In Pursuit of the Green Lion (33 page)

The next morning, not long after we had broken our fast, the gray-faced Dominican who seemed to be the lord’s chief adviser came to fetch Malachi. They spoke Latin, so I didn’t understand a word, but I didn’t like the man’s tone, though it didn’t seem to bother Malachi a bit. But he addressed Malachi as “Theophilus,” and acted deferential. And then he stared at Sim in a way I didn’t like, as if pricing a pig, and murmured in some dialect words that sounded to me like “too ugly.”

“Malachi, are you going to—” I began in English, but Brother Malachi shushed me with a sharp glance, one that looked so alien, it startled me for a moment. Then he spoke cheerfully, also in English. “Good-bye for the moment, my dears. And whatever you do,
keep Sim with you.”

“Yes, of course, Malachi,” answered Mother Hilde in the calmest voice in the world. It was exactly the same voice she uses to say “the child has stopped breathing.” I do admire Mother Hilde. I can imagine her walking straight down into hell and telling the Devil to put out the fire, he was making it entirely too warm above, in that exact same tone. As she always used to tell me when she was my teacher, “Margaret, there are times
when firmness
is everything.”

Late in the forenoon Malachi caught us three mingled with a crowd of loafers in the tiltyard, watching the squires drilling on horseback, and said to us in English,

“My dears, let us go and inspect our horses.”

“Our horses?” I was puzzled. We hadn’t any.

“Yes, Margaret. Our horses, so close by in the stable,” he repeated firmly as Mother Hilde gave me a sharp glance. We came away without another word.

“We’re less likely to meet with English speakers here,” said Brother Malachi, solemnly inspecting the backside of a horse in his stall. “Though with all the mercenaries about, you never know,” he added, passing to the next stall. We all stared at the switching tail of the next horse as he spoke.

“They have everything I’ve ever dreamed of. Beautiful equipment. Their own glassblower. Six assistants. Messer Guglielmo, who has to be the greatest jackass in Europe, has done nothing with it. He’s half as far as I am. Doesn’t keep records—that’s his problem. ‘Why write down something that doesn’t work?’ he asks. The fool! So you don’t repeat it, that’s why! Besides, you may stumble upon something else and you won’t remember how you got it. He’s got one process he’s been simmering for over a year. And two thousand eggs that he buried for six months before trying to create quintessence of egg. Powerful stuff, if he’d got it. But phew! What a stink! I don’t know why you complain of me! But what a laboratorium! Philosopher’s eggs, all sizes! Pelicans and cucurbits, all you can ask for! An athanor big enough to roast a whole kid! I could be happy the rest of my life with a laboratorium like that one.”

Something was wrong with Brother Malachi. His words were the same as ever, but his voice sounded wrong. We passed to the next stall.

“Books. They’ve got books I’ve always wanted. The forbidden works of Arnold of Villanova. Graecus’s
Book of Fires.
‘So, you’ve got the
Mappae Clavicula,’
I said. ‘Yes,’ said that infernal Dominican. ‘If you’d like to stay to copy it, you will be assured of my lord’s hospitality.’ That’s when I knew he had no intention of letting us go.” Malachi turned his face toward us. In only a few hours it seemed to have sagged into deep folds. Dark circles had emerged beneath his eyes.

“Then I had a good talk with Messer Guglielmo. Snooped around. Criticized. That’s when I knew for sure. It’s as I suspected.” His voice sounded haunted.
“They’re using the wrong fixative.
The one I told you about. There are nasty brown splashes of it everywhere. God only knows where they bury the bones. The black candles, too. They’ve hidden the rest, but I saw the stub of one in a niche that they’d forgotten. Forgive me, forgive me, Hilde. It all seemed so easy when I first thought it out. I should have made more inquiries. I should have guessed. But now it seems my carelessness has brought us to our doom.” He turned his tormented face to her, but her strong heart never faltered as she took his hand.

“My place is always beside you, Malachi. It’s what I’ve chosen. You don’t need to be forgiven.” He looked at her, as if he were drinking in her strength, and took several great breaths.

“Delay them,” she said. “You know how. You’re good at it. We’ll use the time to find out where Gilbert’s hidden. Why”—she chuckled grimly—“Sim can practically walk through walls. And you—you know all those languages, and will have the run of the place. And Margaret and I—well, God will show us the way. He’s done it before. And—Margaret—now that I think of it, give me that box with the ring in it. You haven’t got the heart to give it away, and besides, the poison might be bad for the baby. I think I will have plans for it. Fixative indeed! We’ll see who needs fixative.”

O
VER THE NEXT FEW
days, although we were well treated, we had much cause to repine. Malachi vanished daily to the great hidden laboratorium, and Hilde’s worry wouldn’t stop until she saw him safe at suppertime. And because we didn’t speak the languages we heard rattling all around us, we sometimes felt as close kept as if in prison. Occasionally someone would speak the French of the north, and we could make ourselves understood. But no matter where we went, someone always seemed to be following us.

At length Sim, who was always in search of food, managed to make friends in the kitchen, through the use of sign language and the performance of little useful tasks. We were driven frantic with worry when he would vanish, but then he’d return, usually munching an apple from one of the great storage barrels, and telling us of some new sight he’d seen. It was he who told us about the hidden rooms, and the screams that were sometimes heard at night, just as casually as he’d describe a bearbaiting.

“And then,” he said, taking another bite of his apple, “they cross themselves and make a show of putting their finger in front of their lips for silence, and drawing it across their throats, like this—” another bite. “And do you know how he gets them? Ships them in from far away with that gloomy old goat in black, or if he gets short, he goes night hunting, like a ghost, all in black. Knocks on his peasants’ doors with the butt of that riding whip he carries—the one with the bone death’s-head handle, and then points with it to the child he wants—even the babies in the cradle.”

“How did they tell you all that, about the color and the babies, if they can’t talk?”

“This way,” he said. “They point to something black and do like this,” and with a few gestures he depicted a cloaked, booted figure in black from top to toe, riding a glistening white horse, surrounded by outriders.

“Well, why don’t they tell the Bishop? He’d bring the Inquisition on them. That many babies can’t disappear without someone noticing.”

“Everyone’s afraid of him. He can cast spells and call devils. And when the moon is full, he rides out like the Devil himself, in search of blood.” Sim waved his arms behind him like a flying cloak, and leapt about as if galloping, all the while grinning at the ghoulish vision. “When I get home, I’m going to tell my friends. I’ll frighten the growth out of them, and then we’ll all stay the same size,” he said contentedly, sitting down to finish his apple. You’d never take Sim for anything but a street urchin if you saw him eat an apple. He finishes it all off, even the core and the seeds, down to the little twig that was the stem, just as if he thought he’d never get another.

“Now, Sim, you be careful. I don’t want anything nasty happening to you,” Mother Hilde cautioned.

“Oh, don’t worry about that. I’m too ugly, they say. He likes blond babykins. Besides, I’m quick. Good-bye, I’m off to help pluck chickens.”

As for Mother Hilde and I, we walked here and there, especially by open cellar windows, hoping to hear something. A hint, a voice, something. But the most likely place, beneath the great donjon keep of the castle itself, seemed to have no windows at all.

“So, Mother Hilde, what should I do? I can’t sing by every window like King Richard’s troubador. It would look very suspicious in this season, standing in the mud and singing into cellar windows.”

“Something will present itself. By the way, speaking of nosy things, what ever happened to that Weeping Lady you said was attached to the little shoes?”

“She said crossing the sea made her ill, and got all filmy and pale and vanished. When even your spooks leave, Mother Hilde, that’s when you know you’re really in trouble.”

“I suppose you’re right, Margaret, though I’d never thought of it that way.” But it was at that moment that one of the Countess’s ladies-in-waiting, a large, dark-haired lady with a preposterous great two-horned headdress, found us as we stood on the outer steps of the great hall, surveying the mud of the inner bailey.

She spoke to me in clear French, though with an odd accent, and said, “Is that woman with you the celebrated mistress of herbal remedies,
la Mère
Hilde?”

“Why yes,” I answered, “but how did you know?”

“We heard from your confessor, the Brother Theophilus, that she is in demand with the
noblesse
of England. He says she has treated the Queen herself. Can you speak to her for us?” Oh, clever Malachi, he’s up to something, I thought. And so there ensued a three-sided conversation by which Mother Hilde was told that the Countess had many sicknesses, and her son was unwell, and Mother Hilde was asked to attend.

The next thing we knew, we were shown into a wide circular stone-vaulted room, hung with beautiful silk tapestries. A great fire was burning, and the room was all hot and smoky, for the wood was too damp. A sallow, droopy little boy of ten sat by the fire, all wrapped up in a fur coverlet. A vast fur lined cap of crimson sat upon his stringy, brownish-yellow hair. His father’s strange wide red lips, on him faded to yellowish pink and set in a narrow, sickly little face that reminded me of a bald squirrel, gave him a strange look of degeneracy and decay. And like a squirrel’s, his timid little eyes seemed to sit almost on either side of his head. The dismal, narrow, chinless little face was almost a perfect replica of his mother’s as she leaned over his chair, watching him as he played a game of chess with his tutor. As she saw us enter she detached herself from the group and gave orders to another lady-in-waiting, with a headdress as ridiculous as the first lady’s and her own, to show us to her.

“I need remedies, medicines,” she said, and her voice faded into a complaining whine. She touched the jeweled headdress that sat atop her sallow rat’s face. “I have headaches, terrible headaches. I go nearly blind with them. You holy pilgrims, you must help me. And my digestion, it’s so poor. I suffer in my digestion. Pains, pains, you understand? I’m weak. And my son—look—he needs strengthening. He never leaves this chamber. He can only travel in the heat of summertime. Find him a remedy, or cure him with your prayers, and I’ll beg my husband to reward you richly. You’ll ride to the Holy Land—no, Compostela, is it?—mounted like queens. Hounds, men at arms, money. I’ll get anything, if you make him strong, like other children.”

“You know the cause, Mother Hilde?” I asked in English.

“Look at her coat of arms on the wall, Margaret. I can’t read arms, but I see at least four quarterings with very much the same emblems. Weak blood is the first cause. Great families can afford to get papal exemptions from the forbidden degrees of kinship in marriage—they marry their own kin too much and weaken their blood while they strengthen their purses. The other cause is the evil of the house. It sucks the strength of these innocents, though they have been kept in ignorance.”

“And tell her,” whispered the Countess in French to me, so her maids would not overhear, “I cannot get another child. My lord would love me again if I had another child. He loved me once. He gave me gifts and made a poem in my honor before we married. If he loved me again, he wouldn’t leave me alone like this. All locked up in these rooms, never going outside. We never travel with him anymore. And when my lord resides in this castle, he never speaks to me, save at the table, when company is present. Always his own business, night after night. No time for me. Not a word, a visit, or a sign of favor. His son—look at him! He sneers at the child. If you cannot mend this one, get me a stronger one, I pray you. I don’t care by what means—I must have my lord’s favor again.”

As I translated, Mother Hilde inspected the child, making clucking noises, as he went on playing chess, appearing not to hear. I suppose people had clucked at him all his life.

“I need to seek the right herbs,” said Mother Hilde, “tell her that they don’t all grow in her garden, and that we need to go outside the walls into the mountains with a boy to show us the way.” The little rat face looked terrorized. But that is how, the very next day, with two armed footmen, we got to wander beyond the walls above the village and into the blustery mountain passes. Mother Hilde brews several wonderful headache remedies, though the best, which requires willow bark, could not be made here for lack of ingredients. We learned the lay of the land, but never got any closer to finding Gregory, though I was sure he was there somewhere.

In the meanwhile, some of the other pilgrims chafed at not being able to cross the mountains before the heavy winter snows set in, and sent a delegation to the Count, who rebuffed them with a brutal hint about how lordly hospitality was far finer than crossing the mountains naked in wintertime.

Malachi returned each evening with more news from the concealed alchemical laboratorium.

“Oh, I cannot tell you how
wearying
it is, doing nothing.
You
have the benefit of fresh air, but I, where am I? Underground, trapped with the foulest of stinks, and nothing but that king of fools, Messer Guglielmo, and a bunch of mute dullards, stripped like executioners, for conversation. ‘My God,’ I tell them, ‘how could you possibly undertake the Great Work with copper vessels? They contaminate the Dragon. Throw them out. I want glass, all glass. Yours isn’t heavy enough.’ Then Messer Guglielmo fusses like an old lady, and the glassblower acts injured, and it takes a couple of days to get the stuff right. Then I took the biggest aludel in the place and made spirits of wine. I got them so drunk they couldn’t stand. ‘The Elixir of Life,’ I said, ‘just tell my lord to take a portion of it like this every evening before sleep, and it will prolong his life by one hundred years.’ So they did that. He came down to watch me. ‘Ugh, impossible equipment,’ I tell him. ‘I need orpiment; I can’t work without it.’ He got nasty. I think he must be deep in debt and need the money. ‘My equipment is the best in six kingdoms,’ he says, shaking those menacing jowls of his at me, ‘and as for orpiment, if you can’t work without it, I’ll pluck your fingernails out one by one until you can.’ Ugh. Cultured, ptah!” Brother Malachi spat on the floor. “And at dinner I’m supposed to enjoy my food while those minstrels sing those monstrosities he calls verses. Why, Gilbert dead drunk could turn a better verse than that. Gilbert
asleep
could do it.”