“Well,” Kate said, “for God’s sake, take care of yourself and don’t do anything stupid like you tried that day with the young drunk. You could get hurt.”
His face relaxed into amusement, and something more. They could see, shining clear as day, the regained source of his serenity. “The Lord is my light and my salvation,” he said simply. “Whom shall I fear?”
Twenty-Eight
Yet the friends of St. Francis have really contrived to leave behind a portrait; something almost resembling a devout and affectionate caricature.
Brother Erasmus, he who once was the Reverend Professor David Matthew Sawyer, spent the next twelve days with his old friend Eve Whitlaw at the house she had borrowed in Noe Valley. When Easter morning dawned, however, he was not at her house; he was not even in San Francisco.
Neither Kate nor Al ever saw him after that. But among the homeless, the marginal, the discarded citizens of a number of large cities, the people of the street talk about Brother Erasmus. They say that he was a rich man who humbled himself, and that he had a small black-and-white dog, a sort of familiar spirit, who was killed by a demon man, who in turn was vanquished by Erasmus. They say that he healed a sick boy; that he foretold the future; that he transported himself magically across the waters.
They say he is dead. They also say that he lives and walks the streets unrecognized. Some call him a saint. Others say he was a fool.
These things they say about the man who called himself Brother Erasmus.
And they are all true.
Also by Laurie R. King
Kate Martinelli novel
A Grave Talent
Mary Russell novel
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice:
On the Segregation of the Queen
The chapter headings come from G. K. Chesterton’s biography of St. Francis of Assisi (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1924).
The passage quoted on Chapter 12 and the reference on Chapter 11 to the modern Irish community of Fools are to be found in John Saward, Perfect Fools, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.
TO PLAY THE FOOL. Copyright © 1995 by Laurie R. King. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
King, Laurie R.
To play the fool / Laurie R. King.
p. cm.
“A Thomas Dunne book.”
ISBN: 978-0-312-11907-2
I. Title.
PS3561.I4813T6 1995
813′.54—dc20 94-40981
CIP
Laurie R. King, To Play the Fool
(Series: # )
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