The Lark's Lament: A Fools' Guild Mystery

by Alan Gordon

  “Nonsense!” I said. “You’ll be giving him the future queen of Aragon.”

  “Only if he still wants me,” she said. “Men are so easily disappointed. My father renounced my mother just because I wasn’t another Guilhem.”

  “A galling lack of gallantry in one who fancied himself a gallant, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “I don’t,” she said, pouring some more cider. “Everyone before you has been afraid to say anything about my father. It’s refreshing to hear someone actually say what I have thought all those years.”

  “One of the advantages of being a fool, milady,” I said. “And you continued living here after he sent your mother away?”

  “For a little while,” she said. “Then he married that Castilian bitch and decided to trade me to Marseille for some shipping agreement or other. And in Marseille, I became the bitch that Barral married after renouncing his barren wife.”

  “How horrible,” I said, patting her knee sympathetically. “And you were only thirteen?”

  “Barely,” she said. “But at least, I was a viscountess. Papa may have thought he could take Montpellier from me, but I had Marseille, as long as I could keep that old goat of a viscount happy.”

  “And you did,” I said. “Until he died.”

  “You can overdo happiness,” she said, sighing. “You can die from it. And you can kill with it. That’s another lesson I learned too late.” She glanced at the lute slung over my shoulder. “Do you sing?”

  “Of course, milady,” I said, tuning it. “What would you like to hear?”

  “A woman’s song,” she said. “Something for mothers.”

  “Then it will be a strong song,” I said.

  I had been traveling with my fellow fools for so long that I had forgotten what it was like to sing by myself.

  It was glorious.

  She shifted over to one of the divans and lay down, her feet propped on a cushion, waving her hand aimlessly to the rhythms of the songs. And so we passed the time.

  After I finished a third song, I heard applause from the rear of the room. I turned to look, and saw Helga standing with a smaller girl who might have been a toymaker’s attempt to capture the countess in miniature.

  “That was lovely!” said the girl, dashing forward to embrace the countess.

  I stood and bowed to her, and she giggled in delight.

  “Careful, darling,” warned the countess. “When a fool bows to you, it may only mean you are the queen of fools.”

  “I would like that, Maman,” she said. “And I truly love this Helga. May we keep her?”

  The countess glanced at me, and I laughed.

  “Tempting, but she is not for sale,” I said. “However, we will come and visit tomorrow so that you may play together again.”

  “May they come again, Maman?” begged Guilhema. “Please?”

  “By all means,” said the countess, hugging her. “If it pleases you, it pleases me. But now, Maman needs her nap.”

  “Then we will take our leave of you, milady,” I said, and Helga and I bowed and withdrew.

  Léon was waiting for us and escorted us out. As we reached the front entrance, he handed each of us a penny. We bowed and thanked him, then passed through the courtyard and out the gates.

  “Well, how was it?” I asked Helga.

  “I have something to tell you,” she said, grinning.

  SEVEN

  The white sheet bleaching on the hedge,

  With heigh! the sweet birds, O, how they sing!

  Doth set my pugging tooth on edge;

  For a quart of ale is a dish for a king.

  The lark, that tirra-lyra chants,

  With heigh! with heigh! the thrush and the jay,

  Are summer songs for me and my aunts,

  While we lie tumbling in the hay.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, THE WINTER’S TALE, ACT IV, SCENE 3

  When I was little, I lived with Mama in a house full of women and children. There were many rooms, but we weren’t allowed to use most of them because they were for business, so we all slept jammed into one room in the cellar. As I got older, I learned to amuse the men when they came to the house. They would tell me to sing and dance, and I would, and I was good at it. I started doing somersaults and cartwheels, and could do real flips by the time I was eight. The men would give me candy, which I would share with the other children, and sometimes a penny, which the Master would take from me as soon as the men were out of the room. I soon learned how to palm the pennies so I could give them to Mama, and she would say, “Helga, little angel, soon I will have enough to buy us out of here.”

  But she started getting sick, and the Master wanted to throw her into the street. She begged him to let her stay. He told her that he would if she would let the men bid for me. I was nine. I told her I would do anything to help her. She told me how proud she was of me. Then, in the middle of the night, she carried me out of there and brought me to a funny-looking man wearing oddly colored clothes. She told me to sing, and I sang. She told me to dance, and I danced. She told me to fly, and I ran and jumped, doing a somersault in midair. The man clapped, and asked if I would like to do all that instead of living with all the women and children crammed into the cellar, and I said, Yes, I would. Mama hugged me hard and cried and told me to go with the man, and she would come see me as soon as she could. Then the man took me to another funny-looking man in another town, and he brought me to the Fools’ Guild.

  I never saw Mama again.

  At the Guildhall, the old one in the Dolomites that we lived in before the Pope chased us out, I slept in a room with all the girl novitiates. There were less of us than the boys, but we were still packed like salt fish in a barrel, and the Dolomites were cold, so we huddled together in the big beds for warmth, and it was much nicer than the cellar room where I was before. When we went to the haven in the Black Forest, we all slept in the hayloft of the barn, girls on one side, boys on the other, and horses down below.

  Then I became apprentice to Theo and Claudia, which meant I either slept in one room with them, or, if we were lucky, in a separate room with Portia.

  I have never had one room to myself in my entire life. That’s how I knew this girl Guilhema had to be one of the wealthiest girls in the world. She had three rooms, just for her.

  She was having her hair brushed by a maidservant when the woman Sylvie brought me to her. She was seated on a cushion by a window that overlooked a garden, and had a tabby cat sleeping on her lap.

  She looked at me, and her eyes lit up. “A girl fool!” she squealed. “What do I call you?”

  “You call me Helga, milady,” I said. “What do I call you?”

  “Well, I was supposed to be Viscountess of Marseille,” she said, considering the question. “And I am going to be the Countess of Montpellier someday, and I’m the stepdaughter of the King of Aragon.”

  “Well, all I am going to be is a fool,” I said. “I can’t possibly remember all of that. How about I just call you Guilhema?”

  “Nobody calls me that but Maman,” she said indignantly.

  “What about your friends?” I asked. “What do they call you?”

  “My—That’s none of your business,” she said. “But you’re not my friend; you’re a fool. You can’t call me Guilhema. It’s not proper.”

  “Look, if you are going to be a lady someday, then you have to have a fool,” I said. “It’s very fashionable.”

  “Is it?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “And everybody who is anybody knows that fools treat nobody with respect.”

  “They don’t?”

  “That’s right. So, I will call you Guilhema.”

  She thought about that for a minute. “That’s fine,” she said. “I can play the harp.”

  “I can play the lute,” I said. “And I can wiggle my ears.”

  “Can you really?” she breathed.

  “Watch closely,” I said. I scrunched up my face and clenc
hed my teeth, and my ears wiggled a little.

  “That’s wonderful!” she laughed. “Can you teach me how to do that?”

  “I’m not sure it can be taught,” I said. “But I’ll try. Let’s sit in front of that mirror there.”

  We sat side by side, and she watched my reflection as I did it, which made her giggle, then tried to imitate it, which made me giggle, and soon we were making all kinds of silly faces and laughing until we were weak. The two maidservants stood by the door and never smiled once.

  “What else can you do?” she asked, gasping.

  “I know lots and lots of songs,” I said, then I leaned forward and whispered, “and lots of stories that I’m not supposed to know.”

  Her eyes grew big; then she turned to the maidservant and said, “Sylvie, you and Marianne go away for a little bit.”

  The two maids curtsied, looking relieved, and vanished silently from the room.

  “Tell me!” she cried as soon as they were gone.

  I told her a mildly naughty story that they had taught us girls at the Guildhall for just such an occasion, and she was in hysterics by the end of it.

  “I love it!” she said. “I wish I had someone to tell it to.”

  “Are there no other girls here to play with?” I asked.

  “Not really,” she said. “A lot of the girls had to leave after Maman became Countess because Maman didn’t like their parents. I felt bad for them. It wasn’t the girls’ fault that their parents were so mean to Maman and had to be punished like that. Now all the other girls are scared when they come here.”

  “I’m not scared,” I said.

  “No, you’re not,” she agreed. “I’m glad. I’m not a scary person. My servants like me just fine, and so does my kitty, and so do my birds. The birds have only known me for a couple of months, and they like me!”

  “You have birds?”

  “Lots of them. Want to see?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  She grabbed my hand and we ran through a door into a long, narrow room with windows all along one side and a dozen birdcages on the other. There was no singing. Half of them were asleep, and the others were hopping about the floors of their cages pecking at seeds scattered around.

  “That’s a bergeronnette,” she said, pointing to a yellow bird the size of my hand that was wagging its tail as it ate. “He likes bugs, especially crickets. He’ll eat them out of my hand. Maman doesn’t like me to touch bugs, but I think it’s fun.”

  “He’s pretty,” I said. “That’s some kind of finch, isn’t it? I’ve seen those all over.”

  “It’s a chaffinch,” she said. “And that’s a dunnock, and that’s a chiffchaff, and that’s a thrush, and that’s a linnet, and that’s a warbler, and that’s a warbler, and that’s another kind of warbler.”

  “Why aren’t they warbling?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “They sing in the morning, sometimes, but my room faces west, so I think they get confused or something.”

  “Maybe they’re lonely,” I said. “You have just one in each cage.”

  “I could try that!” she exclaimed. “Put them together, or get lady birds and they could all get married and live together like Maman and Pedro, only Pedro isn’t living here right now. This one is a tree creeper.”

  She poured some seeds into her hand and held it by the bars of one of the cages. The bird inside had unusually long claws and clung upside down to a log leaning against the side of the cage. It pecked at her hand, and she whistled at it. It did not reply.

  “Where did you get them?” I asked.

  “They all came from the houses of the people Maman didn’t like,” she said. “Everybody liked to keep songbirds, so she just took one that she liked from each place.”

  “Like hunting trophies.”

  “I suppose so,” she said, pausing at one cage which had a small bird that was streaked with different shades of brown and had a short beak. “This one made her laugh when she got it, I remember.”

  “What kind is it?”

  “A lark,” she replied.

  Oh, if Father Gerald could have seen me at the moment. Full marks for the nonreaction, Helga, I could hear him say.

  “Why did it make her laugh?” I asked, looking at it. “It’s not a very funny-looking bird.”

  “She was just saying how that’s the right bird to take from that house,” she said.

  “Why? Which house was it from?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t care,” she said. “It’s mine, now. I wish I could hear it sing, though. I don’t think I ever will.”

  “Why not?”

  “Maman said that larks only sing when they fly free,” she said.

  “Maybe you should let it go,” I suggested.

  “No!” she said, stamping her foot. “It’s mine, and I am going to keep it. And if it dies, I’ll bury it in my garden with the other ones that died and I’ll make a little stone to mark its grave. Would you like to see my dolls?”

  “Please,” I said.

  We walked into another room.

  I once had a doll that was just some sticks tied together with some scraps of cloth, but it was my favorite thing in the whole wide world because it was my only toy, and then a little boy I was playing with got mad at me and threw it into the fire. I cried for a whole month.

  Guilhema had a room with toys and games, and one entire wall had shelves built just for dolls. She must have had a hundred.

  “Which ones shall we play with?” she asked me.

  “You pick,” I said.

  “All right,” she said, taking down several. “Let’s make a wedding. I can read and write, can you?”

  In five languages so far, I wanted to say, and Claudia was teaching me Arabic. But Father Gerald’s voice echoed in my head again: What you know is a weapon, and what they don’t know you know is a better one. When people think you can’t read, they may leave something worth reading in front of you.

  “No,” I said. “Someone showed me once how to make my name.”

  “That’s the most important thing,” she said. “Here’s the Princess. Should she marry the brave knight, the monk, or the pirate?”

  “I don’t think monks can get married,” I said.

  “But he’ll be a greedy evil monk who really wants to be Viscount,” she said. “So he’ll quit being a monk just to get married to do that.”

  “All right.”

  “I think I’m going to marry a king someday, just like Maman.”

  “That’s a very good idea.”

  “Only I don’t want to marry other people first like she did. Do you want to marry a king?”

  “I don’t think I can,” I said. “I’m not noble like you.”

  “Who will you marry?”

  “I had a proposal just last week,” I said.

  “You did! How exciting! What’s he like?”

  “A fool,” I said. “Like everyone else I know.”

  We played for a while. I actually enjoyed it. Then she decided we should go see her mother, and we ran down to the room where I first saw the Countess. I could hear Claudia singing as we came to the door. I held a finger to my lips and we stood silently by the door and listened.

  Claudia is a wonderful singer, and the smartest woman in the world, and had a wonderfully romantic marriage to a duke, and then her husband died and she met Theo and became a fool because she loved him so much. All the girls at the Guild kept looking at Theo and wondering what was so special about him, because he wasn’t a very handsome man, but when he came back from Constantinople with Claudia and Portia and taught some classes, we could see what a good jester he was. Father Gerald said he was one of the best when he was sober, and Father Gerald didn’t say that about just anybody. I listened to Claudia sing and thought Theo must really be something if he had Father Gerald’s praise and Claudia’s love, and how lucky I was to be apprenticed to them.

  We said our good-byes, and Guilhema asked if I could come back, wh
ich pleased Claudia, I’m sure. We left, and the seneschal paid us, and we bowed and thanked him.

  When we were outside the courtyard, Claudia turned to me and asked, “Well, how was it?”

  “I have something to tell you,” I said, grinning.

  EIGHT

  There are three degrees of bliss

  And three abodes of the Blest,

  And the lowest place is his

  Who had saved a soul by jest

  And a brother’s soul in sport …

  But there do the Angels resort!

  —RUDYARD KIPLING, “THE JESTER”

  “Let me get this straight,” said Grelho when he returned from escorting my wife and apprentice. “You have traveled a hundred miles to track down an obscure song that may contain an obscure reference to an obscure someone who is probably dead because an obscure someone else killed another obscurity so he could splash some blood on some books.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Although when you put it like that, it seems like a waste of time.”

  “No, that’s fine,” he said, shrugging. “I just wanted to make sure you had a good reason for all of this. I still haven’t heard the song from either of you.”

  I sang it to him, and he started nodding by the second line.

  “I know that song,” he said when I finished. “‘The Lark’s Lament,’ I remember hearing it.”

  “When and where?”

  “When? Who knows? It was a long time ago, and there have been a lot of songs,” he said. “But where and who, that I can tell you. It was in a tavern near the Blancaria that has long since burned down, and the singer was—”

  “Rafael de la Tour.”

  “Well, yes,” he said, crestfallen. “You shouldn’t step on a fellow jester’s punch lines like that.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  “A simpleton, barely capable of keeping himself alive,” he said. “But with one amazing gift that made his fortune. He could hear a song once, then sing it forever, and with a better voice than any troubadour in the Guild, including Folquet and Peire Vidal. When all of our other entertaining was done, we would repair to this tavern and listen to him sing into the early morn. We would take visiting Guildmembers to hear him, and their mouths would hang open the entire time. Then one day he disappeared from Montpellier, and nobody knew what had happened until we heard about his death in Saragossa.”