So Maistre Robert le Taborer took out his little harp and began the long and sad ballad of the love of Tristan and Yseult. By the time he got to the death of Tristan, it was so very sad that everyone in the room was weeping. Then, as he sang of Yseult’s grief, Margaret’s blank eyes looked him in the face and filled with tears. Once started, she began to sob as if her heart would break, as Hilde embraced her.
Now, Master Robert understood a great deal about grief, for he had experienced most shades of it himself and had been called in to console many with music. And so he followed the ballad with something else, a delicate, lyrical instrumental duet with Long Tom. Then Little William, who was crying considerably himself, wiped his face and began another sad song. Then Master Robert quickened the pace with a livelier song. After that they began a favorite of Margaret’s and begged her to join them. At first she couldn’t, but as they reached the second chorus, she did in a shaky voice, and they applauded. Then they all sang together, beating time, while the others in the room joined in on the chorus so boldly that the house rocked with the noise. Then Master Robert did a comic dance, and everyone laughed, even Margaret.
They stayed there all night, singing and reciting crazy dialogues until the candles were gone, the servants had collapsed with exhaustion, and Margaret had fallen into the first genuine sleep she had had since the dreadful day. In the morning when she woke up, Master Robert himself came dancing up with some breakfast, and Long Tom and Little William stood around and told food jokes while she ate. When they sensed that her mind was knitting together, they embraced her and bade her farewell.
“Margaret, my dear, we have been very dull on the road without you, and we are forced to be excessively careful of our satire since you left us. Remember, you always have a place with the troupe of Robert le Taborer! And now, sweetheart, we must leave you, for we have an engagement at the Goldsmiths’ Hall.” Then they all three bowed with a great flourish and were gone.
Margaret said, “Oh, Hilde, I do love them! Maybe everything will come out all right after all.”
BUT WHAT MARGARET AND her friends did not realize was that the wolves were already circling around Margaret as if she were an orphan lamb alone in a forest clearing. For while a poor widow is nobody’s friend, a rich one is a great prize. And if that one is rich and attractive, then there is little question that she will not be left alone very long. In several places about the City powerful men were making calculations, if not for themselves, then for their sons, as to how many days more it was decent to wait before proposing marriage, and just what forms of delicate pressure might be most successful in forcing the widow’s consent.
Even more unpleasant, Lionel’s and Thomas’s supposedly reformed characters seemed to have shattered shortly after the funeral, in fact, at about the time that they learned of the contents of their father’s will. They had plans for something even more upsetting than marriage. One afternoon, when things had calmed down, Kendall’s apprentices and assistants had moved out, and there were no more visitors going to and fro, Lionel pounded on the front door for admission, at the same time that Thomas did so at the back. To the surprise of the members of the household who answered at both doors, they were immediately overwhelmed by half a dozen armed brigands, who forced their way in and gathered the terrorized servants in the great hall.
“If you wish to live, don’t try to leave,” Lionel told them, smiling wolfishly and brandishing his short sword. “We’re planning a surprise for your mistress and don’t want to be disturbed.” When the toughs had rounded up the stragglers in the stable, they locked them all in a downstairs storeroom. Then they stormed up the stairs to find Margaret, her children, and the nursemaid.
“Ha, Agatha, now at last you’ve got the chance to give them the beating they deserve,” laughed Thomas, as he threw a purse full of money to the nurse. “Hold them for us here, but don’t kill them—if all goes as it ought to, we’ll clear a pretty penny on the sale of their dowries.”
“It’s all my pleasure to serve your least desire, sir,” she answered with a bob and a malicious smirk.
The hired toughs had found Margaret and held her by the arms in her own bedroom, while Lionel prowled in front of her.
“And now, you whore, tell us where it is,” he hissed.
“Where what is?” gasped Margaret.
“Don’t pretend with me, you know perfectly well what we’re after.”
“I swear, I swear, I don’t know at all,” said Margaret, but her answer infuriated Lionel, who grabbed her by the throat to try to strangle the answer out of her, just as his brother entered the room.
“Don’t strangle her yet; remember, we won’t get a thing until we find it, and we lose everything if you kill her first,” he called to Lionel, who at that very moment let out a shrill cry.
“The bitch has burned me!” He pulled back his hand and looked at it; there was a stink of seared flesh in the air. Across his palm was a black mark, imprinted like a brand, of chain links that matched the chain around Margaret’s neck. She shrank back from him and tried to put her hand on her neck, but her arms were held fast at the elbow by Lionel’s men, and so she could not reach the painful spot. There, at the base of her neck, a great livid bruise was forming, shaped like two thumbs. She was paralyzed with horror, as Lionel pulled out his knife. The two men who held her by the arms had not loosened their grip through this entire episode.
“Brother, brother. Wait until later. Make her talk first, before you do something you can’t undo,” said Thomas. He took out his knife, too, and pressed its blade to her throat. “Now,” he said, “tell us where it is, or you’ll regret it very, very slowly.”
“I swear by the saints, I don’t know what you mean!” Margaret gasped, afraid to move the slightest muscle.
“The will, the will, you sly, vicious little trollop. The right one. The one that you stole.”
“There’s no other will, except the one that’s just been read. What on earth do you mean?”
“The woman has the most amazing effrontery, brother. Do you hear her deny it?”
Lionel got up from the chest, where he had been sitting and nursing his burnt hand. He was a sinister figure, all clad in his black mourning clothes. He strode across the room and lifted his brother’s knife away from her throat with an almost delicate gesture, and then, with a sudden brutal movement, slapped Margaret hard in the face. She blinked the tears out of her eyes and stared at him, a look of incomprehension on her face.
“Don’t waste time with denials. We know you’ve conspired to hide the true will and substitute a forgery. You were seen doing it with your lover.”
“My lover?” cried Margaret frantically. “I have no lover.”
Both brothers laughed raucously. Lionel sneered, “You can’t lie to us, you pious little hypocrite, the way you deceived father. You’ve been after his money all along; we knew it and had you watched. You were seen with papers, written by that filthy friar you’ve been sleeping with.”
“I never, never did that. You’re wicked to accuse me so falsely, with your father only just buried.”
“You deny you were seen with papers? You can’t fool us. We intend to have them before the night is out. Where are the papers?” Lionel had taken out his knife, which glittered wickedly, as he ran its point very, very delicately across Margaret’s throat, where it left a narrow red welt, like a fine scratch. Margaret, in the midst of her terror, suddenly realized what they meant. Someone had told them about her book. It was useless to explain it to them—they would never believe her. And if they did, they would only destroy the book in their fruitless rage. She could imagine them now, laughing and reading its pages aloud, one by one, as they fed them to the flames in front of her eyes. She would never, never, reveal its hiding place. Her eyes searched wildly for some help, but there was none. Lionel saw the look on her face change for an instant, and a vicious, one-sided grin, a sinister caricature of his father’s endearing one, twisted his face.
“Aha! You know perfectly well where it is. Our father left us everything, and you know it. He found out what you were at last.”
“Yes,” broke in Thomas. “We warned him. Then we tried to save him from himself, the senile old fool, but someone found the poison and you came right back, like the persistent little rat you are.”
“But it’s too late for you now. Talk, or I’ll cut your throat right here,” smiled Lionel, and he turned his blade across her neck.
“I’m not afraid of death,” said Margaret. “Go ahead. I have prayed for death. Strike now.” She turned her neck so that the artery below the ear throbbed beneath the knife’s edge.
Thomas had been watching, and now a thought struck him.
“Maybe you’re not afraid to die, but I imagine you’d hate to see a charming little finger or two lopped off before you go. Where are the spankless brats?”
“Oh, in the name of God, don’t touch them!” shrieked Margaret in despair. “I’ll tell you everything!” She was writhing frantically in the grip of the armed men.
“So,” said Lionel, with a triumphant smirk, “where is the will?”
“I haven’t got it here.”
“Did you give it to your lover?”
“Yes, yes, I gave all the papers to Brother Gregory.”
“So where is he now?”
“I don’t know—he went away and said he’d be back.”
“You don’t know? Brother, I think she’s lying,” said Thomas.
Just then there was a tap at the downstairs door.
“Answer that!” roared Lionel to the men downstairs. One of them got up from where he had been sprawled by the fire, drinking up Kendall’s ale. As he staggered up, he stumbled over Lion, who had been lying by the fire too.
“Goddam dog,” he said, giving him a kick that sent him against the wall. As he opened the front door to see who was there, Lion ran yelping outside. There was a boy standing at the door, a brazen little boy with freckles, who announced he had a message for Mistress Margaret Kendall and stuck out his hand for a tip.
“I’ll take it,” said the tough.
“My tip, mister,” demanded the boy.
“Get out!” roared the tough, and slammed the door in his face. Then he yelled upstairs in a mocking falsetto,
“Message for Mistress Margaret!”
Lionel read the message with a wolfish smile.
“She wasn’t lying, brother,” he announced. “This is from her lover—he says he’ll be coming in three days to ‘check her spelling.’ Ha! I can guess how he checks it, all right. Dots all the i’s with his prick, I’ll bet.” Everyone in the room guffawed, and Margaret blushed crimson with shame.
“Well, it’s a three-day wait, then, brother,” said Thomas.
“I say, lock her in the cellar until then, and prepare a little surprise reception for the lecherous friar,” Lionel replied. “He won’t want to talk, either, you know. He’s doubtless planning on sharing the spoils with her in some little love nest somewhere. And he’s a lot tougher and more cunning than she is.”
“I have to give him credit. It’s a bold scheme. No woman could have thought of it by herself.” Thomas appreciated people more cunning than he was, even though it wasn’t a useful sort of appreciation. Now, having appreciated the wickedness of Brother Gregory, he turned to appreciate the wickedness of his older brother, who had clearly thought of something deliciously ugly. Lionel, having turned matters over in his mind, said to his brother and the receptive audience of hired men, “I say we have fun and vengeance all at the same time. Someone has to give these filthy clerks a lesson. It might scare off a few others, sometime, if we set a good example with this one. We’ll hold a grand reception for this cunning friar! String him up, just like Abelard, and geld him right in front of Margaret here. Then we’ll beat the hell out of him until he talks.” The toughs nodded and growled their appreciation. “And now, stepmother, dear, we will escort you to the cellar.”
Margaret was sick with apprehension as they locked her alone in one of her own storage rooms in the cellar. All night she grieved, sleeping fitfully as she sat propped up against a barrel. She worried and wept over her children, she thought about how badly she missed her husband. But what made her feel particularly wretched was that in her anxiety to save her children and her book, she had betrayed an innocent man to the butchers. She was so frantic with grief that she didn’t remember even once to congratulate herself on the absence of rats from her storeroom.
Margaret might have felt somewhat better if she had known that Lion had been kicked out the door. He did exactly what he always did when he was let out. He went straight to Mother Hilde’s.
When, in the early hours of the morning, Mother Hilde came home from a long delivery, she was very surprised to find Lion, looking like a bundle of rags, lying forlornly on her doorstep.
“Why, what’s this, Lion? You’re bleeding! What could be wrong?”
Lion whined and snuffled, and tried to lead her to Margaret’s house. Hilde followed him as he trotted through the streets. Being an astute woman, she did not knock on the front door, but listened by a window. She saw lights, long after the household was usually in bed, shining through the shutters of the kitchen. She heard unfamiliar voices and the raucous sound of drinking. Lion pulled on her dress and whined, leading her around the house to one of the heavily barred slits that opened into the basement. He dug at the slit and whined. The whining woke Margaret, who wasn’t really sleeping very well anyway, and she called out softly, “Who’s there? Is that you, Lion?” She was overjoyed to hear Mother Hilde’s whisper answer back.
“Margaret? What on earth are you doing in the cellar at this hour?” Under the cold stars that shine brightest just before dawn, Mother Hilde crouched in the snow at the window to hear Margaret tell the story of the awful ambush that was being laid for Brother Gregory.
“You must hurry, hurry to warn him, Hilde. I’ve done a dreadful thing to him, and you must save him.”
“But what about you, Margaret?”
“I’m sure Brother Gregory can think of something. He’s clever. Ask him what to do; just hurry, Hilde, and warn him!”
It was soon the pink hour of dawn, when the gates are opened and the City rises. Mother Hilde, with some trouble, had found the house where Brother Gregory lived, and with Lion dancing at her heels, she puffed up the rickety outside staircase to the tiny room under the eaves that he had been renting, and planned soon to leave forever. Her frantic knocking disturbed Brother Gregory at a delicate moment. Having said his morning prayers, he was meditating. He had decided that the best thing to begin with was the Wounds of Christ, but he was not getting on very well. For one thing, he was hungry. He always was after rising, and it distracted him. For another thing, Christmas with his father in the north had not worked out very well, and he was still nursing a bruise across the side of his head, where his father had clouted him during the raging argument they had had over his decision to devote his life to solitude and prayer. In fact, the moment Brother Gregory had stepped over the threshold, the old man had become so wrathy that he had immediately restored Brother Gregory’s weakened will on this matter. The sooner, the better, had been his conclusion after the first angry exchange of words with his father.
The ear on the side his father had clouted still buzzed inside, and that interrupted his thoughts considerably. He was annoyed: why on earth had he let his father hit him like that, when he was a grown man? Well, he mused distractedly, it was either that or hit the violent old man himself, which really wasn’t proper. Looked at in another way, one might even see it as admirable that he’d taken a blow for his decision. Why, it showed the abbot had been entirely wrong! He had not a speck, not the tiniest speck of Pride at all! Brother Gregory began to feel pleased with himself. He’d been very Humble and had only shouted back a little bit (and that bit entirely justified under the circumstances) before his father had laid him out with the powerful blow. He was feeling better and better.
The abbot would certainly be impressed with this degree of Humility and admit that he was wrong.
With this rosy light cast on the affair, he began to feel quite mellow. He wondered how Margaret had liked the Psalter. She’d recognize the writing, of course, and probably admire the attractive capitals, but she’d never guess he’d done the translation too. That was his secret. She wasn’t so bad, for a woman, and it was a pretty farewell gift. He’d kept the commission, of course—that was fair, he thought—but he’d put the rest of the fee into the poor box at St. Bartholemew’s. When you got right down to it, Brother Gregory really didn’t care about money very much—he felt that God was always ready to support an admirable fellow like himself, and something would always turn up. Besides, it’s common to worry about money, and Brother Gregory prided himself on never being common.
The meditation seemed to have strayed a bit, so Brother Gregory tried to think about Humility awhile, before he got back to the Wounds of Christ. It was at this point, prostrate on the floor before his crucifix, that Mother Hilde knocked.
“Who is it?” he said in an irritated voice, getting up off the floor.
“It’s Mother Hilde, and I must tell you something very important.”
Mother Hilde? The famous Mother Hilde. He’d never seen her. In fact, Brother Gregory was almost the last person in town who had not yet heard of Roger Kendall’s death, for he had been away until the last day or so, and though he’d planned to clear up his business here before leaving, he still hadn’t been to see anybody yet.
He opened the door, and Mother Hilde’s sharp eyes took in his narrow little room at a glance. It was hardly big enough to turn around in, and at its highest point, the ceiling, canted at the angle of the roof, hovered only a few dangerous inches above Brother Gregory’s head. Plain, whitewashed walls adorned only with a crucifix, a plaited straw mattress on the floor, a little writing table, a cold brazier in the corner, and a tiny window with a leaky shutter—there are worse rooms in London, she thought, and some of them have whole families inside of them. Nevertheless it was clear he didn’t live in the legendary luxury of the self-indulgent clerics she had seen.
A Vision of Light Page 45