In Pursuit of the Green Lion

by Judith Merkle Riley

  “Get away, Margaret, you’ll be killed!” Gregory shouted, now distracted from the battle with his father.

  “He’s hurt,” called Margaret, without stopping.

  “Of course he’s hurt, you idiot woman. Your brat has broken his leg and cost him his life,” cried Sir Hubert.

  “Maybe not broken …” Margaret’s voice was carried away by the wind. She had got to his head, and made a low, chirruping sound as she grabbed the creature’s long muzzle.

  “What the hell do YOU know about horses? I’ve seen you ride—like a peasant on top of his grain sacks, poking along on his nag to market. Get away and let me do my job.” The Sieur de Vilers had got another knife, and was wading back into the water. The destrier’s eyes had quit rolling, as she stroked his head and spoke quietly to him. But the massive black flanks were still quivering in terror. Margaret gingerly worked her way around the huge chest, and her hand slipped under the water, carefully feeling the length of the deadly forelegs. “Now, now,” she crooned as her hand felt for the injury. Her lips were turning blue with cold. “Here it is. Both bones,” she said softly to herself. “And caught—here.”

  She bent over, and an arm went nearly to the shoulder into the water. The horse hadn’t moved. Neither had anyone else, for fear he would take fright, lash out, and split her head open. Even the Sieur de Vilers stood, frozen still, the knife in his hand, as the water rushed around his legs. She was doing something under the water, he couldn’t quite see what, and then heaving with both hands, gritting her teeth with the effort. Suddenly she turned her face toward him. Her hair was blowing crazily about her shoulders, and the way her hazel eyes caught the light, they glistened yellow for a moment. Like a falcon’s, thought Sir Hubert, and he tried to remember just where it was long ago, in a distant place, on another face, that he had seen that look before.

  “Help me get him to his feet,” she said to the old lord. And with that quiet, precise movement that all great horsemen have, he sheathed the knife and stepped to her side. Together they threw their weight against the stallion and lifted his head. With a kind of groaning squeal he heaved up and righted himself, as they drew back. Sir Hubert threw his belt over the stallion’s neck and led him, badly limping with each step, to the bank.

  “Get back, the lot of you.” The Sieur de Vilers’s voice was hoarse and quiet. “Go home, make up the fire, and get those brats out of here. I’m taking him to the stable myself.” He gritted his teeth against the cold. The woman, he saw, was blue around the mouth, but wouldn’t leave the stallion’s head. Her long, wet kirtle clung about her knees, and its long sleeves dripped. Another time, and he’d have ordered her beaten for appearing half naked like that, without a surcoat and a decent head-covering, the laces of her heavy wool gown showing indecently up her back. But this time he looked at her, shaking with cold, and said, “You go home too. You’re frozen.”

  “No,” she said quietly, “he’s still frightened.”

  Together they walked him back and shut him in his big stall. Sir Hubert himself found his halter and tied his head, then called for the grooms to check his wounds and clean off the mud. He stood back and looked at the bad leg. The destrier was holding it so only a tip of the huge hoof touched the ground.

  “He’s ruined,” said the old lord, shaking his head. “No foot, no horse. And I’ve no guarantee he’ll breed well.”

  “I can stay, and look to the leg.”

  “You’ll stay nowhere. You’re frozen through. Let John look to him.” Gregory’s cloak was still over the old knight’s shoulders. It was only damp at the hem. He took it off and put it over her shivering figure. “City bred. No sticking power,” he said.

  The fire in the hall was piled high with new wood and smoking heavily when they entered at last. Two grooms stripped the old lord naked, right there before the fire, and dressed him in a heavy wool gown and fur lined robe de chambre of an unusual richness for this austere place. Warmed and seated, he looked curiously at Margaret. Suddenly she remembered her hair wasn’t properly covered, and she was dressed only in her long, dark kirtle, and in spite of the cold she blushed crimson.

  “You haven’t a maid,” he said, looking at her clutching Gregory’s old cloak over her soaking dress. She looked at the floor. “And you’re not in bed. Gilbert has a weak hand, evidently.” He called his steward and spoke to him. The man went upstairs and returned with another robe de chambre, a woman’s. It was heavy crimson, stiff with gold and silver embroidery, and lined with sable. Sir Hubert pointed to her wordlessly, and the steward lifted off the cloak and put it on her. The old lord could see her fingering the embroidery.

  “French,” he said. “Spoils of war. It’s yours. Haven’t made you a wedding present yet. Cold in here.”

  “Merci, beau-père,”she said. He stared at the fire awhile.

  “And now, madame, there is the question of your daughters.” She looked at his huge hands.

  “Don’t hit them; you’ll kill them,” she said.

  “I assure you, madame, I have no intention of causing them permanent damage. It would mar their marriageability and delay their exit from my house.” She looked silently at the floor.

  “I suppose you’ve never struck them. It’s a problem that weak-minded women have. My late wife, for example, who was as weak-minded as they come. ‘Don’t hit the baby,’ she’d wail, ‘what if he died?’ ‘But what, madame, if he lives, and you raise a little monster?’ Then every time the baby takes ill, they moan that it’s because you hit him. That, woman, is how brats are made. Women, children, dogs, and fruit trees all need regular beatings.” He looked fiercely at her.

  “My girls are good girls.” She looked fiercely back, and he could see the flicker of gold in her eyes again.

  “The signs are plain, madame. Your children lack discipline.” It was so quiet in the room, he could hear her breathing.

  “Children are not unknown to pay with their lives for their failure to heed their elders,” he added, and he saw the flicker weaken.

  “Not too many.”

  “Five for the big one, three for the little one.”

  “She didn’t do anything—she’s only a baby.” By this time the girls had been brought in and stood before the old lord. They were listening to everything.

  “I distinctly saw her holding the oat pan, madame.”

  “Not so many, then. She doesn’t understand what she did.”

  “Three and one. And there I stick.” Everyone in the hall was listening. They’d never heard of such a thing before. A villein’s child who’d done such a thing would be beaten to death by the grooms in the courtyard. Even a son of the house might expect a great deal more. And here was this woman, with eyes unlowered, facing down the old lord’s justice. It was something to be talked about for many years after at the firesides of the little houses in the village.

  “Stand the little one in front of me, and hand me my riding crop,” he directed the grooms. Margaret gripped her seat until her knuckles turned white. The old lord looked fiercely at Alison. She looked innocently up at him through her long lashes, her eyes large and blue.

  “Do you understand what you did?”

  “I didn’t do it. Cecily made me.”

  “You understand then. For holding the oat pan, one stroke. For trying to shift the blame—cowardice and slyness, one stroke. For lying, one stroke.” They weren’t easy blows, and left deep welts under her heavy wool dress. The grooms had gathered in the hall to watch the administration of justice.

  “This is my house. I won’t have lying, slyness, or cowardice in it. Not ever,”he addressed the howling child. “Now the big one.” Cecily looked entirely unrepentant and, if anything, rather pleased at her sister’s treatment. It was no less than what she had thought of her all along.

  “It will be at least six years until I can sell your marriage, and they will be very long ones for you unless you learn obedience.” He looked at her; she stared right back. Suddenly he thrust his heavy head for
ward and glowered at her from beneath his bushy white eyebrows.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “He was the best. The biggest of all. I didn’t know he’d fall.”

  “You’ve crippled the best stud in twenty miles.”

  “I’m sorry.” Sorry, sorry. Sorry she couldn’t ride him again. It had been perfect. For a little space of time she had been the ruler of the world. No one could take it back.

  “The laws of this house are—first—girls do not ride stallions, not ever. Second—no one rides anything without permission. Third—no one takes or uses anything without permission.” As he spoke he delivered the blows. Cecily never wept, though her eyes filled with tears and she bit her lip so hard it bled.

  “God help the fool who marries you,” said the old man. He handed back the whip to one of his grooms to put away, and looked at Margaret where she sat. Her face was white, and tears were running down it. He motioned, and the idling grooms ceased watching and went to set up the trestle tables for dinner.

  “You’ll sit on my right at dinner,” he said calmly to Margaret. The place of honor. He’d never offered it to her before, not even on her wedding day.

  At supper, he offered her the best part of the dish with his own hand. She stared at the trencher and shook her head slightly.

  “Again you don’t eat? You dishonor my house.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s not that,” she said, looking worried. “It’s just that I don’t eat them.”

  “Salt herring? It is Lent, madame. I can offer you nothing better.” She turned her pale face to him, frightened and apologetic at the same time.

  “I’m truly sorry. I’m not trying to dishonor your table. It’s—just—just that I can’t eat anything with eyes.”

  “Is that all? I’ll take them off.”

  “No, not that—I mean that ever came with eyes on.”

  “And why is that?” Gregory stiffened as he watched the exchange. The old man was capable of anything. With a sudden blow to the head, he could smash a peasant’s skull. He had been eerily controlled for too long—at any moment something might set him off and he’d lash out, God knows how. Margaret was too small, too frail, too crazy for his father’s house. He needed to take her away. If only the inheritance could be freed up, he could keep her someplace safer. A moment gone wrong, and it could turn out very badly for Margaret.

  But the old lord looked authentically curious this time. Margaret saw that, and answered simply: “I’d see the eyes in my sleep. They’d all be looking at me, and they’d give me nightmares.” The answer didn’t seem to surprise the old man a bit. When Damien knelt before him to offer him the next dish, the Sieur de Vilers broke the order of service and sent for a cheese. He observed her all the while she ate, stroking his beard with his left hand and thinking. He knew horses very well, and he knew he wasn’t wrong. He had seen what he had seen. A woman who could raise a fallen destrier was no ordinary woman. But a woman who raised a horse with a broken leg, who saw eyes and didn’t eat fish, and who stared at him with a frightened face when she realized he’d seen what the others had missed—that was something else entirely. It might very well be a problem.

  Had Gilbert known all along? It certainly would go far to explain the look on the pup’s face when he’d announced that as long as they’d taken the trouble to rescue her they might as well carry her off. He inspected his second son’s face. No, it would be entirely in keeping with his character never to notice what was right under his nose. But then again, it was Gilbert who had burst out and said that he should have asked before he’d made off with her, and the old lord was never going to admit that Gilbert might have been right, even this once.

  IN THE DAYS AFTER the strange dinner when the Sieur de Vilers gave me the wedding present, things were better, or at least quieter. But Cecily and Alison were in disgrace. After they’d gone and nearly killed his destrier, Sir Hubert had confined them to the solar in the care of a ferocious fellow named Broad Wat, a onetime pikeman who had followed him through all the Scottish wars. This worthy had instructions not to let them out of his sight until a nursemaid of sufficiently dragonlike qualities should be located.

  “You should count them lucky,” said Gregory after supper one day, “he used to lock me in the cellar on bread and water for far less. And there’s a veritable legion of spiders down there.”

  “He’s very hard. He’s frightened me since the first day I laid eyes on him.”

  “Oh, do cheer up, Margaret. At least he’s never heaved a bench at you. But whatever made you wade in after Urgan, feeling the way you do about Father? It’s a miracle you weren’t killed.”

  “I just saw him rolling and squealing there, all bloody, and I felt so sorry for him. That’s all. So I had to. I never thought about it. I might not have, otherwise.”

  “Sorry? For a horse? You are strange sometimes. You had better save your sympathy in the future—warhorses are trained to maul humans, and I’d really like you to stay away from them. He could have smashed your head like an eggshell, and then where would I be, Margaret? And Urgan’s famous all around the shire for his bad temper. Father got him at a bargain after he killed a man, and he’s lost his head groom to him since, as well. Father’s just too stubborn to get rid of him. He’s convinced he can breed the height into his line, and breed out the bad temper. Oh, well, I suppose you’d have seen Urgan’s eyes too.”

  “How did your father know how I learned how to ride? I’ve never even told you that I always sat on the grain sacks when Father led the horse to the mill—that is, when we had a horse.” Gregory winced. I knew it was something I shouldn’t ever mention again, at least while we were in his father’s house.

  “Father knows everything, when it comes to horses. He’s never wrong.” He looked at me speculatively. “You’re afraid of them, too, aren’t you? Horses, I mean. Father knew that too. He told me the first time he saw you mounted. How did you ever get to your country place in the summer?”

  “You saw the little white mule in the stable? That’s mine. Master Kendall got it for me.”

  “And it sits there still, eating its head off, until the country property is settled. Father says it’s a total waste, and ought to be sold.”

  “He won’t sell it, will he? He won’t sell my mule or my house? Don’t let him, Gregory. It all comes to you, not him. Remember that we were happy there, and can be happy still.”

  “Father’s the head of the family, and I owe him obedience—but if there’s enough for the upkeep, after all these lawyers get through, I will. But you know, in this family, you can’t be seen mounted on a mule. It would irritate Father, and there’s no telling what he’ll do when he’s irritated.”

  “But—but—”

  “No buts,” he said gently. “You’re on his good side now, and I won’t see you lose it. Don’t look so worried. You’re brave enough, in other ways. You just sit a horse like a coward. I can fix that.” His voice sounded warm and strong. It would have convinced anyone that the thing was easy.

  So, much to my mortification, that is how I found myself the very next day atop a dreadful mountain of a beast, mud flying from beneath its hooves as it cantered in circles at the end of a lunge line.

  “Sit up straight, Margaret! Quit clutching like that!” Gregory held the line in his left hand, flicking the long whip in his right whenever the horrid creature faltered. And, of course, I couldn’t help noticing how tall and well made he was, and how strong his hands looked as he paid out the line, and this sort of distraction came close to costing me dearly more than once.

  “So what are you going to be doing now?” he asked as we walked from the stables.

  “Sitting quietly for the next week until I quit aching,” I answered, brushing the mud off my sleeve. The acid in my voice made him laugh.

  “You’re a hard case, Margaret. But don’t think I give up all that easily. Whether you like it or not, I’ll have you riding like a de Vilers. After all, I haven’t the least intention of ev
er giving Hugo the satisfaction of paying him off.”

  “What? You have a wager?” I was furious. Gregory didn’t seem bothered at all.

  “Father put him up to it, I’m sure. He thinks he’s sly, but I know he did it—it’s got his mark on it, that idea. Hugo’s too dense to have noticed without Father’s prodding.” I was so livid, I couldn’t decide which one of them enraged me the most. Making sport of my misery! I could just see Hugo gloating, with that stupid smile of his.

  “We’ll ride again tomorrow,” I snapped.

  “That’s what I thought you’d say,” he said serenely.

  And so I went to nurse my wounded spirit in the solar, where I had in mind to spend the rest of the afternoon teaching my girls their stitches, as a way of keeping their fingers out of trouble. There I found Broad Wat bemoaning his fate. A formidable widow was being acquired from a neighboring hamlet for his relief, but it was not soon enough, in his opinion. He had worn himself out giving rides and telling lies. When threats and bribery no longer had any effect, he had resorted to numbing his senses with a plentiful supply of ale, brought up by a parade of kitchen boys eager to hear his lurid complaints. When I emerged from the narrow stair, he was lying on the straw bed before an audience of kitchen boys, half dead by his own account, while Cecily and Alison ran rampage through the solar.

  “It’s punishment for my sins, that I’m trapped with them for another three days,” he was complaining. And while he talked, the kitchen boys laughed behind their hands. For they could see what he could not—that as he spoke the girls were engaged in pouring an unknown liquid out of Wat’s great mug onto the head of some unwary soul beneath the window. Clearly, it was time for female intervention.