A tall brown angel. Brother Nicolas Florin paused suddenly. The tonsure had not made this young man ugly; on the contrary it lengthened his pale brow, giving him the appearance of a proud chimera.
Brother Bartolomeo de Florence was standing on his right, his eyes lowered towards his clasped hands.
Nicolas murmured in his strangely soft yet cavernous voice:
‘I am at a loss to understand why they are sending me north when I proved so useful to them here in the South during the riots last August that unleashed bloodshed and destruction on our good city. I took part in foiling the devilish plot of that depraved Franciscan, the execrable Bernard Délicieux.* Never was a name more ill suited. No, I honestly do not understand, unless they mean to honour me. Yet my instinct tells me the inverse is true.’
With a willowy hand Nicolas raised the resolutely lowered chin of his victim.
‘What is your opinion, sweet brother?’ he repeated, fixing Bartolomeo’s eyes with his soft dark gaze.
The novice’s throat was dry. He had prayed night and day for a miracle powerful enough to rid him of his tormentor, and now he dreaded the consequences. However much he reproached himself, repeated to himself ad nauseam that he had nothing to be afraid of, that the order for the transfer was signed by Cardinal Benedetti with no more mention of his name than of the true reason for the relocation, he remained uneasy. Nicolas and his insatiable desire for power, his appetite for inflicting pain, everything about this excessively beautiful, cunning creature terrified him.
The naive young Dominican had soon realised that faith was not the driving force behind his cell companion. For certain ambitious offspring of low birth, entry into the orders had always been a useful tool.
Bartolomeo had gathered from Nicolas’s circumspect confessions that his father had been a lay illuminator to Charles d’Évreux, the Comte d’Étampes. Although as a child he showed little interest in the task of colouring and lettering, his lively mind had, with the aid of the Comte’s splendid library, soaked up a fair amount of knowledge. He had been pampered and spoiled by an ageing mother for whom this late gift of a child was compensation for the years of suspicion about her ability to conceive. Added to the poor woman’s humiliation was fear, for she exercised the profession of midwife to the ladies-in-waiting of Madame Marie d’Espagne, daughter of Ferdinand II and wife of the Comte.
One day, when they were praying side by side, Nicolas had whispered in Bartolomeo’s ear in a voice that had made him tremble:
‘The world is ours if we know how to take it.’
One night, as Bartolomeo lay sleeping in the cool darkness of their cell he thought he heard the words:
‘Flesh is not earned, and only the feeble-minded share it. Flesh should be taken, snatched.’
Nicolas’s excesses had begun soon after he arrived in the town of the four mendicant convents,* which at the time boasted ten thousand inhabitants. Bartolomeo was convinced that they had contributed to the hatred the populace felt towards them and to their uprising against the royal and religious authorities.
One particular memory wrung the young Dominican’s heart. That poor girl Raimonde, who was touched in the head, and claimed to be visited at night by spirits. Encouraged by Nicolas, who preyed on her like a cat preys on a mouse, she attempted to demonstrate her powers, which she professed came from the Virgin. She stubbornly repeated incantations she claimed were capable of piercing rats and field mice. Despite the fact that her efforts ended in failure, Nicolas managed to make her admit responsibility for the death of a neighbour carried off by a mysterious summer fever, as well as for some cows miscarrying. The young Inquisitor’s case was weak, and yet he proved her guilt, arguing that the Virgin could not transmit a lethal power, even one used only against harmful rodents. The devil alone could do that in exchange for a soul. The poor mad girl’s insides hung from the rack. Her suffering had been interminable. Nicolas stared with satisfaction at the blood flowing from her entrails into the underground chamber’s central drain, dug out for the purpose. Bartolomeo had fled the Viscount’s Palace, loathing himself for his cowardice.
In reality, the young man was too rational to be able to turn a blind eye. He radiated faith, and love for his fellow man. He might have found the inner strength to rebel and even, why not, to defeat Nicolas. But a sort of evil curse of his own design prevented him. His excitement when Nicolas’s hand brushed against his arm. His unpardonable urge to justify what was simple debauchery and cruelty on the part of his cell companion. Bartolomeo loved Nicolas with a love that was anything but fraternal. He loved him and he hated him. He would gladly die and at the same time live for his next smile. Naturally, Bartolomeo was aware that monks practised sodomy, as they did concubinage. Not he. Not he who dreamt of angels as others dream of girls or finery.
The beautiful demon must go, he must vanish for evermore.
‘I am talking to you, Bartolomeo. What do you think?’
The novice mustered all his strength to reply in a steady voice:
‘I see in it only a sign of approval. Surely it is not a reprimand, much less a punishment.’
‘But you will miss me, will you not?’ Nicolas taunted him.
‘Yes …’
He spoke the truth and it made him want to weep with rage, and sorrow too. The firm belief that his morbid fascination for Nicolas would be the only insurmountable ordeal he must endure devastated him.