken and old trees with tortured branches. His men were sullen and quiet. Philip felt eyes on
them, perhaps animals, perhaps sprites. All knew that in woods like this fairies slept in the leaf bowers and strange dwarves scurried through the shadowed gloaming. Any man who died here without
the holy sacraments would be damned to be a will-o’-the-wisp for all eternity.

A skein of white smoke drifted up through the trees, and guided them to her cottage. The crone was in her garden, collecting herbs. She had wild grey hair to her waist, and possessed the
chilling stare of a cat. She watched their approach, one hand on her hip, the other shielding the sun from her eyes.

‘You’re Marguerite, the wise woman?’ Philip said.

‘I am. And you’re Philip of Vercy. What is such a fine seigneur as yourself doing out here in the wood?’

‘Do you not know?’ he said, testing her.

She bent down and snapped a sprig from a rosemary bush. ‘I have heard your boy has been sick. I dare say you have had him bled and purged and prayed over and now you have come to see me as
a last resort.’ She smiled at his confusion. ‘I cannot read minds, my lord. I am just not as mad as I look.’

Philip handed the reins of his horse to his sergeant-at-arms and slid from the saddle. There was a plank path that sank into the mud with every step. ‘They say you heal all manner of
sickness with your potions and salves.’

‘I am equally famous for those I don’t cure. You’d best come inside.’

Philip followed her, knocking his head on the low door. It was very dark. With a quick glance he made out some herbs and dusty sprigs of dried flowers hanging from the ceiling, others drying
over the hearth fire. A rusted pot sat crooked over a pile of ash and charred wood.

Marguerite pulled aside a tattered curtain at the back of house; behind it there was a table with two chairs, and a few narrow shelves crowded with jars. He recognized some petrified sprigs of
fleabane and another of blackberry leaves. Most of the others he did not know. There was a pestle and mortar sitting in the middle of the table.

‘Sit,’ she said to him.

Well, this is novel, he thought. Not often I have been ordered about like this. Not even by my wife. But he sat, without complaint.

‘I’ll have the servants bring spiced wine in a moment,’ she said.

‘Just some figs and sherbets will do.’

She teased a sprig of rosemary between her fingers, split it, held it to her nose and breathed in the aroma. ‘God makes fine things,’ she said. Her hands were brown and gnarled with
age, all crooked joints and swollen veins. But she had a young woman’s eyes, bright and quick and intelligent. ‘But then He unmakes them. It is a mystery and sometimes a very painful
one. Tell me about your son.’

‘It started just after the Feast of the Epiphany. He was slow to rise in the mornings, seemed listless, and then could not keep down his food. We had the doctor look at him; he applied
leeches and such. But by Easter he was barely out of his bed and all he can take in now is water and a little broth. He is skin and bone, no more.’

‘Does he suffer?’

‘The doctor prescribed belladonna. For a time it helped but now he moans and tosses night and day. I hardly leave his side; I am afraid to fall asleep, thinking that when I wake up he will
be gone. As you say, we have prayed and prayed, have fetched doctors from as far away as Bayeux, sold much of my wife’s dowry to pay for them. Still no good.’

‘Is there fever?’

Philip shook his head.

‘Does he pass blood?’

‘If he did not moan and occasionally call out for his mother, who is now in her grave these four years, he would no longer do anything that a living creature does.’

Marguerite reached across the table and took his hands in hers. He was surprised at her strength and the heat coming off her. He was also surprised that she might presume to lay hands on her
seigneur without bidding.

She took a piece of hessian cloth and some jars from the shelf; she poured a little from one, more from another. Other herbs she crushed in the mortar before adding them to the little pile of
leaves and powder on the cloth. She deliberated long over each bottle before she was finally satisfied. Then she took needle and thread, tied it into a bundle and handed it to him.

‘What is this?’ he said. It smelled foul.

‘Hawkwood, sorrel, marigold, purslane. Also some hellebore, spikenard and nightshade. Angelica for purifying the blood. Many things. You must make an infusion with this, and have him drink
it, as much as he can stand.’