A Vision of Light (56 page)

“Give me your hand, that I may kiss it, my true, good friend. I do value your love. I never dreamed that I could be loved by someone so gentle and good. I did not think it possible.” My heart overflowed with tenderness. I couldn’t sit up, but I took the hand that he extended. It was wide and muscular. A terrible scar ran up the back of it. I kissed the palm, and then the scar, so very gently. Then I held it against my cheek as I fell asleep.

Each day of my recovery he brought some little gift. A posy, a ribbon, some little trifle chosen with exquisite taste and care. And as he came and held my hand each day, I saw a wonderful thing take place. His face glowed with joy and seemed to grow, on each visit, a little younger, as if love renewed him. He dressed with great care now, not in the gravy-stained bits and pieces I was always used to seeing him in. He favored deep, rich materials, often lined in dark fur and embroidered exquisitely. His heavy gowns now bespoke dignity, and his gold chains and rings were no longer laden on for showy effect, but selected with care, to reflect his natural elegance and taste. His face—it would never be young again, but it was something better. It had become thinner, and the muscular jaw had emerged again from once sagging fat. His eyes seemed brighter, and the lines of experience on his brow became him well.

“Everyone says that I grow young again, Margaret. It is your influence. I eat those ridiculous vegetables, that ghastly tea—why, I’ve even cut down on wine. Look at my foot!” He held it up and wiggled it. “Much better! I want to be young again for you, to make you happy.” How could my hardened heart not warm to him?

Now I was better and could be carried down by two footmen to sit in his parlor room. He opened the window onto the garden, so that I could see the roses and breathe outdoor air. Each day he took a bit of time from his business and sat with me, showing me the strange treasures in his great ironbound chest. He had swords of strange design, an astrolabe, and foreign things that I had never seen before. He had books in Latin, French, German, and even Arabic—a treatise on mathematics—as well as in English. The English ones he read to me. They were mostly poems, beautiful poems.

One night he sat beside me in our great bed, the curtains pulled. He held my hand.

“Dearest Margaret,” he said, “have you never thought that we might have children?” I shivered. He put his arm around my shoulders tenderly, and said, “Love is not evil, Margaret, or painful, or cruel, or shameful.” I hung my head. “Truly,” he said, “good children are begotten of good love, and I would have no other.” When he saw how I looked at him, he said, “I remember my promise, Margaret, and honor it. I want you never to despise me.” I saw his face, ardent and generous, and knew he was my truest friend.

“Just one kiss, and I will not ask again.” His voice was yearning, soft, and sad. Only one? I thought. It was so small a thing to ask, after so much.

“Surely, one is not much—not enough for your goodness. I do wish it,” I answered him.

He embraced me gently and kissed me full on the lips, which he had never done before. It was delicate, and yet passionate, in a way I cannot describe. I felt something powerful stir within me.

“Another?” I said in a small voice.

“Another? My precious, dearest love.” And he kissed me again. His sensitive hands touched me gently—here, then there, softer than the dust that floats in a sunbeam. I felt a shiver—a delicious shiver, this time—shake my body. He kissed my neck, then my breast, in an exquisite way that sent a searing flame of passion straight up from the gates of love.

“I do, I do desire you, my beloved bridegroom,” I whispered to him. I felt my inner self begin to bloom like a flower. How else could I ever have said such a thing to any man?

“Then do not be afraid of me now, my beloved,” he said softly.

Somewhere—I can only imagine it must have been very far from this hard land—my husband had become a master of the hidden secrets of love. What wise and passionate woman had instructed him? Some women hate their husband’s former lovers, but I, if I knew her, would thank her, even now. But of all that he said and did, what moved me and changed me was the great caring that his deep and perfect love revealed. I still can’t even find the words to explain it to myself. With a kind of subtle delicacy he nursed our mutual passion to the heights of unspeakable rapture. My whole being was shaken and made new. And when we had dallied—so beautifully, so pleasantly, that I cannot bear to even use the same name for it as is commonly applied to grosser couplings—he rested with me fondly and said, softly, “Again?”

“Again and always,” I murmured, burying my face in his neck. And if the first was rapture, the second reached beyond it. We fell asleep together, twined in a true lovers’ knot.

An errant beam of sunlight had made its way through the heavy curtains of the bed, illuminating my husband’s bare back above the coverlet. It was beautiful to me—the pale skin over the shoulder blades, the even marching column of backbones, rising in an arch where he lay curled. Everything looked more lovely, like the green earth after a summer rainstorm. What beautiful curtains, what an interesting coverlet! And what an amazing creature lay in the bed beside me—someone who had cared enough to unlock for me the treasure of love and show me the secrets of my own heart.

“Surely,” I mused to myself, “this must have been the sort of wedding for which God intended His blessing. Not that other kind. People have made a mistake, as usual.”

My husband stirred, turned, looked up at me where I sat in the bed beside him, and smiled. “You are a very unusual woman,” he said. “I wonder if you have any idea how unusual.” I kissed him, and he returned the kiss. We soon again reentered that state of bliss we had experienced the night before.

“Margaret, you are a woman beyond belief. You have renewed my youth,” he said, admiring my face.

“And you have taught me of something that I never knew, never suspected could exist,” I whispered to him.

He sent for breakfast, and we drank from the same cup, for love. We lay in bed all day, talking and renewing our love from time to time, and all through the next night.

“Is this what marriage is supposed to be?” I asked him on the second morning.

“Not usually day and night, but that’s the general idea,” he said happily.

It was true, at length we had to open the bed curtains and come out into the world, for there is always work to be done. But my days were full of the friendship and warm understanding that make marriage, true marriage, a blessed estate. Kendall’s house was large, and learning to run it took time. Besides, I had ideas that made a great deal of trouble. I had the servants scrub the house from top to bottom, for they had developed slovenly habits in the days of Kendall’s widowerhood. The necessary-places in the back wall of the house were stinking dens: we hired men to clean them, since no house servant would do it. We rebuilt the storerooms solidly, to discourage the burrowing of vermin, and I set a fat old tabby and her kittens to live there, for I do hate rats. What they do not eat, they foul—and in this they remind me of some human creatures that I won’t speak of just now.

“I must speak with you, wife. The money you spend on new rushes is immense. And mixed with sweet herbs always! The most dainty people are content to change them but four or five times a twelvemonth, yet you are constantly sweeping them out.”

“Dirty rushes hide rats and insects. I hate rats.”

“The world is full of rats and insects. Suffer them to live, and spare my household all this turmoil.”

“They may live anywhere they wish, as long as it is not in this house. Besides, I have a lovely idea. Haven’t you seen those beautiful carpets, with the fabulous plants and monsters woven into them, that foreigners put on their floors? If we had them, there would be only one expense.”

“And what an expense—a hundred years’ worth of rushes! Wouldn’t you like jewels? Most women love jewels. I could shower you with them.”

“I’d rather be showered with a clean floor, beloved husband. Perhaps just in our own room, at least?”

“I’ll write to Venice,” he answered with a smile.

“And the beautiful room that looks onto the garden?”

“That too.”

“And the hall?”

“At that I draw the line. Too much falls from the table. Better to sweep out rushes.”

“As you wish.” I smiled. He shook his head in wonderment and smiled his funny, lopsided grin.

But he did not object too much to the transformation of his house. He said it was as satisfying as getting a new one, and without the trouble and expense of moving.

It was not long after that I found myself pregnant. When I told him, he was beside himself.

“You’ve given me a new life, a second life that I never expected at the end of the first one,” he said to me that morning. He was immensely pleased that he could show to the world that he was as manly as ever, and took every opportunity to drop the fact into conversation with each man that he met. It was only natural that it became the talk of the town, and he received a great many teasing comments, which he took blandly as compliments.

“But won’t you be angry if it’s not a boy?” I asked him.

“I have sons already, and they’ve been a disappointment. Why not try something different? Whatever child that is yours and mine is welcome.”

It was true that his sons made him sad. They were already grown. The elder, Lionel, was twenty-five, and the younger, Thomas, was twenty-two. They showed few of the good qualities of their father. This I attributed to the indulgent spoiling their grandmother had given them, particularly when Kendall was away in their youth. They led wasted lives and cared for their father only as a source of money. They had already failed in the trades he had apprenticed them in. Thomas now lived in a rented room above a tavern and spent his days dicing. Lionel lived with his mistress, who was an unpleasant, grasping woman. I knew about her from before. She was said to have once been a favorite of the Earl of Northumberland, before her looks faded. She had procured an abortion from an old, incompetent midwife that I knew, who had used the dark powder carelessly, nearly killing her and, indeed, leaving her lunatic for many months after. Kendall had often before paid for justice for them—to get them off for killing a man in a tavern brawl, for dumping a friar into a pile of manure—just as he helped them escape punishment for playing handball in church, and smashing a window, when they were little.

My husband often sat with his head in his hands, brooding about them, I know. I would kiss his neck to make him feel better, and he would start, looking up at me to say, “Oh, Margaret, if only they could have had you as their mother, they might have turned out better.” And then he would stroke my belly with the swelling life in it and smile sadly.

He told me that he once thought all boys were wild, but that eventually they became sober and took on manly responsibilities. His boys had not only run away from school, they once broke the master’s stick over his back. He tried apprenticing them with a fellow merchant, where they had proven incurably lazy and troublesome. The eldest he had sent to sea on one of his merchant ships, in hopes of his learning more about trade; he learned, instead, more about vice.

One day in springtime, when everything was green and joyful, he called me to him in his office, where I seldom went. He sighed deeply, and said, “I have made my decision, Margaret. This house, my country estate, and my personal goods I am dividing between you and our child, or, God willing, children. There is an income from the estate alone that will support you all well. My business stock, my movables, and the goods I have in storage in the seld are to be sold. Part of it I am leaving as gifts to my servants, friends, and benefactors. There is a large lump sum that will be divided between you and any children we have. I have asked that Master Wengrave act as their guardian and take over my apprentices’ terms. I know you trust him, Margaret, and he’s a good man to have on your side. Even with the large sum I intend to leave to the Church for perpetual Masses for my soul, you will still be a wealthy widow—one of the wealthiest in London, Margaret.”

“Oh, God, husband, don’t speak of it, I don’t want to be a widow, wealthy or not. I want to go with you. I can’t live without you, don’t you see that?” I could feel the tears gathering in the corners of my eyes.

“Margaret, Margaret, you are too young to speak like that,” he said gently, wiping my eyes as he would a child’s. “Listen to what I say, for it is you I am thinking about, and your own good. You must look after our child, Margaret; I care about you more than I can tell you, and this is a very wicked world.” For his sake I tried to listen, but talk of death arrangements, even though we all must do it, fills me with superstitious fear.

“What I’m trying to tell you, Margaret, is that I have disowned my sons. Their debauchery and crimes have brought me nothing but grief, and I have paid their proper inheritance several times over to get them out of trouble. I dreamed, once, that they would mend their ways; but they have brought me nothing but disgrace with their notorious way of life. I am leaving them each, on condition that they show honorable behavior, with a small sum—more than I started out with, to be sure—which they will doubtless consider sufficient to provide them with only a few nights’ carousing. It ought to keep them properly occupied in the courts, trying to certify their virtue in order to secure the money, and it may keep them from annoying you.”

“Surely you leave them too little?” I asked.