“What's the other thing?” he asked Brother Malachi.
“I hate lawyers,” said Brother Malachi.
“By God, I hate them too,” said Sir Hubert, though without his old fire, for shouting would make his head hurt worse. “I hate them like poison.”
“Then we're agreed?”
“Let us go forward with this thing, and tangle them up in their own documents. And—” he paused a long time and sighed, “and you'll find I'm a gentleman, and capable of apology. I did put the trees ahead of the little ones' house and happiness. I didn't think it counted.”
“It does with me,” said Brother Malachi.
CHAPTER TWELVE
OFF TO MASS AGAIN SO SOON, YOU two? The holiness in this house becomes oppressive.” Hugo was lying on his backside on the bench in our hall, one hand holding a wedge of Cook's pigeon pie, and the other lazily extended to pet one of the large, ugly hounds that they had brought with them. “Nothing like— mmf, munch—a bite to eat to settle a queasy stomach. I swear that dish of smoked pike I ate last night was tainted.”
“If you will eat at the stews, that is what will happen,” I said, unpitying.
“I might as well settle in to enjoy myself, while you two are praying up a loan. It's going to take a while.” Hugo threw the last greasy remnant into the new rushes for the dogs to fight over. I could feel my back stiffen. My nice new rushes. My clean whitewash. Polluted by these oafish, uninvited visitors. Hugo sat up, one leg, the one clad in blue, crossed over the other, the one clad in red. “Tell me, brother, since you're the family expert in theology, if I have my confessions written out, is it best to be seen frequently at mass before I let it be known about the book, or should I experience a sudden conversion, a sort of bolt out of the blue?” I could see Gilbert grinding his teeth. Then he spoke, very carefully, so that he would not be tempted to bang Hugo over the head with the bench and thus delay our errand.
“Attendance at mass is an excellent strategy, Hugo, but only if you refrain from pursuing women during the elevation of the host.”
“Hmph. I don't really see your reasoning. A good-looking woman is a work of God. Pursuing them is a kind of devotional exercise.” I could see the back of Gilbert's neck turning red. I pulled on his sleeve. “The way I see it, since there are no carnal relations in heaven, and since God clearly made us for carnal relations, then it's our duty to do as much as possible while on earth.”
“That, Hugo, is called the sin of lust.”
“A sin, eh? Goodness, who'd have thought it. And here I had it all worked out. Maybe I should pass on this theology fashion and save my conversion for my deathbed. Yes, that's it; I'll confess everything and repent, and take monk's robes, and everyone will weep. Besides, it's much holier that way.”
“And just what do you mean by that?”
“Well, I'll have ever so much more to confess by that time, and so when I receive God's grace, it will be bigger than other people's.” Waves of rage were coming off Gilbert like the heat over a summer cornfield. I saw him eyeing the bench. I tugged at his sleeve again. He looked at me, a long look, then back at Hugo. Then he growled and turned on his heel.
“I'm thinking that lightning blasted the wrong person that day,” he said as we went out the front door.
“Odd, that's exactly what I was thinking,” I said, but the door had slammed behind us.
WE WERE ALREADY at Cornhill, passing the Cardinal's Hat tavern, before Gilbert quit fuming and talking to himself. The smell of stale fish wafted our way from the Leadenhall Market, as we picked our way through the gutters to Malachi and Hilde's house. One look at our sour faces and we were whisked inside and plied with ale until Gilbert stopped spluttering.
“The heat must have made you thirsty. Have some more of this excellent brown ale. Margaret made it, and there's no better in the City.” Mother Hilde beamed as she filled the cups again. She and I had planned to have a delicious time catching up on all the abnormal births in the City, while Gilbert and Malachi planned the contents of the letter that would just accidentally reveal the hiding place of the chest with the deeds.
“I am well aware of that, you old thief, since I packed the cask over to you myself.”
“Nothing better to lubricate the brain. And by the looks of you, you had better lubricate yours a little. Gilbert, you look like a thundercloud. What have you been doing?”
“Arguing theology with Hugo.” Malachi burst out laughing.
“Hopeless, hopeless, and you should have known it! Come, let's go to work. I must show you all a treasure I've found. Get up, Margaret, and just take a look at this.” I stood up from my seat, a long, low chest that served also as a bench, and stood aside as Malachi opened it and rummaged through. “Let's see, it's down near the bottom,” he said, throwing aside a Dominican habit that was folded up with pennyroyal and lavender. “Yes, here!” He plunged his hand deeper and came up with an old drinking horn. “Just look at this. The ceremonial drinking horn of Ingulf the Saxon. Don't you think it will add verisimilitude to the contents of the chest?”
The horn itself was from some sort of gigantic ox I certainly had never seen. The mouthpiece was in silver and gilt, elaborately carved with twisting lines and set about here and there with small, semiprecious stones. The tip was made in the form of an elaborately carved dragon, whose fangs had a gap apparently made for a chain or cord now missing. It looked very old, crusted with age and neglect, and the silver had turned black.
“Did you age it, Brother Malachi?” I asked. “I've never seen a better job.”
“No, it came that way. A fellow alchemist friend of mine was about to reduce it for the metal. But I just had a thought that it might come in handy some day, so I bought it from him.” Gilbert picked up the horn and turned it this way and that, a beatific smile playing over his features.
“Malachi, you're an artist,” he said.
“Of course he is,” said Mother Hilde, her eyes shining with pride.
“Gilbert, don't touch the tarnish. It has to be even all over when it's found.”
“I was just wondering. Are these some kind of writing?” he asked, pointing to the elaborate, interwoven, abstract figures.
“If they are, then they're nothing we can read. And if we two accomplished scholars can't read them between us, neither can anyone else. It's just the way the Saxons, or maybe the Danes, did things. Just look at that ugly dragon. It's quite popeyed, and hasn't got a nose worth looking at. Certainly not the way a dragon should look.”
“Splendidly barbaric. Even father will be surprised to find this thing in there.”
“Surprise is essential. It will give a genuine reaction, and the witnesses will believe the whole thing, because of the fraction of truth in the way they behave. Especially Hugo. Gilbert, I have never been able to conceive of how you acquired a family like that. You must be some sort of freak, like that horse of Caesar's with the toes.” Malachi stood, taking his ale with him for inspiration, and headed for the door of his laboratorium.
“I always thought it was the other way around, Malachi—I am an ordinary sort of fellow, and they are the freaks—” Gilbert followed him, ducking through the door, cup in hand.
“On the contrary, Gilbert, they represent the average run of humanity—” The door closed behind them.
“Come round into the garden by the front gate, Margaret. I've beans to pick, and a thousand things to tell you.” I picked up the basket from the corner to follow her.
“Margaret, you don't have to do that, you're a great lady now. It isn't proper.”
“Mother Hilde,” I said, following her around to unlatch the front gate, carrying both of our baskets, “I'm still just me, Margaret. The rest is all—clothing, if you see what I mean. We're just the same as ever, and you'll always be my teacher.”
“And doesn't this just remind you of the old days, when Malachi wouldn't let us go through the laboratorium and out the back door, for fear our female essence might undermine one of his experime
nts?” she said happily.
“Or that our tread was too heavy, and might wiggle some delicate process—as if he had such a light tread himself.” Mother Hilde's garden was golden with summer sun, and the fruit hung warm on the trees. In one corner were beehives of twisted straw, and in the other was the shed where Mother Hilde kept her she-ass for milking. Asses' milk and goats' milk are best for babies, she always said, if their own mother's milk fails and the wetnurse can't be got quickly enough. But a she-ass has the virtue of also being able to carry panniers laden with market goods, or Mother Hilde herself, if her feet get tired.
The scent of the roses that climbed all over the shed filled the garden. Malachi may be a genius with metals, but Mother Hilde is a genius with plants. In a sunny corner place by the beehives, she had strange herbs that looked like a tangle of weeds, grown from seeds she had brought back from her pilgrimage abroad, the one she had taken with me when we retrieved Gilbert from that French prison. Beyond the wattled fence of her henyard, amidst the contented clucking, there was a raucous screech.
“I meant to ask you, Mother Hilde, where did you get the peacock?”
“A gift, Margaret, but he's so lovely I can't bear to eat him. And my rooster's jealous of him. Oh, it's a drama these days in my henyard. Let me save a few tailfeathers for your children.” As I picked beans from the tall tents of her beanpoles, Mother Hilde let herself into the yard and came out with a handful of feathers.“I don't know whether he just drops them or whether the rooster picks them off, but he certainly has more where these came from.” I held them up by my head.
“Look at me, Mother Hilde, now I'm fine and grand.” I turned my nose up in a mockery of some court dandy.
“You're fine to me always, Margaret. But my, they are a pretty color. Wouldn't it be elegant if the dyers could color cloth like that?
I'd wear it every day.” She took to filling her own basket with the things that had come ripe that day, onions, crabapples, a half-row of turnips.
“I see you're expecting again,” she said.
“How did you know so soon, when I wasn't even sure myself until just this week?”
“Well, for one thing, your face is shining and your eyes look happy, and for another thing, Malachi told me,” she answered.
“Oh, Mother Hilde, and here I thought your powers were greater than ever.”
“Not always great enough. Do you know, Margaret, I was deceived? A wind pregnancy. I'd heard of them, never seen one.”
“A wind pregnancy?”
“Yes, and nary a baby growing at all. The goodwife just puffed up on wind. It went on and on. In the tenth month, she started to have labor pains, and they called me. She cried out, she sweated, oh, it all looked so real! But when I'd seated her on the birthing stool, and felt beneath her skirts for the head, there was nothing there. The birth passage was as closed as in a woman who never bore child. ‘There's no child here,' I said, and she screamed at me. ‘You've stolen it!' she cried. Luckily, there were a dozen witnesses in the room.‘There's no child, there's nothing,' I said to her mother.‘See for yourself.' ‘But I felt it moving last week.' ‘That is wind,' I said. ‘This is a wind pregnancy. Put your head to her belly and listen for a heartbeat. There is none.’ She listened, they all listened, and the woman squalled and accused them all. She became a madwoman, Margaret, with eyes like the Devil himself. The labor stopped then and there, and I left to the sound of her howling. I hear now that she is completely mad; she claims she is still pregnant, the wind is still inside, as big as a full-term baby, and she's going on twelve months now. Twelve months! Impossible! But she claims it will be a prodigy, since it is taking longer to grow. God spare me any more wind-children, Margaret. I could have been taken for a witch.”
“That is the strangest story I've ever heard. What would make a wind-child, do you think?”
“God. Or the Devil. Or perhaps desire. The woman was barren, and her husband malcontent. Maybe she puffed herself up with some charm or spell.” A sing-song humming was coming from the shed, mingling with the buzz of the bees and the chirp of songbirds.
“Peter's in the shed again?” I asked. Mother Hilde was once married, but pestilence carried away her husband and all of her children but Peter, who is not right. He is shaped sacklike and short, rather like a troll, and has odd eyes. He's a kindly fellow who sings and talks a bit, and carries heavy things, but he has no mind. Hilde's other children were tall and handsome and clever, but what God takes, He takes.
“We have new kittens out there, and he sings to them all day. I'm glad to see him so happy,” she said, casting an eye at the shed where the roses bloomed in profusion. “When the mother of that windchild woman asked me what to do, I told her the girl should learn to fill her grief with good works. God sends consolation.”Arm in arm, we carried the baskets of sun-warmed garden fruits through the front gate and into the house.
NOW THE ONLY THING more difficult that entertaining relatives unexpected is getting up a family expedition into the country. In the first place, nobody really wants to go, or if they want to go they would rather it be another time, or they don't feel like packing or they feel like packing too much. Then there's hiring the sumpter mules and the drovers which is a great bother. At least we didn't have to ride hired horses which are nothing but trouble, because thanks to the Burgundians who had refilled our empty money chest we had been able to have our horses brought back from the country and could afford to keep them again. Besides, Gilbert's father says there's nothing lower than riding hired horses, and we never would have heard the end of it, all the way to Brokesford.
First of all, we were delayed by Hugo, who complained that he hadn't finished his exploration into the more obscure forms of his worship of God's creations, and that he had heard there was a new woman come into the stews who was a giantess, and he wanted to find out whether she was a giant everywhere and whether she would smother him in passion.
“That's disgusting,” I said. “Your appetite gets more abnormal all the time.”
“Really, you don't expect me to go back to that dull, demanding woman when I haven't half finished up here.” Luckily, Sir Hubert cut short this argument by flinging Hugo across the hall, which gratified Gilbert immensely.
Then there were the girls, who whined, “We don't like stepgrandfather's house, Mama. It's all ugly and dirty and broken down, and the rain comes through, and besides, we didn't like it last time.”
“It will be nicer this time, and we'll be home before you know it.”
“Then why go at all?” said Cecily.
“Yes, we don't like Lady Petronilla. She's a mean, bad lady and she hates us.”
“It's much different now. Uncle Hugo likes you now, and stepgrandfather will make her be good. Besides, Damien and Robert are there.”
“Damien! We love Damien! When will he marry us? We're growing all the time.”As only little girls can be, they have been passionately in love with Damien, old Sir Hubert's squire, since they first laid eyes on him. It was his sunshiny smile that won them, and the fact that he was “very, very big, but not old.” It was probably also because he had so many sisters and brothers at home that he knew how to deal with them. Unfortunately, their love took the form of throwing things down on him from the windows of the solar, and punching his arm, and hanging onto his leg. It was seeing this that made me first realize that they needed serious instruction in being ladies. “No man loves you back if you hit him,” I told them, so they went off and poured water in his boots, all out of sheer adoration. Once again, the magic name did its trick, and they went off to pack—oceans of dresses and hair ribbons and other things designed to win over Damien's affections.
“I take it, I will not be needed on this excursion?” asked Madame, and for the life of me, I couldn't decide whether she meant she wanted to go or she didn't want to go. The only way to tell is by her complexion. It looked very pale. I think she thought it might all be a ruse to get rid of her.
“Now, more than ever,
Madame,” I answered. “The girls have even more need of instruction in the country than here in the home they're used to.”
“The ways of great houses require a deep understanding of chivalry. It is not to be expected that they could have mastered the fine points at their ages.” She glided away to pack. That's Madame, I thought. Why don't I always know what to say like that?
Then Mother Sarah complained her bones were too old for travel, and Perkyn said the house would fall apart if I left at such a critical season, and him getting on, to expect him to handle everything.
Gilbert moved in and out of the house, vanishing for long periods, and then conferring with me over the arrangements. Sometimes he whistled to himself, “The Knight Stained from Battle” and other tunes, some religious, some I suspect very bawdy, from his bad old days as a student in Paris, singing drinking songs from tavern to tavern on the left bank.
“What's the arrow chest for?” I asked.
“Malachi's thought of everything. It's for the shovels. If any are missing from the estate or the village, someone's sure to notice. You know what gossips country folk are. So we bring our own, locked up.”
“I haven't seen you so content since we were sitting in that awful place in Avignon.”
“And Malachi and I were forging alchemical secrets to fund our return home? Margaret, you are sentimental about the most amazing things. But I must admit, there's something refreshing and contenting about putting one over on people who deserve it.” He sighed. “I haven't been in trouble for so long, Margaret, it was just getting boring.”
“You mean you miss writing nasty poems and anonymous denunciations to post on church doors, and getting pursued by inquisitioners and vengeance-seekers?”
“It's the chase, Margaret, the game. Some people like to pursue animals. I like to skewer pompous men of authority.”
Margaret of Ashbury 03 - The Water Devil Page 12
