The knight threw her a baffled glance, but had no time to ask what she meant, for there was a sudden commotion from the buttery. Muttering under his breath, Baldwin rose to his feet, but before he could discover the cause, the cause discovered him.
Edgar fell back from the doorway, his arm round Cristine’s waist, staring at the door with a smile of sheer delight. There was a short silence, then Baldwin watched with astonishment as Simon’s servant, Hugh, hurtled out, slipping on a patch of wet rushes and falling over. He sat up, rubbing a sore elbow and glowering ferociously as a massive shape filled the doorway.
“I said you’ve had enough!” the shape boomed. “That means you won’t have any more ale. I’ll not have a drunk escorting my lady.”
“Baldwin,” Jeanne said sweetly, “my maid didn’t join me at Tavistock, so you haven’t met her, have you? This is Emma.”
Ralph crossed the small yard to the chapel, and stood at the entrance, wiping a hand over his forehead. The night before he had sat up with one of the older inmates while he slowly faded, dying just before dawn. The monk sighed. It was a hard duty that he had taken up. The only certainty was that his flock would diminish faster than any other.
Opening the door, he walked inside, and was about to reach for his broom when he heard the regular sweeping. It brought a tired smile to his lips. “Mary?”
“Oh, Brother Ralph, I didn’t worry you, I hope?”
He could see her face now, vaguely anxious, as if her taking on the cleaning could be construed as an insult to his own cleanliness. “No, my dear. No, I am very happy that you should help me, but…Surely you have other things you could be doing?”
“No, sir,” she said, leaning on her broom-handle and speaking with a calm certainty. “I want to help the men here.”
“Mary, you are young. You will find another man to marry. It’s not right that you should stay here, among all this disease.”
“I know my man has always been a good soul. It was my intention to marry him, and if I can’t, I won’t marry at all. Anyway, I can do more good here, for you, for your lepers, and for my soul, than I could by becoming a farmer’s wife. No, I was prepared to wed Edmund Quivil, and if he’s going to die, then at least I can see he dies easy in his heart. He’ll know that I’ve always been loyal to him.”
Ralph sat at a stool, and gestured for her to follow suit. “But perhaps your presence is not so beneficial?”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“Well, you see, he can watch you every day here, and that must be unsettling for him. He was to marry you, as you say. If he loves you, how would he feel knowing you are here with all the other lepers?” He held up a hand to prevent interruption. “Your being here, near him, must always be a sore temptation.”
At this she laughed. “Oh, Brother! You think he might rape me? My Edmund?”
“You may find it hard to believe, but worse things have happened to young women in lazar houses. And even if he doesn’t, don’t you think it might be cruel to remind him of what he is missing?”
“Like letting the bull see the heifers but keeping him fenced off?”
“Well, er, yes. Something like that.”
“I suppose it’s possible. But I think my Edmund would prefer to see me here and know I care for him still than wonder what I was doing outside. And if you’ve heard the talk, I don’t care what people say!”
This last was said with a sudden passion, and Ralph nodded slowly. “The people of the town can be very cruel, but try to forgive them. They don’t understand-all they know is, they’re scared of the disease that we hold in here.”
“Saying I’m no better than a whore!” she declared hotly. “They ought to know better.”
“Well,” he sighed, “some misguided people believe that leprosy is an evil brought about by lust. They think it’s transmitted by intimate relations, and therefore lepers are especially libidinous.”
“You don’t?”
“No, Mary, and even if they were, that would be no reflection on you. I think my charges have more important things on their minds than fornication. They have their eyes firmly fixed on the life to come, or on how their poor, tortured bodies will be eaten up and destroyed by their disease. Anyway, I don’t believe that leprosy is sexually transmitted. It’s a gift from God, and the sufferers should be honored. I agree with St. Hugh of Lincoln, that the more deformed they are, the more they suffer here on earth, the more brightly their souls will shine in Heaven. They have been sent their diseases to teach us all how we shall be tormented with pain in Purgatory. Their Purgatory is here, now!”
“Yes, Brother. But if it is a gift from God, then maybe He intends honoring me too.”
“We should never presume to look for such things from God,” he said sententiously. “Whatever He decides for you, you must accept it.”
“But it cannot be wrong for me to want to help look after His own selected people.”
“No,” he said uncertainly. It was considered that women were capable of looking after others in certain circumstances, he knew. “Except I really do think you should be considering starting a new life without Quivil. He’s lost to you now.”
“So he is, but that’s no reason why I shouldn’t help you, is it? Especially since by so doing I’ll be helping those whom God Himself has chosen to be a sign to us all.”
“Well…I suppose so.”
“Then I’d better get on with the sweeping.”
Ralph watched her move down the little aisle, rhythmically swaying as she moved the broom. She was the picture of a rough, untutored peasant girl, with heavy body and coarse, grubby hands, and yet she was demonstrating more generosity of spirit and kindliness than many of his brother-priests. The thought made him sigh, but it also gave him a spark of satisfaction. He walked forward and bent at the altar, offering up a short prayer for her and her doomed lover, before leaving the chapel. He might as well go and see to laying out the body of the dead leper.
After all, he reasoned, what harm could come from letting Mary work in the lazar house?
“My God! Simon,” Baldwin gasped. “How could Jeanne have allied herself with that?”
“It can’t have been her fault. She must have been stuck with the woman from an early age,” Simon said.
They were standing at the entrance to the inn, watching the small cavalcade disappear down the street. Edgar was leading the way, Hugh keeping the rear with the packhorse, although from the way he kept throwing appealing glances back at his master, he would have preferred to remain. Baldwin couldn’t blame him.
“She’s a bear, Simon, a ravening, insane beast! How could a frail thing like Jeanne stand to live with something like that?”
As they made their way along the road toward Godfrey’s hall, Simon laughed. “She’s not so bad as she looks, Baldwin. She can even tell jokes.”
“Jokes? I daresay she could, but not the sort I’d want a soldier to hear! And did you see the warts on her chin? And her arms are more strongly muscled than my own, I swear.”
“Baldwin, you can’t deny that she’s eminently capable of protecting her mistress, can you?”
That, Baldwin agreed silently, was the whole point. With a fearsome guard like Emma he would find it very hard to get Jeanne on her own, if the display with Hugh was anything to go by. He had no objection to Jeanne being safe from footpads and felons, but that was very different to her being carefully fenced in from him by her maid. And he had no doubt that Emma would be a most resolute guardian. He had seen it in her eyes as she was introduced to him-cold, astute eyes that seemed to read him with terrifying ease. Little, brown eyes, they were, but without any of that gentle, bovine softness that Baldwin had always associated with the color. Emma’s were sharp and angry, like a small hog’s.
The rest of her bore out the analogy. She was short, but with a massive frame that made her look almost perfectly round. Her chest was carried like some kind of armored buttress-or maybe like the curtain wall of a castle, Baldwin amended, recalling the awesome immensity of her bosom. An army, he felt, could batter itself to death against such a vast obstacle.
Seeing his self-absorption, Simon laughed. “Forget her. You have a murder to solve. So tell me, whom are we to see now?”
“The daughter of the man who was killed. Her name is Cecily, and she was discovered in the same room as her father’s corpse. She was knocked senseless.”
They were soon at the house. Clearly most of the townspeople had accepted the fact that Tanner was not going to be bribed into allowing them to view the corpse or the place where Godfrey was killed, and had left to get on with their work. Tanner stood aside for them to go in, and Simon led the way, but not before Baldwin had caught a glimpse of the men standing well back, almost in the alleyway opposite. It made him frown for a moment, seeing the lepers there, but then he shrugged. Why should he assume that lepers, by mere virtue of their disease, should be uninterested in the fate of others? He knew that old men were always keen to hear of the demise of their peers, or of those younger than themselves. There was a greedy fascination with death among those who were likely to experience it for themselves in the near future, and lepers surely fell into that category.
Yet when he glanced over his shoulder, he was surprised to see how keenly one of the rag-clothed figures was following his progress to the door. It was the new man, the one he had seen with Quivil earlier, and Baldwin made a mental note to ask the leper master about the stranger when he had a chance.
The door was open, and just inside, seated on a stool from which he could see both front and back doors, was a watchman. He stood and nodded to Baldwin, and let the two pass into the hall itself.
“Ugh! You could have warned me, Baldwin!”
“Squeamish, Simon? I had thought you would have been cured of that after looking into so many murders.”