In Pursuit of the Green Lion

by Judith Merkle Riley

  Now Master Kendall was very fond of me and always interested in my improvement, so he hired Madame for my French teacher and Brother Gregory for my reading tutor. That’s what gave them their chance. First they tried to get him to put me away by telling him I had disgraced his name with Brother Gregory. But Master Kendall just laughed at them and then disowned them entirely for their insolence. Everyone in the household knew Brother Gregory was too prickly for that; he was touchy because his family had come down in the world and women were nearly as high on his list of dislikes as merchants, money changers, lawyers, purchased knighthoods, and forged genealogies. But what no one knew at the time was that because he had needed the work, he hadn’t bothered to tell anyone that his abbot had thrown him out for his unbearable quarrelsomeness, and he wasn’t a Brother anymore, or a Gregory either, though I still call him that when I forget.

  But then when Master Kendall died, his sons plotted to be rid of me again, and when Brother Gregory discovered the plot and tried to help me, they would have been rid of us both if his family hadn’t finished them off. So you see I counted Gilbert de Vilers as a friend, at least until his family decided they would reward themselves for their pains with Master Kendall’s fortune and make off with me as if I were a bride in a story. After that he wouldn’t talk to me, and every glance was full of resentment for the marriage his father had forced on him. And as for me, the more I saw of his family, the more I counted him as one of them—a hypocrite, a shameless tomb robber in a false monk’s gown.

  Then in the midst of this bitterness came the watching, the strange flitting chill that left me with a feeling I was on the verge of madness itself. It was a week after the wedding—the day they came back from London with my things—I remember that very clearly.

  “Well, sister,” said Hugo, striding into the room ahead of two churls carrying a chest, “we’ve brought your things from the City. Father says he doesn’t want to see a new bride moping around the house in black, so he says you are to wear color to supper tonight.” I can’t tell you how much Hugo irritates me. I have yet to decide whether it’s his stupidity or his vanity that offends me most. Or perhaps it’s because he thinks no woman on earth can resist him. At any rate, there he stood in his travel-stained surcoat, hands on his hips, with his vulgar ballocks-knife slung low down at midwaist. When he talks to women, he caresses the long handle and eyes them suggestively. It’s hard to imagine he and my husband are brothers, they’re so different. Gilbert is dark and tall, but Hugo is medium in height and rather square-looking, like his father, and light-haired like him too. Or rather, his father must have been blond once, for his hair and beard are quite white. But where his father is fierce, with ferocious white eyebrows and piercing blue eyes, Hugo travels about instead in a cloud of self-conceit that irritates my husband nearly as much as it offends me.

  “I’m wearing what I want to wear,” I told him.

  “Be careful how you refuse me, you stubborn little she-ass,” he replied. Hugo was coming much too close. I glared at him.

  “If you were mine, you’d be better disciplined,” he said, stroking the long, leather-bound hilt of his knife. “I’d tear that dress off and beat you until you begged to wear whatever I told you. Gilbert’s a fool. Unbedded women always get shrewish.” He leered and then turned on his heel. The chest had been set down in the corner of the solar, and Cecily and Alison were digging in it, looking for their things. Suddenly Cecily shouted and held up her amber beads. How could I help it? When I saw them, I thought of how her father had given them to her that last, beautiful Christmastide, and started to cry. Then Alison, who is still a baby, started to bawl, and Cecily to wail.

  I could hear Hugo’s “Women! Ridiculous!” as he thumped down the narrow, coiled stone stair to the Great Hall, leaving both the stair doors open. The stair is not designed for convenience, but for the defense of the upper part of the house—only one person at a time can go up its slippery stones, directly under the murder-holes, and the heavy oak doors at the top and bottom can stop a battle-ax. But when the doors are open, the sound from the hall rises up just like smoke through a chimney, and the goings on can be heard as clearly as if you were in the hall yourself.

  As I knelt on the matted rushes to look through my chest, I could hear the rising sounds of the quarrel downstairs.

  “You DAMNED fool! I tell you, if they find out it’s not consummated, they’ll try to get it annulled! Then where will I be?”

  “Out of purse, which you deserve for being greedy.”

  “Out of purse for your sake, you miserable whelp! Bribes for the judges, bribes for the bishop, an entire tribe of lawyers, and God knows who else will turn up! How was I to know he’d left her so much that half of London would be ready to cut my throat for it?”

  “You could have asked, before you made off with her.”

  “It was you that wanted it. It was all for your sake.”

  “My sake? MY sake? Who wanted the roof mended? You saw the money and you grabbed her! I was HAPPY the way I was! It’s YOU that couldn’t resist meddling, and got us into this mess!”

  “Mess? There’d be no mess if you’d do your duty and put a baby in that woman’s belly. What’s wrong with you anyway? Hugo could put twins in any woman! Look at him—bastards here, bastards there! Now THAT’S a man! HE doesn’t roll his eyes up at the sky and gabble about God all the time!” There was the noise of blows, before Hugo’s voice sounded cheerfully above the scuffle.

  “Come now, Father, he won’t be able to do anything if you keep bashing him like that.”

  “Then—just—have—him tell me,” said old Sir Hubert, catching his breath, “what excuse he has this time.”

  “It’s Lent. What’s more, it’s a Friday.” I could hear Gregory’s voice. It sounded prim and righteous. I knew him well. He’d have turned up his nose and looked at his father with that priggish look that drives the old man crazy. Just thinking of it made me smile. I sat back on my heels to listen better. In all the time I’d known Gregory, thorny-tempered as he is, I’d never imagined he had a family like this. That’s the problem with marriage. You don’t just marry a person, really, you marry a whole family.

  “What has that to do with you failing your family?”

  “All the Authorities agree, that if a man dedicated to religion finds it necessary to marry, he should forswear carnal relations on holy days.”

  “Just what sort of holy days, you holy imbecile?” rose up the staircase in a low growl. There was a crashing and a rustling in the rushes below, as if someone had leapt aside to escape a blow. I could hear Hugo laugh.

  “Lent, Advent, Sundays, feast days, the eve of feast days, Wednesdays, and—also”—another crashing and rustling, and the sound of a bench hitting the wall—“Fridays.”

  “Mama, they’re smashing the furniture,” whispered Alison, her eyes big.

  “Don’t you think to go down there, Cecily, get away from the stairs at once.” When I saw her reluctantly pull her tousled red head in from the doorway, I looked again in the chest. Beneath a pair of little shoes and the folds of my blue wool kirtle, the spine of a book peeped out. I felt a brief start of joy. Gregory must have slipped it in when they’d gone through the London house. I pulled it out and ran my hand over the initials embossed on the binding. M. K.—Margaret Kendall. My Psalter. Maybe God hadn’t abandoned me after all. Voices echoed up the stair.

  “I tell you, Father, I intend to see God whether or not I’ve left Witham, and you’re not going to stop me.”

  “See God? SEE GOD? Didn’t the abbot knock that idea out of you for once and for all? What makes you think God has time to see you? God’s a busy man! He doesn’t waste his time seeing younger sons who disobey their fathers! I tell you, you take care of your family’s business, and God will take care of you!”

  “Try all you want, I refuse to let you distract me. My conscience belongs to me, and I’ve got plans….”

  “To spend your time listening for voices in the ai
r? Quit trying to distract me with moonshine and play the man, or I tell you, I’ll lay on stripes that make that priest’s look like a baby’s handiwork….”

  I picked up the book, opened the pages, and ran my finger along the neatly written lines marked off with the red capitals. All English. Beneath them, the lines marked by blue capitals were in Latin, and a mystery to me. My good dead husband had had the idea of the book, and he had commissioned Gregory to do the translation, because he said he knew a first-class scholar when he saw one, even if he was as prickly as an entire basketful of nettles. Who had ever loved me as much as Master Kendall, to think of something as a gift that meant the whole world to me? It was at that very moment that I felt the eyes watching me, and a sort of cold breath on the back of my neck.

  “Who’s there?” I whirled around in a panic, but I didn’t see a soul. Except for the two girls, who were now standing on their toes at one end of the long window seat, trying to peep out the window, there wasn’t anyone in the room. It was a big room, the entire second story over the kitchen, buttery, and pantry, and a “solar” only by courtesy, since it didn’t catch that much sun. The walls were eight feet of solid stone, pierced by high, narrow, unglazed and shutterless windows that let in thin columns of pale sunlight when the weather was good. Long stone window seats, devoid of cushions or comfort, were set perpendicular to the windows in the wall openings. Nothing could hide there. Was there something in the shadows? I looked along the walls and checked the corners. The long perches on the walls above the beds were still hung with clothes, chain mail, and sheathed longswords. At the squires’ bed, a falcon napped, head under his wing, while another paced up and down the perch beside his companion, jingling his bells.

  Maybe it was a person, someone hiding under the beds. Well, he wasn’t going to catch me unaware. I got up and pulled down a heavy longsword, and poked it under the nearest bed. “Get out of there, you,” I whispered fiercely. Nothing under the bed where the squires slept. Nothing under the rumpled, pulled-out straw truckle bed where their bodyservants slept—it lay directly on the floor. The chests were against the wall. No room for anyone behind them. On the opposite wall stood the sagging little bed where the pages had once slept, when there had been pages in the house. Now it was Cecily and Alison’s. Suppose he were hiding under there? I strode across the room, carrying the heavy sword in both hands. But behind me, I heard something like airy footsteps rustling in the rushes, just behind my own.

  “Get out of there!” I said, prodding fiercely under the little bed. But there was nobody beneath it. I sat down on the bed to think. The big door that led from the solar to the tower was shut—nobody could have left that way. The stair door was open, but no one had come in. That left only the big bed, Sir Hubert’s second best, standing against the wall. Our wedding bed, such as it was. The sagging curtains were pulled aside, so no one could be hiding behind them. But underneath—well, underneath it was very wide. Too wide for the sword to reach. I’d look first, no matter how much it frightened me. I crept quietly to the bed, crossed myself, turned up the hanging covers, and knelt to peek underneath. I need to be strong, I told myself. My girls are here, and I won’t let anything get at them. I peered into the musty darkness, half expecting to see the white shine of a pair of evil eyes in the shadow.

  “Get out at once or I’ll call the men up and have you killed,” I hissed, and whipped the sword in a semicircle, as far as I could reach. I thought I heard a soft sigh behind my ear.

  “No use,” it said. And that is when I knew for a certainty that it wasn’t human. I turned and leaned against the bed, still kneeling, and clutched at the cross I always wear at my neck. It is a famous talisman, not, perhaps, as famous as the Cross of Rouen, which has a fragment of Christ’s shroud in it and has been known to raise the dead, but almost as famous. It has protected me ever since I got it, though I haven’t the time to tell you how just now. “In the name of God, begone and trouble me no more,” I whispered, so the children would not hear. But the only answer I had was like an icy puff of wind that passed through me and made my spine crawl.

  Downstairs, the quarrel had not abated one whit, but I was no longer interested in it. I could hear Hugo’s voice announcing, “When I wed, I’m certainly not going to hunt up any skinny, sharp-tongued, snobbish London widow. I don’t blame you a bit, Gilbert. She’s too long in the tooth to give pleasure anymore. You might as well use her money and be holy. I’ll find something fresh and new to bear me plenty of sons.” There was the clatter of more furniture being overturned. I could feel the tears running down my face. Old, old. That was it. I was old. Not young and fresh anymore. Twenty-three, and tired of trying so hard, and too old ever to be truly loved again.

  “Oh, Master Kendall, why did you have to die?” I cried. “You always loved me and were good to me. You weren’t all that old—not too old for me—you could have lived longer, and spared me this.” I could feel the cold thing wrapping around my shoulders, but I was too sad even to shiver. The girls had tired of climbing on the window seats, and seeing me so sorrowful, they came to sit on my lap and console me. In the air behind us there was a thin sound—sad, like a sigh.

  But soon it was suppertime, and after that, drinking time, which is the chief entertainment in this house, which hasn’t even got a minstrel. The big fire blazed at the center of the hall, its only light, setting an orange glow on the faces at the trestle tables. At the head table they always spoke in French, just to remind anyone who was listening—including God—that the de Vilerses are a very old family, and not tainted with a lot of English peasant blood. On our right was a long wall entirely forested with antlers, still clinging in pairs to the bits of white skull-bone from which they had sprouted. The wall on the left of the dais was decorated with captured pennants from Sir Hubert’s recent campaign against the French, with old Scottish and Welsh battle-axes, and a large, dented shield displaying a badly peeled version of the three cockleshells and red lion of the de Vilers arms. Not a single tapestry. They were too “soft.” If he’d ever had one, Sir Hubert would have traded it for a horse.

  “I pray you, drink, madame my sister,” said Hugo, passing the ale cup. “You’ve picked at so many meals, you shrink daily. You need to pad out your bones to please my brother.” Chivalry: just meanness in fancy dress, I thought.

  “Dear brother, I thank you for your concern, but I am not yet thirsty,” I replied also in French. It’s hard to get thirsty in a house where they draw the water for the ale from the same moat they throw the garbage into. Not that I would ever tell them, but I could brew ale ten times better than this. I never use anything but sweet spring water; that’s one of my secrets. The other secret is a special prayer I use when it’s fermenting, but I’m not going to write that down for just anybody to know. Master Kendall loved my ale; so did Gregory—that’s one of the reasons he hung around the house so much, picking quarrels about theology with Master Kendall.

  “Ha, listen to that wool-in-the-mouth accent. Convent bred, I’ll wager,” said old Sir Hubert, wiping his beard on the tablecloth. Gregory, who knows more about my family than is decent, composed his face in a sardonic look. At the lower table, we could hear the jokes and insults traded in English getting louder. Sir Hubert drained the cup. Ale, even this ale, made him mellower—but not mellow enough. I inspected their faces as they sat there, wondering if Gregory would ever become as impossible as his father. The old man belched and wiped a drop of gravy from his raggedy white beard with the tablecloth. He was dressed with a kind of shabby arrogance in a well-worn old-fashioned knight’s gown of heavy wool cut below the knee topped with a long brown embroidered surcoat lined in squirrel’s fur. Beside him in the place of honor sat Sir Hugo, whose new knighthood had exhausted the family’s resources. He’s even worse, I thought, watching him tilt the cup to his lips. Gregory is at least much better looking.

  Sir Hubert’s younger son was at least a head taller than his father and older brother, with a heavy mop of dark brown curls
, dark eyes, and savage eyebrows that he could arch up in ironic detachment, an expression he favored, especially when among his family, fools, and strangers. I ought to know, he used it often enough on me when first we met. He had a mind, too, and that made him different from the others in his family. He could write poetry in three languages and argue about theology well enough to make a bishop weep, neither of which counted for anything under his father’s roof. Here at his father’s hearth his witty, malicious tongue was stilled, and a habitual look of sullen rage had transformed his handsome features. His father had trapped him into coming home again, trapped him by using me, and he was furious.

  But Sir Hubert had seen me inspecting them. As his squire knelt to present the next dish, he put down the cup and addressed me.

  “Madame my new daughter-in-law, what do you think of our ancient family seat?” He raised a white eyebrow and gazed at me as if he’d seen a louse crawl up my neck. Oh, table manners, I thought, I’m tired of you. Your only virtue is to give me relief from all the shouting. I spoke in my politest court French.

  “Most honored lord and father-in-law, your esteemed manor is a source of infinite interest and novelty for myself, who had previously to content herself with a simple life in the City.”

  With a silky growl, he replied, “It would delight me to hear you enumerate these novelties that interest you so much.” Even as he spoke, I knew it might have been unwise to have anything to drink on an empty stomach.

  “It is my duty to obey your every wish,” I said, looking down regretfully at the dark green surcoat I had put over my black kirtle. “So I will now tell you that your delightful house has rats in the rushes, fleas in all the beds, and a Weeping Lady in the chapel.” I saw him start with rage, and put his hand on the dog whip he always wears stuck in his belt when he’s at home. The hounds under the table shifted and growled. I set my chin. Just let him break courtesy at table.