Sheen on the Silk - Anne Perry [64]
Surprised and pleased by the vehemence of his response, she found herself smiling. “What ailments will we be most likely to find, so I can bring the best herbs?”
“Hunger and fear,” he replied ruefully. “But we will also find diseases of the lungs and of the stomach, and no doubt of the skin, from poverty, insect infestations, and dirt. Bring what you can.”
“I’ll be here,” she promised.
She went with Constantine at least two days in every week. They traveled the poorer areas down by the docksides, the back streets, narrow and cramped. There were so many sick, especially during the summer heat when there was little rain to clear the gutters and flies swarmed everywhere. It was a difficult course to steer between the spiritual ailments and the bodily ones. It was even more so with Constantine so close and the certainty that all she said to a patient could be repeated back to him.
Often a patient would say to her, “I’ve repented, why aren’t I getting better?”
“You are,” she would reply. “But you must also take the medicine. It will help.” Then she tried to bring back to her memory all the appropriate saints to pray to for the specific illness and realized in doing so that she did not believe it at all. But they did, and that was what mattered. “Pray to St. Anthony the Abbot,” she would add. “And put on the ointment.” Or whatever was right for the problem.
Gradually she let slip from her mind the part Constantine had played in the riots. He loved the people, and he was tireless in ministering to them. He had a purity of thought and a strength of faith that eased away the fear that crippled so many.
Always he comforted them. “God will never abandon you, but you must have faith. Be loyal to the Church. Do the best you can, always.”
She too felt the need for someone who knew more than she did and whose certainty healed her own gnawing doubts. How could she deny it to anyone else?
At the end of one particularly long day, tired and hungry, she was glad to accept the invitation to return to his home and eat with him.
The meal was simple, bread and oil, fish, and a little wine, but with the poverty she had seen in the last weeks, abundance would have been close to obscene.
She sat opposite Constantine at the table in the quiet summer evening. It was late and the torches were all that lit the night, throwing warm, yellow radiance onto the walls, catching the flash of a gold icon. The fish was finished and the plates removed, only bread, oil, and wine were left, along with an elegant ceramic bowl of figs.
She looked across at him. The lines in his smooth face were deep with tiredness, his shoulders slumped under the weight of other people’s pain.
He became aware of her glance and looked up, smiling. “Something troubles you, Anastasius?” he asked.
She ached to tell him and be rid of the burden of guilt that sometimes weighed so heavily that she was not sure she could ever stand upright beneath it. And of course she could say nothing.
He was watching her now, his eyes searching.
“Yes, I am troubled,” she said at last, crumbling bread absentmindedly in her fingers. “But then I imagine many people are. I was called to treat the emperor a short time ago …”
He looked up, startled, and then a darkness came into his face, but he did not interrupt her.
“I could not help becoming more aware of some of his views,” she continued. “Of course, I didn’t discuss such things with him. I think he is committed to union with Rome, whatever the cost, because he believes there will be another invasion if we remain separate.” She gazed at Constantine steadily. “You know better than he does the poverty we have. How much worse will it be if there is another crusade, and it comes through here again?”
His heavy hand on the table clenched until it formed a fist, knuckles white. “Look about you!” he said urgently. “What is beautiful, precious, and honest in our lives? What keeps us from the sins of greed and cruelty, of the violence that despoils what is good?