Bristol House (41 page)

However much her manner displeased me, I saw the plan as canny and fell in with it, saying as little as possible to our traveling companions so as to maintain the deception she had created for us. I was nonetheless surprised by one thing. In front of the others, she called me Justin, making that the name I was known by the entire time we were together with the family and servants of the man known in his own tongue as Diego di Mantova.

While we were still in Calais, the Lombard procured a horse and three donkeys and arranged for us to join a caravan of merchants traveling together for mutual protection. And so, without incident, after three weeks we arrived in Metz. It proved to be as great a city as any we had seen along our route—and all seemed to me more splendid than London—but also one in turmoil.

Metz stood at the place where the Moselle and Seille rivers met and was surrounded by a great wall. It was neither Frankish nor Rhenish but independent, though that was not apparently an easy condition to maintain. When we arrived, war was expected at any moment. The townspeople turned this way and that, unsure of what would happen or how to behave. They did not welcome strangers at such a time, but we were allowed through the gates because here as everywhere else, the Lombard merchants were princes of trade who paid such enormous taxes and tributes to the city’s rulers that no one questioned too closely what went on behind the doors of their houses.

Rebecca had told Diego she had relatives in the city—a grain merchant, according to her father—and he had agreed to take her to them as soon as we arrived. He did indeed escort us to the place where, according to the Jew of Holborn, the man lived. After tearful farewells between Rebecca and Diego’s daughters, who had grown fond of each other during our journey, we found ourselves standing alone at the door of a modest establishment. Even there on the street the yeasty smell of fermenting grain was apparent, and the dust of chaff filled the air and caused us to hide our mouths and noses behind our hands. “Hurry and knock, or we shall choke,” I said.

“Do you imagine, foolish Geoffrey, that it will be less unpleasant inside than it is out?”

I could not argue with her logic, so I said nothing.

And still she did not knock, only stood for a few moments, then said, “Now, come quickly and do exactly what I tell you. Whatever happens, contradict me in nothing.” Thereupon she set out at a pace so hurried, I could do nothing but follow her.

I was in no doubt she was following a plan she had previously made—a judgment confirmed when we came out of the maze of alleys of the Jews’ Quarter. Free of that tangle, we found ourselves on a broad street where it was possible to see the spire of a great church rising on a hill directly in front of us. “There,” Rebecca said, pointing to the spire, “is where we are going. We seek a house across from what they call the Annunciation door. It is the home of Diego’s brother and where he will stay while he is in Metz.”

I knew then that she had discarded the whole of the scheme of her father and put one conceived by herself and Diego in its place, and I wondered if Diego had understood her intentions and provided answers to her questions with full knowledge of how she would use the information, or if he was simply disarmed by her beauty. That seemed to me entirely possible. Even with the artificial belly she had created to disguise her parcel of treasures—she looked six months with child rather than three—the sight of Rebecca would take the breath and twist the thoughts of any man.

Where such thoughts led, I already knew. And, God forgive me, it had sometimes given me secret pleasure to remember that what every man who looked at her lusted after had already been mine. Indeed, it was the constant awareness of my sin that made me proof against repeating it. I had come to know such charms as Rebecca possessed to be the gift of the devil, and to understand that women are put on this earth to tempt men to sin exactly as Eve tempted Adam.

But of the cleverness of females, at least as exemplified by the one I followed that day, there could be little doubt. “Watch for this so-called Annunciation door,” she said as we traveled down an ancient alley that led to the great church at the heart of the city. “You should find it more easily than I, should you not? Or have you forgotten all they taught you in that place?”

This harking back to the life we had left behind, which now seemed so distant it might not have existed, brought me enough to my senses to cause me to put out a hand and seize her arm. I gripped it tightly, not thinking of whether I hurt her, and would not let her free. “What about that?” I asked, and pointed to her belly.

“Do you suddenly have care for the child you once told me was so steeped in sin it probably was not meant to be born?”

“The child is in the hands of God, as are we all. It will live or die as He chooses. But if you do not intend to do what your father meant you to do, what is to become of his legacy?”

“Exactly what he planned,” she said. “I will accomplish his intentions in a way better than he imagined. The only question remaining, Geoffrey, is whether your intentions are still what they have been.” With that she looked around, and having seen that we were for the moment alone in the narrow divide between two high walls, she reached down and drew back her cloak.

The parcel of treasures wrapped in the old Jew’s kirtle hung over her belly as before, but her intention was not to assure me of that fact. While I stared, she lifted her underskirt, causing the treasures to be raised above her waist and exposing her plump thighs and the thatch of curly black hair that decorated the cunny that had caused me to risk my soul.

God help me, I could not look away.

“Take a last look, Geoffrey. And be certain you prefer your monkish state to what you tasted and found sweet.”

I would like as not have taken her where she stood—thrusting her against the brick wall and driving my swollen cock into the place it craved to be—except that somewhere a church bell rang and summoned me to my senses. Rebecca heard it as well, knew its meaning, and let her garments fall back into place, though she did not once take her eyes from my face. “Ah, Geoffrey,” she said, her voice without that lilt of mockery I had lately come to expect from her, “I loved you so. Now I have lost you, and my rival is no creature against whom I might fight but your almighty church.”

I hesitated, remembering how in days past she had whispered to me of her struggles and schemes to see to it that her father did not promise her to one of the other Lombards before I would be quit of the Charterhouse. All for naught, once I was priested and the future was out of our hands.

Rebecca saw the memories that overtook me—no doubt they played upon my face as they did my soul, drawing me away from the things of God to the lures of Satan. “Geoffrey,” she said, speaking my name with such a depth of feeling. “Geoffrey.”

“I have no choice,” I said. “I am a priest, indeed a priest of the True—”

Praise God, she stopped my words with her fingers before I had a chance to utter them and betray Dom Hilary’s secret. “Listen to me, Geoffrey. It is all lies, everything they tell you. All this talk of holiness and prayer and men denying themselves the very things that make life worth living—it’s lies to further their dreams of power and their bloodlust. What God is this who asks such things? A savior worth following? I think not.”

Her blasphemies brought me to my senses, and I was overcome with fury and pulled her close to me that she might better hear every word I spoke. “That you are Satan’s whore I have known for some time, but if you cause me to break yet another vow, the one I made to your father concerning the treasures he gave us to carry here, I swear I will be happy in hell knowing you are suffering worse torments as you must.”

“You left your good humor behind, as well as your sweet nature, when you were priested, Geoffrey. Very well, know this—I will do what I must to find protection for my father’s patrimony, but also for myself and my child. And for the love I once had for you, and because you are that child’s father, I will shield you as well—but only so long as you do exactly what I tell you. Diego is on his way to a Rhenish town called Freiburg, in a place of mountains and forests. I have wheedled from him the knowledge that it is some four days’ walk from a Charterhouse. You chose the monks over me, Geoffrey who has become Dom Justin. Now come with me and do as I tell you, and before too much longer, you will be back among them.”

“And the treasures of the ancient Temple of Jerusalem, which may have been touched by the hand of the Savior Himself?”

“They will be distributed along our route, precisely as my father intended.”

“How can you arrange such a thing? If the Lombard or anyone else knew what you have there”—I nodded to the hiding place beneath her cloak—“he would take it from you by any means necessary.”

“Of course,” she agreed. “But in the dark, Geoffrey, and sometimes, as now, even on a bright sunlit day, men do not think with their heads but with their crotch.” Then her manner softened toward me, as if she saw my anguish and regretted being the major cause. “Do not fear,” she said. “I gave my word to my father. I will not break it. The gifts of the Jew of Holborn will go to those he meant to have them.”

I knew that for some time she had each day said the mourning prayer for the man who had given her life. It was a duty she solemnly observed, and I did not think she would be faithful in that obligation and ignore the other. As for me, my duty seemed to be twofold: to keep the vow I made to the old Jew, and to bring word to my brother monks of all that had transpired at the Charterhouse in London. Perhaps when I was once more with my Carthusian brethren, I would find others of the True Obedience of Avignon and learn what Almighty God meant for me. So it seemed yet again that doing as Rebecca planned was the wisest course to follow. Only one thing still troubled me: “How have you explained to the Lombard the reason for your journey? Does he not wonder at a woman traveling with a single servant setting out on such a trek as you have undertaken? By now there is doubtless a price on our heads. What if he—”

“You are such a fool! I told Diego what he wished to hear, and he told me what I needed to know. But if we spend more time in argument, everything I have done will be wasted, and we will truly be alone and penniless in this foreign place.”

After that I knew she was more likely than I to find solutions to our problems—as much on account of her beauty as her intelligence—and I did what she asked without complaint.

Soon we were walking the perimeters of what turned out to be a great cathedral dedicated to Saint Stephen—Saint Étienne as he was known in the language of the place—and when we came to what I thought to be the west facade, I saw above a set of doors a series of carvings that made music out of stone. An angel hid his shining face behind his wings lest the young girl beside him be blinded by his glory, and she stood listening intently, head bowed and hands clasped in an attitude of prayer and acceptance. It was as if, seeing this thing, I heard aloud the words of scripture:
Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Be it done unto me according to thy word.
“Here,” I said, “is your Annunciation door.”

As she had no doubt previously arranged with Diego, as soon as the door of his brother’s house was opened to her, Rebecca spun a tale of having been turned away from the home of her relative the grain merchant and in desperation come here instead. The result was that not only Diego and his daughters but also his brother Giuseppe greeted her with open delight and invited her to stay as long as she liked. As for me, they took me in for her sake. Would they deprive a widow in such straits of the one servant she possessed?

It transpired that this Giuseppe of Metz was not a wandering trader but had been many years in the city. His household was large and well established, and numbers of merchants visited to arrange the receipt or the shipment of goods. For that reason there was a constant coming and going of people in and out of the house, and no one took note of the arrival of a beautiful young widow and her servant. As for Giuseppe himself, he seemed to count our presence no hardship.

So were we settled in exactly the manner Rebecca had predicted.

I, however, was not at peace. I was prepared to take it on Dom Hilary’s word that the sins of my comings and goings in and out of the Charterhouse had been in the service of the priesthood of the True Obedience and as such not sins at all. But the time in the woods beside the Fleet, when I had given in to the lure Satan sets between a woman’s thighs, yet felt to me like a millstone that would press me into the bowels of the earth, there to burn forever. Never mind that Hilary had given me absolution. How could that suffice when I had not told him the terrible truth of what I had done? It could not, I determined. Rather it was a parody of the very forgiveness I so desperately required. And how could I go to some strange priest at the cathedral, when telling my story as I must meant exposing who I was and what Rebecca had carried with her out of England, and perhaps sending everyone in the Lombard’s household to the stake along with Rebecca and myself? Nothing in my experience of the past few years gave me confidence in even the sworn secrecy of the confessional.

These thoughts threatened to overcome me, except that I clung to the notion of the Charterhouse in the Rhenish forest. I made myself believe that when I reached it, I would be like gold tried in the fire and permitted to tell my sins and be absolved of them. I could not know that everything I had been through was merely prelude.

What followed came about because, like all men, I had sometimes the need to piss.