The object of his concern was sitting with Lazarus at a discreet distance from the highway but within view, some quarter of a mile along the road that led towards the river crossing at Atcham. One of the begging bowls they held, at least, was legitimate, but they made no appeals to any of those who passed by, and used their warning clappers only if some charitably disposed soul showed signs of approaching too closely. They sat cross-legged and shrouded in the bleached autumnal grass under the trees. The attitudes were easily learned.
“Just as you are,” said Lazarus, “you might walk away through their cordon and go free. They will not believe any man so brave or so mad as to walk in a dead leper’s gown, or be themselves so brave or so mad as to risk stripping you to find out.” It was a long speech for him, by the end he stumbled, as if his maimed tongue tired of the effort.
“What, run and save my own skin and leave her still captive? I do not stir from here,” said Joscelin vehemently, “while she is still in ward to an uncle who plunders her substance, and will sell her for his own profit. To a worse than Huon de Domville, if the price is right! What use is my freedom to me, if I turn my back on Iveta in her need?”
“I think,” said the slow tongue beside him, “that if truth be told, you want this lady for yourself. Do I belie you?”
“Not by a hair!” said Joscelin with passion. “I want this lady for myself as I never have wanted and never shall want anything else in this great world. I should want her the same if she lacked not only lands, but shoes on her feet to walk those lands, I should want her if she were what I am feigning to be now, and what you?God be your remedy!?truly are. But for all that, I’d be content?no, grateful!?only to see her safe in the care of a worthy guardian, with all her honors upon her, and free to choose where she would. Surely I’d do my best to win her! But lose her to a better man, yes, that I would, and never complain. Oh, no, you do not belie me! I ache with wanting her!”
“But what can you do for her, hunted as you are? Is there ever a friend among them you can rely on?”
“There’s Simon,” said Joscelin, warming. “He doesn’t believe evil of me. He hid me, out of goodwill, it grieves me that I quit the place without a word to him. If I could get a message to him now, he might even be able to speak with her, and have her meet me as she did once before. Now the old man’s gone?but how can that ever have come about!? they may not watch her so closely. Simon might even get me my horse …”
“And where,” asked the patient, detached voice, “would you take this friendless lady, if you got her out of ward?”
“I’ve thought of that. I’d take her to the White Ladies at Brewood, and ask sanctuary for her until enquiry could be made into her affairs, and a proper provision made for her. They would not give her up against her will. It would go as far as the king, if need be. He has a good heart, he’d see her justly used. I would a long sight sooner take her to my mother,” burst out Joscelin honestly, “but it would be said I coveted her possessions, and that I won’t endure. I have two good manors coming to me, I covet no man’s lands, I owe no man, and I won’t be misprised. If she still chooses me, I’ll thank God and her, and be a happy man. But I care most that she should be a happy woman.”
Lazarus reached for his clapper-dish, and set the clapper woodenly clouting, for a plump, solid horseman had halted his pony and turned aside from the road towards them. The rider, nonetheless, smiled from his distance and tossed a coin. Lazarus gathered it and blessed him, and the good man waved a hand and rode on.
“There is still goodness,” said Lazarus, as if to himself.
“Praise God, there is!” said Joscelin with unaccustomed humility. “I have experienced it. I have never asked you,” he said hesitantly, “if you have ever had wife and child. It would be great waste if you had always been solitary.”
There was a lengthy silence, though silences at Lazarus’s side were neither rare nor troublesome. At last the old man said: “I had a wife, long dead now. I had a son. He was blessed, in that my shadow never fell upon him.”
Joscelin was startled and indignant. “I don’t find you a shadow. Never speak so! Any son of yours might properly joy in his father.”
The old man’s head turned, the eyes above the veil shone steadily and piercingly upon his companion. “He never knew,” said Lazarus simply. “Hold him excused, he was only an infant. It was my choice, not his.”
Young and blunt and blundering as he was, Joscelin had learned in haste to understand where he might not pass, and must not and need not wonder. It astonished him, when he looked back, to discover how far his education had progressed in these two days among the outcasts.
“And there is a question you have never asked me,” he said.
“Nor do I ask it now,” said Lazarus. “It is a question you have not asked me, either, and since a man can hardly say anything but no to it, what sense is there in asking?”
In the mortuary chapel of the abbey, after Vespers, Huon de Domville was coffined, in the presence of Prior Robert, Canon Eudo, Godfrid Picard, and the dead man’s two remaining squires. Picard and the two young men had ridden in from the fruitless day’s hunting, tired and irritable, still cloaked and gloved, with no captured malefactor to show for their trouble, though whether that was a matter for regret to anyone here but Picard and Eudo seemed to be in some doubt.
The candles on the altar and at the head and foot of the bier guttered gently in a chill draught, and the shadows of those present quivered hugely on the walls. Prior Robert’s long white hand took the aspergillum, and shook a few drops of holy water delicately over the dead, and the candlelight caught their flight and turned them to sparks, kindled and dying in the air. Canon Eudo followed, and looking round for the only other kinsman present, handed the aspergillum to Simon, who stripped off his gloves hastily to take it. He stood looking down at his uncle’s body with a somber face as he dipped the brush of sweet herbs, and sprinkled holy water in his turn.
“I had not thought to do this for many a year yet,” he said, and turned to hold out the aspergillum to Picard and withdraw again into the shadows.
The green sprays shook some drops of water on the back of his hand as he relinquished them, and Picard watched them fall, and saw the young man shake them off as if startled at their coldness. There was something fascinating in the way the light of the candles picked out so sharply every detail of those ministering hands, cut off at the wrist by dark sleeves. So many severed hands moving and acting with a life of their own, the only pallors in the enfolding dimness. From Prior Robert’s pale, elegant fingers to Guy’s smooth brown fist, last of the ministrants, they performed their ritual dance and held all eyes. Only when the act of reverence was done could all those present look up, and find relief in the more human pallor of strained and solemn faces. It seemed that everyone drew a deep breath, like swimmers surfacing.
It was over. The five of them separated, Prior Robert to a brief session of prayers for the dead before supper,
