In Pursuit of the Green Lion (27 page)

I paused at the screen that separated the kitchen door from the hall. “Where do we go now, Master Kendall?”

“The hearth first; there’s a loose stone.”

“The hearth?” The hall looked dark and forlorn. The kitchen boy had run to close the shutters as the wind began to blow gusts of pelting rain through the windows. The smell of damp dust and the rattle of rain on the roof made it seem even more gloomy. How different it had been in the days of Master Kendall’s life, all garlanded and filled with feasting and mirth! “We’ll need a candle,” I said, staring into the sad shadows.

“Mistress, is that the ghost you’re talking to?” Cook’s voice sounded troubled as she brought the flickering candle, newly lit in the kitchen fire.

“Why, yes, of course. How did you know about him?”

“We thought he was back. We’ve missed him for some time. It was so reassuring, like, feeling him in the corners, and seeing him pass through the door. He was a good master, and we’d have him back anytime. But we thought you didn’t see him. You never gave a sign of it before you left.”

“It’s different now, look. He says he hid your back wages under a stone in the hearth.”

“Oh, then he
has
been gone.” Cook shook her head ruefully. “Why, otherwise he’d know those fearsome fellows who carried you off came back and pried up all the hearthstones. ‘These rich merchants always have money hidden,’ said that fierce old knight. ‘Believe me, I haven’t burned cities for nothing. They’re all alike, French, German, or English: pry up the hearthstones.’”

I’d never seen Master Kendall’s ghost angry before, but at this speech he swirled and crackled almost as fiercely as the Weeping Lady in one of her fits. The stirring wind he made extinguished the candle. Several people who could sense him hid their heads in their arms; Mistress Wengrave recited several Paternosters and the stableman crossed himself. The boy hurried back with the relit candle, and I held it high, peering into the darkened hall. The circle of light glittered on the clustered faces of the watchers.

“He asks you, did they look behind the paneling?”

“No, they never thought of that. When they found the gold, they left, gloating.” A rolling peal of thunder and the crash of nearby lightning made me start.

“But—Gregory, did he gloat too?” I could feel my heart hurting. Is this what we must all come to, this dusty darkness?

“Oh, no, mistress. He’s not like them at all; he looked as if he were going to a funeral.” Cook looked sad at the memory, but then brightened. “But he asked me about my bird; he inquired after my sister’s health; he remembered my leche lombard. He said no one could make anything to touch it, not even the Duke’s own cook! Why, he remembered everything! So gracious! Who’d take the time to remember someone like me when they’ve got troubles of their own? Oh, he’s a gentleman from top to toe, and inside as well, where it counts! I’ll wait forever until you come back with him, good mistress, and so will everyone that’s here.” Will the steward had joined her, and Bess and Tom and all the others. They all nodded silently in agreement with her. My eyes felt damp. There are plenty of places these days for good people like that. Not many are as fortunate as I am in my household.

“Master Kendall says you can’t wait without wages, so we must try the panel.” Silently, Robert le Clerc took the candle and held it by the seamless paneled wall as I felt with my hands, listening for the soft sound in the air that was Master Kendall’s voice. As he instructed me, I felt along the grooves and carving, while they all watched, awestruck. I tapped and put my ear to hear the hollow space, asking his directions as I maneuvered the intricately carpentered little hidden door open.

“Ah!” A breath passed through the watchers all at once, as the segment of panel came off in my hand, revealing a dark little hole behind it.

“Now, Margaret,” Master Kendall’s voice sounded calm, though the renewed rattle of rain on the roof made it difficult to hear. “Take the little bag right away without opening it and put it in your bosom. As I recall, there are ten or twelve good gold florins in it, if I’m not mistaken. You’ll be needing that yourself, though I fear it’s not enough. The larger bag is silver. Open it before the company, and use it to pay my obligations. Even in death, it would shame me to be thought stingy.”

So I plunged my hand deep into the hole, oblivious of spiders, and took out the bigger bag. While they were exclaiming, I stowed the little bag unnoticed. But when I’d paid everything, there was nothing but a single silver penny left. It certainly did look small, sitting there in the palm of my hand. Not enough. Not enough with twelve florins, either, even if they are good gold. Why, even if I could ransom him, it wouldn’t be for this sum; it was all his own fault for going and getting knighted. It raised his price. I felt annoyed all over again, just thinking about it. And let me tell you how proud knights are of their ransoms. The more you cost, the more honor. And there are knights that set their ransom so high, they can’t go home for ages, just so they won’t be shamed when they return before their fellows. “I’m a big man, set me high,” they say. And then they hunt and wench on parole with their captors, who are really more like hosts, while the folks at home scrimp and borrow. And, of course, folks who are judged not capable of raising ransom are chopped to pieces. So the arrangement, like most such arrangements, benefits the rich and not the poor.

“This won’t do; I need an expert in money,” I said to myself as I tucked the coin into the purse at my waist.

“Who’s that? A banker? Master Wengrave knows of several very reliable ones.” When Mistress Wengrave spoke, I realized with a start I’d been talking out loud.

“No,” I said. “Bankers make loans, and there’s not a one on the face of the earth who’d help me. I need someone who can pull money out of nowhere. I need Brother Malachi.”

“This sounds altogether interesting,” said Master Kendall’s ghost, cheering up. “Margaret, you always were a young woman of infinite resourcefulness.”

And so, that very afternoon in the pouring rain, Mistress Wengrave dispatched a boy to Mother Hilde’s house to find out if Brother Malachi was home yet. And as the little creature dried himself out before the fire, we all exulted to hear that Brother Malachi, with his usual cat’s instinct for finding comfortable spots, had returned home with Sim just before the bad weather had set in, and was all abubble with good news.

“S
O YOU SEE
, Brother Malachi, I have a very large-sized problem.” I was seated on a bench by the fire, extending my damp shoes and mud-splashed hem toward the warmth. My muddy pattens stood on the hearthstones; the two grooms from Master Wengrave’s were drying themselves off, too, and trying to pretend that they weren’t listening. Brother Malachi was comfortably ensconced on a big cushion in the household’s only chair; Mother Hilde and little Bet were on the bench beside me, stringing dried apples while Clarice, seated on a stool with a big basket on the floor beside her, finished her mending. In the corner behind the woodpile the cat was nursing a new litter of kittens. Peter and Sim, who were supposedly minding the fire under another one of Brother Malachi’s experiments in the back room, had taken advantage of the diversion to stand in the door to listen. In short, the little room Hilde and Malachi called their “hall” was full of people and the smell of damp wool and cooking cabbage, the way it usually is in bad weather.

Brother Malachi was so full of his own good news that he found it difficult to listen. His face was all pink and round with contentment, but he managed to make it look long and sad as I spoke.

“Margaret, how many times have I told you that everything has two sides? I remember when you sat in this very place, weeping because the Bishop had put you out of business. And then what happened? Why, the richest old man in town proposed marriage so you could fix his gout on a permanent basis! You see? Two sides! In every bad thing, a good thing is hidden, if you know how to look.”

“But, Brother Malachi, what if in every good thing, a bad thing is hidden? That’s two-sided too.” Brother Malachi’s face clouded over for a moment, but then brightened again.

“It can’t possibly be—for then inside the bad thing is hidden another good thing. So you see, the bad things must be taken as opportunities. And where would we all be without opportunities? That is why the world becomes constantly better.”

Mother Hilde sighed with pleasure. “Oh, Malachi, I never tire of hearing your philosophy. How fortunate I am to live with the wisest man in the world!” She rose from her work to put another log on the fire under the kettle, while Malachi waved his hands airily to explain his theory further. And as he explained his positives and negatives, rising always to a better state, his arms rose higher and his face grew happier. He hesitated briefly when he reached the point where he would have to choose between the comfort of remaining seated and the pleasure of standing to allow his hands to rise in elaboration of his theory concerning the improvement of the world. He rose but an inch briefly before he decided for comfort, wiggling his fingers toward the shining constellations between the bright, red-painted beams in the low ceiling to depict infinite height, and adding “and so forth and so on” to conclude his discourse as he sank with a satisfied plop back into his chair, which was located exactly beneath Ursa Major. The gaudy red and azure and the incongruous painted stars, more suited to a chapel or some nobleman’s bedchamber, made the room somehow seem all cheerful and odd-looking, not unlike Brother Malachi himself.

“I’m afraid I’m too dense for your theory, Brother Malachi. It’s all ideas, with no illustrations. Bad things turning into good, improving the world—that’s too hard for me,” I said.

“Let’s take me for an example, then. Here I was, sweating and suffering on the road for an honest penny. The mule had got a stone in his shoe, my feet were sore, and Sim was getting a fever. That’s the negative. The positive: We were near Southampton, where my old friend Thomas the Apothocary, who is one of the small circle of true philosophers and seekers, owed me money—so we’d stay with him. Perfect! We got to his house—it was in mourning. He’d died. A tragedy. And what’s worse, all his equipment had been sold to pay his debts. Not a trace of his work left. And here he’d let me know he’d got as far as the peacock’s tail. Can you imagine how much I wanted to see the work he had left? A tragedy—a tragedy of the first order. That’s the negative. But remember the positive. Not only did his widow and daughter entertain us well for old times’ sake, but it turned out he’d left me a book in his will. The positive! And wait until you see the book, Margaret. It contains the dream of my life.”

“The Secret? He was after it too?” I was astonished. Brother Malachi put his finger across his lips and smiled.

“A wonderful book. He left me a letter. It seems he’d labored in vain over it. He couldn’t read a word of it. And so he’d left it to me, the greatest living master of our art, to pay off his debt and to assist me in my search for the Ultimate. Who would have thought it from a sour, envious old tightwad like Thomas? But no, his last illness led him to a higher frame of mind. His wife, whom I last saw laboring in rags, was clad in a new dress, his daughter decently dowered, and even I—once the main object of his envy—had been remembered generously. Ah, thus do we reform when faced with the Infinite.” Brother Malachi paused briefly for a pious prayer for Thomas’s soul, and then continued. “But—in the positive, another negative. The entire text is unreadable. What, do you say, could be the positive? I plan a splendid and mentally enriching trip abroad in search of a translator.”

“But, but—what about Hilde? And your household?”

“Why, that’s the most positive of all—if Clarice hadn’t come to us in a moment of need, then she would not be here to handle Hilde’s business and look after Peter and the household.” I looked at Hilde, who seemed very pleased, and Clarice, who nodded as if it had been all arranged. Outside, the rain had stopped, and we could hear the shutters on the second stories bang open, as women leaned out to get a bit of air and shout the most confidential gossip to each other across the muddy alley.

“Now, first, according to my theory, you must inspect your difficulty from all sides,” said Brother Malachi, fixing his eyes on me. He looked completely pleased with himself at the opportunity of demonstrating how his theory worked. Shrill voices rattled among the damp rooftops. Someone’s goose was honking in the alley.

I looked at my hands. Gregory’s narrow gold ring was on my left hand, and old Master Kendall’s elaborate one on my right. “It seems pretty hard to me: my husband’s given up for dead, and he may well be if I can’t retrieve him. His lord wants to marry me off to someone else, his brother wants to kill me for the money Master Kendall left me, and I haven’t the funds to get him back. So where do I begin?”

“It seems to me that there are two ways,” said Brother Malachi. “One is easy and the other one difficult. So, let’s deal with the easy one first. How do you feel about him, Margaret?”

“What do you mean?” There was a long, uncomfortable silence.

“I mean,” Brother Malachi went on, “do you love him? The easiest way, you see, is simply to send a message to the Duke’s court, telling them where you can be found.” His eyes looked very shrewd, as if he were calculating something.

“Malachi!” Mother Hilde was indignant.

“I don’t want another man, if that’s what you’re thinking about. Everybody seems to think that’s all a woman needs. But it’s him I love, and I don’t want to give him up. Oh, I want him back so badly! I’d give anything to hear him grumping about Aquinas or see him prowling about the kitchen, sniffing in all the pots like a hungry wolf. He went and changed, Malachi—all he did was spout about honor and who sat where and whether he should have his personal coat of arms redone and, and, whether or not he should buy a stupid—pavilion. Can you believe it? And it was all bad for him. Just look how it came out.”

“Oh, my. That sounds exactly like him, all right. He always did fling himself into whatever he was doing. Were they versifying in pothouses? Why, then he had to be the best—ha, I remember one time in Paris when he was carried through the streets after some triumph in a tavern poetry contest. Was metaphysics in fashion? Then he was the most fluent elaborator of the
quattuor causae.
Then he heard about God-seeking. Ha! The most mystical mystic I ever met—until even the Carthusians wouldn’t have him. Though why, I don’t know. Nobody could outdo him for extravagantly ragged clothing and all-night vigils. Now, I take it, he’s doing chivalry.” Brother Malachi chuckled. “I imagine he’s quite unendurable. He often is, at the height of these fancies. Though I must say, in all our long acquaintance, he never gave the impression that he had a family.”