FromChapter 2

Maybe she should not have given him so much herbed wine. Dame Agatha had been upbraiding her lately for dispensing too many pain-relieving infusions, reminding her that pain was humanity's inheritance from the Fall and that, if offered up in a spirit of penitence, it was pleasing to God. But every time the man returned to consciousness, he moaned and wailed and thrashed about like someone damned. The patients downstairs would cross themselves and bite their nails, and Ingrid was so distracted that she was useless to all of them. So the man got his medicine.

All day he had been writhing on the cot, neither awake nor deeply asleep, sweating under the twisted blankets that she kept doing her best to smooth. The room smelled like the inside of a wineskin. The shutters on the only window had been bolted for years. She struggled for several minutes before they gave way, all at once, to fresh air and light.      

The setting sun cast a streak of gold across the floorboards and over the man's dozing form. His right arm was thrown across his face, and Ingrid could see the deep armpit with its fine, moist hairs. His skin, which took on the color of the fading light, was stretched taut over his bones, the rib cage lifted gently by his breathing. Since she last looked in on him he had kicked the blankets off, and now they covered only his splinted leg. The good leg bent inward in such a way that his pelvis protruded sharply and she could see the pale smooth crescent of his buttock. The sight of him evoked a queer tenderness, a seasickness in her womb. Though she had never seen a naked man before, something about the slight palmward curl of the fingers, the plaited muscles, the jutting bone of his hip—something about this sight and this tenderness was not unknown to her.

The blood rushed to her face as she realized what it was. The man reminded her of the crucifix in the chapel, the one Lady Ladbrook had given them. Dame Agatha detested it, and Ingrid was furtive about her own feeling for it. The straining body against the uncompromising geometry of the wood seemed to her all the rebellion in the world, and all surrender. The sad face, the feet curled one atop the other, the bones so raw they seemed to bruise the flesh from within—she wanted to take it all into some safe, secret part of her own body, to cherish and heal it.