“She has her due now,” said Cadfael. “But for all that, I think she might be happy to exchange her title to all that great honor for one living kinsman.”
The silence was long and cold, as if he trod upon forbidden ground. Nevertheless, he persisted doggedly. “You are a quenched fire. You have been now for years, I judge. Do not deny it, I know the signs. What God imposed, no doubt for his own good reasons, for reasons as good he has lifted away. You know it. You are a peril to no man. And whatever name you have used all these years, you are still Guimar de Massard. If she cherishes your sword, how much more would she revere and delight in you? Why deprive her now of her true shield? Or yourself of the joy of seeing her happy? Of giving her with your own hand to a husband I think you approve?”
“Brother,” said Guimar de Massard, shaking his hooded head, “you speak of what you do not understand. I am a dead man. Let my grave and my bones and my legend alone.”
“Yet there was one Lazarus,” said Cadfael, venturing far and in great awe, “who did rise again out of his tomb, to the joy of his kinswomen.”
There was a long hush while the sailing filaments of cloud were the only things that moved in the visible world. Then the old man’s unblemished right hand flashed from within the folds of the cloak, and rose to thrust back the hood. “And was this,” asked Guimar, “the face that made his sisters glad?”
He plucked away the face-cloth, and uncovered the awful visage left to him, almost lipless, one cheek shrunken away, the nostrils eaten into great, discolored holes, a face in which only the live and brilliant eyes recalled the paladin of Jerusalem and Ascalon. And Cadfael was silenced.
Lazarus again covered the ruin from sight behind the veil. The quietness and serenity came back, almost stealthily. “Never seek to roll that stone away,” said the deep, patient voice gently. “I am content beneath it. Let me lie.”
“I must tell you, then,” said Cadfael after a long silence, “that the boy has been sounding your praises to her, and she is begging him to bring her to you, since you cannot go to her, that she may thank you in person for your goodness to her lover. And since he can refuse her nothing, I think in the morning they will be here.”
“They will understand,” said Lazarus calmly, “that there’s no relying on us wandering lepers, the pilgrim kind. We have minds incorrigibly vagus. The fit comes on us, and the wind blows us away like dust. Relics, we make our way where there are relics to console us. Tell them that all is well with me.”
He put down his feet from the bench, carefully and slowly because of their condition, and courteously shook the skirts of his gown down over them, to hide the deformities. “For with the dead,” he said, “all is very well.” He rose, and Cadfael with him.
“Pray for me, brother, if you will.”
He was gone, turning away and withdrawing without another word or look. The heel of the special shoe he wore tapped sharply on the flags of the floor, and changed its note hollowly on the boards within. Brother Cadfael went out from the porch, under the slow-moving clouds that were not drifting, but proceeding with purpose and deliberation on some predestined course of their own, unhurried and unimpeded, like death.
Yes, with the dead, he thought, making his way back to the abbey in the dark, all is surely well. The child will have to find them work for their gratitude, instead. Their dead has accomplished his own burial, now let them turn rather to the living. Who knows? Who knows but the beggar-woman’s scrofulous waif, fed and tended and taught, may indeed end as page and squire to Sir Joscelin Lucy, some day? Stranger things have happened in this strangest, most harrowing and most wonderful of worlds!
The next morning, after Mass, Iveta and Joscelin came to Saint Giles, with the abbot’s sanction, and hearts full of goodwill to all those within, but seeking two in particular. The child was easily found. But the old leper called Lazarus had gone forth silently in the night, leaving no word where he was bound, and saying no farewells. They sought for him by all the roads from Shrewsbury, and sent to ask at every place of pilgrimage within three counties, but even on crippled feet he outran pursuit, by what secret ways no one ever discovered. Certain it is he came no more to Shrewsbury.