In Pursuit of the Green Lion

by Judith Merkle Riley

  ALSO BY JUDITH MERKLE RILEY

  A Vision of Light

  The Master of All Desires

  The Serpent Garden

  The Oracle Glass

  The Water Devil

  for

  MARLOW

  with love

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am grateful for the loving support of my husband, Parkes, my son Marlow, and my daughter Elizabeth, who read the manuscript and offered valuable criticism. I also owe much to the intelligent insight of my editor, Carole Baron, and the encouragement and wisdom of my agent, Jean Naggar.

  As always, among the great pleasures of working on a book with a widerange of historical sources are the hours spent in splendid libraries. I am particularly appreciative of the outstanding medieval resources of the Henry E. Huntington Library of San Marino, California, where a large part of the background research for this book was completed. I would also like to thank the Honnold Library of the Claremont Colleges and the Pomona City Library. But most especially, I wish to acknowledge the contribution of the Francis Bacon Foundation Library, for it is from the pages of its alchemical collection that the Green Lion leapt whole one sunny fall morning.

  PROLOGUE

  IT WAS IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1358, in the summertime, just two days before the Feast of Saint Barnabas, that a Voice spoke out of heaven into the ear of my understanding.

  “Margaret,” said the Voice, “just what are you doing there?” My pen stopped, and I looked up.

  “Surely, You know already,” I said to the still air.

  “Of course I do, but I want you to tell Me, and that is entirely different,” the Voice answered.

  But to begin in the right place, I must begin with God’s gift of daughters, which is made to mothers as a test and trial. For on the Day of Judgment when we must answer for all things, what shall we answer if our daughters be too stubborn and impatient for the needle? Thus does God try our souls, and likewise cast out vanity, for the mothers of ungovernable children must be always humble.

  Now the day on which the Voice spoke was all fair and warm, and everything was blooming and growing. We had removed our household from London for the summer once again; the disorder in the kitchens at Whithill Manor had at last been put right, and there remained only the never-ending clatter of the carpenters rebuilding the burnt stables and outbuildings. The air was so fresh, and the green fields so inviting, only a fool would imagine that two little girls as willful as Cecily and Alison would remember their duty. And only twice a fool could think that two children so wily could not, like the serpent, beguile their nursemaid into the bargain. Still, as I climbed the long outside stairs to peep into the bower up under the eaves, I did not foresee what I would find. Empty! It was clear enough what had happened—two little pairs of shoes tumbled underneath the embroidery frame, a few dozen halfhearted stitches added to the work of months, and on the windowsill, Mother Sarah’s abandoned distaff.

  “And she’s no better than they are! How could they?” I called out the window, “Cecily! Alison!” and thought I could hear the answering shriek of children’s laughter from a far-off place. Oh, failed again, I brooded. How ever will I make them into ladies? And then God will say at the end of the world, “Margaret, you allowed your daughters to become hoydens. Their French knots unravel. And those daisies. Ugh. Exactly like toadstools. Pass on My left, unworthy woman.”

  But the silence of the abandoned bower was so inviting, I could feel the wonderful possibilities rising from the floor like mist. Mine, all mine, rejoiced my careless heart. Space, room, and quiet! And before I knew it, I had my paper and ink from the chest, and my writings about housewifery spread about me.

  Now you must know that long ago I made a plan to write down all the wisdom Mother Hilde taught me, so that it would not be lost. And my girls shall have it after me and so become celebrated for their mastery of the arts of healing and cookery and housewifery. And it is very well that it all be written, even though these are all true secrets, for suppose some grief should come to me—how would they manage then? And this I must say of them, though they are slow at the needle, they are swift at the art of reading, which is most rare among females.

  I set the pen at the place I had left off. “To keep the moth from woolens …” I had written, all those months ago, in London. How much had happened since then! Their father dead, so much changed. A bright shaft of sunshine from the little window above made a warm puddle of light on the page. Moths. How can keeping the moths off make my girls happy?

  “Oh, bother moths! What do I care about moths? What ever possessed me to write about moths anyway?” “Certainly not Me, Margaret.” The Voice sounded warm and comfortable, as if it were somehow inside the sunlight. I looked up from the paper and inspected the sunbeam carefully. The only thing I could see were thousands of dancing dust motes, all shimmering golden.

  “It seemed like such a good idea at the time,” I addressed the sunbeam. “But now it’s all turned into moths and recipes for fish. And I don’t even like fish.”

  “Why write about them, then?”

  “I thought it was proper.”

  “What is proper is what you understand best, Margaret.”

  So of course it was all clear. It wasn’t fish and moths I needed to write about after all. It was about something much more important. And certainly something my girls should know about, for the world tells them nothing but lies, leaving them entirely deluded on the subject.

  “Why so busy, and so inky?” asked my lord husband that very evening. “Have you taken up that recipe book again? Write about those tasty little fruit things in pastry—they would definitely be a loss to posterity. My future sons-in-law will bless me.”

  “I’m writing a love story.”

  “Another tale of courtly love to add to the world’s stock of lies? Surely you lead mankind astray. Pastries would be far better.”

  “No, I’m not writing about that false, flowery stuff. Jousts, and favors, and lute playing in rose-covered bowers. I’m writing the happily-ever-after part. I’m writing about real love.”

  “Real love? Oh, worse and worse, Margaret. Nobody writes about that. For one thing, it’s not decent. For another, it’s impossibly dull. No, if you wish to write about love, you must respect the conventions. What interests people is the trying to get, not the getting. Look at Tristan! Look at Lancelot! What kind of romance would it be if they could have had what they wanted? Tristan marries Yseult, and they produce a dozen moon-faced brats! Lancelot and Guinevere run off and set up housekeeping, and she yells at him for tracking mud inside! Where’s the romance in that? Absolutely none! There’s no story there at all. That’s why the trouvères, who understand better than you that married people do nothing but get fat, always leave off before the wedding. You must face facts, Margaret. You don’t understand anything about writing love stories. Stick to recipes.”

  So of course I set to work right away. After all, my lord husband considers himself a great expert on the topic of love, because he has written a number of poems on the subject. But I, I have loved the most greatly.

  CHAPTER ONE

  MOST LOVE STORIES BEGIN IN MAY sunshine, with secret glances at a dance or feast, or stolen conversations in a hidden garden. But mine begins in winter, with a funeral, when my heart’s love was sealed into the tomb forever. It was only duty then that kept my soul from following Master Kendall’s into that long sleep. Nothing but the tears of the two little daughters he had left me bound my unwilling heart to the earth. So I resolved to stay yet a while for Cecily’s and Alison’s sakes, but to give myself only to their upbringing, and never to another man. For having once been wed to Master Kendall, who would
be the spouse of a lesser man? There were others who were lords in rank, but who more lordly in manner than Roger Kendall, mercer of London? And who could ever be his equal in kindness, or greatness of spirit? His memory strengthened my resolve against the ever growing numbers of badgering suitors who hoped to obtain his fortune by marrying his widow.

  But what men cannot achieve by cozening or guile they will have by force. Master Kendall’s memorial was scarcely set into the wall at St. Botolphe’s when I found myself stolen from a house spattered with the blood of failed contenders and would-be heirs by the most shameless, fortune-hunting family in the entire realm: the impoverished, quarrelsome, pretentious tribe of the de Vilerses. And worst of all, it was I myself who had foolishly let the first of them into my house, in the form of a scapegrace younger son, a failed monk and poetic scribbler who went about town under the name of Brother Gregory. For it was through my intervention that he’d got himself retained by my husband as a clerk. And now, grief, self-pity, and rage at my own weakness contended for first place in my heart when I found myself wedded to him by the sword in the chapel of his father’s house.

  IT WAS ONE OF those gray, drizzling days in early spring, when the sky seems that it might almost touch the ground. Here and there the snow, standing in unhappy piles crusted by slippery ice, broke apart to reveal a bit of dead grass or frozen mud. Along a rutted track that wound across a frozen meadow and through a village of thatched huts, a party of riders approached their destination: Brokesford Manor, a fortified house built in the old Norman fashion, half hidden behind a tumbledown wall at the end of an avenue of bare-branched trees. At the village, a dozen peasants, barefooted in the icy mud, stood in a cluster by the road, while children peeped out of the windows to see the spectacle. It was mid-February in the Year of Our Lord 1356, and the Sieur de Vilers was returning home from an adventure to which he had ridden out at full canter less than a week before, followed by his sons, squires, grooms, and an arms-laden packhorse.

  A murmur went up from the group as the party came closer. It was not the same group that had set out. At its head, it is true, rode old Sir Hubert himself, straight and arrogant, on his tall red palfrey, followed by his eldest son, Sir Hugo, on the bay. Then a groom, leading the packhorse. But—after that—something different altogether. Robert and Damien, the two esquires, were riding double. Before their saddles were the small figures of two children. Girls, by the look of them, though they were heavily bundled. Behind them, in a shapeless gown and sheepskin cloak, rode Sir Hubert’s younger son, the one who’d been seized by a religious mania and run off heaven knows where for years, causing his father untold trouble. But the most delicious scandal of all was that he’d got a young, pretty woman riding pillion behind him. A frail-looking, pale-faced woman, with red, swollen eyes, wearing a rich, deep black cloak and gown. Even before the grooms at the end of the party were within the gates, the gossip had spread that the woman was a wealthy widow, an authentic heiress from the City, rescued from certain death by the bold lords of Brokesford.

  But the best part, the part that set up clucking speculation around every hearth in the village, was that she was to be married on the instant, without even publishing the banns. And not to old Sir Hubert, who had long been a widower, or even to Sir Hugo, who really ought to be producing a legitimate heir by now, but to Gilbert, the lunatic who wasn’t fit for anything better than looking in books. How had he found her anyway? Perhaps Gilbert was more his father’s son than they’d thought. Imagine the opportunity for a man of religion to slip into married women’s houses by the back door. Exactly like the rascally friar in the ballad! And everyone knows that the women who live in London have no morals. To think he’d been loose in a whole city full of shameless women. After all, the old lord and his eldest between them had at least a score of unacknowledged bastards spread all the way from the Cinque Ports to the Scottish border. It was a great joke that the runt of the litter might have outdone both his father and elder brother.

  BUT IN THE BUSTLE of the return, the widow had seemed to have been forgotten. She’d been fussy about setting her fancy slippers in the mud, so they’d lifted her off at the stair before the horses had been led off to the stable through the churned-up muck of the courtyard. There she stood, a black bundle silhouetted against the low, arched door, her little girls clutching her skirts.

  Not until he’d seen that the horses were off and sent for the chaplain did the old lord remember to offer her his arm, and the hospitality of his house, leading her into his hall with a flourish. She sat shivering in her damp cloak on a bench by the fire, while the squires cleaned up the bloodstained breastplates and chain mail and went to stow them upstairs. The old knight called for drink and turned to eye his younger son up and down. The young man was nearly a head taller than his father, rawboned and dark-headed, with arched eyebrows over brown eyes that glittered with intelligence. With a shrewd, appraising blue eye, the old man took in the sandals with ragged leggings wadded beneath, the worn, ankle length gray gown with the blood splashes dried all down the front, and the atrocious, matted sheepskin.

  “You’re not getting married in that,” the old man said.

  “There’s nothing wrong with it. Getting married was your idea,” said the younger.

  “Insolent as ever. Don’t any of those books you read tell you ‘honor thy father’? I’m telling you now, you’re not getting married in that. You’re in my house now. Remember that, and quit acting disgracefully.”

  The young man looked truculent. His father called for a bath to be drawn in the kitchen that lay behind the screen at the end of the hall. Then he sent one of the lounging housegrooms to look up a suit of clothes in the solar upstairs. The stone walls of the hall were twelve feet thick, and as damp and cold as a cave. Puffs of frosty air could be seen coming from the old lord’s mouth as he spoke.

  “I don’t want a bath.”

  “You’ve gone soft, living in the City.” The old man prowled around his son, looking at him from all angles, as if to assess which side had grown softest. The widow turned her head to watch, her face impassive.

  “I don’t need one. I don’t want one. Getting married ought to be enough to satisfy you.”

  “There are four times in a man’s life when he should wash—in your case three. When he is born, when he is knighted, when he dies, and—WHEN HE’S MARRIED! And if you don’t yet know your duty, I’ll call six men to show it to you, even at the risk of your drowning!” The old man’s voice was thunderous. The son drew himself up to his full height with a graceful, catlike dignity.

  “As usual, father, your command of logic has convinced me.”

  “Serpent’s tooth,” growled the old man as he followed him into the kitchen.

  The widow had looked about her, where she sat by the great fire in the center of the room. She was still clutching the cup she’d been given, but the ale didn’t look touched. She had wrinkled up her nose when she first smelled it, but luckily no one had seen her do it.

  Beyond the screen, in the tall, rain barrel–shaped bath by the kitchen fire, things had proceeded as the old man had commanded. The widow could hear the splash as the manservant poured cold water over the standing occupant of the tub. The old man’s voice, never a soft one, carried beyond the screen.

  “Don’t you dare turn your back on your father…. Turn around and look me in the eye.—Hmm, who laid those on? He had an even hand. A priest? That accounts for it then.—What for? A book? You went and wrote a book? Damn fool thing to do. That’s what you get for messing with books. And they burned it, too, you say?—Well, knowing you, it’s probably better off burned. I’ve never known you to have a sensible idea yet. You should have listened to me. If you’d done the respectable thing and stayed in the military, instead of giving yourself over to this ridiculous God-chasing and scribbling, you’d be carrying your scars on the front, like an honorable man, instead of on your back….”

  Margaret sighed, put down the cup, and clutched Cecily
and Alison to her. It didn’t seem like a very auspicious way to begin a marriage.

  IT WAS EARLY IN Lent, on the eve of the Feast of Saint Matthias the Apostle, and scarcely more than a fortnight after my hasty and dreary wedding, that I began to suspect I was being followed by something that was—well, not entirely natural. Sorrow and loneliness can play tricks on us. And sometimes, too, God makes wonders for our consolation, as when a friend of Robert le Tambourer received, in the midst of remorse over a great sin, a visitation of Saint Bartholomew that was fully twenty-five feet high and glowed with a color like flame.

  But this visitation was no handiwork of God’s; it was an eerie unsettling feeling, very like being watched in an empty room. It followed me in the day and lay with me in the dark. When I sat, all wakeful in bed beside the stiff, stubborn form of my sleeping husband, who, in his rage against his father, still refused to consummate the marriage the old lord had ordered, I could hear a strange whistling sound, soft, like the blowing of wind in the night stillness of the room. So I fell into despair that the Evil One might be watching me secretly, and redoubled my prayers in the cold, ill-furnished little chapel of the new father-in-law’s house. What did I pray for, besides my deliverance? Most of all, I prayed for the soul of my lost husband, good Master Roger Kendall, who had died so swiftly, he had not been shriven.

  The fearful watching began after my new husband and his relations returned from that first trip they made to London after the wedding. For no sooner had the vows been said than they were off again to get their hands on the property that had been left to me, and on my girls’ dower-funds, if they could. There was other necessary business too: seeing lawyers and bribing the judges in the case concerning the murder of my stepsons, which they claimed was entirely justified as self-defense. I suppose in a way it was, depending on how you look at it, since my stepsons had tried to kill a member of the de Vilers family first. Of course, as Master Kendall’s sons by his first marriage, they had expected to inherit everything until, in his old age, he had married me and produced new children to suck away what they thought was their due.