In Pursuit of the Green Lion

by Judith Merkle Riley

  “Thus did the ancient lords of Brokesford dwell, in the hall, amid their people. It was a good custom. I am home again.”

  “Yes, Father, home. And a hero.”

  The horrible lips parted, and the old man’s voice was barely audible. “The box, Hugo. Don’t forget to give Dame Margaret the box.”

  “No, Father, I won’t.”

  “And Hugo, I will die happy if you fulfill the arrangements I have made with Sir Walter. Bring home his daughter as your noble bride, to get this house fair sons again.”

  “Yes, Father, I will fulfill my duty and your wishes.” Was the father deceived, or had the humble tone that Sir Hugo habitually used with his sire faded, if just a little, to be replaced by a note of triumph? The old man was so weak, he found it hard to tell. Still, Hugo had attended to everything with great care. The sea voyage, the dreadful trip home. But the wound, which had seemed so small at the beginning, was draining his life away. At first slowly, and now swiftly.

  Then, as he watched the dark arches of the hall swaying and shivering, high above the litter, he thought he heard something through the dreadful clattering and banging of the great bed being put together. It was a clear voice, thin and strong, that said: “I am here.”

  “Thirsty—”his lips said, almost without sound.

  “Yes,” she said, and he could feel wine, all cool from the cellar, make its way across his tongue. She laid his head back on the pillow, and he could feel the heavy fur coverlets being turned back.

  “Get away, you, the surgeon’s been summoned from Bedford, and one of the Duke’s personal physicians is coming from London.”

  “It will take the physician many days to get here, and I trust Mother Hilde’s wisdom better than any surgeon on earth. Step back, I say, and let me see it.” There was something authoritative in the voice, and he could feel the shifting and grumbling men move and give way and the voice move closer to him again. He began to shake again with the chill as the covers were pulled away, for he was clad in nothing but the heavy bandage around his side.

  “Filthy,” the voice said, and he screamed as the bandage was pulled away.

  “Malkyn, the pot in the kitchen, and the fresh cloths.”

  “What are you doing—are you so vengeful that you want to kill him like this? I tell you, I’ll run you through if you harm him.”

  “A hot poultice,” said the woman’s voice. “It draws the poison.” The heat and the pain mingled with the sound of hammers. For a coffin? So soon, a coffin? How long could he bear it, this pressure, and this pain, like a knight?

  “See?”he heard her say, and he screamed again as the poultice was stripped away, and something dreadful burst inside, draining and stinking, and giving unspeakable relief.

  “By God, there’s pints of it in there. How much can a man hold, and live?”

  She spoke again. “That, I do not know. Look—here’s something black poking out.”

  “Splinters. Splinters from the lance tip. I saw it from afar. He took the blow badly on his shield. Unlike him—so unlike him. The lance shattered here, at the edge of the breastplate—and the splinters went through the links of the mail beneath. He was unhorsed—Damien and Robert captured the French knight—but who would have thought all this could come from so small a wound?”

  “Small, but deep—aha! I have it out.”

  “Four inches, at least. There’s another.”

  “I have it,” she said. And the infinite blackness sucked him down.

  “Jesu!” The cry was terrible.

  “DEAD. YOU’VE KILLED HIM,” said Hugo to Margaret as the grooms clustered around them.

  “No, he’s fainted, and he’ll live,” said Margaret, looking at Hugo with a curiously detached, cold, calm expression as she rebandaged the wound. “You can put him in the bed now,” she announced. And Broad Wat lifted the shrunken figure as carefully as he would a baby and laid him beneath the great canopy.

  “How do you know he’ll live?” asked Hugo in a suspicious voice, his eyes narrow as he shifted them back and forth to take in the whole scene.

  “I can feel it. Also, that’s one of the things I can see. The black shadow around him is thinning.”

  Hugo stepped back and looked her up and down. The black gown gave her a pallor like a corpse. Her hollow, red-rimmed eyes looked at him as if he were an insect. He thought for a moment of hitting her, but backed up a step and crossed himself instead. She could see death. A witch. A witch between himself and the lordship. And arrogant as the Devil himself. She would sing a different song once he’d collected Gilbert’s property—his property now—and brought home his beautiful young bride. There wasn’t room for something like this in the house—not with a tender young girl, and his own sons. First he’d sequester her, then have her burned—no, that would mar his sons with scandal. He’d have her strangled secretly—that was neater and quieter.

  And if the old man insisted on living now, why, he could just fade away later, the way God had intended him to do. After all, it was God’s will, the way he took that lance. In all the years he’d watched him, he’d never done anything like that. Of course, he’d had no sleep for days. He’d ridden all over the place like a madman, when the word came about Gilbert, searching and searching, as if that would do any good. No, it was all God’s work. God intended to pay Hugo back for his years and years of dutifulness to his grasping, dictatorial sire. It was entirely fair. God meant him at last to be rich, as befitted a man of his honor and lineage.

  Then there were her brats, of course. It would be four or five years before he could sell their marriages. Yes, it was a good plan not to taint them by burning the mother, even if she was a witch. But wait—what good were a few hundred pounds compared to taking their whole inheritance? Ah, better and better—Hugo, you clever fellow, your brain is really working now. Get rid of her, and shut them up in a convent as soon as possible. How soon? After the wedding might be best. Might as well get it all settled quickly, while the old man was unconscious. Brilliant. And all part of God’s plan. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

  He looked at the old man on the bed. He could hear his heavy breathing. Too bad, he thought. Do you know how I’ve hated you all these years? All the while I was bowing and scraping and laughing at your stupid jokes, I was hating you. You were too damned cheap with me—kept me on short rations—took all the best women for yourself first—kept me rotting here in the country, instead of letting me winter in London, where the fun is. Everything for the horses, nothing for Hugo. I’ve waited a long time for this. Now I’ve got a town house, Gilbert got it for me from that little witch. It was wrong for a commoner, a merchant, to own anything that good anyway. Well, it’s in the right hands now.

  He looked away from the gray, shrunken form on the bed, and saw that Margaret was waiting for him. He was all politeness. There were many witnesses, and he was never less than a model of courtoisie.

  “Robert, get the box.” Robert removed himself and went to search in the baggage.

  “Dame Margaret, I must inform you that your husband died a hero. He saved the Duke’s encampment, and possibly his life as well. It was at the siege of Verneuil; we burned the suburbs and divided into three parties, surrounding the town, to begin the assault on the walls the following morning. That night there was a counterattack through the walls by stealth, on the Duke’s own party. They strangled the sentries so silently that no one was roused. But they had not counted on Gilbert—he was up alone at night, writing with a little candle in a hooded lanthorn to conceal the light. The first thing that anyone heard was the de Vilers war cry, and as the camp roused, they saw him half clad, swinging his great two-handed sword in pursuit of the fleeing rogues. The Duke’s men pursued, and after the melee six corpses were found—all French—but not his. The following day we breached the city wall and slew every living thing in it. One tower held out another day, but fell at last. But Sir Gilbert was gone. His last words, they say, were ‘For God and King Edward!’ A noble d
eath. Robert, what was it that Piers said he heard him cry out that night? I ask you to confirm that they were most admirable words.”

  Robert seemed to hesitate; a debate was going on within him. Piers had been lost in the taking of the tower on the third day, but not before he had told Robert everything. It posed a bit of a problem. Should things be as they had been, or as they ought to have been?

  “So?” prompted Sir Hugo.

  “Well, um—actually, um—what I heard—or I thought I heard—I may not have remembered it all entirely—but—”

  “Yes?”

  “What he cried out was said to have sounded very like ‘You bastards, my manuscript!’”

  And that is how Margaret knew, all of a sudden, that it wasn’t a mistake after all. He was really gone. She’d been hoping they’d made a mistake. And she’d been really sure they’d mixed him up with someone else—surer and surer as Sir Hugo told his story. But Robert—no, that was Gregory to the life, or rather, to the death. She put her hand over her heart to still its terrible pounding.

  Hugo broke in quickly to cover this lapse of Robert’s. “The Duke has commended Gilbert’s courage and service, and says he will not forget. He sends you this remembrance of him. You’ll understand, he’s kept the notes of the campaign that Gilbert was writing. We’ve brought back his armor and personal effects.”

  Robert had retrieved the little box, and silently handed it to Hugo. Hugo in turn proffered it to Margaret. Margaret was terrified to open it. For all she knew, it might be the dried and shriveled remains of a human heart, the great severed arteries gaping like toads’ mouths. Gregory’s heart, a loveless, unloving object of horror. The end of everything.

  She opened the box a little and peeked in very carefully. So far, nothing horrible. Then a glimpse of white—paper. She opened it farther.

  “It was the paper he was writing that night,” explained Robert, sensible of the drama of the moment.

  Margaret unfolded it. It was a poem, or rather, the beginning of one. It was written in French.

  “Margaret of the white hands,” it went, “you are queen of my heart—” And then there was a blot. A great big oblong blot, where the pen had been laid down in haste. And she suddenly saw everything, how it all must have been on that night, for there was hardly anything in the world that would make Gregory leave a blot, except Death himself.

  He did love me, he really did, she thought as she began to sway. He couldn’t say it, so he was writing it. And my letter—it didn’t get there in time, and he never knew how I—As her knees crumpled Robert bore her up, while Hugo called for someone to attend her.

  THAT NIGHT, WHEN MARGARET knelt in the chapel with her customary prayers for Master Kendall’s soul, she added to them prayers for Gilbert de Vilers’s as well. She was heavy from within from unspeakable grief, and dizzy from a nameless fear of a dreadful future. So few months for such terrible changes. So far from friends and home. So alone. And her girls—who would protect them now? And Gregory, her love, her great love, lost and gone, and his bones rotting in a foreign place. And she’d never been able to tell him what he’d come to mean to her. Regret twisted her heart.

  “Oh, God help me,” she said to herself. The formless sobbing that perpetually echoed among the stones of the chapel ceased.

  “Well, now you have something to weep about, too,” whispered the spiteful voice of the Weeping Lady.

  THE NEXT MORNING Sir Hugo dispatched Robert, all bathed and shining in new clothes, with two attendants in livery to Poultney Manor in Leicestershire, where Sir Walter de Broc had deposited his three unmarried daughters and youngest son for the summer. There they were to inspect the eldest, and best dowered, and if they found her suitable in visage and figure, to announce that Sir Hugo de Vilers was coming to arrange the terms of his marriage with her as soon as her father should return. They were to inform the family that should the financial arrangements prove satisfactory, Sir Hugo wished to proceed immediately with the betrothal and wedding, in accordance with his dying father’s wishes and his prior negotiations with Sir Walter last spring in Calais.

  “Only fifteen and as pure as a lily, Robert, just think of it.” Hugo was acting love-smitten; he’d tucked a flower behind his ear, and was ordering up new hangings for the wedding bed.

  “And beautiful, they say, too,” agreed Robert, who was always anxious to see what was new and female.

  “Yes, and with a hundred acres settled on her, and bloodlines that can be traced for three centuries on both sides. Make no mistake about it, Robert: It’s a high marriage—one that might have escaped me, if not for our recent good fortune.”

  Robert nodded agreeably. He thought Hugo meant the capture of the French knight, whose ransom he had sold to the King for an immense sum. He and Damien could settle down on it, even with the third they’d had to give to Hugo. The poor bastard had been hauled off in a cart with a half-dozen others in the same fix, stripped of his armor and stiff with the disgrace of it all. The King, of course, would resell the ransom to the man’s family at a steep markup. It was how he managed to live so well. War, after all, is just business carried on by other means.

  “And just think, Margaret,” said Master Kendall’s ghost that evening, after the children were asleep. “Here I am, between heaven and earth for a bit of piracy and a few adventures between the sheets—long before I knew you, of course—and these fellows practice on a much larger scale than I ever dreamed of, and get blessed by the bishop for it into the bargain!” He was sitting on the edge of the bed, all smoky in a shaft of moonlight, while Margaret sobbed into her pillow.

  “Quit being so gloomy, Margaret, and sit up. I want to show you the trick the money changers use—it’ll make you laugh.”

  “How can you be so cheery when Gregory’s dead? You’re not nice at all,” came a muffled voice from the pillow.

  “Dead? Who says he’s dead? Do sit up and let me show you the trick—I have to get you to do it, because I can’t lift anything, even a pebble, these days.”

  “What do you mean, not dead?” and one eye turned up from the pillow to inspect the smoky form.

  “Not dead is what I mean. He may be gone, but he’s not dead. I see everybody who comes through here, you know, on their way up or down, and he’s not among them. You were so concerned, I made inquiries—met a number of the fellows he went over with—all butchered quite awfully, trailing limbs, heads, that sort of thing. They haven’t seen him. Wherever he is, Margaret, he’s not dead. So now, sit up and try my game to please me.”

  Margaret could feel the heaviness begin to lighten.

  “You swear?” she said, sitting up.

  “On my love for you,” said Master Kendall, and he looked so like his jaunty old self that Margaret had to smile.

  “Now,” he said, “take that little bit of plaster, there on the floor, and pretend that it’s a false gold piece, and the little pebble there is real money. Slip the first up your sleeve—no, no, not that way, this way—yes, that’s it.” And as Margaret tried the trick out, she began to smile. How like Roger Kendall, who, live or dead, had the gift of being able to make people smile. I’ll never stop loving you, she thought as Master Kendall pronounced her fit to go into the money-changing trade, if she ever needed to.

  “Pity you can’t get to London,”he said. “You could make inquiries of the returning knights and find out where he is.”

  “But even if I knew, how would I raise a ransom? I haven’t a penny anymore.”

  “Ha! And you won’t ever get it from Sir Hugo,” announced Roger Kendall. “He stands to inherit, the greedy dog, so he’d rather have things as they are. No, Margaret, you get to London, and I’ll show you where I have a bit laid by.”

  “Laid by? It’s all with the Lombards, or spent on those nasty horses.”

  “Oh no it’s not. What kind of merchant would I be if I trusted the world? Our house, the central part at any rate, is quite old. Built by a fellow called Aaron fil Isaac well over a hundred ye
ars ago, before the Jews were driven out of England. There’s an escape tunnel to the river no one knows about. And panels! Oh my, yes. A number of secret ones, and hidden hollow stones beneath the hearth, and all sorts of things like that. I’ve got gold and silver cached in them all. I died before I could tell you about them, though I always meant to. Get to London, and I’ll show you where it all is. After all, it won’t do me a spot of good anymore. And why should it be Hugo’s? He doesn’t deserve a penny.”

  “That’s true. Just think, when Gregory told me what he thought of Hugo, long ago, I didn’t even understand him. Now I understand entirely too much.”

  “Now I’ll just whisk off—I want to see if anything’s doing at Bedford. I never sleep anymore. Just imagine, bored in the day and all night as well! Now, you sleep properly so you can get your mind to working. You can get that ridiculous young man back, if you want him.”

  “Want him, oh, God, want him!” Margaret leapt up for joy to embrace Master Kendall, temporarily forgetting his incorporeal state, and wound up freezing her face and arms.

  “Oh, Margaret,” he said, looking at her tenderly as she shuddered and wiped off the spectral dampness, “you have no idea how much I regret not being warm anymore.”

  CERTAIN KINDS OF THINGS I can’t write down. One kind is the things that are too horrible to talk about, and the other is things I don’t remember. Now, when I lost Gregory, it was too horrible to talk about, and also I can’t remember much, either, because my mind was gone and I had dreams, waking and sleeping—dreadful dreams. I think I dreamed that Sir Hugo rode forth as a groom on a white steed, wearing new clothes and a hat with a peacock feather, after kneeling before his dying father for his blessing. He took with him hounds, attendants and gifts, and a snow-white mare with a gilt sidesaddle on which to bring back his bride. I dreamed that a great feast was prepared for her reception, not as great as if the house had not been in mourning, but great enough. As the pigs and sheep were brought in from the country and, with terrible screaming, made to give their lives for sausage and meat pies, I dreamed that I tended the shrunken shell of the old man that Hugo had left behind, and that he screamed as I changed the dressings. There was a time that I’d hated him, but it had passed by.