Stigmata by Colin Falconer Page B

danced in his eyes. He said suddenly and without
preamble: ‘You are so very beautiful, Fabricia.’
    Perhaps he did not mean to speak this thought aloud. He seemed as shocked as she.
    He got to his feet. ‘I must go,’ he said.
    After he left her mother and father crept back down the stairs holding a smoking tallow candle. They seemed puzzled, but said nothing. Her mother seemed to have divined what had happened.
    All churchmen were alike. She said it often enough.
    *
    S IMON HURRIED ALONG an alleyway of wine shops, bawdy houses and tinker’s stalls. Evening was drawing on, the Devil’s hour. An ox cart creaked
past and he shrank into a doorway. The whores took this as an invitation to mistake him for the Bishop and one of them bared her breasts at him and offered him congress against the wall for three
deniers.
    He pushed away from her with an angry shout. She had foul breath and bad teeth like a demon. I have made of myself a common joke; a monk transfixed by a woman, he thought wildly. I have
dedicated my life to contemplation of the divine; instead I am fixed on cunny like a bawd.
    What was it that St Augustine said of woman? The gate by which the Devil enters. She is a temptress set by Lucifer to lure a man from his perfect state. Fabricia was then a perfect demon:
fire-haired, slender and ripe as bruised fruit.
    He passed a man lying in the street who had been blinded as punishment for some crime. His empty sockets were horrible to look at, and he sat in the filth of the gutter, with his arm
outstretched, begging for coins. Some small boys were tormenting him for their own amusement; they pinched him and slapped him while he raged at them and tried in vain to catch hold of them, which
of course only made the game even better.
    Simon saw himself there: blind, grovelling, wretched, tormented by the Evil One for jest. I must stop this .
    He caught one of the wretch’s tormentors by the ear and reproved the lad in the name of the Church. He found a few coins in his purse and gave them to the beggar. He was no doubt a thief
– or had once been – but had paid his terrible price, and Simon had no stomach to see him suffer more. He would not survive much longer in the street anyway.
    He returned late to the monastery, as the bells rang for vespers. He was tardy and received the reproving glances of his brothers.
    The Devil remained his companion all that night both in the chapel and in his bed. He weaved moist dreams of Fabricia and unclothed her in his sleep. He felt her breath on his face, sweet as
strawberry wine; her hair smelled of summer, and his arm was around her waist, which was soft and yielding. Finally, in some ragged scrap of dream, he saw her lying naked in a cornflower field, and
tried to go to her. But someone pulled him away. A man’s voice called his name.
    It was Brother Griffus shaking him awake to attend matins and lauds. His hand went guiltily to his groin. He pulled on his robe in the darkness, desperate and aching and ashamed.
    The candles wavered in the draughts of the dark choir, illuminating the sacristan’s bible, throwing long shadows of his cowled brother monks and the carved saints above their heads. The
ranks of the holy stood against him in the gloom.
    His lips moved with the words of the psalms and responses while he felt her warm breath even in that cold, dark chapel, tasted the salt of the sweat at the nape of her neck. It was just a dream
but his memories of it were as vivid as if it were real; so real that he believed that at that very moment she, too, was sitting upright on her pallet bed, seeing his face as clearly as he saw
hers. Impossible to imagine that he could conjure such an intimate moment and that she had not felt it also.
    After the service he returned eagerly to his cell, hoping a swift return to his moist and salty dream, and to Fabricia Bérenger. But a dream is not a place; he could not go back. Instead,
he lay awake through the long night and begged