Once he’d taken on a monk’s habit, the abbot said, he lived a life of penitence and rigid self-denial… “Even then, sinful as I was, I could not admit to anyone what I had done, though I confessed to God and begged His mercy every day.”
So exemplary had he been that his fellow monks had elected him as their abbot when the old one died.
He’d taken it as a sign that God was relenting to him and might relent further if he could advance Glastonbury’s holiness and prosperity.
“Which, by the Lord’s grace, I did,” Abbot Sigward said simply. “With every improvement, I became certain that I had gained forgiveness at last.” He shook his head. “But God’s memory is longer than that, and so, it seems, is a Welsh bard’s. When King Henry sent to tell us to dig between the pyramids, I thought, Is this Nemesis at last? Well, I shall accept her. But no, I was reprieved yet again; the bodies were taken to be those of King Arthur and Guinevere. The Lord has allowed me to work even harder for Him, I thought. Perhaps the fire that consumed my abbey was His final punishment, and now, in allowing my son and his friend to be misrepresented, they and I can bring the pilgrims back to Glastonbury.”
Startled, Adelia took her eyes off the island ahead to glance at the abbot. He’d laughed, actually laughed.
“Our Lord has humor,” he said to Rowley, “do you know that? He sent the true Nemesis in the guise of a Saracen and a woman-representatives of a race and a sex that the old Sigward despised.”
Adelia turned away, grateful that the voice had stopped at last. The only sound now came from the calling of a flock of geese flying inland.
“… Deinde, ego te absolve a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris, et Fili, et Spiritus Sancti.” Rowley was pronouncing the absolution in a voice she hardly recognized.
Sigward said, “And now this poor child here, I would wish her absolved from sins which sprang from mine. Come along now, Hilda, you will feel the better for it.” He might have been urging the woman at his knee to take some medicine and buck up.
Adelia heard Hilda’s voice mutter something and Rowley’s, forced, granting her forgiveness in the name of his God.
Lazarus was close now, and Adelia could see why it imprisoned those on it. The Brue was becoming sluggish, oozing between rises of sand that buttressed the higher ground of the island, each with a pool at its lowest point. Sphagnum moss, that wonderful bandage for septic wounds, grew in plenty like a mat.
But there was no health here. The mats quivered and stank of rotting vegetation; the quicksand beneath them slurped as if an old man was sucking his teeth.
And… “Oh, no, look,” Adelia said.
A stag was floundering in one of the mats. Its front hooves thrashed at the moss and the sand beneath it. The antlered head turned this way and that as it tried to raise its lower body from the morass. It was bellowing in distress.
“Help it, can’t we help it?”
The abbot looked to Godwyn. “Can we help it?”
The man shook his head. “No.”
“We can pull it free,” Adelia begged.
“Too heavy,” Godwyn said. “The sand… it sucks, like. Increases weight tenfold. Be like dragging a house. That’d take us with it.”
“It’ll suffocate.” It was unbearable to watch, to listen to.
“No,” Godwyn said again gently. “He’ll not go down further. He’s floating, and he’ll go on floating. ’Tis high tide today-we’re in the estuary now, see. Then he’ll drown, poor creature. ’Tis the easier death.”
Adelia didn’t think so. Neither did the stag. They could still hear it bellowing as they rounded the island and approached a long jetty.
Beyond was a compound no less neat than a country village, with houses of wattle and daub thatched with reed. There were gardens, and fields containing cattle and sheep, a little stone church with a bell tower. Whatever else he’d done, Abbot Sigward had made his lepers as comfortable as he could.
Somebody was ringing the church bell, and people were coming down to the landing stage, shouting a welcome to the abbot.
Rowley turned to Adelia. “They don’t look like lepers.”
At this distance, they probably didn’t, Adelia thought. Some would still be ambulatory and able to work; others would not be lepers at all but were condemned to spend their lives here because of their contact with the disease.
Whatever they were, neither Emma nor Roetger, nor Pippy, was among them. But there were children. Oh, God, there were children…
“Children?” she heard Rowley ask.
“Indeed,” the abbot told him brightly. “The Church would have lepers lead lives of chastity, and I am not supposed to perform marriages, but I do. And baptisms. I have learned the value of human as well as godly love.”
Like their houses, the people waiting for them on the landing stage were well accoutred though, differing from ordinary villagers, they were mostly dressed in uniform black with wide-brimmed hats not unlike a pilgrim’s. As the punt drew in and Godwyn tied up, carefully locking its hawser to a bollard, they crowded forward to help Abbot Sigward out, embracing him, kissing his hands, talking, some trying to pull him toward their houses to bless the sick that lay inside.
Anxious and distressed though she was, the scientist within Adelia saw the early signs on some of them: thinness from loss of appetite, twisted hands, blotches and eruptions on their faces, but even these were energized out of leprosy’s inevitable lassitude by the coming of the abbot.
If it hadn’t been for Emma, she’d have liked to question and examine. What was leprosy? Was it passed down from parent to child? Why did some catch it and others did not? Which conditions encouraged it, and which didn’t?
As it was… “Where are my friends?” she asked Godwyn sharply.
Rowley was grimacing at the sight of the people above him and scrambled ashore reluctantly to join Godwyn and Adelia on the landing stage, taking care to keep away from the crowd around Sigward.
Hilda remained kneeling on the floor of the punt, her head on the thwart the abbot had sat on, her eyes open and staring at nothing. “Back in a minute, sweetheart,” her husband told her. She didn’t move.
Leaving the abbot to the lepers, Rowley and Adelia followed Godwyn along the dirt track through the hamlet-except that now any resemblance to a normal village was gone. The people propped up against their doorways in the sun were not gossiping or weaving or tending to their children; they were being eaten alive, the disease chewing their flesh like a rat gnawing at a corpse. They had the dreadful similarity to one another that advanced leprosy gave to their faces, turning them lion-like.
The loss of feeling in their extremities, so that some had accidentally burned themselves or suffered cuts without knowing it, contributed to the absence of fingers and toes that necrosis had caused to drop off. One blind, bare-legged old man was unaware that a seagull was pecking at the stump of his foot.
Adelia shooed it off and, stooping, covered his legs with a flap of the blanket he sat on. Rowley pulled her away. “For God’s sake, don’t touch him. You can’t do anything.” He hurried her on.
Everything in Adelia screamed for her to do something, but she knew from what her foster father had told her of the disease that while opium could relieve pain in the early stages, these sufferers were beyond that; they must die slowly, inch by inch. Nothing was spared them, not even the stink from their rotting flesh.
“The firstborn of death.” Rowley was quoting from the Book of Job.
Little wonder the Church maintained that these people would not go to hell when they died; they were in it while they lived. From one of the cottages came a mumbled cry for water, whether from a man or a woman it was impossible to tell. A little girl came out with a pail and went running to a pump. That would do no good, either; the thirst at the end was inextinguishable.