A Vision of Light (45 page)

He rode for a long time in silence. We passed Cornhill and at last turned into our alley. Father Edmund shook his head, as he turned to look at the Burning Cross. “Hmm. Of all the possibilities, I’d never thought of that one,” he said to himself. He dismounted gracefully before our door, and I slid off the dun mare.

“So, then, to test the idea, why don’t you touch it?” I took up the cross in my hand and held it out to him, the chain still around my neck. He looked shocked, then gingerly extended a finger, poked it, and then took it in his hand.

“You see?” I said, as we stood before my door.

“It’s from Byzantium. You can tell by the pattern. It’s very old,” he said, still holding it in his hand, as he turned it this way and that to inspect it more closely.

“Byzantium? Is it far? I’ve never heard of it.”

“There seems to be a great deal you’ve never heard of. They were very fond of poison in Byzantium. You may be a very shrewd woman.”

“Either that, or you’re a very holy man.”

He smiled appreciatively.

“Perhaps I’d prefer to be a very holy man. Farewell, Margaret. And when I hear of a hard birth, I’ll tell them to send for the little midwife on Thieves’ Alley.”

B
ROTHER
G
REGORY SET DOWN
his quill and looked up at Margaret, who was standing beside him, watching him as he wrote.

“I didn’t know you knew John of Leicestershire,” he said.

“I know a lot of people. Midwives get around.”

“So it seems. I don’t think a proper woman would be seen at an armorer’s, though.”

“Doesn’t that depend on what’s proper? Maybe our idea of propriety should be modified, then, Brother Gregory.” She spoke to the back of his neck, since he was busy sealing up the inkhorn and letting the last page dry.

“I thought you’d say that, Margaret,” he remarked placidly. “I was trying you out. I’d think by now, with all that you’ve seen, you’d have learned the value of the womanly virtue of modesty. You’ll do nothing but get into trouble if you can’t check your boldness.”

Unexpectedly Margaret’s face grew long, and she looked very sad. Brother Gregory saw the look.

“I don’t mean it for your harm, Margaret, truly I don’t,” he apologized. “I know I’m sharp, sometimes. But you—and Kendall, too—walk a fine line. You want to be free, and he thinks the heathen Bragmans can be virtuous. You could offend people, you know. Powerful people.”

“My dear Brother Gregory,” said Margaret, laying her white hand on top of his big inkstained one. “No one is better aware of that than I am.” Something in the tone of her voice affected Brother Gregory so much that he even forgot to pull away his hand. He looked at her gravely. She knew too much; she was hiding something painful, and he did not want to pry. So he tactfully changed the subject, saying, “So this cross you’re wearing is the famous Burning Cross? I’ve heard of it before, but never knew what it looked like. But they say it was supposed to have been seized by a mystic hand that appeared from the air, when there proved to be no one virtuous enough to wear it.”

“A hand? Oh, that’s so silly. It was seized by John the Armorer for a bad debt, and I wear it always. I’m very fond of it.” Margaret had gone to the door to let in her dog, who was whining and scratching at the door. She made him quit jumping and sit down, and turned back to Brother Gregory, who was preparing the reading lesson. He glanced at the cross, and there was something—could it have been the shadow of a blush?—that crossed his face.

“Well—there’s something—I’d like to ask,” he said, as he suddenly looked at his toes.

“You want to touch it too?” Margaret laughed. She looked like another person when she laughed. Like a little girl who would never grow up.

“Go right ahead. Go on! It doesn’t bite.” She held it out to him, the chain still encircling her neck, as she had to Father Edmund on that Epiphany morning, long ago.

Gregory opened his left hand and folded his fingers around the cross, engulfing it in his big, rawboned fist.

“I don’t feel anything at all.” His face wore an expression of righteous pleasure.

“Well, then, you’re a virtuous man too,” said Margaret with a smile.

“Are you too tired for your reading lesson now?” asked Brother Gregory, his satisfaction overflowing into concern.

“I’m never too tired for that. I love learning. Have you heard me speak French? Madame says I am almost ready.
Je parle correctement presque tout le temps, maintenant
.”

“Why, that’s very clever,” Brother Gregory answered, also in French. “What are you getting ready for?”

“We’re having a very grand dinner party, with a lot of important guests. I’ll make my debut then. Do you think I sound like a lady?” Margaret’s French had the fashionable nasal intonation of a wealthy convent school. Its slowness and precision gave it a certain quaintness and charm.

Gregory spoke in English. “Your husband chose a good teacher. You have a nice accent. You’re a very good mimic, I think.” Margaret blushed with pleasure.

“We’ll begin with the writing,” Gregory said brusquely, pretending not to notice. “Take your tablet and write, first, ‘God giveth dominion over the earth to man.’”

Margaret screwed up her face, printing carefully with the stylus. Brother Gregory was walking back and forth in the room, absentmindedly scratching his hand, thinking of the next sentence. Margaret looked up at him from where she sat by the window.

“Oh, Brother Gregory, what’s wrong with your hand?”

“I’m just scratching it; it itches.”

“Really, is it red?”

“No, it’s just a bite. You gave me a flea.”

“I don’t have fleas, Brother Gregory,” insisted Margaret.

“Everyone has fleas, Margaret. It’s part of God’s plan.”

“I don’t. I wash them off.”

“Margaret, you haven’t any sense at all. They just hop back. You can’t wash enough to keep them off.”

“I do.”

“Aren’t you afraid your skin will come off? It could, you know. That’s much worse than fleas.” Brother Gregory spoke with an air of absolute certainty.

“Everyone tells me that. It hasn’t come off yet.”

“Margaret, you’re too hardheaded for your own good. Now take for your next sentence, ‘Fleas do not wash off.’”

“Is this right?” She held up the tablet, and Brother Gregory shook his head in mock indignation.

“I despair of you, Margaret.
Flea
is not spelled with one
e
—it’s spelled with two.”

CHAPTER NINE

B
ROTHER GREGORY LOOKED OUT OF HIS
little window under the eaves, thinking about how he might plan the rest of his day. It was one of those perfect mornings that are so welcome in winter. The sun had broken through the clouds and was engaged in melting the ice on the barren branches of the tree before his window, and each twig glistened with dripping water. Great patches of blue, decorated with scudding clouds, showed high above the steep tiled roofs of the City. A gust of clean, cold air whipped through his room, ruffling the drying pages on the table. He’d been up since before dawn and already had a lot done; in consequence he was very pleased with himself. He’d been to Mass, meditated on the sin of Wrath and the virtue of Meekness, and stuffed himself on the rolls that had been pressed on him yesterday at the Kendalls’, which had been baking day. Then he’d done quite a bit of writing on the Psalter, which was almost ready to be bound. His ink was almost gone—it was time to renew it. That made the decision easy. He’d go to Nicholas’s today and arrange for the binding, and get more ink as well.

So, a little reluctantly, he pulled his nose in out of the fresh air, closed the shutter, and returned to the table. He stacked the dried pages up neatly, then picked up his inkhorn and writing case and hung them on his belt. With his pen tucked jauntily behind one ear, he sauntered down the rickety outside staircase, humming to himself. He was off for Little Britain, that grubby maze of alleys beyond the wall, where his friend Nicholas had his shop. It wasn’t the biggest or the best of its kind, but he’d never think of patronizing another: Nicholas was the only person who’d been willing to advance credit to him when he’d first come to town, and he owed him more than money. Besides, there was always good conversation there. You never knew who would come to look at the books, or buy paper and ink; the place was usually full of more arguments than sales. Sometimes things might come close to blows over a hotly disputed topic such as the precise nature of the Arian heresy or the relations between Reason and Necessity in the creation of the visible world, but Nicholas’s calming genius seemed to always prevent bloodshed.

How Nicholas supported a widowed sister and three growing nephews on the penniless customers who frequented his shop was anyone’s guess. But everyone respected him. He was writing a treatise on philosophy, which, when it was done, would explain the entire nature of the universe. But what with bookbinding, buying and selling books, and a spot of copying, the work was progressing more slowly than he had anticipated. That’s how it always goes, thought Brother Gregory: women and trade—they pull a man down from the life of the mind. Still, it was hard to imagine Nicholas being any other way than he was.

Stepping lightly around the puddles, Brother Gregory arrived at Aldersgate, whistling merrily. It was one of the rowdy old goliard songs they used to sing in Paris, he and his friends, when they crowded into some tavern after a particularly disputatious lecture, to argue and drink. It was too bad it had all ended as it had, but even after they’d burned the book, he’d never regretted throwing everything over for a scholar’s wandering life. Besides, the authorities had never got hold of his poems, nor had they ever discovered who had written the scurrilous essay enumerating twenty significant errors in the theological writings of the bishop of Paris.

And now, now there was Contemplation. What a magnificent vista of eternal sublimity it opened up! To think, he might never have realized that his true vocation was Contemplation if they hadn’t brought such an untimely end to what he now perceived as his entirely too worldly passion for scholarship. That just showed that God planned everything for the best, after all. Soon enough he’d be seeing God personally, and then he’d go back and devote all of his time to Contemplation, free of all the hindrances this messy stuff of life made for him. Wasn’t it amazing how life made chains for a man? No money, too much money, property, family—it was astonishing how they all tie down a free soul. When you get down to it, there are only two things worth having in life, thought Brother Gregory happily—freedom and thinking. Those are the best of all. And with that he saw that he had finished his walk, for there before him at the end of a crooked alley was the door of Nicholas the Bookseller’s little shop.

Nicholas greeted him with that quiet, vaguely humorous way that he had, and after they had made the arrangements for the binding, he sold him ink and a half-dozen reed pens.

“I see you’ve finally sold the Ovid,” remarked Brother Gregory, with a glance at the tall, slanted shelves where nearly a dozen books of varying sizes lay flat on display.

“At long last, and it fetched a fine price, considering that you’d read it through often enough to commit it to memory,” responded Nicholas. He was a slender man of medium height, not yet forty, with thinning reddish-brown curls, a closely trimmed beard, and intelligent, whimsical gray eyes.

“I don’t believe I’m the worst offender you have here,” replied Brother Gregory, looking over to where two threadbare clerks, one in an Oxford gown, were examining Nicholas’s wares.

“I’ve got a new one here that’s more your style these days,” said Nicholas, picking up a smallish, plainly bound volume.

“Ah, the
Incendium Amoris
—you tempt me, Nicholas, but I’m trying to avoid Property these days, since I intend to retreat from the world again once this last job is done,” Brother Gregory said complacently, taking the book in his hand and beginning to peruse its contents.

“Enjoying the use of an object is one of the definitions of property,” Nicholas reminded him.

At this the first of the readers looked up in annoyance at the interruption—then he recognized Brother Gregory.

“Gregory? I hardly knew you, you’re looking so prosperous. Your face is fatter.”

“Why, Robert—what a surprise—and my face is not fat,” remarked Brother Gregory placidly, looking up from the book.

“I didn’t say that, you old horse, just fatter. You used to look like death warmed over.”

“If you continue to insult my physiognomy, Robert, you’ll dine alone today,” replied Brother Gregory calmly, turning a page.

“I hope you don’t imagine I’m paying for your dinner again, you human tapeworm.”

“I was imagining, Robert, that when I invite Nicholas and his brood out, I might ask you as well. I said I was divesting myself of Property, these days, and I was paid yesterday.” Brother Gregory looked up from the book and raised one eyebrow at his old friend, and his brown eyes glittered with amusement.

“Good Lord, have you found a gold mine? Or have you taken up cutting purses?” Robert answered. The Oxford scholar closed the book without putting it down and moved closer to listen. He was painfully thin, and a bit white around the mouth.