Stigmata by Colin Falconer Page A

thought later, when he made his great mistake. He should have scolded her for asking such scandalous questions and reminded her of her station. But he did not. He
allowed himself a moment’s intimacy with a woman and what followed later issued inevitably from the decision to share his heart.
    Why did I do it? His daily communion with God should have been sufficient balm for his heart’s bruises. His real betrayal of the divine was that in succumbing to her questioning he
allowed that a life with only the divine for solace was not enough.
    ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there are times when I have wondered what man I might have been in other circumstances.’
    ‘What kind of man is that?’
    A flutter of a smile, a childhood habit awkwardly retrieved from his memory. ‘I would doubtless have been a sinner.’
    ‘We are all sinners, are we not?’
    ‘Some of us hope for redemption.’
    Their eyes locked and he felt his loneliness as he never had before. He longed in that instant to be keeper of her heart as well as her body. He knew he must retreat or be lost. ‘I do not
regret those choices made for me, Fabricia. When I look at the world, at its falsehoods and futilities, at the evil I see every day around us, I know that seeking only God’s goodness is the
right path.’
    ‘Did you never love a woman before you became a monk, then?’
    She grew more impudent by the minute. Yet he was overcome by a desperate need to unburden himself, even though he knew where this ache in his treacherous heart might lead him. He sat down again.
‘Fabricia, you must understand. I was just a boy when my father offered me to the Church. My father had five sons, and I was the youngest. He was – is – a wool merchant in
Carcassonne, a man of some wealth, but not enough to secure an income for so many sons, so he used his influence to gain a place for me in the abbey.’
    ‘You look sad,’ Fabricia said.
    ‘I am not sad.’
    ‘You miss your brothers.’
    Such a hard truth and so frankly spoken. He remembered his first few months as a novice, how he cried himself to sleep every night on his hard wooden pallet. ‘My father gave me an
opportunity to prosper. It was difficult at first but I am grateful to him now for what he did, for it led me to God and a blessed life.’
    ‘And yet you long for a life not quite so blessed. Is that not true?’
    She might as well have hit him with the soup kettle; it would have shocked him less. He felt suddenly naked in her presence. She had disarmed him utterly.
    She had astonished even herself by speaking in such a way. She thought he would upbraid her for it but instead his shoulders seemed to sag under the weight of some great burden.
    His hands shook. Such beautiful hands! They were smooth and soft and white, so unlike her father’s, which were calloused and criss-crossed with scores of small cuts that evidenced his
daily travails; but these, these were hands that turned the pages of books, delicate hands that came together for prayer.
    When he finally spoke, his voice was so low she could scarce hear him. ‘I took a vow of constancy to God, yet I am still a man. It is an oath of no small consequence for I struggle with it
every day.’
    His frankness disarmed her. She was sorry now she had been so blunt.
    ‘This vow may seem trifling to you now,’ he went on, ‘but with each year it grows heavier on the shoulders. You should think of this before you take up the veil.’
    ‘But you are a man of God. Do you think it is wrong for me to dedicate my life to His service, simply because I might find the life difficult?’
    He was just a young man who wanted to be good, she thought, and to listen to her mother talk, there were few enough of those in Toulouse. She found him both endearing and sad and for a moment
she felt an unexpected stirring in her heart.
    It was growing dark in the square; the grey light that seeped through the oiled linen on the windows was almost gone. The fire leaped and