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  Arsen’s indirect accusation was clear enough. Had Madeleine not persuaded Marie to join Robert’s pilgrimage, the twins would not be wandering the countryside hungry and tired.

  The twins removed their sandals, wriggled their toes and asked Madeleine to rub their feet. “Please, Madeleine,” they begged. “Just this once?”

  Madeleine sighed. Rising to her knees, she dug her thumbs into the arches of their calloused feet, first Agnes and then Arsen. Nearby a Jumièges pup with brindled fur and a freckled belly worried a hickory stick. Tossing it into the air, the mongrel jostled Madeleine’s elbow with his body and together they toppled into the ankle-high spring grass. The three women laughed for the first time in months.

  Agnes winced but did not complain when Madeleine resumed working her feet. Madeleine hardly noticed, so intent was she on contemplating her good luck. The freedom to ponder a sky marbled with turquoise, ruby and apricot clouds filled her with joy.

  “We’re nothing but bones,” Arsen said, stroking her lean ribs.

  “And our hair has grown dry as straw,” Agnes said. Before they left Rouen, one of their regular customers had given the twins a set of ivory combs carved in the shape of fanned peacock tails. Now Agnes adjusted one of these combs in her hair, studying Arsen as though assessing her own reflection. Arsen pushed Madeleine’s hands away with an exasperated sigh. “We’re ugly and I’m hot, hot, hot!” she said, pulling her robe over her head and wriggling free of the heavy serge. She leaned back on her bent elbows. Her linen gown pulled tight against her unbound breasts and raised her nipples. “For sure we were fools to follow this crazy barefoot wanderer!”

  Madeleine watched Arsen straighten her girdle and recalled Robert’s fingers fanning simples. “We will soon reach our destination,” she said. “The Master is an honest and admirable man.”

  “Is it admirable that he so often seeks your company?” Arsen asked. She tilted her head and assumed the guileless gaze of a child.

  “Robert is mindful of all of his followers,” she said, thinking the twins jealous. “He seeks out the two of you on occasion and many others as well.”

  The twins met Madeleine’s response with blank stares. “We’re tired,” Agnes said, and together the sisters laid back into the grass. Turning onto their left sides, Agnes coiled into the scoop of Arsen’s embrace and the two drifted off to sleep while Madeleine went in search of Robert’s company, the mongrel pup cavorting at her heels.

  She found Robert addressing the lepers, who, despite their disease, proved resilient during the journey. Some suffered horribly from their affliction, their faces swollen red and ravaged by blisters, their eyes lidless and fixed, while others seemed almost normal, only a few blemishes hinting at disease. Settling on the edge of the group, she studied Robert’s composure and felt a pleasant heave of relief, for she could not detect the uncertainty he had revealed to her earlier that morning.

  The puppy zigzagged between the lepers before rolling onto his back and offering his belly to their outstretched hands.

  Madeleine, who often felt the need to keep her own hands busy in Robert’s presence, turned to the daisy shrub on her right. She plucked one yellow flower after another until a heap of flowers filled her lap. Using her thumbnail, she opened a buttonhole in each stem, threading one through the next until she had formed a chain. Linking beginning to end, she closed the circle. She was dropping the necklace over her head when Marie entered the group.

  Robert nodded to Marie and continued his sermon. “‘Now,’ the Lord said, ‘I have come down to bring my people to a land flowing with milk and honey.’”

  “Do you liken yourself to Moses, Master Robert?” Marie asked, leaning into her cane and moving nearer Robert with difficulty. “Has God spoken to you from a burning bush? Has he turned your staff into a snake?” she demanded.

  “Mother Marie,” Robert said, “I would never compare myself to Moses.”

  “Yet you imply that you are leading us to a land of milk and honey. Bah! Better a little mutton and a carafe of wine! Better a fat partridge and a draft of ale!” Her hair had thinned during the journey, a shine of pink scalp visible at the center part. “We are hungry, Master Robert. What,” she bellowed, “do you intend to do about it?”

  “We will find assistance in Vendôme,” Robert said. “Have faith a bit longer, Mother Marie.”

  Shaking her head, she reached into her bodice and retrieved the sack of coins she had carried with her from Rouen. “Faith will not feed my belly,” she said. “Consider this my oblation.” Tossing the sack at Robert’s feet, she turned and made her way back to the wagons.

  Madeleine rose and retrieved the coins. “If the Lord provides herbs to ease our afflictions, might he not also provide money to sate our hunger?” she asked, placing the sack in Robert’s hands.

  Brother Girard entered the oratory pew, dropped to the kneeler with a heavy thud and began whispering his rosary, enjoying the sensuous slide of wooden beads between the strong fingers of his right hand. But instead of focusing on the Holy Mother, Girard contemplated the taste of beef simmering in a peppery broth of summer leeks and cabbage.

  Brother Rainald’s footfalls interrupted Girard’s reflections and he returned to prayer most fervently. As he did every day he prayed that today would be the day he was released from his incessant thoughts of food. Even when his belly sagged and obscured his sex, even then, he could not stop eating. Not when his heavy thighs blistered with rash, not when his joints ached with contrition.

  “I accuse myself of gluttony,” he said so loudly that shy and timid Brother Rainald, stumbled in his genuflection. Girard buried his face in his hands, but not before coveting Rainald’s lean visage and adding envy to his sins.

  “My Brother,” Rainald whispered, lightly touching Girard’s shoulder. “Pilgrims are approaching the monastery. Abbot Geoffrey asked that we finish our prayers and then greet them.”

  Girard nodded. “Hail Mary, full of grace…” he recited. And though he tried to join the Holy Mother in her infinite devotion, he could not. Between the polished words of the prayer slipped a memory of his own mother trilling her fingers through a basket of dried lentils as she prepared his father’s funeral banquet.

  On the day of the funeral, the family had slaughtered a goat and four chickens before Girard’s brother added a gray partridge to the fare. “Here,” Bernard said, returning from his early morning hunt. “Ma wants you to pluck this. And be quick about it.” His eyes, hooded in grief, hardened into arrogance at the sight of Girard.

  Sixteen-year-old Girard did not need Bernard’s contempt to remind him of his inferior position in the family. Because of his defect—a flaccid left arm that stopped six inches short of his right—Girard could not hunt. Instead, he tended the family garden and combed the nearby meadow scavenging for asparagus and watercress. His mother had promised Girard that her eldest brother would secure a place for him at the Benedictine seminary, and so Girard tolerated his role as kitchen helpmate until Bernard, two years younger than he and not nearly as bright, learned to hunt. Bernard roamed the countryside with such freedom that Girard grew jealous. And though he tried to deny his feelings, they played out in brooding silence and unexplained rashes made worse by his father’s disregard.

  Bernard Senior valued physical stamina and valor, not intellect. A practical man who thrived in the here and now, he gave barely a thought to the uncertainty of some ethereal afterlife. And while Girard found the words of the Bible lyrical and compelling, his father judged all spiritual matters womanish, distracting, and entirely too complicated. Girard’s mother strived to make up for her husband’s distance with a fawning concern Girard found claustrophobic and self-serving. “My poor baby,” she whispered, tucking him in at night. “My poor, poor little boy.”

  Shortly before his birth, she had come across a rabbit snared in a bear trap, its left foreleg mangled between the wood
en teeth and the trigger pan. Convinced that the sight had upset the careful balance of sanguine and melancholic humors in her womb, she blamed herself for her son’s deformity. Oddly, and to Girard’s dismay, her guilt often took the form of impatience. “Go get me some fennel from the garden, and be quick about it,” she had demand. Girard complied not because he was humble but because he was ambitious. He knew that if he performed the duties of a devoted son his mother would keep her promise and send him to study at seminary.

  “Are you listening?” Bernard asked, giving his brother a kick. At fourteen Bernard stood six feet tall and possessed the proud bearing of a man. After throwing the partridge at his brother’s kneeling form, Bernard headed for the house in long, sure-footed strides.

  Girard glared at Bernard, his lips caught between a smile and a grimace, as he mumbled Christ’s words to John. If the world hates you, you know that it hated me first. Picking up the game, he walked to the barn.

  Seated on a bag of grain, he positioned the partridge between his knees and fingered the throat feathers. “My poor little bird,” he said. Following the shaft of a gray capular feather, his fingers found the buried tip of the quill and tugged. “My poor, poor little bird.”

  That evening at the funeral feast Girard ate until his stomach bloated and stretched tight as a wine bladder, gorging himself on tare-flavored bouillon, roasted game marinated in wine and marjoram, chicken boiled in an aromatic broth of sage, mushroom fried in olive oil and garlic, brain flavored with vinegar, pepper, ginger, and parsley, and finally, for dessert, pears saturated in wine sauce spiced with cinnamon and cloves and topped with soft cheese. He washed his meal down with a carafe of burgundy and barely made it to the garden before his stomach erupted and nothing remained but black bile. Returning to the banquet, he refilled his platter again and yet again.

  The following week he left for seminary.

  Five years later, Brother Girard stepped through the south door of the transept of Trinity church and watched a flock of pilgrims ascend a hill and make their way towards Vendôme. A single file of pilgrims—a hundred people at least!—beaded through the horizontal spread of a cypress grove. The stunning display of silk crosses patched onto the shoulders of their cloaks took Girard’s breath away. With Brother Rainald at his side, Girard stepped into the shade of a maple where he watched a slumped figure astride a mule take the rise of a knoll.

  “More souls come to venerate the Holy Tear,” Rainald said, ignoring altogether the splendor and enormity of the group.

  “I hope there are no lepers among them,” Girard said, rubbing his tonsured skull, and contemplating his old fear. The young Girard and his mother had once stumbled across an encampment of lepers in a forested area just outside their village. His mother grabbed his hand and led him quickly away, but not before he smelled their rotting flesh and saw their blistered lesions. His mother crossed herself and muttered, “What could be worse than dying by degrees?” Girard felt her shudder to the tips of his toes.

  “But brother,” Rainald said, calling Girard back to the present. “We are all children of God! If you show partiality, then you are practicing sin.” He crossed himself and looked hopefully at his brother.

  Girard heard the shrill, high-pitched scream of a swift and lifted his head to the sound. “Yes, only some children are deformed by disease or providence,” Girard said, watching the sooty blur of the swift’s flickering ascent, “and some are not.” Lowering his head, he looked into Rainald’s startled eyes.

  “Surely one may enter the kingdom of God by the way of many afflictions,” Rainald said. He fingered the rosary belted to his waist, his lips moving in silent prayer.

  Girard sighed. Only his brother’s innocence spared him the awful knowledge that the human soul was a flawed and fragile thing. “Forgive me,” Girard said. “Of course, you are right. You should love your neighbor as yourself.”

  “It is not for me to forgive,” Rainald said, even as his face lit with gratitude.

  Girard wondered if Rainald’s cloying devotion was yet another test of his faith. Girard found the Lenten season particularly trying. At nones, the brothers received a meager ration of vegetables, black bread and cabernet, a meal that merely whetted Girard’s appetite. Rainald, on the other hand, picked at his portion before lowering his head in prayer. The man’s self control sparked in Girard a voracious cruelty that, much like his craving for food, seemed never to be sated.

  Not that he did not strive to follow the Lord’s commandments. More than anything, he longed for absolution and redemption. Eight weeks running he had asked, in the name of the healing virtues to better serve his holy community by assuming Brother André’s kitchen duties. With the best of intentions he carried out his penance, a labor made awkward by his withered arm. A wooden platter carefully balanced on the fingers of his good right hand, he walked the narrow hall that joined the refectory to the kitchen and felt a slow simmering of faith.

  And perhaps Girard would have found salvation in the sudsy water and kitchen grease if Brother Jerome had acknowledged his tentative smile. Later, it occurred to him that Jerome, a popular and passionate disciple with an imposing muscular profile, had simply not seen him in the dimly lit passageway. But his realization came too late.

  The day of Jerome’s real or imagined slight, Girard hurried to the kitchen, replaying over and over in his mind the cruelty of Jerome’s insult. With an urgency that recalled his father’s funeral feast, he gorged on the discards of his brethren—dark crusty hunks of barley bread and bowls of vegetable soup. His face smeared with cabbage and squash seed, Girard prayed to the Almighty—Forgive us our sins… And bring us not into temptation. He wept for his innumerable weaknesses of body and spirit, but still he could not stop until he had eaten every morsel of food on every plate, scraped the cooking pots, licked the great spoons, and even picked through the kitchen refuse.

  So while the other brothers grew gaunt in their Lenten abstinence, Girard grew more obese. Suffering from heartburn and nausea, he spent his nights in fitful erratic sleep.

  “Here they are,” Rainald said to Girard before mumbling to himself, “I must remind them to take no relics with them.”

  Watching the pilgrims sit down beneath the cypress, Girard was both hungry and tired. But then the cowled figure dismounted his mule and spoke—“I am Robert of Arbrissel. These pilgrims have nothing to eat”—and Girard was quite suddenly neither. The stranger’s voice, the first sound of his life that made complete sense, filled him with joy.

  Girard stepped from the shade of the maple into the afternoon sun and did not notice the difference. Looking into the eyes of the haggard pilgrim, Girard’s withered arm seemed to grow and flex.

  “The Lord be with you, Father,” Girard whispered. At seminary he had adopted a commanding, some would say arrogant, manner of speaking. Pausing dramatically between words, he had crafted an emphatic delivery. But this time, his tone was gentle and unassuming.

  An alarmed Rainald rested his hand on his brother’s shoulder. Girard shrugged off his touch.

  “And with you, my brother,” Robert said.

  Rainald opened his mouth to welcome the guest, but Girard cut him off. How many times had he listened to his brother recite the history of Trinity of Vendôme with the same annoying exhilaration?

  “Welcome to the Holy Trinity, Father,” Girard said. “I am Brother Girard and this is Brother Rainald. Please come in out of the sun, and I’ll share our history with you.”

  After Robert guided his mule into the shade, Girard cleared his throat and repeated Rainald’s lecture word for word. “In the year 1044, Geoffrey Martel, Count of Anjou, founded the church and abbey to house a sacred relic he had brought back from the Holy Land—the Holy Tear Christ shed at Lazarus’s tomb.” Girard felt his brother’s body tense, but he did not stop, for he desired all of Robert’s attention. In Robert’s presence, Girard felt a fl
ood of love and respect that knew no bounds. “Would you like to worship and sing praise for the Tear?” Girard asked.

  A young woman stepped forward. Freckled and lean with reddish-blonde hair and sun-parched lips, she looked directly into Girard’s eyes. Girard had little experience with women, but those he had known while growing up had all deferred to men, particularly clergy. This one’s behavior startled and intrigued him.

  “I am Madeleine. This man is ill with quartan fever,” she said, lifting an impossibly small hand in Robert’s direction. Girard noted the birthmark spreading her neck like a swallow of sweet rosé and felt inexplicably drawn to her. He fingered his cincture, the belted cord symbolizing his vow of chastity, and prayed for strength and guidance. Looking into her exhausted eyes, he discovered sorrow and a hesitancy of spirit that mirrored his own.

  “Please,” the woman said, “can you help him?”

  Girard thought that if he could remain forever in this place with this godly man and this sorrowful woman he would be happy. If he were never again to rise at four, never to kneel on pained knees, never to lie awake in his narrow pallet shaken by dreams of gluttony and lust, he would be happy.

  “We have an infirmary,” Rainald said. “I could take Father there myself.”

  Girard glared. “I will handle this, Brother Rainald.”

  “But…”

  “All in good time, my sons,” the man said in a voice that lifted words beyond their meaning. “First, I must see the Abbot.”

  Girard saw beyond the enormous power of his presence to his yellow-tinged skin and sunken cheeks.

  “Father…” Rainald began, but before he could complete his thought, Girard pointed to the pilgrims clustered in the shade of the cypress trees. “How many are there?” he asked.

  “A hundred. Maybe more,” Robert said.

  “Brother Girard wondered if there might be lepers among you?” Rainald asked in a sweetly insinuating voice.