Stigmata Read Online Free PDF Page B

couple in there, the boy with his hose around his knees, the girl with her ankles around his hips. Fabricia
stopped and stared.
    She could not take her eyes from the woman’s face. She had seen bawdiness in the street before, Toulouse was a crowded place and people took their vices where they could, but this was no
penny whore. Her head was thrown back, her mouth open in a silent scream. This was passion, not street commerce. Could any physical experience be so intense? The woman clung to her lover so tightly
her fingers were white. This is what joy looks like, Fabricia thought.
    The woman’s eyes blinked open and for a moment the two women stared at each other. Then Fabricia turned away and hurried inside the church, shaking.
    She lit a taper by the feet of the Madonna and kissed the cold marble hem of her robe. She closed her eyes and tried, by force of will, to persuade her to speak, as she had before.
    ‘Move for me,’ she implored her. ‘Talk to me! Tell me what to do!’
    She pressed her hands hard, painfully, against her forehead and waited for the saint to speak. But there was only silence.
    That night she lay on her straw pallet beside the fire, listening to the watchman in the square rattle his iron-shod staff and cry out the ‘All’s well!’ But all is not well,
she thought.
    She had long feared a slow descent into madness, ending her days in the gutters, foam on her mouth, covered in ordure, bearing the stinging stones of jeering little boys. She had decided that if
she were instead secluded in a monastery, her mother and father would be spared her shame, and would not be outcast along with her.
    ‘Please, Blessed Mother, make this stop,’ she murmured. Exhausted, she closed her eyes, dreading sleep for what dreams might come.
    And what she dreamed was a knight with steel-blue eyes. She was riding a pony and he was walking beside her, leading it by its halter. He was smiling at her. Suddenly he fell, an arrow in the
centre of his chest. He disappeared into a chasm that fell away from the mountain beside them. She woke in the night, screaming his name.
    Philip.

 
VII
    Vercy, fifteen leagues from Troyes
    Burgundy, France
    ‘A LEZAÏS, MY HEART .’
    She was straddling him, hands behind her head, fixing the curls that fell loose about her shoulders. He cupped her breasts, like small fruit, dusky and ripe. Her eyes were like a cat’s in
the dark.
    The blue night curtains were tied back on the wooden canopy. It was late summer and the soft copper wash of the sunset retreated through the window, and a scribble of smoke tumbled towards the
draught. There was the aroma of freshly burned rosemary.
    His wife, so delicate, so pale by daylight but with the snuffing of the candles she was transformed. You get energy from the moon, he said to her once.
    She arched her back and her hips writhed, serpentine, each uncoiling drew another groan from his lips. She had all the skill of the King’s tormenter, teasing him slowly to his little
death.
    She bit gently at the lobe of his ear: Take me to the tilt, my warrior. Bury your lance as deep as it will go.
    He took her face in his hands. Alezaïs, my sweet, my darling. He felt her breath on his face, sour wine and strawberries, chased the golden shadow of her soul in the cloister of her
eye. You are my hope.
    *
    He started awake, realized he had been dozing in the saddle. His sergeant-at-arms pointed: the castle loomed above the valley on a bend of the river. A smudge of smoke rose from
the keep and stained a filthy sky; he saw the flare of a torch behind the arrow slits of the donjon . He looked for the window of their bedroom, high in the tower. He knew that beneath it
there was an iron chest, ornamented with iron scrolls, in which she kept her treasures and rarities. It served her also as window seat and prie-dieu and he wondered if she was there now, if she
could see him.
    His wife, his home.
    He felt many eyes watching their approach. He wanted to