The Mad Monk of Gidleigh Read Online Free PDF Page A

the vivacity from them, leaving deadened husks – whey-faced youths or chestnut-brown men who looked as though they were forty years old when they were only twenty. And the women were worse. Either they were worn out from too many birthings, or they were ruddy-faced and as incontinent as bitches in heat. They terrified the chaste young scholar, but there was another part of his soul, a very human part, which jealously watched the young bucks flirting with them. On more than one occasion, he had stumbled across naked buttocks hammering between parted thighs, and had rushed away, horrified; yet he also knew that the pounding in his chest wasn’t only from disgust.
    There were times when, if he had been offered the solace of feminine company, he would have taken it, and that knowledge scared him. It was against his training and vocation to lie with a woman. Other priests might have sunk to that sin, but he had thought himself immune to such lust, that he had more willpower. It was to distract himself from his dreams of voluptuous female flesh that he had immersed himself in this building.
    It was hateful, this place. Stories abounded of the devil, how he had tempted men and women into sin, how he and his hounds hunted for lost souls across the moors. When he still lived with his mother, Mark had known men who had laboured all their lives, but somehow they seemed less ancient than the shrivelled folk of Dartmoor. The people here had no sense of humour. Their existence was harsh, unleavened with laughter or pleasure. One survived, and that was all, in their world.
    Mark gazed before him, thrusting his chilly hands beneath his armpits for warmth; he could feel the fingers like individual twigs of ice.
    From here the land sloped down to the river. There, at the bottom, was the narrow track that led from Gidleigh to Throwleigh, a dangerous place in summer, when outlaws lurked, but safer now in the depths of winter when even the fiercest felon must be settled in his hovel. From here, at the door of his chapel, the priest could see the hills rising to the south. Bleak, they were, as though they had been blasted by God’s fury.
    Glancing up, he saw that the clouds were heavy with threatening storms, lowering over the moors. They suited his mood, and he grabbed his basket and made his way through the ankle-deep black mud to his door. His legs were quickly caked up to his knees, and his habit was sodden and bespattered with it before he reached the small lean-to cob and thatch room that was his home.
    It was tiny, but sufficient for his needs. There was a palliasse to sleep on, a few strands of hay – all he could afford – spread over the floor to keep in the warmth, and a good-sized hearth in the middle of the floor. At the wall which the room shared with the chapel stood his chest, a simple, plain box which contained his spare shirt, vestments and some parchment. It was little enough, and he found it a depressing sight. The fire was all but out, and the chamber was dingy and damp.
    At least he could throw a faggot of sticks on his fire and enjoy the quick rush of heat. It might just bring the feeling back into his blue fingers and toes. The thought of flames was at once delicious and terrible: he knew that his chilblains would complain and the pain would be worse as the feeling returned to numbed toes and fingers. It was only at night, when he went to bed, lying beneath his rough blanket, that he knew peace. There, with the thick sheepskin pelts keeping him warm, he felt a kind of contentment. With his eyes closed, the room could have been anywhere. The dying fire at his side could have been the embers on the hearth of a great lord’s hall, the palliasse beneath his back a herb-filled mattress in a king’s solar and the thick skins and blanket the richly decorated bedclothes from an abbot’s private chamber. In his imagination, Brother Mark slept in magnificent halls.
    In the morning, though, he always returned to real life and