Chapter Text
The whole body is supported by bones and cartilages in combination and all its parts are attached to, and stabilised by, them.
The skeleton of anything is what gives it its shape. Guy Malton’s life has been shaped by places, and languages, and names.
His earliest memories are from Mālaqa, which later became Málaga. The walls of the buildings golden or rosy like the sun-warmed cobbles under his feet. The sky and the sea both brilliant blue. Warm sun and the sweet-sharp scent of orange blossom. The gentle music of Arabic. His name was Mohammed, like the prophet (peace be upon him), and Elakbar, like his father, whom he esteemed almost as highly. He ate olives and pomegranates. He would rather remember those things than the siege that eventually broke the city and put his family to flight.
Before they ran, they converted. He was baptised on the feast day of Saint Guy of Anderlecht, so he was given the name Guido. His parents attended church scrupulously but he was never certain whether they became Christians in their hearts. Guy, on the other hand… He had already known stories of Jesus from the Quran, but when he learned of Him as an aspect of God, and saw his parents’ heavy crucifix, he wondered at the idea of a God you could see, who had once walked the earth.
The mystery of the Trinity, the tragedy of the Crucifixion, and the miracle of the Resurrection filled him with awe. And the paintings and stained glass depictions of the saints: people you could have met, could perhaps have been friends with, whose tombs you could visit…for a small boy who had lost almost everything, it was a new, greater community—a community that he could ask to hold his family safe and who were always close at hand in any new city or town. Saint Guy himself, a poor man who had cared for the needy and travelled far on pilgrimage, became a companion of young Guido’s heart.
Some cities and towns are unimportant, cartilage at best. A few months in Toledo; a strange passage through Navarre, where the Basques spoke neither the Latin of the Spaniards, nor the Arabic of his childhood, nor the French he would soon learn; half a year in Rouen; these and others are a blur. If they needed a surname on their travels through Spain, they just used “de Málaga”. In France, they adopted “Legrand” as a reasonable translation of “Elakbar”. It led to some teasing until he got his full growth, but many children are teased. It was better to be teased for his surname than his skin; he had chosen the name and might cast it off again one day. He changed his first name, too, from the Latinised Guido to Guy.
The next stable point in his life was Louvain. Louvain, where his parents were not afraid. Louvain, where he first took formal religious instruction, learned to read and write Latin, eventually went to medical school.
The buildings of Louvain were of grey stone and sometimes red brick, full of pointed arches and glass windows. These grey buildings were made to hold the heat in, unlike the golden adobe and sandstone buildings of Málaga, which were made to let it out. In Spain, the buildings invite breezes; in the Low Countries, they try to exclude drafts.
Fruit here was apples and pears and berries, not oranges and lemons and pomegranates. Those sunny, sharply fragrant fruits were available, of course—it was an international city and near major ports—but they were imported and expensive, and there were not gardens full of those glossy-leaved, fragrant trees.
If Málaga for him was a city of sun and salt, Louvain was a city of glass and books. Here he learned the French of the ruling class—not so very different from Latin—and the Flemish of the people, entirely new to him.
And from Louvain he could walk to Anderlecht, home of his namesake, and visit the tomb of Saint Guy.
Three times he took that day-long walk.The first time was when they moved to Louvain; the second was when he decided to study medicine; the third when he decided to leave the Continent for a post he had been offered in the household of a minor noble in England.
After he finished his medical qualifications, there were more blurred cities, more diffuse connective tissue. No appointment lasted very long; jealousy and suspicion always found a target in a man with dark skin, a foreign accent, a Moslem past. He lasted longer in Malton than he did in most places; the people seemed to accept him and value his care of them. But he could not stop himself slipping away many days to hear the hours chanted at the Gilbertine priory in Old Malton.
When he finally answered the call of his heart to the monastery at Scarnsea, he thought he had found a home for life. The buildings were cold and his room small but his heart was large. To the community of the saints was added a family of brothers. Within that family, he was known as Brother Guy of Malton, just as the other monks had names like Brother Mortimus of Kelso and Brother Gabriel of Ashford. He cared for their bodies and they collectively cared for each others’ souls. None of them was perfect—it is a fallen world, after all—but the rhythm of the sacred hours and the liturgical year were a haven for him. He had learned English (not unlike Dutch) in his former posts, but now he could also bathe in the sea of the Latin chant five times a day.
And then Matthew Shardlake came, and that life ended in a storm of violence and finally a tumble of walls and he had to start over one more time. He would have gone back to Louvain if he could, but the clash of nations prevented it. He went to London as the most cosmopolitan city in England—a poor second-best to Louvain, but Matthew was there, and he helped Guy (now Guy Malton, that monastic “of” swept away like the rest of that life) to begin yet again. London was dirty and noisy after the tranquillity of Scarnsea and English was almost the only language he heard but slowly, slowly, so slowly, he began to believe that after all his journeys he might have found a place where he could stay.