The Leper's Return Read Online Free PDF Page A

well.”
    “It hardly demonstrates the correct desire to punish a wrongdoer.”
    “Oh, I don’t know, Bishop. Surely it is better to punish one man leniently than potentially the whole town unfairly,” Baldwin said teasingly. “Especially since it might demean a genuine miracle: that of Orey.”
    Stapledon snorted. “So what has he been up to since? I assume you must be well acquainted with him for you to be able to call him to mind so easily, especially since, as you point out, you didn’t even live here when all this took place.”
    The knight sipped at his juice. “It is true that I have seen something of him.” He decided that the most recent rumors he had heard should be withheld. Peter Clifford might know something of them, but there was no need to inform the Bishop when it could only serve to irritate the prelate. “He has been brought before me in my capacity as Keeper of the King’s Peace, but never over anything serious: selling underweight loaves of bread, that kind of thing.”
    “That’s bad enough!” exclaimed Ralph. Many poor people depended on their bread for their daily sustenance, and those who short-changed their customers were guilty of trying to starve them, in his view.
    “True, but it’s not something a man should be hanged for,” Baldwin stated easily. He knew how hard some found it to make any kind of a living, and didn’t believe in excessive severity against those who only committed offenses to prevent their own starvation.
    “So he’s hardly a model citizen,” the Bishop commented.
    “No—but he adds a certain color to the town’s life,” Baldwin suggested. “He has a bold nerve. I believe he could sell sulfur to the devil—and profit from the exchange!”
    “Hardly the sort of comment to endear him to me,” Stapledon snapped coldly, but even as Ralph gave a sharp intake of breath at his irreverence, Baldwin could see that Stapledon was concealing his own amusement.
    “But it’s true enough,” Clifford said, with a kind of weary resignation. “Irelaunde has some kind of natural gift with language. Only last week he persuaded me to take some of his cloth. I know what he’s like, and although I’m quite certain there’s no malice in him, I should’ve known better than to buy from him.”
    “If there’s no malice…” Ralph interrupted, confused.
    “There doesn’t have to be evil intent,” Baldwin explained. “John only thinks of the next minute or two, and what he can make. If there’s an opportunity for profit, he’ll take it. He will trade in anything. It usually won’t be something that could hurt—but it wouldn’t necessarily match the high expectation the customer had.”
    “And then,” Clifford added gloomily, “he always has a ready explanation, which on the face of it is reasonable, and which inevitably shows that you are somehow at fault. Take my cloth: he let me have it for half the going price—purely, he said, because he had picked up a sizeable quantity cheaply from a retiring weaver, and he’d prefer to see the Church get a bargain than make more money himself or give the benefit to an already fat merchant.”
    “That should have warned you, Peter,” said Baldwin, mock-reprovingly. “He actually implied that he would sooner see you gain the advantage of the deal than he himself? What more warning could he have given?”
    “He was most convincing.”
    “He always is! Go on, what was the matter with the cloth? Did it dissolve in the rain? Or perhaps it evaporated in the sun?”
    Peter Clifford pursed his lips. “The cloth was for tunics for some of the lay brothers and servants,” he admitted after a moment. “Some of them had such threadbare stuff that they were hardly better off than going about naked. But as soon as John’s material was washed, it shrank. It had already been made up into clothes by then, and it was all useless.”
    “And he said it was your fault?”
    “He was most apologetic, but he said we should have