The Serpent Garden - Judith Merkle Riley

by The Serpent Garden (epub)

  —RENAISSANCE DRAWINGS AT THE GETTY. Exhibition catalog

  I made THIS PICTURE AT MISTRESS ANNE’S REQUEST TO SEND TO HER FATHER, BUT THEN BECAUSE OF THINGS THAT HAPPENED IT DID NOT GET SENT AND SO I KEPT IT WITH MY OTHER DRAWINGS FOR A LONG TIME. Mistress Anne was brown-haired and slender, and most clever and interesting in conversation, as well as skilled in several kinds of music. She also had a sixth finger on one hand, which she usually hid in a fold in her skirt except when she was playing, but I did not draw that, because it would have annoyed her. I would never have thought her destined to be a queen, but that is how it turned out, although it is not part of my story. I always thought she was more likely to wed some rich country gentleman and spend her time telling him how to get on at court, which she was very good at. Perhaps that would have been a better idea.

  Eighteen

  THE Queen of France, her eyes red with weeping, sat in her chamber at Abbeville, dictating a letter to her secretary. It was a desperate letter, written in haste to her brother, the King of England. Around her sat a dozen of her ladies, pale with the disgrace of being sent home. In the outer chambers, in the kitchens, the storage rooms, the stables of the old stone house, men and women, stiff with shock, talked numbly to each other. How would they pay for the voyage home? What other household might employ them? Servants were aplenty in England. Musicians, cooks, stable hands might never find another place. The eight trumpeters clustered grimly in the courtyard, their voices bitter. How many lords were so great that they required trumpeters? From the height of the world, service to a queen, they had been tumbled into the abyss with the rest.

  “I must pay them something…” the queen broke off in the middle of the letter. “How will they manage? They have served me honestly.”

  “You must ask the King of France to pay their passage home,” said the secretary, looking up from his writing.

  “Whatever you do, don’t anger him,” added one of her ladies. “Wait until he sends for you. Then be most kindly and gentle. If you are demanding, he will harden. Instead, beguile him. Then you must beg sweetly, prettily….”

  The hysterical girl paused, horrified. Was this what it meant to be a queen? To be a beggar surrounded by scheming foreigners? Why had no one told her? Why had she not understood?

  “But I must have my Mother Guildford. Who will advise me if I have no one older and wiser near me? Oh, if only my lord of York were here. He is subtle, he would surely convince the king not to send away my good Mother Guildford.” Her eyes were frantic. She felt she was stifling. Oh yes, the letter. She must tell the king, her brother. Mother Guildford had been taken ill with the news, and without her steady presence in the room, the girl-queen could already feel how lost and isolated she would be with her gone.

  “You must write to my lord of York when you are done with this letter to the king. For while he will surely act from brotherly affection, my lord of York will advise him of some clever web of intrigue to get us back to you,” advised one of her gentleman-ushers. Yes, it had to be. The Archbishop of York was shrewd and subtle. Wolsey would think of something terribly clever. He would advise her brother. They would make the King of France take back her servants.

  “Begin again where we left off,” she said to her secretary. Pausing, she breathed deeply to regain her control. “Tell him I am left alone, for on the morn after my marriage my chamberlain and all other men servants were discharged, and in likewise my Mother Guildford with all my other women and maidens, except such as never had experience to give me counsel in my time of need, which is more to be feared than your grace thought at the time of my departing, as my Mother Guildford will show you more plainly than I can write, to whom I beseech you to give credence…” Mother Guildford must tell King Henry the whole story in private, the part that could not be written, the part that would send him to her defense. He must hear that her physician had told her the King of France would most likely not live long enough to get her with child, that the heir apparent was pressing his unwanted attentions on her, that her honor was in danger, that all of England’s grand dreams were on the verge of blowing away like smoke. Oh, yes, Mother Guildford must tell it all. She was abandoned here, in a court of intrigues too deep for her to fathom. Surely then, the King of England would somehow send Mother Guildford back to her again to tell her how to thread her way through the maze. He must.

  That afternoon, the king sent for her. Pale, frightened, but determined, she took her lute to his sickbed. At the sight of her, so humble, so determined to be charming, the king’s sunken eyes lit up, and the hint of a wolfish smile curved his pallid lips. I am not yet too old to break this little filly to the bridle, he thought.

  “Play me some music of England,” he said. “I would be merry today.” First she played an air, then sang, in her pretty, light, girl’s voice. Charming, thought the king. For hours she played. Spanish pavanes, English ballads, Italian airs. Sometimes the king listened with closed eyes, lying back on the pillows. Then he would sit up with a start, trying to conceal the signs of his growing weakness. She told him a riddle. He laughed. Delicious, he thought.

  “My lord,” she said, so sweetly that he thought she might be begging for some trifling toy, “might I ask one boon?” He nodded benignly. “Of all my servants, my dear old Mother Guildford has been my guide since infancy, could you not spare one…” Suddenly, the girl found herself looking at two hard, black stones, set in a fearful skull barely covered with an old man’s parchmentlike skin.

  “I will not hear that woman’s name mentioned in my presence,” said the King of France.

  The queen broke off, frightened. She could hear her own heart beating, and her hands were clammy with the cold realization that she was no longer a petted princess, immune to the fearful dangers of court life. This man could do anything he wished with her. But beneath her fright, she could feel rage rising. Tudor rage, violent, passionate. Who was this old man that he thought he had a right to suck away her youth and joy? He was like some creature from the grave that needed to feast on the living to retain unnatural life.

  “You will soon learn to be happy without her,” said the king. “Besides, you should seek to please me in all things.”

  “My lord and king, that is my only desire,” she said, bowing her head. Before this moment, she had seen only the king, the glory, the honor and wealth. Now she saw the man, and plainly. He is missing teeth, she thought, and his breath smells bad. His skin is old and putrid with disease. His body is corrupt and repulsive. I have been cheated. I have been sold. And it is my brother who did this. No, he will not send Mother Guildford back to me. He knew all along. He took the risk, but it is I who must pay. I will be destroyed here in France. For the first time in her short and spoiled life, the girl-queen knew true fear.

  Two days later, a grand procession departed from Abbeville in the direction of Paris. Hundreds of French soldiers, mounted guardsmen, and nobles on heavy horses trapped out in gold and velvet led the vanguard. In their midst was the King of France, borne on a litter carried by two black mares, and the Queen of France, mounted, at his side. Behind her rode those few of the English that were still in her suite, her almoner, her physician, her master of the horse, a half dozen ladies. Following them, her heavy gilded wagons, loaded with dowry plate, labored through the churned-up mud, and French stable boys, perched atop her spare heavy horses, led the long train of her white palfreys. Farther back, with the baggage train of mules, a few minor attendants, ushers, and grooms mingled with the army of French servants that followed the king wherever he went. Awestruck peasants pulled off their hats and knelt in the mud as the procession passed the wintering farms and little villages on the way. It was the sight of a lifetime: the King of France and his beautiful English princess on the way to Saint Denis and her coronation.

  From Abbeville on the same day, a long, straggling parade of English departed in the opposite direction. Heavily bundled against the cold, clumps of nobles were followed by their pack mules. Behind
them, beneath the steel gray sky, followed hundreds of servants, strung out along the muddy road on foot, carrying all they had on their backs. Ahead of them were Boulougne and the dangerous late-fall crossing of the Channel.

  Nineteen

  WHY ever did they bury a lawyer so near the church? Someone’s bound to hear us.” The hour was just past midnight, and in the black sky, a half moon seemed to have entangled itself in the barren branches above the little country churchyard. Beyond them the gray stone of the square, Norman church tower shone dully in the moonlight.

  “Trouble enough for us that he went and had himself buried in this village, Master,” said a burly man carrying a torch and a shovel.

  “The damned wretch should have been buried in unconsecrated ground. It was his own fault he died. He shouldn’t have crossed me, and that, I’d say, is suicidal, wouldn’t you?” Crouch chuckled briefly at his own joke. “Well, he’s in no position to refuse me anymore.” Septimus Crouch smiled wolfishly as he took out his long, white, necromancer’s wand. He gloried in the cold breeze that ruffled his dark, horned hair and brought to him the faint odor of decay. His nostrils flared, and his cold green eyes glittered with incipient madness. Tonight, the dead would talk, and at last the middle portion of the book of prophecies would be in his hands. Ludlow was a fool, to think he could elude him even in death. Crouch’s assistants, who were his cook and his lackey, dipped their torches so that he could sprinkle the proper mixture of henbane, hemlock, opium, and mandrake into the fire. “Now,” Crouch commanded, drawing his sword from beneath the long, black ritual gown he was wearing, “the circle.” With the sword’s point he described a counterclockwise circle in the dirt around the lawyer Ludlow’s grave. The soggy ground, not yet sunken and hardened over the coffin, was quickly thrown back, and there was the sound of iron hitting wood.

  “Berald, Beroald, Balbin, Gab, Gabor, Agaba, arise, arise, I charge and command thee,” chanted Crouch, touching his long magic want to the coffin lid.

  “I wouldn’t bother with that if I were you,” a sly, insinuating voice said. Swiftly, Crouch looked over his shoulder in the direction of the churchyard gate.

  “Oh, I’m not there, I’m up here,” said the voice. There was something about it that made even Crouch’s flesh crawl. His assistants, hardened to their master’s experiments, looked up in horror. A steamy sort of thing, like breath on a cold day, was swirling up above them, directly over the coffin.

  “Avaunt, spirit, whatever you be,” said Crouch, holding up the talisman that he wore around his neck.

  “Avaunt, indeed, piffle,” said the demon, and Crouch recognized the taunting voice from the mirror. Belphagor. In the shape of the grayish mist, shining in the moonlight, Crouch could see the form of an ugly creature with a long nose, little narrow eyes, bushy eyebrows, and scrawny arms with very long, ugly fingers. The figure was entirely naked. Analytically, Crouch noted a goat’s tail and hairy legs like a goat’s forming up in the mist. This is the most he’s ever manifested himself, thought Crouch. He must have been feeding very plentifully somewhere. Has he goat hooves as well? But the long, skinny feet, with knobby toes, each knob growing a tuft of hair, were not at all like a goat’s. And as the creature turned full face toward him, Crouch saw that he was equipped in a manner that far excelled any goat. Fascinating, thought Crouch, the demon master. A distant amusement stirred Crouch as he realized suddenly what kept bringing the demon to him. Why, he feeds on the emanation of my crimes, following me the way some starving cur follows a butcher with a string of sausages. That’s how he’s gained so much substance, compared to the previous times I’ve seen him. It explains why he keeps popping up, stirring my mind into some new rage. Carefully, Crouch, carefully, and you’ll be able to lure him into your hand. After all, it’s not as if I were dealing with a mind of the quality of Lucifer’s.

  “Lord Belphagor, what has led you to grace our humble essay at necromancy?” said Crouch, beaming on the swirling, misty thing, and bowing genteelly.

  “You’ve done it wrong,” said Belphagor. “You’ll never raise his corpse that way.”

  “What do you mean? I’ve eaten dog’s flesh for nine days, and I’ve worn a used winding sheet since the sun went down yesterday. I think I have everything in order. You’re not speaking to an amateur, you know.” Crouch’s voice was arrogant and assured.

  “You ate salt,” answered Belphagor.

  “I did not,” said Crouch.

  “Master,” said the cook. Crouch whirled on him, cracking his wand across the burly man’s shoulders.

  “It’s you. You salted something.”

  “Master, I didn’t. But remember the bread you bought? Straight from the baker with never a thought. I told you you shouldn’t.”

  “Ha!” said Belphagor. “I told you so. Never contradict a demon. Now, listen to me, Crouch. I’ve decided to reveal the hidden treasures of the earth to you in return for a few favors.”

  “My soul perhaps? Regrettably, I’ve already signed a contract for it to Lord Beelzebub, but I’m sure with a person of your stature in the infernal, an arrangement can be made….”

  “Your soul’s a joke, Crouch. I don’t want a used soul in that condition. I do have some standards, you know. Now a nice virgin, or a pious widow, or maybe a new little priest, all fired up with virtue, those are good souls to have. Hardly used, all fresh. Yours is shopworn. No, I need something else. I hear you’re an expert in antiquities. What do you know about genealogy?”

  “I know a great deal. It’s part of the study of antiquities, and a fit subject for study for any noble gentleman. Is it something you wished to take up, your lordship? I can only commend my own poor talents to your glorious self. How honored I would be to instruct you. I can trace the line of the Caesars straight into the great houses of modern times, with only two breaks. I know ancient seals, heraldry, the descent of kings….”

  “Yes, this’s what I want. Royal houses. What do you know about King Philip of France, from around, ah, let’s see, your time, 1312. He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “Ah, you mean Philippe the Fair of the house of Capet. Yes, he is, regrettably, dead.”

  “Then that wretched feather ball was right,” muttered the demon to himself.

  “What’s that you said, Lord Belphagor? How may I serve you further?” Crouch was an expert at sensing weakness, even in demons. Something has made him desperate for this knowledge, he thought. Tease out the cause. Gently, gently. Flatter him. Make yourself indispensable.

  “I need to know his house. Who rules in France now?”

  “The Valois rule. They are the cadet branch of the Capetians.”

  “Then they’re still there. Ten thousand curses! I’ll have a terrible job, finding them and rooting them all out,” muttered Belphagor.

  “Is Your Grace in need of expert assistance?”

  “Not grace, you idiot,” said the demon, swirling upward in a rage, “Your Damnedness, if you please.” The two quaking assistants had dropped their torches, crouched down, and put their arms over their heads, but Septimus Crouch still stood upright, his green eyes as hard as diamonds, his mind calculating at full speed.

  “Why, yes indeed, yes, yes, Your Damnedness.” Touchy beggar, thought Crouch.

  “Much better,” said Belphagor, and the steamy stuff settled toward the ground and firmed up. Crouch’s assistants had fainted. Puffing, Crouch knelt down and picked up a sputtering torch before it went out in the damp mud. Fascinated, he held it near the demon, the better to behold him. Belphagor folded his arms and smirked. “Seen enough? Now, let’s get down to business. I need to travel on this earth among men. I had plans to get a body for it, but…someone spoiled them.”

  “Indeed. Had you planned a possession?”

  “No, they’re hard to keep. I was going to be born.” The demon confides in me already, Crouch exulted. Get him to reveal more, and you shall own him at last, he said to himself.

  “A pity, I do commiserate,” said Crouch, looking
touched. Belphagor cocked his smoky head to one side, inspecting him. As a demon of destruction, he always knew the right thing to say to cause the most trouble.

  “You’d be more touched if you knew what you’re looking for was not hidden by that dead man. Always look for a woman when you’re looking for trouble. It will save you the bother of rummaging in that grave.”

  “Susanna Dallet, that lying little vixen!” Crouch exclaimed, almost dropping his torch in his excitement and rage. Belphagor swirled happily above him now.

  “Do you want her?”

  “I want her body—in pieces. I want the manuscript she hid from me. Who is she working for? Wolsey? I swear, she’s Wolsey’s agent. Has she sold it to him? Did Ashton get it from her?”

  “She’s off to France, on that fat churchman’s orders,” announced Belphagor.

  “The Valois. Damn. The manuscript goes to them, to thwart the plan of the Priory. I can’t expect a penny from the Valois.” Crouch clenched his jaw and began to pace back and forth before the open grave.

  “What is all this mumbling? What’s on that bit of parchment?”

  “The Secret that will unseat the Valois from their throne. It’s the center of a conspiracy. Get hold of that paper, and you can sell it to half the monarchs in Europe. It will cause untold trouble….”

  “Trouble? Then I’m with you on this, you dear, malicious man. Trouble for the Valois. Listen, Crouch, I need a human assistant. Someone who knows how you creatures breed, so I won’t make any mistakes.” Belphagor’s large eyebrows twitched, and his face grew greener in the torchlight. He dipped and hovered close to Crouch, peering at him as if nearsighted. “Besides,” he went on, “you humans all look alike to me. Well, with the exception of someone like you, so excellently shaped, you understand, with such a lovely whiff of evil about you. It makes problems for me, you see. It’s just a little task, but once it’s done, I’ll reveal the treasures of the earth to you. Oh yes, and power, too. Glory? Fame? The sexual services of your choice, in great abundance? You can have all that if you like. The whole thing—it’s yours, once this is done. Agreed?”