In Pursuit of the Green Lion

by Judith Merkle Riley

  “If you love me even the tiniest speck or scrap, refrain from becoming infected with it. I fear I have a lifetime of suffering ahead with Hugo.”

  “Very well.” I smiled. “I love you more than a speck.”

  But we really were home, as Lion’s joyful barking attested and the shouts and laughter confirmed, when we rode into the alley that ran between our stableyard and that of the Wengraves’. Every shutter had been thrown open on either side of the street, and all the neighbors had leaned out to huzzah and wave napkins and scarves like banners before they rushed out to crowd about us and hear the news.

  But it was Cecily and Alison I was looking for, even before I’d dismounted. They ran from the door of the Wengraves’ kitchen ahead of everyone else shouting, “Mama! Mama! Mama’s back; I told you she’d come back!” Oh, I was overjoyed.

  “My precious babies!” I cried. But when they saw the basket, they stopped short.

  “What,” said Cecily, pointing her finger, “is that?”

  “Not a present,” said Alison.

  “My dears, this is your new little baby brother, who was born overseas. Would you like to see him?”

  “We don’t want a baby brother,” announced Cecily in a firm little voice.

  “No. Boys are disgusting,” added Alison.

  Gregory had dismounted and stood beside me to help me down from the mare.

  “He’s back, too,” said Cecily.

  “Did you have to bring him?” queried Alison.

  Gregory had his back to them, and was facing the mare’s flank. When he heard what they said, he turned around very slowly to look at them. Then he pulled together his fierce, dark eyebrows in a grim stare of disapproval. Never in his life had he looked more like an écorcheur, fresh from the killing fields, all dusty and swarthy from the sun.

  “I am not ‘him.’ Henceforth, you will address me as ‘Father,’” he stated, very slowly and distinctly. An ordinary child would have quailed.

  But the skinny little mophead who had ridden the destrier that had killed a man looked him in the eye and said: “You’re not my papa.”

  “No,” he said, and his voice was grave and quiet. “But your papa lives in heaven now, and you need a flesh-and-blood father on this earth, if you are to live to grow up. I am what you have while God wills it. Remember that, and call me Father.” It seemed like an eternity that Cecily stared at him, turning it over in her mind. Alison stuck her thumb in her mouth, waiting for Cecily’s response.

  “Yes, Father,” she said, and, hesitating briefly, curtsied in the fashion she had learned from Mistress Wengrave. A look of disgust crossed Alison’s baby face at this betrayal, and she turned on her fat little heel.

  “And you,” said Gregory. Alison ignored him. “The little one. Alison. Turn ’round.” She turned. She ruminated on her thumb awhile, thinking. Then she took it out of her mouth. I know her well. She was calculating her advantage.

  “Yes, Father,” she said. And holding her skirt in both hands, she wobbled a bit in the form of a curtsey.

  “Good,” he said. “Now I will help your mother down so that you may embrace her.” And handing me down, he called a groom to assist him in unfastening the basket, standing guard while the neighbor women swarmed about it crying “Precious! Sweet! How beautiful! How big!” and the horses were led away.

  LATE IN THE NIGHT, Gregory sat up in bed. It was so silent that even the crickets had stopped chirping in the garden. The newly hung bed curtains were drawn back, but it was impossible to see anything in the dark behind the closed shutters. The chamber was still stark, denuded of its chests and hangings, and the carpet not yet put back, but that didn’t account for the strangeness of it. He had never slept there before. And he had never sat at the head of his own table before, giving orders and having the servants bring him the dishes for his approval. And never, in his wildest imaginings, had he dreamed that after supper, sitting by the fire, he would hold two little girls on his lap while reading aloud from the romance of Ywain, the Knight of the Lion, which stood on the candle-lit bookstand before him. The entire household had watched silently as Alison had taken him by the hand and pointed to the place he should begin—a beautifully painted bookmark placed there by Master Kendall only two days before his death. They had listened with rapt attention as he began to read in his clear, grave voice, for the story, all written in the common tongue from some Frenchman’s tale, is a very good one, and they all had been wondering for some time what had happened after the lion was rescued from the venomous serpent. It was all different. So very different.

  Margaret heard him right away, for being a mother, every rustle in the night awakened her.

  “Are you up?” she whispered, wrapping the covers around her tighter.

  “Of course. What do you think?” he whispered back in the dark.

  “You aren’t sick, are you?”

  “No, I’m thinking.”

  “Thinking about what?”

  “That my life didn’t turn out the way I’d expected.”

  “Nobody’s does.”

  “I guess I’ll never see God after all. It seemed very close there, for a while, but then it slipped away.”

  “Don’t worry, God sees you.”

  “God sees everybody. I wanted to be special. I guess I thought it would be very fine if everybody said, ‘There goes Brother Gregory; he may only be a second son, but he’s really illuminated.’ But that just turns out to be Pride.” He sighed. “I guess you can’t find God by looking.”

  “I think—I think you can by asking. And—by listening …” She curled up in the covers and closed her eyes again. Gregory tucked his knees up, and put his elbows on them. Resting his chin on his cupped hands, he peered into the impenetrable darkness. He listened. First he heard his own breath coming evenly in the quiet, and the soft pulse of Margaret’s beside him as she returned to sleep. Then he heard the little uneven puffs of the baby in the cradle, and through the walls the children and old Mother Sarah and Cook and even the neighbors. The little thoughts that cluttered his mind like busy ships moving to and fro in the harbor had been swept away in the listening, and he no longer sensed himself as he listened. He wasn’t turning over old sins like moss-covered stones to see what was underneath; he wasn’t addressing prayers to the Virgin or imagining the Passion; he wasn’t naming the seven virtues or praising the mighty deeds of God. Not a thought of last night’s supper or tomorrow’s breakfast flitted past like a distracting moth. And still he listened, until he could hear the deep and ageless sound of the earth breathing. And beyond that, nothing. As he entered Nothing, a strange warmth sprang up in his breast, somewhere around the heart. And he didn’t say, Aha! this is described in the Incendium Amoris but not in the Scala Claustralium, but instead, Let it be. It kindled and sprang higher until he was ablaze with it. It reached high up, outward, and inward into the Nothing. Pure love, on fire. It blazed, for a fragment of a moment, all the way to God, like a spark rising in the darkness. And as it died down, he could sense that everything on earth was softly glowing with it.

  “Astonishing,” said Gregory to himself as it faded and he returned. “I must try this again sometime,” he mumbled, as he rolled over and sleep overtook him.

  “LET’S SEE—YOU’LL BE wanting to invite that Robert le Clerc—” Margaret was all abustle, counting off potential guests on her fingers in order to keep track of the place settings.

  “How do you know that old tosspot? He’s not the proper sort of person for you to be acquainted with, Margaret.” Gregory’s voice was not altogether undismayed. It’s like uncovering an unconfessed sin, when you discover your wife has made the acquaintance of your old friends from bachelor days.

  “I know him from when you were gone.”

  “Worse and worse. Did he try any of his lecherous tricks?”

  “Him? Oh, no,” Margaret laughed. “He came to apologize for a filthy song he’d written about you.”

  “You mean—there’s a filthy song abo
ut me going the rounds of the City?” Gregory had been enjoying his newfound respectability, wallowing in it, even, and so the thought of the song disturbed him more than usual.

  “It’s going the rounds of the realm, Gregory. So just don’t bother yourself about it.” He put his hand on his head and groaned.

  He was sitting in the room off the hall on the ground floor where Roger Kendall had once done his accounts. The wide oak table and narrow bench were as they ever had been. The glass had been put back in the window. The room looked bigger without the bales and bolts that had been perpetually stacked there, even though it now contained a new piece of furniture—a plain, iron-studded wooden chest containing excerpts from Jehan le Bel’s new chronicle, as well as a nicely bound copy of his virelays given as a parting gift. There was also a borrowed copy of the chronicles of Matthew Paris for reference in addition to the untidy stacks and rolls of notes taken abroad.

  Above the table, on which quills, knife, sand, and ink were neatly laid out beside the half-written sheet of paper that lay beneath his hand, there was another new thing hanging on the wall halfway between floor and ceiling. It was a crucifix, austere and dark, with the figure of Christ carved in light wood. While the cross itself was ebony, inlaid and beautifully finished, the little figure was unpainted. Gregory, browsing along the street one morning, had seen it in the woodcarver’s shop that way. He stopped to watch the man as he sat in the window, finishing it off with delicate strokes, as he prepared it for the lurid coating of gilt, azure, and gore that characterized all of his finer works. Something about the face of the little figure—perhaps it was just the way the light caught it—seemed oddly familiar to Gregory, so he entered into negotiations on the spot out of concern that paint might spoil the illusion.

  Now he found there were times it was good to look at it as it hung there, and sit quietly a moment, before beginning again. When the chronicle was going badly or when he’d opened and read a letter from his father, for example, it seemed to calm him. Or then there was the day when a terrified cat, dressed in baby clothes, had leapt through the open door and onto his writing table in a single bound, spilling his ink across an entire page. He’d confronted the creature’s clattering little pursuers without even shouting, which was really quite astonishing, all things considered.

  “Are you sure?” he asked Margaret, looking again at his crucifix, sighing, and taking his hand off his head.

  “Oh, yes. I heard the song on the road from Wymondley last fall. Your only hope is that a worse one about somebody else will supplant it. Now, what about that nice fellow who sells books?”

  “Nicholas? You know him too?”

  “A bit. Now you be sure to tell them it’s an evening dedicated to the muses, so they must each bring some of their work. Cook’s planning her finest, and I’ve already ordered the wine.”

  “There’ll be ale too?”

  “Absolute gallons. You know, I’ve just been thinking. We never had a wedding feast, and we’ve been married over a year. So this will serve, in a belated sort of way, won’t it? Now, how about Master Will?”

  “That priest who rants on street corners about the end of the world? Are you sure, Margaret?”

  “He’s writing a long poem about the sins of the rich, Gregory. Master Kendall supported his efforts for years, and I believe you’ve inherited him. He stopped by just yesterday for something to keep him in paper.”

  “Oh, all right, since you insist.”

  IT WAS THE VINTNER’S wife who first discovered that Margaret was having a feast of the muses. She heard of the wine order from one of her husband’s journeymen, which led her to consult further through her cook to Margaret’s cook to discover the precise nature of the gathering. She then took counsel with Mistress Wengrave, who agreed that it was entirely unfair that old friends should be neglected in an evening that promised to be so interesting, with such unusual and fascinatingly raffish guests—the sort who aroused curiosity precisely because one was not allowed to greet them on the street. It was only a moment’s work to convince Margaret to pretend that she had intended for them to come all along and order more wine. It was a much more touchy matter to rouse their husbands from their ledgers and convince them that an evening with the muses would be quite as lovely as an evening spent cultivating business contacts in high places.

  “The muses? You mean poetry and singing?” rumbled Master Shadworth, the mercer, who had a very splendid establishment two streets from the tall house on Thames Street. “Surely, this is some unworthy charity of yours, mistress. You don’t expect me to greet a woman who ran off with one of her husband’s clerks before his corpse was cold, do you?” He paused to weigh the number and force of his wife’s words as he would silver in a balance. He never actually listened to what she said, but only measured the amount. A man should never make judgments on his wife’s reasoning, since women have no logic to speak of, and one can easily be led into foolish actions by their chatter.

  He nodded occasionally, in a neutral sort of way, as one does in this sort of situation. “Of course, we’ve paid visits before,” he broke into the torrent of argumentation with the careful tone one would use to address a mental incompetent. “But that was when Master Kendall lived. You must understand there’s a difference now. I’ve no wish to meet clerks who spout French verse: they’ll only want to borrow money.” But in the end he was prevailed upon, as was Master Barton the pepperer and even Sir Thomas de Pultney, the fishmonger, or perhaps he might better be called a fish broker, for the only fish he dealt with personally were numbered barrels of salt herring on paper.

  Then Margaret had to send another order to the butcher’s and the poulterer’s and the grocer’s, and arrange for the loan of an extra trestle table from Mistress Wengrave.

  “Margaret,” an appalled Gregory addressed her. “This has gotten entirely out of hand. The disaster I foresee makes me yearn for the monastery. Robert will get drunk and pinch the ladies; Master Will will denounce the rich; the fishmongering knight will deliver his opinion on the lower orders in trade. All that it lacks is my father, denouncing the merchants of the City as money-grubbing parasites bent on consuming the honor of England in their cash boxes. How could you have allowed it to happen?”

  “But Gregory, think of it this way. You’ve never been properly introduced to the neighbors. You can’t just slink back into town and pretend nothing’s happened, after all. I’ve doubled the wine order; if they drink enough, it will all work out smoothly—you’ll see.”

  Gregory sighed. “Yes, I imagine I will see. The more they drink, the more they’ll fight. Then I shall have to change my name and return to the Continent to hide for the rest of my life. I think I’ll organize a Free Company and die in harness. Thus, with one disastrous evening, you’ll have accomplished what my father has failed to manage for years.” He shoved his thumbs under his belt and went off to walk mournfully about the streets as a way of saying good-bye to the City he loved so.

  But Margaret went off to consult with Cook on the entremets, for she knew that when something like this happens to a person, the only way out of it is through it, and activity is a great distraction for the troubled mind.

  “NOW, WHAT MORE CAN possibly happen?” said Margaret to herself on the morning of her fete, sitting down to nurse the baby as a way of getting off her feet. The trestle tables were being brought into the hall, the goblets unpacked, and the long unused linens shaken out and aired. Good smells had been coming for days from the kitchen, and Cook had wept into the broth at how it all reminded her of the old days, when good Master Kendall was alive. And all the while for the past several days there had been an ebb and flow of visitors, ostensibly to admire the baby, but also to try to catch a glimpse of that fabulous object of gossip, Margaret’s new husband, who was rumored to be—oh, heaven knows what. Possibly a Frenchman, maybe once a monk. Perhaps a French monk or maybe a soldier. Or was it a foreign lord or an English knight? Well, at any rate, he had “Sir” in front of his name, w
hether it was authentic or not. And he knew the King, or perhaps it was the Duke of Lancaster, or the Prince of Wales, or the Archbishop, or somebody else very interesting on the most intimate of terms. He was a step up or a comedown, but in any event, well worth inspecting. Of course, it was difficult to tell quite what he was, by his grave, polite salutation. And wasn’t that an interesting cut of foreign doublet he had on? And the chaperon. Quite unusual, and would certainly look quite nice on one’s own husband if one could coax him into wearing fancy foreign styles.

  Margaret sighed, letting the easy wave of relaxation and pleasure sweep over her body as the milk let down. Her feet were propped on the little stool before her chair, and she half closed her eyes to shut out the booming clatter of the world before looking down to admire the blissful fulfillment on the tiny face working away at her breast. Once again, we two, she thought. A familiar cold, damp feeling caught her at the back of the neck.

  “Master Kendall? Are you there? I’ve missed you; it’s been hard.”

  “Oh, Margaret, you look so contented there. I think he must have said it.”

  “He did, but it wasn’t easy.”

  “Then you won’t be wanting me anymore.”

  “Yes, I will, I’ll always love you.”

  “Margaret, you have a big heart.”

  “Always big enough for you.”

  “But I have news. I’ve been accepted among the blessed. A very nice location they’ve reserved too. They said it was an honor I didn’t deserve, but they were tired of your bothering them. I thank you, little Margaret.”

  “Oh, but don’t go too soon. Stay for the party, at least. There’ll be poetry, and music, and readings. You’ll like that.”

  “I’ve already got permission to stay for it, Margaret. You know how I’ve always enjoyed an evening of good conversation.” Master Kendall’s ghost was formed up now, all filmy in his long merchant’s gown.