Stigmata by Colin Falconer Read Free Book Online Page B

stones of the Rule. If you are
unable to hold your tongue, I fail to see what service you might be able to render to God.’
    Feeling that he was once again in control of the situation, he warmed his legs before the hearth and told her stories of Augustine and of Benedict of Norcia, to illustrate to her what a true
love of God entailed. He was approaching the topic of St Agnes’s martyrdom when she suddenly looked directly into his face, and said: ‘I have visions, Father. I see things I should
not.’
    It was as if she had dashed a pail of cold water in his face. She was not listening to him at all.
    ‘What manner of visions?’
    She shook her head. ‘I cannot tell you that.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘You will take it as a blasphemy.’
    ‘I shall be the judge of that.’
    She stared at the floor. Outside the tinkers clattered past in their wooden shoes and a priest, with his hand bell, was summoning all to pray for the souls of the dead. Finally, she said:
‘I have seen a woman, very much like Our Lady. Only I do not think she can be real.’
    He watched the firelight play in her hair. ‘Because you see things, Fabricia, it does not mean they are there. Young girls of your age before they are . . . wed . . . are famed for such
notions.’
    ‘So a monk or a priest or even a nun might see God and know it is real but if it is a young girl then it is a kind of madness? Is that what you are saying, Father?’
    ‘Where did you see such things?’
    ‘Once, in Saint-Étienne, while I prayed at her shrine. She descended from her pedestal.’
    ‘She moved?’
    ‘Yes, Father.’
    Simon sighed and affected forbearance. This was the source of her supposed devotion to God? ‘You give too much weight to mere flights of fancy, Fabricia Bérenger .’
    ‘You think so, Father?’ she said, and then looked at him with such directness that he averted his own eyes. He wanted desperately to touch her.
    ‘You must confess,’ he said.
    ‘Confess? Have I sinned?’
    ‘Of course you have sinned!’
    ‘But I have no control over such things.’
    ‘That does not matter. In this . . . fancy . . . did she speak to you?’
    ‘She did.’ She lifted her right hand and laid it on her breast. ‘I felt the words here, in my heart.’ His eyes followed the ecstatic passage of her fingers from her
shoulder to her bosom. He imagined the porcelain softness of her breast beneath the crisp linen, the pale vein that succoured the swollen bud of her nipple.
    Her skin would smell like lavender and musk, and there would be a sprinkling of the finest red-gold hair below the dimple of her navel, visible only in the golden splash of sunlight that fell
across her bed in the late afternoon.
    Her back was sinuous and slender, like the wriggling of a snake as she slid between his thighs . . .
    He jumped to his feet, spilling both his stool and his mead on to the floor. The Devil threw back his head and roared with laughter. Fabricia stared up at him, startled.
    ‘There is nothing to be done with you!’ he shouted and fled the house without another word.

 
X
    S IMON KNEW HE must never again return to the stonecutter’s house, for that was utter folly and would invite disaster.
But he had to know what Fabricia had told Anselm about his visit with her and he approached him on some pretext one day in the Église de Saint-Antoine. As he was leaving he said, as if an
afterthought: ‘Has your daughter spoken to you more about this notion to take up the Rule?’ He feigned no more than a casual interest.
    ‘No, Father, she has not, though she has been greatly preoccupied. She is not herself at all. She hardly speaks.’
    There was something in him that found this news deeply gratifying. ‘I believe I made some progress with her,’ he heard himself say. ‘But I shall need to speak to her
again.’
    ‘Of course, Father. When?’
    ‘This Sunday,’ he said, and left the mason to his work.
    He walked away, both astonished and appalled at what he