A Vision of Light (60 page)

Roger Kendall had been old and well beloved. At the black-draped door with the priest stood every member of the Mercer’s Guild, in full mourning livery, to escort the body. As the coffin left the house, the greatest of the bells in St. Botolphe’s Billingsgate began to toll. Its mournful sound followed the procession that escorted him through the crooked streets. First marched his guild brethren, then the crucifer; behind the cross the clergy walked, two by two, carrying lighted candles. Before the coffin was the solitary figure of the parish priest; men stood on either side of the pallbearers, carrying lighted candles. Behind the coffin walked Margaret, bereft of all sense, supported by Hilde. Her two daughters, their eyes all red and swollen, walked beside her, clinging to her skirts. Then came the dead man’s sons, dressed in deepest black and making a great show of grief. Then followed his household, and the many who had loved him, shrieking, groaning, and wailing, as was the custom.

Margaret somehow maintained composure during the service, while Kendall’s corpse lay before the altar for the requiem and absolution. But when the pallbearers took up their burden once again, and the cantor began the ancient chant “May the angels lead you into Paradise,” those who watched Margaret follow the coffin to the grave saw her mouth open in a soundless scream of anguish that was more terrible than any tears.

Funerals are followed by eating and drinking, but Margaret saw and remembered none of this. She was, for a short while, completely mad. Hilde called Brother Malachi and a large number of her friends, both old and new, for she was more widely loved than she would have ever suspected. They sat with her in groups, never leaving her alone day or night, and trying to coax her to speak or eat. They sat her children on her lap, but she did not see them. The household feared that it would not be long before they lost mistress as well as master, and the sadness of the thing was almost beyond bearing.

Then, one day, as Brother Malachi wandered through the muddy ice of Cheapside, with his head sunk down and his hands behind his back, wondering what to do, he heard a familiar sound. To the beating of a drum two well-known voices were doing the debate between Winter and Summer. Summer was getting the worst of it this time, which was only natural at this season. No one but Maistre Robert le Taborer could do it so well. Waiting discreetly until the money had been safely collected, Brother Malachi stepped up to Master Robert.

“Well met, Maistre Robert!” he greeted his old friend of the road. “Today I badly need your assistance—only you, a master indeed, can help me. Your old friend Margaret is newly made a widow and has gone mad with grief. Can’t you come and cure her for us?”

“Why, old friend! What a surprise to see you here!” cried Master Robert in a jovial voice. “But I am sorry to hear the news. Of course, you are right; the only possible cure is music.” Then he made his excuses to the little crowd around him with a grand obeisance: “My dear friends, I must beg your leave for now—we have an unexpected private performance.” Together the little group—Malachi, Little William the juggler, Long Tom the Piper, and Maistre Robert—trudged the narrow streets down to the river and Margaret’s house. When Master Robert looked up at its bravely painted front, he drew in his breath between his teeth. It was very grand that Margaret had become—not that she didn’t deserve it, of course, but Master Robert couldn’t help but remember when they were all sleeping in coarse blankets by the side of the road, and lucky enough to get together a few pence for stale bread and thin ale.

“You needn’t worry,” said Brother Malachi, “she’s still just the same nice girl—but sadly changed with this calamity. It worries us all, you see.”

Together they were shown upstairs, although their gaudy, particolored cloaks and ribbon-bedecked instruments created a certain shock among the more respectable-minded members of the household. Margaret was sitting on the bed, looking nowhere at all, and didn’t see them. Master Robert was very grieved to see this. Plain or fancy, his surroundings didn’t matter too much to him. With a glance he took in the tapestries and the lush carpets, the great curtained bed and ironbound chests, and saw that money, which consoles many a widow, meant nothing to Margaret. Whoever the man was, she must have loved him with all her heart.

So Maistre Robert le Taborer took out his little harp and began the long and sad ballad of the love of Tristan and Yseult. By the time he got to the death of Tristan, it was so very sad that everyone in the room was weeping. Then, as he sang of Yseult’s grief, Margaret’s blank eyes looked him in the face and filled with tears. Once started, she began to sob as if her heart would break, as Hilde embraced her.

Now, Master Robert understood a great deal about grief, for he had experienced most shades of it himself and had been called in to console many with music. And so he followed the ballad with something else, a delicate, lyrical instrumental duet with Long Tom. Then Little William, who was crying considerably himself, wiped his face and began another sad song. Then Master Robert quickened the pace with a livelier song. After that they began a favorite of Margaret’s and begged her to join them. At first she couldn’t, but as they reached the second chorus, she did in a shaky voice, and they applauded. Then they all sang together, beating time, while the others in the room joined in on the chorus so boldly that the house rocked with the noise. Then Master Robert did a comic dance, and everyone laughed, even Margaret.

They stayed there all night, singing and reciting crazy dialogues until the candles were gone, the servants had collapsed with exhaustion, and Margaret had fallen into the first genuine sleep she had had since the dreadful day. In the morning when she woke up, Master Robert himself came dancing up with some breakfast, and Long Tom and Little William stood around and told food jokes while she ate. When they sensed that her mind was knitting together, they embraced her and bade her farewell.

“Margaret, my dear, we have been very dull on the road without you, and we are forced to be excessively careful of our satire since you left us. Remember, you always have a place with the troupe of Robert le Taborer! And now, sweetheart, we must leave you, for we have an engagement at the Goldsmiths’ Hall.” Then they all three bowed with a great flourish and were gone.

Margaret said, “Oh, Hilde, I do love them! Maybe everything will come out all right after all.”

B
UT WHAT
M
ARGARET AND
her friends did not realize was that the wolves were already circling around Margaret as if she were an orphan lamb alone in a forest clearing. For while a poor widow is nobody’s friend, a rich one is a great prize. And if that one is rich and attractive, then there is little question that she will not be left alone very long. In several places about the City powerful men were making calculations, if not for themselves, then for their sons, as to how many days more it was decent to wait before proposing marriage, and just what forms of delicate pressure might be most successful in forcing the widow’s consent.

Even more unpleasant, Lionel’s and Thomas’s supposedly reformed characters seemed to have shattered shortly after the funeral, in fact, at about the time that they learned of the contents of their father’s will. They had plans for something even more upsetting than marriage. One afternoon, when things had calmed down, Kendall’s apprentices and assistants had moved out, and there were no more visitors going to and fro, Lionel pounded on the front door for admission, at the same time that Thomas did so at the back. To the surprise of the members of the household who answered at both doors, they were immediately overwhelmed by half a dozen armed brigands, who forced their way in and gathered the terrorized servants in the great hall.

“If you wish to live, don’t try to leave,” Lionel told them, smiling wolfishly and brandishing his short sword. “We’re planning a surprise for your mistress and don’t want to be disturbed.” When the toughs had rounded up the stragglers in the stable, they locked them all in a downstairs storeroom. Then they stormed up the stairs to find Margaret, her children, and the nursemaid.

“Ha, Agatha, now at last you’ve got the chance to give them the beating they deserve,” laughed Thomas, as he threw a purse full of money to the nurse. “Hold them for us here, but don’t kill them—if all goes as it ought to, we’ll clear a pretty penny on the sale of their dowries.”

“It’s all my pleasure to serve your least desire, sir,” she answered with a bob and a malicious smirk.

The hired toughs had found Margaret and held her by the arms in her own bedroom, while Lionel prowled in front of her.

“And now, you whore, tell us where it is,” he hissed.

“Where what is?” gasped Margaret.

“Don’t pretend with
me
, you know perfectly well what we’re after.”

“I swear, I swear, I don’t know at all,” said Margaret, but her answer infuriated Lionel, who grabbed her by the throat to try to strangle the answer out of her, just as his brother entered the room.

“Don’t strangle her yet; remember, we won’t get a thing until we find it, and we lose everything if you kill her first,” he called to Lionel, who at that very moment let out a shrill cry.

“The bitch has burned me!” He pulled back his hand and looked at it; there was a stink of seared flesh in the air. Across his palm was a black mark, imprinted like a brand, of chain links that matched the chain around Margaret’s neck. She shrank back from him and tried to put her hand on her neck, but her arms were held fast at the elbow by Lionel’s men, and so she could not reach the painful spot. There, at the base of her neck, a great livid bruise was forming, shaped like two thumbs. She was paralyzed with horror, as Lionel pulled out his knife. The two men who held her by the arms had not loosened their grip through this entire episode.

“Brother, brother. Wait until later. Make her talk first, before you do something you can’t undo,” said Thomas. He took out his knife, too, and pressed its blade to her throat. “Now,” he said, “tell us where it is, or you’ll regret it very, very slowly.”

“I swear by the saints, I don’t know what you mean!” Margaret gasped, afraid to move the slightest muscle.

“The will, the will, you sly, vicious little trollop. The right one. The one that you stole.”

“There’s no other will, except the one that’s just been read. What on earth do you mean?”

“The woman has the most amazing effrontery, brother. Do you hear her deny it?”

Lionel got up from the chest, where he had been sitting and nursing his burnt hand. He was a sinister figure, all clad in his black mourning clothes. He strode across the room and lifted his brother’s knife away from her throat with an almost delicate gesture, and then, with a sudden brutal movement, slapped Margaret hard in the face. She blinked the tears out of her eyes and stared at him, a look of incomprehension on her face.

“Don’t waste time with denials. We know you’ve conspired to hide the true will and substitute a forgery. You were seen doing it with your lover.”

“My lover?” cried Margaret frantically. “I have no lover.”

Both brothers laughed raucously. Lionel sneered, “You can’t lie to us, you pious little hypocrite, the way you deceived father. You’ve been after his money all along; we knew it and had you watched. You were seen with papers, written by that filthy friar you’ve been sleeping with.”

“I never, never did that. You’re wicked to accuse me so falsely, with your father only just buried.”

“You deny you were seen with papers? You can’t fool us. We intend to have them before the night is out. Where are the papers?” Lionel had taken out his knife, which glittered wickedly, as he ran its point very, very delicately across Margaret’s throat, where it left a narrow red welt, like a fine scratch. Margaret, in the midst of her terror, suddenly realized what they meant. Someone had told them about her book. It was useless to explain it to them—they would never believe her. And if they did, they would only destroy the book in their fruitless rage. She could imagine them now, laughing and reading its pages aloud, one by one, as they fed them to the flames in front of her eyes. She would never, never, reveal its hiding place. Her eyes searched wildly for some help, but there was none. Lionel saw the look on her face change for an instant, and a vicious, one-sided grin, a sinister caricature of his father’s endearing one, twisted his face.

“Aha! You know perfectly well where it is. Our father left us everything, and you know it. He found out what you were at last.”

“Yes,” broke in Thomas. “We warned him. Then we tried to save him from himself, the senile old fool, but someone found the poison and you came right back, like the persistent little rat you are.”

“But it’s too late for you now. Talk, or I’ll cut your throat right here,” smiled Lionel, and he turned his blade across her neck.

“I’m not afraid of death,” said Margaret. “Go ahead. I have prayed for death. Strike now.” She turned her neck so that the artery below the ear throbbed beneath the knife’s edge.

Thomas had been watching, and now a thought struck him.

“Maybe you’re not afraid to die, but I imagine you’d hate to see a charming little finger or two lopped off before you go. Where are the spankless brats?”

“Oh, in the name of God, don’t touch them!” shrieked Margaret in despair. “I’ll tell you everything!” She was writhing frantically in the grip of the armed men.

“So,” said Lionel, with a triumphant smirk, “where is the will?”