I think I struggled against his embrace for a moment. Indeed, just then, I hated him more than the Bourc Camus. There is nothing worse than knowing that you have done wrong, and been seen to do it. Nothing.
Well, I still have the scar. Eh?
We were twenty days to Avignon, and mostly it was a wasted trip. But my cheek healed, to my relief and I saw my sin and my disfigurement together, and I swore a great oath to never fornicate again – an oath which I confess I’ve broken more than once or twice. When my cheek knitted we were high in the Savoyard passes, and I stopped at a roadside chapel and left a gold florin and a small silver cross.
We jousted. The weather was good, and I was a better lance than I had been, and Fiore was experimenting with lances and swords on horseback. He spent days trying to use his low guard with a lance against my lance, and I dropped him on one Savoyard field a dozen times before he snorted and agreed that his technique did not apply on horseback.
We arrived at Avignon and it, too, was like a home. The four of us had lived there almost a year, after all, and we got good rooms in the Hospital this time because most of the garrison had been dismissed. My room had a lovely glass window, a fine desk, a bed and a magnificent applewood and ivory crucifix of our lord in his passion that I admired so much that I took to using it as a focus for meditation. Fiore was excited by breathing that summer – breathing exercises, of course – and he taught us how to breathe in his own peculiar way as a sidelight to prayer, and the three of us practised it a great deal, because there was little else for us to do.
Father Pierre Thomas was there, too. He was in apartments at the palace, as if he was a great prelate, and indeed, I discovered that my spiritual father was now a powerful bishop with a magnificent amethyst on his thumb. When I met him, I kissed it, and he laughed.
‘You know,’ he said softly, ‘I’ve lost it twice?’
‘It is blessed by God!’ I said.
He looked away. ‘I could feed twenty poor women for a year on this ring,’ he said. ‘That is its value.’ His eyes met mine.
I have heard of men with burning eyes – fanatics. Pierre Thomas was not one such. His eyes were brown and large and held nothing but love – all the time. But that summer he was deep in the matters of the Court of Avignon – the papal curia. The death of King John had thrown yet another blow at his crusade project, and again he had to repair the rent fabric of the church, cajole men to do their duties … Indeed, it was at times difficult to watch. He was so absolutely humble that he would accept what we, his knights, saw as insults; would accept them with bent head and a smile.
At any rate, after my audience with him, he introduced me to his squire, Miles Stapleton. Miles was also a donat of the Order, younger than me, and far better born. And deeply pious, like Juan more than me. He was my size, with broad shoulders, blue eyes, and light-brown hair, another of Father Pierre’s Englishmen, as they called us.
He had a smile as solid as his shoulders. ‘Father Pierre has spoken of you,’ he said, as if that was the highest praise a man could receive. Well, I suspect I shared that view, at least while I was in his presence.
Miles joined our little group – Fiore, Juan, and Miles and I. I was the worldly one, and a belted knight. Juan and Miles were better born, far richer, and far, far more religious. Fiore – well, he was what he was: tall, odd, and difficult to have around.
Unless you happened to be fighting.
We’d been a week or two in Avignon and nothing seemed to be happening. The rumour was that the crusade was cancelled because the King of France was dead. Peter of Cyprus – it was the summer of Peters, as far as I was concerned – was supposed to be in Avignon, but he’d stayed in Rheims to see the new king of France crowned and to persuade him to take the cross.
We were sitting in my favourite inn in Avignon, drinking wine.