grabbed my wrist and pulled me inside.
It was a narrow, crowded garden, like many a courtyard in Florence, with old peeling ocher walls, and bright flowers flourishing in the sheltered sun. Three other women sat there, together on a bench beneath a tree. All wore wide and beautiful skirts, rich sleeves, and had high bosoms which began to drive me mad. And the one who had brought me in, I saw now she was an ordinary woman! Her face was on the front of her body, like that of anyone else. It had all been some kind of illusion with the veils she pulled from her hair. Some little trick.
She confessed this to me, and this set them all to laughing so much I thought they would never stop.
I was dizzy. Suddenly these women were crowding about me and saying, “Father, take off your clothes. Come, stay with us in this garden.” And the blond one, who bore the famous name of Lucrezia, said that she had bound me with spells to make me come, but not to fear, they weren’t witches, rather their men were gone off to hunt in the country, and they would do as they pleased.
Their men gone off to hunt? This sounded bizarre. But I perceived the truth beneath it. These were whores, but whores free for the day, and I was the object of their desire.
“We are proud to initiate you, virgin child,” said the eldest of the women, who was as beautiful as all the rest. They drew me across the tiles and into the bedchamber. They took off my sandals and removed my robes; then they flung their dresses this way and that, crying out in jubilation, and they danced about me, naked as nymphs, singing some little song. It was all a joke to them! It was all a game. They were shocking the young Franciscan, who though he had a full beard still had the expression of a child.
But I was not shocked. Once more a strange knowing came to me of a time when all the world had done these things; the Garden of Delights it had been, with all romping naked, and playing and singing and dancing; and flowers all about us, and plenty of fruit to eat.
Then fear took hold of me. Gone, all that. Blackness.
I was meantime making like a satyr for these women, which they found very amusing, and which I could not help. At last they tumbled into the bed next to me, covering me with kisses, and I grasped the breasts of the closest woman, and began to suck tenaciously so that I made her cry in pain. The others planted kisses on my naked shoulders, my back, my organ, my chest.
In a twinkling I was back in the birth chamber in England, in the arms of my mother, knowing the fierce pleasure of drawing the milk savagely from her breast. I was drunk with the pleasure, and now it found its worst culmination in the organ, and I soon rode all the women, one after another, crying out in ecstasy, and then beginning with the first to take them all again.
It was now evening. The stars were visible above the courtyard. The roar of the city was dying away. I slept.
I was with my mother, only she was not hating me and crying in terror, but a long slender creature such as me, much too long to be a real woman, and stroking me with fingers which like mine were too long. Didn’t everyone see I was a monster like this woman? How could people be so easily fooled?
I drifted into dreams. I was in a mist, and people were crying, and sobbing, and men were rushing to and fro. It was a massacre. “Taltos!” Someone shouted it, and then I beheld in my dream the farmer from the field near Florence, and heard him whisper, “Taltos!” and I saw before me again a pitcher of milk.
Thirsty, I woke, and sat bolt upright as was my custom, and stared around me in the dark.
All the women were still, but with their eyes open. This struck me as horrid, horrid as the illusion that the woman’s face had been on the back of her head. I reached out to shake awake the blond woman, so rigid was her gaze. And I perceived the moment I touched her that she lay dead in a pool of her own blood. Indeed, all of them were dead, one on either side of me, and the three who lay on the floor. They were dead. And the bed was soaked with the blood and it stank of human people.
I rushed out into the courtyard in uncontrollable cowardice, and collapsed near the fountain, on my knees, trembling, unsure of what I had seen. But when I finally rose to my feet and returned, I saw it was true. These women were dead! I laid my hands on them repeatedly but there was no waking them! I couldn’t cure them of death!
I gathered up my robes, my sandals, dressed again and ran away.
How could these women have died? I remembered the words the Franciscan had said to me. “Never touch the flesh of a woman.”
It was the dead of night in Florence, but I managed to return to the monastery, and there I locked myself in my cell. When morning came, news of the deaths was all over Florence. A new form of plague had struck.
I did what I have always done at such trouble. I went home to Assisi, walking the whole way. The mild winter was coming, which is nevertheless a winter, and the journey was not easy. But I did not care. I knew someone was following me, a man on horseback, but I only caught glimpses of him from time to time. I was in despair.
As soon as I reached the monastery I prayed. I prayed to Francis to guide me and to help me; I prayed to the Blessed Virgin to forgive me for my sins with these women. I lay on the floor of the church, arms outstretched as priests do when they are ordained. I prayed for forgiveness and understanding, and I wept. I didn’t want to think my sin had killed these women.
I envisioned the Christ Child, and I became the small helpless baby, and I said, “Christ, succor me, Holy Mother the Church, succor me. What can I do on my own?”
I went to confession, to one of the oldest priests there.
He was Italian, but had only just come home from England, where many Protestants were now being put to death. We were rebuilding our monasteries in that land, sending priests back to serve the Catholics who had kept the faith during times of persecution.
I chose this priest because I wanted to confess all-my birth, my memories, the strange things said to me! But when I was kneeling in the confessional these things seemed the dreams of a madman! And it really did seem to me that I was a man only, and had had some proper childhood somewhere which had somehow been erased from my mind and heart.
I confessed only that I’d been with the women, that I had brought death to all four but did not know how.
My confessor laughed at me, softly, reassuringly. I had not killed the women. On the contrary, God had preserved me from the plague which had killed them. It was a sign of my special destiny. I should not think of it anymore. Many a priest has stumbled, taken to his bed a whore. The important thing was to be larger than that sin and that guilt, to carry on in the service of God.
“Don’t be full of pride, Ashlar. So you finally succumbed like everyone else. Put it behind you. You know now that it is nothing, this pleasure, and God has spared you from the plague for Himself.”
He told me that the time would come perhaps when I was to go to England, that England would need us as never before. “Queen Mary is dying,” he said. “If the crown goes to Elizabeth, the daughter of the witch,” he said, “there shall be terrible persecutions of the Catholics again.”
I left the confessional, said my penance and went out into the wintry windswept fields.
I was unhappy. I did not feel absolved. My eyes were wide and I was walking in a staggering way. I had killed those women, I knew it. I had thought them witches! But they were not! The face on the back of the head, all that had been trickery and illusion! And they had died as the result!
Oh, but what was the larger truth! What was the real story? There was but one way to know! Go to England, go as a missionary to England, to fight the Protestant heresies there, and seek the Glen of Donnelaith. If I found the castle, if I found the Cathedral, if I found the window of St. Ashlar, then I would know I had not imagined these things. And I must find the clansmen. I must find the meaning of the words once spoken to me. That I was Ashlar, that I was he who comes again.
I walked alone in the fields, shivering and thinking that even my beautiful Italy could be cold at this time. But was this cold a reminder to me of where I had been born? This was for me a solemn and terrible moment. I had never wanted to leave Italy. And I thought again of the priest’s words, spoken in Donnelaith: “You can choose.”
Could I not choose to stay here in the service of God and St. Francis? Could I not forget the past? As for the women, I would never touch them again, never. There would be no more such deaths. And as for St. Ashlar, who was this saint who had no feast in the church calendar? Yes, stay here! Stay in sunny Italy, stay in this place which has become your home.
