Stigmata (2 page)

When Fabricia opened her eyes, there were three people in the room, and only one of them was smiling. Her mother and father crowded above her, Anselm’s face twisted in a
rictus of dread.

‘She’s alive!’ he gasped.

‘I told you she would be all right,’ her mother said.

‘She was dead, Elionor! It’s a miracle. God has spared us! He has given my little girl back to me.’

Fabricia shuddered with cold. ‘Fetch another blanket,’ she heard her mother say. ‘She’s frozen. How long did you leave her lying there in the rain, you old
goat?’

Fabricia rolled on to her side, wrapping her arms around herself and curling her knees up to her chest. Her skin felt as cold as marble. She was naked. How did that happen? She tried to
remember. She was more puzzled by the woman standing in the corner. She wore a long blue gown, with a hood, and her skin was made luminous by the guttering candles. She knew she had seen her
before, somewhere.

‘
Mon petit chou.
Are you all right? Say something.’

‘Who’s that?’ Fabricia said.

‘She can speak,’ Anselm said. ‘Thank God!’

Elionor wiped tears from her face. She clambered on to the bed and spooned her daughter into her breasts. Fabricia felt her warm breath on her neck.

‘Who are you?’ Fabricia said to the emptiness in the corner of the room.

Anselm looked around. For the second time that day he was very, very afraid. ‘Fabricia?’ he said, ‘who are you talking to?’

‘What happened, Papa?’

‘Don’t you remember? A thunderbolt struck you as you were crossing the square before Saint-Étienne.’

‘I should never have sent her,’ Elionor sobbed. ‘I should have brought your supper myself.’

‘I don’t remember,’ Fabricia said.

‘I thought we had lost you!’

‘You are chosen,’ the woman in blue told her.

‘But why choose me?’

Her mother sat up and shook her. ‘Fabricia? Who are you talking to?’

‘There’s no one,’ Anselm said. He took her face in both his hands, forcing her to look at him. ‘Fabricia? What is it? Who is here, who are you talking to?’ His eyes
went wide. ‘Something has happened to her,’ he said to his wife. ‘She has gone mad.’

Elionor eased her daughter’s head back on to the pillow and covered her to the chin with bearskins. She smoothed back her hair and kissed her forehead. ‘Just rest now,’ she
whispered. Then she cuffed her husband smartly around the head. ‘She’s not mad! What are you talking about? She just needs to sleep. Can’t you see that?’

There was a fire lit in the hearth and Fabricia watched them retreat there, huddling together on two stools. Anselm pulled off his wet smock and hung it to dry, steaming, in front of the flames.
He and Elionor whispered to each other, but she could not make out what they were saying.

The woman in blue had vanished. ‘Now I remember who you are,’ she said aloud. The remembrance made her wonder if she really was still living. She placed a hand between her breasts
and felt for her own heartbeat; it was different, somehow, every now and then it gave a little kick, like a baby in a womb.

The woman was not real, she decided. It was just the shock of having death brush past so close, a fever of the brain. She would sleep now and in the morning it would all be forgotten.

P
ÈIRE DE
F
ARGON
was a stoop-shouldered giant just a year or two older than Fabricia. He
reminded her of one of the sculptures her father made for the capitals in the church, fashioned over-large for the sake of effect. He had chestnut hair that fell over his dark brown eyes, one wider
and darker than the other. He could not see as well out of it, which made his skill with hammer and chisel the more remarkable.

He stood over her, his face creased with concern. Anselm stood at his shoulder.

‘Pèire? What are you doing here?’ she said.

He seemed stricken. Her father nudged him hard with his shoulder. ‘Your father told me what happened,’ he said. ‘I was worried about you.’

‘It was nothing. I’m all right.’ She tried to get out of bed but she could not. Her legs felt too weak to support her. Her mother pushed the two men aside and made her lie down
again. ‘I told these two oafs not to disturb you.’

Fabricia remembered what had happened the last evening, how she had been crossing the square and then the next thing she had woken soaking wet here in her bed, with her mother and father
standing over her. Not a dream then.

Elionor shooed the two men out of the door, scolding them for disturbing her daughter’s rest. She brought her a hunk of bread and some broth from the stove for her breakfast. ‘You
have to rest today,’ she said.

Fabricia discovered she was ravenously hungry and tore at the bread with her teeth. Her mother sat and watched her, as if she could not believe Fabricia was really there. ‘What was
Pèire doing here?’ Fabricia asked her as she drank the broth.

‘You know he likes you,’ Elionor said. ‘Your father wants to arrange the match for you.’

Fabricia managed a weak smile. At that moment marriage to Pèire seemed just as real to her as the lady in blue. The only thing to do right now was to forget about both of them, and
pretend she had imagined them.

‘There is a fair in the square tomorrow, for St Jude’s day. If you are feeling stronger, Pèire is going to take you.’

‘I should like that,’ she said. She meant of course that she would like to go to the fair; how she felt about Pèire was a different matter.

T
HE BELLS OF
Saint-Étienne rang for terce, muffled by the mist that hung white and heavy on the river. The sun would
be hot today, and already the air was thick and damp. Steam rose from the cobblestones. The big storm had clogged all the drains and left the city stinking, the mud in the marketplace thick as
porridge.

As on any feast day the streets and squares were full of people. The toll gates were busy, and there was scarcely space in the market square for all the ox and donkey carts that had been brought
into the town. She smelled dung and the hawkers’ pies. The main square was clamorous from the sounds of the bear-baiting, and the raucous songs of the minstrels.

They stopped to listen to one of the jongleurs. He had taken out his hurdy-gurdy from a sheath on his back and started to play.

The way the minstrel played it, with such a look of comical suffering on his face, he soon drew a small crowd around him, laughing and shouting. He started to play again, not a song this time
but a monologue that he accompanied with dramatic stanzas on his hurdy-gurdy.

There was laughter from the audience all through this, and wild applause at the end. When he had finished he sent around a monkey holding a small cap and into this the crowd tossed their deniers
to show their appreciation, Pèire as well.

‘So, do you believe all that?’ she asked him as they walked away.

‘Of course not.’

‘So when you have a wife, you don’t intend to box her nose if she answers you back?’

‘As if I would dare!’ he laughed. ‘Your father says you used to beat every boy from miles around if there was a rough and tumble in the street!’

‘The boys were smaller then. Besides, how do you know that I shall be your wife?’

He looked at her, as if the question puzzled him. ‘Your father has promised me,’ he said.

A smudge of black cloud appeared on the northern sky, the promise of yet another storm later that afternoon. Pèire talks of marriage as if everything is settled. She tried to imagine a
whole lifetime in his company and could not. But what else might she do? She could not stay under her father’s roof for ever. She heard the distant rumble of thunder. Perhaps it would not
come to that; perhaps the fates had other plans. She realized they had stopped by the fountain where the lightning had struck her. There were fresh burn marks on the stone. Except for that,
everything was as it always was. ‘Three years now I have worked without a wage for your father so I could learn my craft,’ he was saying to her. ‘Next year will be my last as
journeyman and the guild will make me a mason and I shall have my own mark. I shall go out on my own own building houses for rich burghers. You shall not regret making your marriage with me.’
When she did not answer, he said: ‘I have watched you right from the moment I saw you. It has never been anyone but you.’

This confession caught her off guard. She did not know what to say to him.

‘You never knew?’

She shook her head.

‘I near died too when I saw what had happened to you. I come out of the church and there was your father holding you in his arms like you were a babe, and you were white as plaster and
your head and limbs all hanging down like you were dead.’

‘I don’t remember anything about it.’

‘Did it not leave a mark? My mother says she once saw a man who was struck down in such a manner. There was a sort of bruise where it went in and another where it went out. But he was
dead, mind.’

She knew about the man; just the previous summer another pilgrim from Gascony had been similarly chosen for God’s attentions during a tempest and all that was left of that unfortunate were
his sandals and a small pile of ashes.

‘No, there was no mark.’

‘Perhaps it struck next to you, then. I have heard that happens.’ She saw by his expression that though he liked her well enough, he was also a little frightened of her. No doubt he
had heard the stories. Some people thought her strange, always had. She even wondered that a straightforward lad like this would want her at all. ‘He said you rambled, that you talked to
fairies and phantoms.’

‘If he says so, then I must have. I don’t remember anything until the next morning.’

‘Well I am glad you are well again for I don’t know what I should have done if something had happened to you.’ Well, she thought, he had made his declaration and now he waits
for me to show that I am pleased by it. And why should I not be? He is a big strong boy and like my own father in many ways, hard-working and good-natured. What more should I hope for?

A preaching friar was about his business outside the church of Saint-Étienne, haranguing the good people of Toulouse for their infidelity to Rome, and describing for them the torments of
hell. He wore the white gown of the Piedmont overlaid by the black cloak of the Augustinian canons. It marked him out as one of the disciples of Dominic Guzmán, the Spanish monk whose name
her mother could not even mention without spitting in the fire. One of the town burghers halted his morning’s errands to take issue with him, encouraged by cheers and the ribald comments of
the small crowd gathered on the steps.

Pèire bent down and hurled a handful of mud in his direction. The crowd laughed.

‘Pèire, what are you doing? The Lord will punish you for abusing a man of God!’

‘He’s the Pope’s man, not God’s,’ he said. ‘Why don’t they leave us alone?’

Fabricia also wanted to be alone. All this talk of marriage had unsettled her. But she did not want to hurt him, so she told him she wanted to go inside the church and thank the Madonna for her
deliverance. It was not quite a lie; how else might she have survived, if it were not a miracle?

‘I shall come in with you,’ he said.

‘No, wait for me out here,’ she told him. ‘I shall not be long.’

The church was already crowded with pilgrims, the hawkers doing brisk business with their beef and raisin pies. It was like this every summer, the city crowded with pilgrims on
their way to Santiago de Compostela, and there was not a priest or an innkeeper in the city who did not profit from them. She was accustomed to their raucous piety, parading through the streets
singing hymns, the more enthusiastic of them barefoot, whipping themselves with chains as they went. Every day there were crowds of them, on their way to Notre-Dame de la Daurade to gape at the
golden mosaics of Christ and the Virgin before coming here to pray over the bones of the saints.

She pushed through the mob crowded into the nave, wrinkling her nose at the stench. Most of the pilgrims carried long staves, like shepherd’s crooks, and several wore lead badges sewed on
to their robes to represent the holy places they had visited: a pair of crossed keys for Rome, a scallop shell for St James. These worthies were no doubt pilgrims by trade, paid in coin by some
wealthy burgher to do his penance for him.

She knelt among the wreaths of flowers, face to face with the Virgin. She kissed the saint’s feet, placing her forehead against the pedestal.

She lit a taper. ‘Mother Mary, thank you for my deliverance, for taking pity on me, a poor sinner.’

The sun broke through the mist. It was already high enough in the sky so that it angled through the high clerestory windows, reaching into the cathedral vault like one of God’s golden
fingers. She was gladdened to see that His divine touch was gentler than the last occasion He had pointed towards her.

Suddenly there was a buzzing in her head like a swarm of bees descending and in that moment the lady in blue stepped from her pedestal and held a marble hand towards her. Fabricia gasped and
blinked.

‘You are chosen,’ she said.

Fabricia rose halfway to her feet and looked around, thinking that others must have seen this miracle also, but no one stared, shouted, or pointed. It was as if the Virgin was still there, in
her niche high up the wall. For a moment she was tempted to call out, so that she might have witnesses, but then she realized a more terrible truth: Papa was right. I have lost my reason.