Thomas stared at him. “You handle yourself well, Father. Did you learn to fight like that in the Holy Land?”
“Nay—at the University of Paris. I didn’t fight like that in the Holy Land.”
Thomas frowned. “But surely, on crusade, you fought—”
“To kill,” Rainulf finished shortly. “That’s a different kind of fighting.”
Thomas seemed to digest that for a moment, and then he nodded toward the front door. “Do you know that fellow?”
The man standing in the doorway had hair the color of polished copper and a milk white face showered with hundreds of freckles. He wore a plain, clean tunic and clutched a leather bag.
Rainulf shook his head. “I would have remembered those freckles.”
The stranger scanned the room, stilling when his gaze lit on Rainulf. This interest surprised Rainulf not in the least. His height alone often drew attention. And in this dank little student tavern, he would seem sorely out of place, being the only master present and—and six and thirty years—by far the oldest man.
“Are you the one they call Rainulf Fairfax?” the stranger asked, his gaze resting on the priest’s flaxen hair—the feature that had earned him the surname from his students.
“Aye.”
He looked down at Rainulf’s black robe—not a clerical robe, as would be expected, but the
cappa
of a secular master, the open front of which revealed an ordinary brown tunic and chausses beneath. “They told me you were a priest.”
Someone cleared his throat; someone else chuckled.
“They were right—more or less,” Rainulf answered. A few of the scholars laughed good-naturedly, but Rainulf maintained his neutral expression.
“Are you or aren’t you?”
“Why is it so important?” Rainulf demanded.
“I need a priest who’s had smallpox,” said the red-haired man. “They told me you fit that description.”
“They?”
The man shrugged. “A couple of the other masters. If they were mistaken, kindly advise me so and I’ll trouble you no further.”
“They weren’t mistaken. But what’s this about the pox?”
“There’s been a lot of it in the village of Cuxham the past few weeks. I need you to perform last rites.”
“I’m a teaching priest,” Rainulf said. “I haven’t performed the offices of the church in years. There must be a parish priest in Cuxham. Can’t
he
do it?”
“He’s
been
doing it,” said the stranger. “Only now he’s come down with it himself. A bad case, too, but hopefully one of the last ones—I think this outbreak has run its course. Anyway, Father Osred’s dying, most likely, and I promised Sir Roger Foliot I’d bring back a priest to give him last rites. Only, I’ve got to find one who’s already had the pox, so as not to spread the contagion.”
He spoke like a man who knew something of disease. Rainulf glanced at the stranger’s bag. “Are you a physician?”
“A traveling surgeon. My name’s Will Geary. So, will you go?”
Rainulf spent a moment trying to summon up a good reason for refusing. Failing to do so, he sighed heavily and nodded. “I’ll go.”
* * *
Stopping briefly at his Saint John Street town house, Rainulf changed into sturdy traveling clothes and packed the things he’d need into his saddlebag. As an afterthought, he searched for and found a tiny silver reliquary containing a lock of hair of Saint Nicaise, and slipped it in among the vestments and vials.
It was unusually warm for March, and despite his grim mission, Rainulf found the journey to Cuxham a pleasant one. Keeping to the route suggested by Will Geary, he rode twelve miles to the southeast until he reached the mill that marked the northern boundary of Cuxham. From thence he followed the stream south through woods and farmland, until presently he came upon the small stone and thatch parish church. Behind it stood the rectory, as he had been told, and he would have ridden directly to it had his eye not been drawn to a figure in the churchyard, digging a grave. He drew up his mount and watched from a distance, strangely captivated by the sight.
It was a woman—her age indeterminate, for she faced away from him—dressed in a homespun kirtle, her black hair plaited in two long braids tied together in back. Next to her on the ground, shaded from the midafternoon sun by a yew tree, lay a corpse beneath a blanket.
Dismounting, Rainulf hobbled his bay stallion by the stream and approached the woman, who still seemed unaware of his presence. As he got closer, he saw not one but two empty graves dug into the earth. One appeared to be finished, given the sizable mound of dirt next to it. The other was still but a shallow trench. It was this second, just begun grave on which the woman labored so industriously, yet hampered by fatigue, if the slowness of her movements was any indication.
Rainulf looked around for a second corpse, but could see none. He did notice, scattered among the weathered headstones in the churchyard, several fresh graves—victims of the pox, no doubt.
He paused about ten feet from the woman and cleared his throat. She gasped and spun around, holding the shovel as if to swing it. Her face bore a bright red flush, and her hands shook. Rainulf saw fear in her wide brown eyes, then confusion. “You’re not...” she began in the old Anglo-Saxon tongue. “I thought perhaps you were Sir...” She took a deep breath, as if relieved, and lowered the shovel. “Who are you?”
Rainulf took a step toward her, but she raised the shovel again, and he stopped in his tracks.
“Don’t come any closer,” she said. She had an odd, husky voice, unexpected in a woman of such slight build.
Rainulf held both hands up, palms out. “Easy,” he said in English. “I’m Rainulf Fairfax.
Father
Rainulf Fairfax, from Oxford.”
Her gaze took in his short, tousled hair, over which he wore no skullcap, and his rough traveling costume. “You don’t look like much of a priest.”
“I’m not,” he dryly agreed.
A spark of amusement flashed in her eyes. Taking this for encouragement, Rainulf stepped forward again, but she thrust the shovel at him. “Get back!”
“I won’t hurt you,” he said reassuringly.
She smiled somewhat wryly. “I didn’t think you would. It’s just that I’ve got the yellow plague, and I wouldn’t want you to catch it.”
Rainulf’s gaze narrowed on her reddened face. What he’d thought at first to be a flush of fear had not subsided, nor had the trembling of her hands. He suspected that, were she to let him touch her, her skin would be burning hot. This was how this awful disease began, he knew—with fever and chills and that strange scarlet tinge to the face and body. The pox themselves would appear later.
“Rest your mind, then,” he said. “I’ve had this affliction already. I can’t catch it again.”
Her eyes searched his face. “You’ve had this?”
“I had several interesting diseases while a guest of the Turks some years back. Smallpox—what you call the yellow plague—was one of them.” He tilted his head, pointing at the two minuscule indentations on the side of his jaw.
Lowering the shovel, the woman approached him slowly, her gaze riveted on the scars. “That’s all the pockmarks you’ve got?” she asked incredulously. “Just those?”
“I was lucky,”
“
I’ll
say.” She inclined her head toward the corpse under the yew. “Father Osred didn’t get off so easily.”
Rainulf walked over to the body and squatted down. He reached for the edge of the blanket to uncover the face but hesitated, smelling, in addition to the stench of death, the distinctive, sickening odor of the final stages of smallpox. It was an odor that conjured up vivid memories. Closing his eyes, he found himself transported back to the Levant, to that foul underground cell in which he and two dozen other young soldiers for Christ endured a year of hellish suffering. Their torment found new depths when the pox swept through their stinking hole, claiming one out of every four men and leaving most of the rest wishing they’d been taken.
Peeling back the blanket, Rainulf sucked in a breath and executed a hasty sign of the cross. The face on which he gazed was so densely covered with yellowish pustules as to completely mask its features. The poor creature’s thin white hair was the only indication of age. Had Rainulf not known the body to be that of the rector, he might even have thought it to be female.
“It’s best this way,” the woman said. Rainulf turned to find her standing right behind him, leaning on the shovel and staring thoughtfully at the dead priest. “He went blind in the end. Some of them do, you know.”
“I know.” He swallowed hard. She looked at him inquiringly, and he met her eyes, drawn to something in them that surprised and touched him. Compassion. She felt compassion... for him! Here she was, suffering from this appalling malady that killed and blinded and disfigured; yet, sensing his own grief, his own nightmare, she had it within her to feel sympathy for him.
A most strange woman
, he thought, holding her gaze. In their warm depths he saw curiosity and humor, and something else... wisdom. The wisdom of the ages.
“How old are you?” he asked.
She laughed, displaying teeth so straight and white as to be the envy of the noblest lady. Her smile was delightful, and infectious. Rainulf was actually tempted to laugh himself—odd, given that he hadn’t laughed in a very long time, and somewhat inappropriate under the circumstances. Instead, he marshaled his expression and asked, “What’s so funny?”
“You,” she said. “You’re rather an odd person, that’s all.”
“Me?” He pulled the blanket back over the body and stood. “What’s odd about
me
?”
She shook her head, grinning. “Asking my age like that, out of the blue, and before you’ve even asked my name. That’s the kind of thing
I
do.”
“What?”
“Ask the wrong questions at the wrong time.” He noticed a shiver course through her; she shook it off and smiled gamely. “Or so Father Osred used to say. He said I was like a little child, always asking questions.”
“I’m very much the same, but then, I’m a teacher. It’s in my nature to ask questions—and, of course, to question the answers.”
She nodded knowingly. “
Disputatio
.”
Rainulf was taken by surprise that this obviously lowborn woman knew the Latin term for academic debate.
She laughed again. “I know many things.”
He bowed slightly. “Of that I have very little doubt.” She was remarkably well spoken for a woman in her circumstances, in addition to being well informed about things no Oxfordshire peasant had any business knowing of. Rainulf wondered where she had learned so much.
She studied him for a moment. “I’m three and twenty years of age. And I know French as well as English and Latin, although I prefer speaking English. And my name, if it’s of any interest to you, is Constance.”
“Constance,” he repeated. “A very pretty name. From the Latin. It means unchanging.”
“I know.”
Of course
, thought Rainulf with amusement.
She screwed up her face. “I hate it. Why should one want to be
constant
, as if change were some great evil? If it weren’t for change, everything would stagnate, would it not? And that which stagnates tends to putrefy, like a river that ceases to flow. What good can there be in that?”
Rainulf stared in awe at this fragile, exhausted young woman, her eyes glazed with fever, discoursing on the nature of change. She was right, of course; change was the very fabric of life itself. And death.
“My father wanted to name me Corliss,” she continued, “but my mother wouldn’t let him, worse luck.”
“Corliss. Isn’t that a man’s name?”
She frowned indignantly, an expression that, on her, was unaccountably charming. “It’s for a man
or
a woman! And it’s much more suited to me than Constance!”
“Perhaps you’re right,” he conceded with a little bow. He nodded toward Father Osred’s corpse. “I came to give him last rites.”
“It’s too late now,” she said sadly as she rubbed her back.
“Too late for a proper job of it,” he agreed, “but I can still perform the sacrament. There are those who believe it’s useful, even when one has died unshriven.”
She nodded. “Go ahead, then.” Turning toward the half-dug grave, she added, “I’ll finish here.”
“Hold on there,” he said. “You ought not to be digging graves. You’re ill, and... well, isn’t there someone... your husband, perhaps...”
“I’m widowed.”
“Ah. I’m sorry. Was it the pox?”
“Nay, it happened five years ago. There’s no one but me to bury him, Father. The men who haven’t gotten sick yet won’t bury the dead for fear of catching what killed them. And the ones who
have
gotten sick are still too weak. I wouldn’t want to trouble them.”
“I’ll bury Father Osred,” Rainulf said. “And I’ll finish this second grave, if you’ll tell me who it’s for.”
“I thought you knew,” she said, grinning as if at a slow-witted child. “It’s for me.”
The tall priest stared at Constance as if live eels had just sprouted from her head. “You’re digging your own grave?”
“There’s no one else to do it,” she pointed out. “My friend Ella Hest has promised to come by in the morning and check on me. If I’m dead, she’ll put me in the grave and fill it in, but she’s getting on in years, so I didn’t want her to have to actually dig it.”