Sheen on the Silk - Anne Perry [96]
Anna looked at the young man who rose slowly from the hard wooden chair and thought how odd it was for the abbot to describe her when she was only a step behind him. Then she saw the man’s face, thin and worn with pain and yet startlingly gentle. He was no more than in his twenties, but the thing that made her heart beat wildly so the blood thundered in her head and her mouth went dry was that he had no eyes. The ugly sockets were sunken, giving his face a hollow, mutilated look. With a shock like fire, she knew who he was—this was John Lascaris, whose eyes had been put out by Michael Palaeologus so he could not succeed to the throne. No wonder she reminded the abbot of the man who had come to see him—it could only be Justinian.
She choked on her own breath as it caught in her throat. “Brother John …,” she began. How desperately she wanted to tell him that she too was a Lascaris, Zarides was merely her married name, but of course that was impossible.
He nodded slowly, an instant of surprise in his expression because the abbot had not told him she was a eunuch, and her voice betrayed her. “Come in,” he invited. “Please sit down. I believe there is another chair.”
“Yes, thank you,” she accepted. This man was not only the rightful emperor, he was now held by many to be a saint, a man of holiness so close to God as to be capable of calling upon Him for miracles. But it was Justinian’s time with him that filled her mind.
“The Father Abbot told me that you had a friend who came to visit you some years ago, a man from Nicea …,” she began.
John’s face lit with pleasure. “Ah, yes. What a fire there was in him to learn. He was truly seeking God.”
“He sounds like a fine person,” she said carefully. “Would that more of us were seeking, rather than assuming we already know.”
He smiled, a sudden, radiant warmth in his sightless face. “You sound like him,” he said simply. “But perhaps a little wiser. You already begin to know how vast is our capacity yet to learn, and what we do not know is without end.”
“Is that heaven?” she asked impulsively. “Is it heaven to learn endlessly, and to love?” she explained herself. “Is that what he was looking for?”
“You care about him,” he said gently. It was not entirely a question, more a realization. “A friend? A kinsman? He did not have a brother, he said so, but a sister. He said she was a physician, a very gifted one.”
She was glad he could not see her sudden tears.
Justinian had spoken of her, even here with John Lascaris. She swallowed the tightness in her throat. “A kinsman,” she replied, needing to tell him as much truth as she could and claim the tie that was so close inside her. “But distant.”
“He was a Lascaris,” he said softly, rolling the name in his mouth as if the sound of it were sweet. “He doesn’t come anymore. I fear he was involved in something dangerous. He spoke of Michael Palaeologus, and a union with Rome, and how he wanted to save the city without either the bloodshed of war or the corruption of betrayal, but it would be almost infinitely difficult.” John Lascaris frowned, the lines puckering his forehead and deepening the other lines of pain in his face. “Something happened to him, didn’t it?”
There was no possibility of lying. “Yes, but I don’t know what it truly was. I am trying to find out. Bessarion Comnenos was murdered, and Justinian was implicated in helping the man who did it. He is in exile in Judea.”
John let out his breath in a sigh. It carried sorrow and infinite weariness. “I’m sorry. If he could have anything to do with that, then he did not find what he was seeking. I sensed that the last time he was here. He was different. It was in his voice. A disillusion.”
“Disillusion?” she asked, leaning closer to him. “With the Church … or something else?”
“My dear friend,” John said, shaking his head a fraction from side to side. “Justinian was looking for answers to questions of purpose and loneliness. He wanted reasons