Falling Idols Read Online Free PDF

perilously close to courtship. Worse, in some hidden cleft within, she wanted it to be so.
    Giselle knelt beside the matted hay, lay a hand upon it, felt the fading, radiant warmth. His , and may God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Blessed Virgin forgive her, but she did long to feel it from the source itself. If only once, just once.
    She counted, as she might measure a horse, hand-widths down along the matted area where his back and shoulders would have lain, then the tapering length of his legs. She had thought it before, but it occurred to her once again:
    He must be enormous.
    When she left the stable, doll in hand, it was with the taste of delicious fear that she was about to surrender to forbidden curiosity.

    *

    Night, barely a moon, the entire countryside dipped in black that seemed to run and pool.
    Giselle had kept herself awake for an hour by pinching a spot on her thigh, and for another hour beyond that simply by lying in the darkness, contemplating her faltering courage, and wondering where it might lead if she really did creep out the door and dare look her refugee in the face. Perhaps he’d entertained similar thoughts, was right now lying out there with a deliciously miserable heart and hoping to hear the sound of her feet.
    A few feet away, Sister Anna-Marie snorted in her sleep and stirred, then fell silent.
    The back door might wake her — there was this to consider. And maybe tonight would be better spent sleeping. There was always tomorrow night…
    Oh, enough. There would always be another tomorrow night. Of what good was trepidation? He was but a man, no doubt a shy one, certainly kind at heart. No harm would come from their speaking, and meeting one another face to face so that she could at least know what he looked like. The advantage was his, there.
    Giselle eased from her bed, drew her cloak about her and, creeping barefoot across the cold floor, carried her shoes to the back door. From a kitchen shelf she took a lamp and matches.
    Out the door, quickly, quietly as she could shut it, and then she was hurrying along the path. The stable loomed ahead of her, a sagging black square punched into the night. At its door she stopped to light the lamp, then slipped inside.
    A muted glow surrounded her and cast a tilting shadowplay on the walls, and she eased across the hard-packed earth. The deep bellows breath of sleeping horses was the only sound as she passed them in their stalls. To the far wall, then…
    She stopped.
    He was there, lying on one side with his broad back to her, curled beneath a heavy horse blanket that rose and fell with his own steady breath. She could see little of the man himself, just a great head of shaggy black hair.
    In a young life whose course had run slowly, so straight and free of genuine surprise, this was new: that the risk of change came down to a single moment. She had but to take the step into the next, or turn around and retreat and forever wonder.
    Giselle cleared her throat, loudly: “Excuse me? Sir?” And louder still, “Sir? Are you awake?”
    A sluggish flex of his shoulders, a stirring of his legs. The moment crawled by, a slow eternity, then whipped ahead in sudden flurry. She thought she saw his face, half turning back her way as he opened one sleepy eye—
    And could she trust the lantern’s glow, the peculiar shades of color that it sometimes cast? Was that grimacing cheek indeed a sallow yellow? She saw but a glimpse of it, and there was no time to decide. A groan of terrible anguish came scraping forth from the cavern of his chest as he threw the blanket about his own head and scuttled back against the stable wall. He drew his knees in toward his chest and, with head lowered beneath its makeshift veil, held himself together like some trembling fortress.
    “Leave me,” he said. “Leave me to my world, and go back to your own. If you wish to do me one last kindness, then let that be it. Please.”
    Giselle took a step forward without even