There was a lengthy silence, though silences at Lazarus’s side were neither rare nor troublesome. At last the old man said: “I had a wife, long dead now. I had a son. He was blessed, in that my shadow never fell upon him.”
Joscelin was startled and indignant. “I don’t find you a shadow. Never speak so! Any son of yours might properly joy in his father.”
The old man’s head turned, the eyes above the veil shone steadily and piercingly upon his companion. “He never knew,” said Lazarus simply. “Hold him excused, he was only an infant. It was my choice, not his.”
Young and blunt and blundering as he was, Joscelin had learned in haste to understand where he might not pass, and must not and need not wonder. It astonished him, when he looked back, to discover how far his education had progressed in these two days among the outcasts.
“And there is a question you have never asked me,” he said.
“Nor do I ask it now,” said Lazarus. “It is a question you have not asked me, either, and since a man can hardly say anything but no to it, what sense is there in asking?”
In the mortuary chapel of the abbey, after Vespers, Huon de Domville was coffined, in the presence of Prior Robert, Canon Eudo, Godfrid Picard, and the dead man’s two remaining squires. Picard and the two young men had ridden in from the fruitless day’s hunting, tired and irritable, still cloaked and gloved, with no captured malefactor to show for their trouble, though whether that was a matter for regret to anyone here but Picard and Eudo seemed to be in some doubt.
The candles on the altar and at the head and foot of the bier guttered gently in a chill draught, and the shadows of those present quivered hugely on the walls. Prior Robert’s long white hand took the aspergillum, and shook a few drops of holy water delicately over the dead, and the candlelight caught their flight and turned them to sparks, kindled and dying in the air. Canon Eudo followed, and looking round for the only other kinsman present, handed the aspergillum to Simon, who stripped off his gloves hastily to take it. He stood looking down at his uncle’s body with a somber face as he dipped the brush of sweet herbs, and sprinkled holy water in his turn.
“I had not thought to do this for many a year yet,” he said, and turned to hold out the aspergillum to Picard and withdraw again into the shadows.
The green sprays shook some drops of water on the back of his hand as he relinquished them, and Picard watched them fall, and saw the young man shake them off as if startled at their coldness. There was something fascinating in the way the light of the candles picked out so sharply every detail of those ministering hands, cut off at the wrist by dark sleeves. So many severed hands moving and acting with a life of their own, the only pallors in the enfolding dimness. From Prior Robert’s pale, elegant fingers to Guy’s smooth brown fist, last of the ministrants, they performed their ritual dance and held all eyes. Only when the act of reverence was done could all those present look up, and find relief in the more human pallor of strained and solemn faces. It seemed that everyone drew a deep breath, like swimmers surfacing.
It was over. The five of them separated, Prior Robert to a brief session of prayers for the dead before supper, Canon Eudo to the abbot’s lodging, the two young men to walk their jaded horses back to the bishop’s house and see them tended, stabled and fed before seeking their own supper and rest. As for Picard, he bade them all a very short goodnight, and withdrew to the guest-hall, and there drew Agnes with him into their own chamber, and closed the door against all the rest of the household, even those most trusted. He had matter of importance to confide to her, and it was for no other ears.
The little boy Bran had begged and brought away with him from his lesson the strips of worn vellum trimmed from the sheet on which he practiced his letters. He got credit with his teacher for wanting them, though his purpose was not quite what Mark supposed. In the dortoir, where he should long ago have been asleep, he crept to Joscelin’s side with his prizes, and whispered the secret into his ear.
“For you wanted to send a message. Lazarus told me. Is it true you can write and read?” He was in awe of anyone who had such mysteries at his finger-ends. He nestled close to Joscelin’s side, to be heard and to hear in the most private of whispers. “In the morning you could use Brother Mark’s ink-horn, no one will be watching his desk. If you can write it, I could carry it, if you tell me where. They don’t notice me. But the best piece of the leaf is not very big, it would have to be a short message.”
Joscelin wrapped the folds of his cloak round the skinny little boy against the chill of the night, and drew him into his arm. “You’re a good, gallant ally, and I’ll make you my squire if ever I get to be knight. And you shall learn Latin hand, and reckoning, and matters far beyond me. But yes, I can write a sort of fist that will serve. Where’s your vellum?” He felt the meager width but sufficient length of the strip that was pressed eagerly into his hand. “It will do very well. Twenty words can say much. Bless you for a clever imp as ever was!”
The head from which Brother Mark’s pellitory dressing had erased even the last drying sore of under-feeding and dirt burrowed comfortably into Joscelin’s once-privileged shoulder, and he felt nothing but amused and indulgent affection. “I can get as far as the bridge,” boasted Bran sleepily, “if I keep to the back ways. If I had a capuchon I could get into the town. I’ll go wherever you say …”
“Will your mother be missing and wanting you?” Joscelin breathed into the boy’s ear. The woman, he knew, had given up all care for the world, and waited only to leave it. Even her son she abandoned thankfully into the hands of Saint Giles, patron of the diseased and shunned.
“No, she’s asleep …” So, almost, was her busy and contented child, for whom the excitement of study and the small intrigues of friendship opened the world that was closing on her.
“Come, then, shift close, and go to sleep. Creep inside, and get my warmth.” He turned to let the searching face find a nest in the crook of his shoulder, and was startled by the pleasure he got from its delighted confiding. Long after the child was asleep he lay awake wondering that so much of his interest and energy should be directed elsewhere when his own neck was threatened, and so much of his thought devoted to excluding this small, neglected soul from whatever peril he himself had incurred, by his folly or his fate. Yes, he would write, he would try to find a way of getting his message to Simon, but not by involving the innocent lying easy in his arm.
Joscelin also slept, and with mutual drowsy movements accommodated his guest all night long. Somewhere apart, Lazarus lay wakeful far into the night, long since having discarded his need for sleep.
8
Joscelin arose before dawn, with scrupulous care not to awake his bedfellow, who lay now in his abandoned ease and warmth with limbs flung abroad as if discarded. The voluminous leper-cloak Joscelin left draped over the child, for the early air was chilly, and moreover, he dared not draw nearer the town wearing it, though the risk of approaching without its cover was surely as great. He would have to rely on keeping out of sight, and also drew some comfort from the fact that the previous day’s drive must have virtually exhausted the possibility of taking the sheriff’s quarry on the northern side of the Foregate, and therefore, or so at least he hoped, the watch would be concentrated elsewhere.
He stole out through the hall, and picked up Brother Mark’s ink-horn and quill from the desk. He would not wait for light from dawn, and could make none here, but in the church the constant light on the altar, however meager, would be enough for his young eyes and few words. He had already worked out in his mind what he would write, and managed it legibly, if none too neatly, on his strip of vellum. The quill needed trimming, and tended to spit, but he had no knife to correct it. He was come to the condition of those now his comrades, but that his skin and limbs were whole; otherwise he had nothing but what he stood up in, no possessions of any kind at his disposal.