In Pursuit of the Green Lion (56 page)

CHAPTER ONE

T
HE SHOUT OF BUNDLED CHILDREN playing in the musician’s gallery echoed through the dancing chamber in the heart of Leicester Castle, chief seat of the Duke of Lancaster, the strong right hand and sage councillor of King Edward the Third. Chill air, damp with spring mist, blew in through the high, unglazed windows, gusted along the shining tiled floor, and whispered about the gray stone walls, leaving traces of oozing damp in memory of its passage. The heavy French tapestries that hung on the walls in days of celebration had been put away and the chamber given over to homely uses, for Leicester Castle was a castle of women, of children, of old men and priests since the day that the King’s great expedition had sailed for France.

A half year had passed since every available horse, every uncrippled man, and every unspent farthing had been pressed into service in King Edward’s greatest venture—the final, the definitive campaign against the ruined French—which was to end by seeing Edward crowned King of France at Rheims. Their anointed ruler, foolish, luxury loving King Jean, was a prisoner in England, captive since the battle of Poitiers; a weak Dauphin controlled a Paris savaged by disaster and isolated from a kingdom overrun with bandits. Now was the time for Edward to press his family claims for the throne of France. Only the Duke had argued against it, this risking everything on one throw of the dice.

“Not a game,” said the King. “We command overwhelming force.”

“The anointed King of France lives, as does his legal heir,” argued the Duke. “And while they live, the natural French hatred of a foreign king should not be taken lightly.”

“I am no foreign king, but the legal heir,” said Edward.

“Nevertheless, it is a foreign country, our supply lines will be long, it will be winter, and we will have ravaged the countryside.”

“We will take everything with us,” countered the King.

With the first maps ever used in warfare, he planned the route. Six thousand wagons would carry the supplies. There would be food and tents, forges for arms and horseshoes, hand mills and ovens for baking bread. There would be collapsible boats for fishing the rivers in Lent, there would be hundreds of clerks and artificers of every trade, sixty hounds and thirty falconers for the King’s hunting, and the royal band. Every great captain and petty nobleman who could ride a horse would be with him, including his own four sons. The Duke’s advice was swept away in the great plan. Loyal as he was, the Duke stripped his estates, taking horses, knights, tents, clerks, and even his own chronicler, a scholar knight learned in languages, to record the mighty triumph. And now all over England, women waited, and the dancing chamber stood echoing, and without music.

On the floor of the chamber, beneath the gallery, Duchess Isabella’s sewing women were at work. Seamstresses in heavy wool gowns clustered around a smoky little fire of green wood built in the great fireplace of the chamber. Yards of plain white linen were spread across their laps as they sewed the endless expanse of hems on a set of sheets. An old woman, nearly blind, half chanted the tale of the false steward, Sir Aldingar, as she spun by touch. At the end of a trestle table set up in the center of the room, a well-dressed dame with scissors addressed another woman who held a knotted cord. On the table, a length of fair linen, as smooth and luminous as a baby’s skin, was laid out ready for cutting.

“Dame Isabella says they must be cut three inches longer than the old ones, for her daughter grows apace,” said the lady with the scissors.

He wolde have layne by our comelye queene,
Her deere worshippe to betraye:
Our queene she was a good woman,
And evermore said him naye.

sang the old woman in her tuneless voice, as a half dozen needles flashed in and out of the sheets in tiny, precise stitches.

“It is the length Dame Petronilla brought from the Mistress of the Robes,” answered the other. Away from the fire, the air fogged as they spoke.

“Then it cannot be cut whole on the bias on this piece, as she requested. Are you sure this is the length the Duchess wanted made up?”

Sir Aldingar was wrothe in his mind,
With her he was never content,
Till traitorous meanes he colde devyse,
In fyer to have her brent.

“Perhaps she has made an error. It measures short. We must ask before we cut.”Again, they held up the long girl’s shift that was their model and measured off the inches with knotted string.

“If Dame Petronilla has made an error,
I
, for one, certainly don’t want to be the one to point it out,” said the sewing woman.

“Then I’ll go look for Dame Katherine myself,” said the lady. Laying down her scissors and departing through the open door, she left the sewing woman to puzzle over the material, wondering just how it might be pieced in such a way that the different stitching might never be noticed.

“What do you mean, the piece is too short?” came a sharp voice through the open door. “Are you accusing me of cutting it off? Oh, I see, a
mistake.
I do not make mistakes.”

The needles by the fireside paused, and the sewing women looked at each other.

“Lady Petronilla,” said one. “Why did our good duchess ever make
her
assistant to the mistress of the robes?” Rapid footsteps passed by their little circle, accompanied by a sort of icy breeze which was not so much a breeze as a feeling of chill. They looked up to see the back of Dame Petronilla de Vilers’s rigid form moving toward the table, the train of her heavy black gown slithering across the tile floor behind her.

“I heard that the Duke dispatched Dame Isabella a list of wives of his knights to whom she should give preference in her household.”

“Is Lady de Vilers’s husband dead, then?” whispered another seamstress, casting a look at the black dress.

“No, she lost a son, they say.”

“She doesn’t seem old enough to have lost a son in France.”

“No, an infant. Sir Hugo, her husband, was devastated at the news, and when she asked to be sent away from the place where he had died, he used influence to have her sent here, where company could distract her from her loss.”

“An infant? And for that she goes all in black? That is much for only an infant.”

“Ladies are different from us, I suppose.”

“As different as she is from ladies,” came the catty, whispered response.

And nowe a fyer was built of wood;
And a stake was made of tree;
And now queene Elinor forth was led,
A sorrowful sight to see!

The woman in black looked scornfully at the length of cloth laid out on the table. “You’ll have to piece it or send for more—that was the last length from London in the chest.”

“But … but … Lady Isabella wanted it whole, and ready in time for Easter …”

“Then have it ready,” said Dame Petronilla, turning abruptly to go. She was just above the medium in height, with hard blue eyes and narrow, even features marred only by a nose slightly flattened and off center, as if it had once been broken. She wore a thick, black wool gown beneath a fur lined surcoat of imported black velvet, decorated with dark green silk embroidery. Her heavy, honey blonde hair was braided and coiled tightly beneath a fine white linen veil. It was very fine, very fine indeed.

I wonder
, thought one of the sewing women, glancing at the beautiful length of linen that lay on the table, the linen that had been taken from storage for Lady Blanche’s new Easter shift.

“Don’t disturb me again with your incompetence. You have delayed me on my way to my prayers.” A heavy gold crucifix, the agonized corpus of silver gilt upon it dabbed with red enamel and fixed with rubies, hung on her bosom. At her waist, beside her purse and the keys with which she was entrusted, hung a black-beaded rosary that ended in yet another cross, this time in heavily tooled and ornamented silver. Hands folded before her chest, her eyes glittering strangely, she hurried, erect and cold, from the room.

A very holy lady
, thought the woman with the scissors.
So many hours in prayer. Why, she even brought her own confessor with her from the country.
For a moment her eye caught on the light, airy movement of the veil as its owner stepped through the door into the draft that whirled down the passageway.
Impossible
, she thought.
Besides, all white linen looks alike. Forgive me, Lord, it must be envy. It was I who wanted to be named assistant to the Mistress of the Robes; if only my husband had greater rank and preference, the way the de Vilers family has, the honor would have been mine.

THE
MARGARET OF ASHBURY TRILOGY
BEGINS WITH
A VISION OF LIGHT

A
nything but ordinary, Margaret of Ashbury is a heroine for our time. The fourteenth-century midwife has experienced a Mystic Union, a Vision of Light that endows her with the miraculous gift of healing and has become suddenly different—to her tradition-bound parents, to the bishop’s court that tries her for heresy, and, ultimately, to the man who saves her, and falls in love with her.

“Fascinating and factual … If all chronicles of earthly life were recorded with such drama, flair, and wit, the world would be filled with history majors.”               
—Los Angeles Times

“Fast-paced … arresting and absorbing … rich with the ambience and flavor of the Middle Ages … A fourteenth-century story told with a twentieth-century sensibility.”   
—New York Times Book Review

“This author knows how to spin gold on a typewriter.”

—Cleveland Plain Dealer

A V
ISION
OF L
IGHT
0-307-23787-7
$13.95 paper (Canada: $18.95)
Available from Three Rivers Press wherever books are sold.

Copyright © 1990 by Judith Merkle Riley

Reader’s Group Guide copyright © 2006 by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

Originally published in the United States in hardcover by Delacorte Press, New York, in 1990.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Riley, Judith Merkle.
In pursuit of the green lion : a Margaret of Ashbury novel /
Judith Merkle Riley.—1st paperback ed.
p. cm.
1. Great Britain—History—Edward III, 1327–1377—Fiction.
2. Women healers—Fiction.  3. Women mystics—Fiction.
4. Kidnapping victims—Fiction.  I. Title
PS3568.I3794I5   2006
813′.54—dc22      2006012891

eISBN: 978-0-307-49611-9

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