Hilde sat down and shook her head wonderingly. “Oh, Malachi, dear Malachi,” she said. He looked at her as if he suddenly feared she might say something sharp for taking such a risk. But she saw the look, and smiled, and said, “Oh, Malachi. You’re such a philosopher.” And he beamed in response.
I waited for the precious moment to pass, and then broke in with something that had been bothering me.
“Malachi,” I asked, “have you told them it’s an alchemical text? Maybe you should make the agreement before you show them.”
“I haven’t shown it yet, but they always seem to know. And then it’s ‘try down the street.’”
“Well, suppose they know you have the Secret. Then they’ll think that if they translate it, you might not want them to know it too—”
“Yes, sensible, sensible. If I were a man like the Count, I might just send an assassin after them. An accident in the street, a fire—No, suppose I were fearful they’d told? I might just get rid of the lot. Yes. It’s clear. No wonder nobody reads Hebrew. I’ll have to give guarantees—prove my sincerity—” and he was off again, thinking of fanciful schemes.
“Malachi, you must press on,” said Hilde. “We can’t stay much longer. Did you know that Hugo was here trying to borrow money? We think he must have spent the passage money back. Margaret questioned him, and he got very annoyed. ‘I’m the heir of Brokesford, and need to live like a knight. You don’t want me to live like a peasant, do you?’ He hasn’t paid his men, and two of them have vanished. They say they’ve run off to join the Archpriest. The rest are loyal, at least for now. But the sooner we leave, the better.”
“That wretched cabbage brain! I can’t believe he’s any relative of Gilbert’s. I imagine he put the passage money on the gaming table. He hasn’t got the sense of a cooked carrot! He’s probably counting on getting home by hiring out to a party traveling in the right direction. Armed men are at a shortage now, and he can name his price. But us—we’ve got no such recourse. I wouldn’t put it past him to leave without us.”
Now Malachi had a second preoccupation. In the night, when I’d get up to attend to Gregory, whose fever waxed and waned without reason, I’d hear him muttering.
“Money, money. I need money. Think, brain, think. For God’s sake, Gilbert, stop that moaning and gibberish. You’re interfering with my mental processes.” Then I’d hear the bed creak and know that he’d sat up, to stare into the dark for hours.
ABRAHAM THE TAILOR WAS nobody’s fool. He knew how to smell things coming in the air. That is why he was already packed and on the road when they’d fired the Jewish quarter in Marseilles. He himself had led the mule laden with his wife, his goods, and two little babies in the panniers all night beneath the unseeing stars. He’d never turned his face back once on the road to Avignon, even on the rise of ground just beyond the city, when he heard the faint echo of distant cries behind him. His oldest son, a little boy just ten, who walked beside him with a tall stick and a pack exactly like his own, had turned and cried, “Oh, look, Father,” pausing to stare at the column of flames climbing into the night sky. But even then, the old man had only hunched his back and turned his face like iron to the road ahead.
Now he was confronted with a stranger who wanted a book translated. Looking the man over carefully, he went through his mental checklist. Not armed; not evil; not crazy; and not a Flemish wool merchant. No matter what he claimed, the man lacked the countinghouse eyes and ponderous mind of the merchant of the north. He checked the hands as the man held out the book for him to inspect. Acid-stained. And the sleeves—marred by tiny little burn holes, as if from flying sparks. Oh, God, not another alchemist, thought Abraham. What have I done to deserve this? Still, it was tempting. His wife was wanting a new pair of shoes, and his oldest boy had just outgrown his gown, which was ready, even in its patched condition, to be passed to the next child.
“These are indeed Hebrew letters,” said Abraham. “But I will need to be paid in advance.”
“I can’t let the book go. Will you translate it in my presence?” Brother Malachi’s voice was unusually controlled, considering the state of high excitement he was in.
Abraham the tailor took the book and they sat together at the broad table on which he did his cutting.
“Let me see—hmm.” He turned the pages carefully. He sighed. He looked again. He sighed another time, a long, resigned sigh.
“In my opinion, this book is a fraud,” he said.
“What do you mean, a fraud?” Brother Malachi was agitated.
“Whoever wrote it didn’t know any Hebrew. They just put down letters any way it suited them.” He looked at Brother Malachi’s face. The man looked as if he’d been struck by lightning. “Still, the illuminations are very nicely done,” he added consolingly.
“But—but couldn’t it be a corrupted text—or perhaps a code—a cypher?” Brother Malachi’s world was dissolving around him.
“A corrupted text would have meaningless words that had been miscopied mixed in among words with meaning. Here, there is not a syllable of meaning anywhere.” Abraham pointed with a callused finger to the rows of letters on the page. His eyes missed nothing as he watched grief and shock alternate on Brother Malachi’s face.
“But a cypher?” Malachi scrabbled for a last word of hope.
“Well, who knows? Perhaps it is. But large numbers of letters aren’t even correctly written. See this one here? It’s as if you wrote an m with five humps—and over there, three, and then again four. This leads me to think that the person who wrote it didn’t know what he was doing.”
“But the diagrams—the squares, the pentacles?” Brother Malachi sounded desperate now. They all do, thought Abraham. It’s so sad, letting them down gently. No wonder no one but me is willing to do it. I’m becoming a specialist in the art.
“I will transliterate the letters. Perhaps then you will find a clue to another language—one which I do not know.”
Brother Malachi put his elbows on the table; he buried his face in his hands.
“A fake—a fraud. Who would have thought it? Me, of all people, taken in by a fraudulent bunch of paper. Still, it has a kind of justice in it. God must have willed it.”
“Why do you say that?” asked Abraham, who had rarely seen any of them take the news this calmly. So many of them became dangerous at this point.
“Because of my business—hm—my former business, I mean, before I became a wool merchant, that is.”
“And what was that?”
“I sold indulgences,” said Brother Malachi, and then he looked at the beautiful book and began to laugh. Abraham’s eyes glittered with the irony of it, and he began to laugh too.
Malachi laughed even harder, until the tears stood in his eyes and his breath came in sobs. It felt almost like crying, but of course it was much better than weeping. And as Malachi laughed, Abraham laughed harder too. Life had not been all that easy for him in Avignon either.
“Thank you,” said Brother Malachi as he wiped his eyes.
“Thank you,” said Abraham the tailor, doing the same. “Do you want the transliteration now?”
“Can I come back tomorrow? I need to walk about and think a bit,” said Brother Malachi.
“Of course,” said Abraham. But the false wool merchant had already tucked the volume into his bosom and left with his head bowed down.
“Too bad,” said Abraham the Jew. “There must be hundreds of those things floating about the world, and somehow they all end up here.”
THE PSEUDO WOOL MERCHANT, hands behind his back and head sunk low, wandered for a considerable time until he emerged from the maze of narrow alleys into the tiny, cobblestoned square before the massive Gothic portals of the church of St. Pierre. There in the jostling crowd emerging from the dark interior of the church, he saw a comfortable looking older woman in pilgrim’s garb, escorted by a bored looking little boy. Even from the back, the figure was familiar.
“Hilde, Hilde, wait!” called the
wool merchant, and she turned. She had spent the morning walking all over town; she had visited six churches as well as the cave where the most blessed Saint Martha, hostess of Our Lord, had dwelt with her servant Marcella when she preached the Gospel and conquered the dragon with holy water. She was still in a dazzle with the grandeur, the gold and incense, the high shadowy vaults where God so obviously dwelt, and the multitude of enshrined relics. Kneebones, fingerbones, skulls, fragments of cloth and vials of blood—even the very girdle with which Saint Martha had bound the dragon—they’d all moved her to tears. She’d had such a lovely time envisioning the martyrs they’d belonged to and dabbing at her eyes, her heart was all full of it. It had been an absolutely ecstatic morning, one of the few she’d treated herself to in many days of being shut inside helping Margaret.
At the cry, she looked up and waved. Then she said something to the restive little boy, and he sped off in the opposite direction more swiftly than a bolt sent from a crossbow.
“Hilde, I’ve been gulled.” Brother Malachi was puffing as he caught up with her. “Can you believe it? Me? Of all people.”
“Surely not, Malachi, you’re very clever.”
“Not this time. I tell you, that Thomas always had it in for me. Jealous, he was, because I was farther along than he was. He’d never even got as far as the dragon. I told him he was going in the wrong direction, and he said I was trying to trick him into failure, so I could keep the gold for myself. I imagine he died laughing, after he’d signed the will leaving me this thing. ‘If I can’t have it, neither can he—I’ll send him off on a hunt he won’t come back from.’ I’m just lucky he didn’t make it up in Egyptian, I suppose.”
“He may have been a friend, Malachi, and been fooled himself.”
“Him? Not likely. Did I tell you about the time he visited my lab-oratorium and dropped some powder out of his sleeve into all my experimental vessels? Turned everything green—ruined six months of work. And to top it off, he confided he’d seen the Peacock’s Tail, which was entirely untrue. Made me morose for weeks.”
“Morose? Oh, Malachi, you’re not morose. It’s not in your character.”
“Not since I found you, O Jewel of My Existence. It is impossible to be morose in the presence of your lovely self and that marvelous onion pie that only you can make so well.”
“Oh, Malachi, you are so brilliant and genial.” Mother Hilde took the wool merchant’s arm as they strolled beneath the new-leafed trees. “I’m very lucky that some other woman didn’t make you onion pie first.”
“It would have been imperfect, Hilde. No, I was looking for the perfect onion pie and the perfect woman. With whom else could I share my life? Still, I am very sorry to have brought you on this wild-goose chase.”
“Sorry? Malachi, I’ve always wanted to travel. Without you, where would I have ever been, except the village where I was born? And now—why, we live in London! I’ve met princes, dukes, counts—even though that last one wasn’t much, I must say. And look in here—” She opened her pilgrim’s wallet. It was full of pressed tin pilgrim’s badges from the shrines she’d visited. There were pebbles and little pottery vials of this and that, all stoppered with wax. “See those? When I was a girl, Malachi, I’d see the pilgrims ride by, with their badges on their hats, and I’d be envious. They’ve been somewhere, I’d say to myself. Now I’ve been somewhere too. How amazing. After enough life for two women, I have another. A life of travel and adventure with the cleverest man in the whole world. I don’t understand why you’re sorry about that.”
As she spoke Brother Malachi’s face began to relax. It regained its normal pinkness, and the deep lines started to fade away.
“Hilde, I’ll make it all up to you. We’ll go back. I’ve learned a lot on this trip, though not from that wretched book. I’ve a new idea I’ll set to work on. You’ll see. Someday, I’ll make you rich beyond your dreams.”
“Malachi,” she said, smiling at the everlasting optimism that always made him seem so eternally youthful, “I already am that way.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
HE’S FEELING LOW, MALACHI, I CAN TELL.” I’d been hanging out the window, trying to catch the spring sun on my face. The heat had come early, making the room under the eaves stifling. I was crazy with being inside too long, doing little but listening to Gregory’s gasping breath, or the strange words he said when his mind was wandering. So when I saw Malachi puffing up the outside stair to the garret room, I was ready to burst for wanting to tell him my idea.
“Low?” Even Malachi had to duck when he crossed the threshold to the little room. “You’re worried about him feeling low? He’s alive! If that isn’t sufficient cause for rejoicing, I don’t know what is!” He glanced briefly at the sleeping figure on the bed. “In the meanwhile, I worry about serious things, such as the fact we haven’t money or means to get home again. But am I low? No! My brain is churning with plans. I occupy myself with useful thoughts. And it’s me that ought to be low! I deserve to be low, and lie in bed all day with people worrying about me and offering me wine and fruit. My book, my wonderful treasure that sent me off on this foolish chase, is a worthless forgery. Just tell me what else could make a sensitive soul like mine lower?”
There’s no dealing with Brother Malachi in a mood like this, you just have to distract him.
“Brother Malachi, I need your help. Hilde and I had an idea, and we’re going shopping. But we need an expert like you to assist us.”
“Don’t think to distract me with that sly, flattering tone, Margaret. Where did you get any money, besides what you gave over to me?”
“I sold a few things I didn’t want.”
“What—?” He scrutinized me closely, to see what was missing.
“I want to buy him a present. He needs a book.”
“Margaret, I see your hood’s missing, but that won’t buy a book.”
“It’s summer. We’ll be leaving soon, and I don’t need it.”
“What else, you foolish woman?”
“Those nasty mourning clothes. I mended them and sold them. Everyone needs mourning clothes, it’s the plague season. Everybody except me. I’m not sad anymore. They fetched a good price—that horrible lilac water smell made them seem more genteel. Ugh. Lilac water.” I couldn’t help shuddering.
“Tsk, tsk. You’re shuddering, Margaret,” Malachi remarked. “You’ve been rather hasty in divesting yourself of clothing, I fear. But I can tell from your face you’ve gone behind my back. What else did you sell?”
“Just the horse litter.”
“Just the—what? And, pray, how do you think to get him home again without it?”
“He’ll ride when we leave, Malachi, because he’ll be well. Once he gets his spirits back, he won’t do anything but ride.”
Brother Malachi shook his head. “Margaret, you are a hopeless dreamer and a madwoman. The fever comes and goes; he still hallucinates, and when he’s himself, he’s become so morose, he doesn’t speak. So with the harebrained notion you’ll cure him with a book, you have stripped yourself of your last worldly goods. Consider this: You have grown as large as a small mountain. Shouldn’t you have better bought a cradle and swaddling clothes?”
“That’s why I need you to help me find the book. It has to be just right. See? Here’s Hilde back again, so we can go.” Indeed, Mother Hilde had returned with a bucket of water. Setting it beside the bed, she felt Gregory’s forehead where he slept, his eyes all sunken in, and wrung out a towel in the cold water. Laying it across his forehead, she motioned Sim to sit with him and renew the towel when it was needed. Sim nodded, but I could see he took it ill that we were going out when he had to stay.
The wonderful early April sunshine brightened the whole world. Spring comes so soon in the south. It’s really more like summer with us. High white clouds floated in the blue sky. The towers of the papal palace shone like the blessed Jerusalem itself. Below it, the narrow streets were crowded with fruit and flower vendors, strollers, and the
grandees with which this town abounds.
“Oh, Malachi, look,” cried Mother Hilde. “Who is that? The Pope?” A score of outriders were pushing aside the crowds to make room for an elaborate gilded horse litter to pass. In it sat an elderly gentleman, all dressed in silk like the King of Heaven, sniffing at a pomander to keep the street smell from him. From the hounds and horses and members of his household in livery that accompanied him, he looked like a very great lord indeed. Behind his mounted escort came a half-dozen heavily draped mule litters, and a train of sumpter mules and attendants of all description, on foot and mounted. It was a most sumptuous procession; everyone had stopped to gawk.
“No, it’s a cardinal,” said Brother Malachi. “You can tell by the coat of arms. He must be removing his household to his summer palace in the Venaissin, now that heat has brought the season of illness to the town.”
“Malachi, look at the woman.”
“Margaret, I thought you knew enough not to be shocked by a little thing like—oh, my goodness—” Brother Malachi had seen what I had seen. Riding in the gay cavalcade in a covered mule litter with the cardinal’s coat of arms displayed in the gilt carving was a woman. The curtains of the litter had been tied back to give her air. She was all blond and white, glittering with jewels and clutching two tiny white lapdogs. Behind her ran two little black boys in turbans and a half-dozen liveried footmen. I stared like a fool, then smiled and waved, because I just couldn’t help it. She turned her head—she’d seen me, but she didn’t nod in acknowledgment. She’d fixed her gaze straight ahead, so that everyone could admire her profile and jeweled headdress. It was Cis.
“Well, well,” said Brother Malachi. “Isn’t the world full of strange things? Here, Margaret. Take my arm over these cobblestones—you must admit you’ve become totally unwieldy lately. Who’d have ever thought that a slender young thing such as you used to be would become unable to see her own toes?”
In Pursuit of the Green Lion Page 38