‘That’s it? He stabbed me in the heart but my heart wasn’t where it was supposed to be – so he missed?’ I said. It sounded wonderfully absurd.
‘Well, he also missed the major veins and arteries, but yes, that’s it. It’s not even all that uncommon – I remember reading a treatise in Montpellier recently by a much-fêted Arab physician who claimed that one person in ten thousand had been made by God this way. Think of it as being left-handed, but inside your body. No more sinister than that. Ha-ha!’
I acknowledged his feeble joke with a smile. But then Reuben’s face turned grave: ‘I’m not saying it was easy for me: your left lung collapsed and filled with fluid, and I had to drain it with a hollow reed, through a water valve – you will have noticed that beautifully stitched cut under your left armpit – but I won’t confuse your simple brain with the details of my extraordinary skill as a surgeon, nor of my miraculous healing powers as a physician …’
‘Or your world-renowned modesty …’ I murmured.
‘… but in short, you are alive because of the way your organs are arranged – that is it!’ Reuben’s dark face was lit by a grin. And I could not but be warmed by his smile and comforted by his presence at my bedside.
‘I thank you,’ I said, smiling wanly back at him, ‘and I give thanks to God for your miraculous healing powers.’
And I meant it, but while I was grateful to Reuben and his skill, I knew in my heart that I had been saved by God, and that St Michael, the warrior archangel to whom I often prayed, must also have had a hand in my deliverance.
It was then three weeks since the fight in the chapel, and I had spent all that time recovering from my wound in the small cell in the Hotel-Dieu. A rib had been smashed by Eustace’s strike, my lung had been punctured, and I had lost a lot of blood – but, by the grace of God, the assistance of St Michael and, of course, my undeniably skilled physician friend, I was still alive.
I was not, however, in very good shape. I was as weak as a crippled baby mouse, and it still hurt very much even to breathe – but worst of all was the soul-crushing guilt.
I recalled the moment when Hanno was killed over and over again in my head. It was entirely my fault that he was dead: I had foolishly led him into extreme danger and he had not survived it. And, only a little less troubling than the passing of my friend, when Reuben’s drugs allowed me some shallow sleep, I saw the faces of all the men who had died as a result of my quest to clear my father’s name: Owain the Bowman, Father Jean of Verneuil and those other scores of Locksley men who died on that castle’s walls and in that gore-steeped stable; Brother Dominic, Cardinal Heribert, Master Fulk; the nameless man in the Grand Chastelet gaol, whom I killed with my empty hands just so as to have some-where to sit – even the Knights of Our Lady that I cut down in the rainstorm, who for all their violence believed they were serving the Mother of God.
These shades crowded around my sickbed in the small hours of the night, and silently scolded me for my pride. Sometimes Sir Eustace de la Falaise appeared too, with his lance-dagger projecting from his fist, and he would plunge it into Hanno’s ghostly chest again and again. And I would awake, covered in sweat, my pounding heart threatening to tear my chest apart. These dead men would be alive today had I not been so determined to seek revenge.
The Master – or Brother Michel or the ‘man you cannot refuse’ or Trois Pouces or whatever name he was now travelling under – had fled Paris with Sir Eustace and a handful of the Knights of Our Lady. No one knew where he had gone to, but a safe wager was that he had found refuge with his gangs of bandits in the lawless woods south of Paris. The Master, once the strong right hand of the second most powerful man in Paris, had become a hors-la-loi, an outlaw. But I felt no satisfaction; indeed, I felt like a hapless hunter who had been thrashing blindly in the undergrowth seeking a hare, and who had stumbled upon an angry wild boar, been brutally savaged for his temerity, and then had allowed the beast to escape unharmed.
Robin had visited me daily with news and titbits of Parisian food that he felt sure would restore my strength: delicate pastries, sticky sweetmeats and expensive wines. Many of them I could not eat, for Reuben’s drugs killed my appetite along with my pain, and so I passed them on to the elderly monk who brought me gruel and water and washed my body and changed the bedding. Robin was staying as a guest of Bishop de Sully in the episcopal palace – while the old man himself preferred to remain in the Abbey of St Victor and nurse his ailing health. I gathered that Robin had pressured the Bishop into caring for me, and into providing him with accommodation. I would receive the finest care in the Hotel-Dieu, while I recovered from my wound, I was made to understand, and Robin would remain silent about fact that de Sully’s trusted amanuensis had been a murderous gang-master, and that the building of the cathedral of Notre-Dame had been funded by blood money stolen from innocent travellers.