In Pursuit of the Green Lion
Page 49
“Then it cannot be cut whole on the bias on this piece, as she requested. Are you sure this is the length the Duchess wanted made up?”
Sir Aldingar was wrothe in his mind,
With her he was never content,
Till traitorous meanes he colde devyse,
In fyer to have her brent.
“Perhaps she has made an error. It measures short. We must ask before we cut.”Again, they held up the long girl’s shift that was their model and measured off the inches with knotted string.
“If Dame Petronilla has made an error, I, for one, certainly don’t want to be the one to point it out,” said the sewing woman.
“Then I’ll go look for Dame Katherine myself,” said the lady. Laying down her scissors and departing through the open door, she left the sewing woman to puzzle over the material, wondering just how it might be pieced in such a way that the different stitching might never be noticed.
“What do you mean, the piece is too short?” came a sharp voice through the open door. “Are you accusing me of cutting it off? Oh, I see, a mistake. I do not make mistakes.”
The needles by the fireside paused, and the sewing women looked at each other.
“Lady Petronilla,” said one. “Why did our good duchess ever make her assistant to the mistress of the robes?” Rapid footsteps passed by their little circle, accompanied by a sort of icy breeze which was not so much a breeze as a feeling of chill. They looked up to see the back of Dame Petronilla de Vilers’s rigid form moving toward the table, the train of her heavy black gown slithering across the tile floor behind her.
“I heard that the Duke dispatched Dame Isabella a list of wives of his knights to whom she should give preference in her household.”
“Is Lady de Vilers’s husband dead, then?” whispered another seamstress, casting a look at the black dress.
“No, she lost a son, they say.”
“She doesn’t seem old enough to have lost a son in France.”
“No, an infant. Sir Hugo, her husband, was devastated at the news, and when she asked to be sent away from the place where he had died, he used influence to have her sent here, where company could distract her from her loss.”
“An infant? And for that she goes all in black? That is much for only an infant.”
“Ladies are different from us, I suppose.”
“As different as she is from ladies,” came the catty, whispered response.
And nowe a fyer was built of wood;
And a stake was made of tree;
And now queene Elinor forth was led,
A sorrowful sight to see!
The woman in black looked scornfully at the length of cloth laid out on the table. “You’ll have to piece it or send for more—that was the last length from London in the chest.”
“But … but … Lady Isabella wanted it whole, and ready in time for Easter …”
“Then have it ready,” said Dame Petronilla, turning abruptly to go. She was just above the medium in height, with hard blue eyes and narrow, even features marred only by a nose slightly flattened and off center, as if it had once been broken. She wore a thick, black wool gown beneath a fur lined surcoat of imported black velvet, decorated with dark green silk embroidery. Her heavy, honey blonde hair was braided and coiled tightly beneath a fine white linen veil. It was very fine, very fine indeed.
I wonder, thought one of the sewing women, glancing at the beautiful length of linen that lay on the table, the linen that had been taken from storage for Lady Blanche’s new Easter shift.
“Don’t disturb me again with your incompetence. You have delayed me on my way to my prayers.” A heavy gold crucifix, the agonized corpus of silver gilt upon it dabbed with red enamel and fixed with rubies, hung on her bosom. At her waist, beside her purse and the keys with which she was entrusted, hung a black-beaded rosary that ended in yet another cross, this time in heavily tooled and ornamented silver. Hands folded before her chest, her eyes glittering strangely, she hurried, erect and cold, from the room.
A very holy lady, thought the woman with the scissors. So many hours in prayer. Why, she even brought her own confessor with her from the country. For a moment her eye caught on the light, airy movement of the veil as its owner stepped through the door into the draft that whirled down the passageway. Impossible, she thought. Besides, all white linen looks alike. Forgive me, Lord, it must be envy. It was I who wanted to be named assistant to the Mistress of the Robes; if only my husband had greater rank and preference, the way the de Vilers family has, the honor would have been mine.
THE
MARGARET OF ASHBURY TRILOGY
BEGINS WITH
A VISION OF LIGHT
Anything but ordinary, Margaret of Ashbury is a heroine for our time. The fourteenth-century midwife has experienced a Mystic Union, a Vision of Light that endows her with the miraculous gift of healing and has become suddenly different—to her tradition-bound parents, to the bishop’s court that tries her for heresy, and, ultimately, to the man who saves her, and falls in love with her.
“Fascinating and factual … If all chronicles of earthly life were recorded with such drama, flair, and wit, the world would be filled with history majors.” —Los Angeles Times
“Fast-paced … arresting and absorbing … rich with the ambience and flavor of the Middle Ages … A fourteenth-century story told with a twentieth-century sensibility.” —New York Times Book Review
“This author knows how to spin gold on a typewriter.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
A VISION OF LIGHT
0-307-23787-7
$13.95 paper (Canada: $18.95)
Available from Three Rivers Press wherever books are sold.
Copyright © 1990 by Judith Merkle Riley
Reader’s Group Guide copyright © 2006 by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Originally published in the United States in hardcover by Delacorte Press, New York, in 1990.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Riley, Judith Merkle.
In pursuit of the green lion : a Margaret of Ashbury novel /
Judith Merkle Riley.—1st paperback ed.
p. cm.
1. Great Britain—History—Edward III, 1327–1377—Fiction.
2. Women healers—Fiction. 3. Women mystics—Fiction.
4. Kidnapping victims—Fiction. I. Title
PS3568.I3794I5 2006
813′.54—dc22 2006012891
eISBN: 978-0-307-49611-9
v3.0
Table of Contents
Other Books by this Author
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Reader’s Group Guide
Copyright
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