The Girl Green as Elderflower (17 page)

When she had ended, the priest said: ‘A beautiful hymn. Where have you learned it?’

‘It came out of Ireland,’ said the girl, ‘I believe. But it might be a song of my own land, for Saint Martin is the chief saint among us.’

‘Indeed?’ said the priest. ‘Then there are churches in your land?’

‘Many, many churches,’ said the girl, ‘all dedicated to Saint Martin. But our churches do not shine like yours. In our land there is little light, but as it were a perpetual gloaming, and not far from us is a certain luminous country, divided from us by a great stream.’

‘Indeed?’ repeated the priest. ‘Then I take you for one of the Antoikoi or the Antichthones, who live south of the equatorial ocean. And I think that the land you have seen is the edge of Africa, lighted from above like the rim of a plate, by the sun which never descends to your hemisphere.’

‘Of that I understand nothing,’ said the girl, ‘nor of how my brother and I came here. I only know that we were minding our father’s flock, and strayed into a cave. And after wandering far, we heard a certain delectable sound of bells, as when in Bury they all chime together, and at the sound we were entranced, caught up in the spirit, and knew no more until we found ourselves near the harvest field.’

‘And the people of your land,’ said the priest, ‘they are all green, these Christians?’

‘Yes,’ said the girl, ‘green in every part and member. As I was once, and am still, between my thighs.’

The girl looked at the priest with eyes in which there was only one question. The priest’s own eyes were shadowed. Though his body was large, his mouth was that of a good little boy.

‘Would you love me?’ asked the girl.

‘No, Mirabel,’ said the priest, tearing his wistful eyes away from the hazel mists of hers, and staring at his own clasped hands. ‘It would be sin, it would be folly, it would be pain. But,’ he said, and gazed at her again with a boyish candour, ‘I have loved you, and do, as no other child of God. So try me no more, but believe in my love, and I shall bring you from Bury, done by a clever monk there, the hymn to Saint Martin with a picture of the saint dividing his cloak with the beggar. And the naked man will be green, and will look like Michael.’

The soldier’s son, now a clerk of nineteen years, came to visit his parents and his sister. And by strategy he waylaid Mirabel beside a haystack.

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘of Saint Martin, your land’s patron saint.’

The girl looked at the coltish youth with a shrewd understanding. ‘On top of the stack,’ she said, ‘that is where I will tell you.’

When they lay side by side, she said: ‘Saint Martin is of the Devil.’

‘Holy Virgin!’ exclaimed the clerk. ‘This is heresy.’

‘We, who are ancient Britons,’ said the girl, ‘call him Merddin. He was begotten of Satan upon a nun, and is the high priest of his father, whom in our orgies we name Manogan. And in Manogan’s name we dye our skins green, for that is his favoured colour, and in that colour he appears at our conventicles, or rites, to take his pleasure of woman or man.

‘For long after Christianity came to the British countries, Merddin lay asleep beneath the earth in a forest of Brittany called Brocelien, which in our tongue means “the land of concealment”. But in time he rose again, and gave his name as Martin, and was made bishop of Tours. He was the son, he said, of Florus the Hun, and therefore first cousin to the Seven Sleepers, whom Martin ordained, and sent into the cave where they lie breathing still. Their turning in their sleep, as happened in the time of Edward the Confessor and was miraculously made known to him, is a portent of dreadful calamities in the world, but happens perhaps once in two centuries.

‘The bishop Saint Martin was a potent sorcerer, as Christians may read. When the Emperor Valentinian refused to receive him, he passed with the aid of a demon through bolts and bars, and stood suddenly before the throne. And when the great monarch would not rise to greet him, flames covered that seat and scorched him
ea parte corporis qua sedebat
, that is, on the part of the body where he sat down.

‘Christians also know of my people because of Priscillian, who travelled Gaul with processions of women, before whom he appeared naked to perform his rites, his magical orgies and obscene discourses. In such a fashion we honour Manogan, or Satan, and his son Merddin, or Saint Martin, who is not dead but sleeps in a prison of air beneath a hawthorn.’

The long-legged youth moved yet closer to the girl, and panting said: ‘Mirabel, let us honour Saint Martin.’

‘Kiss me,’ said the girl.

The youth kissed her, long and long, lying upon her body. But suddenly he groaned, and rolled away.

‘It is no matter,’ said the girl, gazing with her strange eyes into the sky. ‘The god knows that all things rise again.’

But the youth was shamed. ‘I don’t want to,’ he muttered, ‘now. It is sin, it is the risk of eternal perdition.’ And leaping down from the stack, he made his way home to the manor house, and never saw the green girl again.

A pedlar came to the manor, a young man with brown curling hair, and was well received by all the women, for the sake of his gewgaws but also for himself, for his tongue was sharp but his smile was warm, and he seemed to admire all of them. But most often his sea-grey eyes were on the green girl.

He slept that night among the straw in the stables, and when all the household was abed the girl came to him. He drew her down to where he lay naked, and long and joyously they honoured Saint Martin.

When they were still, the girl murmured, stroking his shaggy chest: ‘Oh love me, love me. I am alone. Oh, be mine.’

‘I am yours,’ said Matthew, for that was his name, ‘and love you truly, and we shall never part.’

She buried her face in his breast, and sobbed, as when she was new to our world.

‘You are strange,’ said her lover. ‘You are like no one else here. Tell me from where you came.’

The girl meditated, listening to the stirring of the horses. ‘I shall tell you,’ she said, ‘when I know all there is to know of you.’

‘Of me?’ said the young man, and she glimpsed his white wild-man’s grin. ‘If you keep secrets, as I am sure you do, I shall tell you. I am a Jew of Lynn.’

At the bleakness in his voice, she comforted him with her whole body.

‘How much of the blame,’ said Matthew, ‘for the fate of our people, for the horrors of York, may lie on a single man. I do not mean King Richard, though his favour was soon a curse to us. I mean one Jew of Lynn, who chose for himself the Christian faith, so enraging the rich and numerous Jewish merchants of the town that in their arrogance they took up arms against him, and calling him deserter and renegade, pursued him to a Christian church. It was for our sake that he fled the house, for he was my father.

‘The huge noise, as they besieged the church and broke down the doors, and dragged my father away to punishment, attracted many Christians, who already hated us for our wealth and pride and the King’s favours. And many came running with arms, among them a crowd of young strangers from the ships, who traded in Lynn. And all of them fell upon our people, who could not withstand them. Many were hewn down in flight, and with them my father, though whether a Jew or a Christian killed him I shall never know.

‘From there the Christians went to our houses, looting and killing, and at last burning everywhere. So my mother and brothers and sisters died, either by fire or the sword. That night, since I was at Norwich, there was not a living Jew in Lynn.

‘The next day a Jewish physician arrived, a man much respected by Christians for his art and manners. But in his grief he expressed himself immoderately, seeming to prophesy revenge, and so the Christians made him the last victim of the Jewish fever. And the young foreigners, laden with our wealth, made off again in their ships, and on them the people of Lynn blame everything.’

‘And yet,’ said the green girl softly, ‘you live there still.’

‘I should have gone,’ said Matthew. ‘I should have gone to York. If only that had been my fate. I would have died with them proudly, by my own hand. Masada,’ he murmured to himself, in a voice like a groan. ‘Masada.’

‘And what have you to return to,’ the girl asked, ‘there in Lynn?’

‘A hut by the sea,’ said the young man. ‘A squalid hut, for me orphaned by riches. I am pedlar or sailor or what work comes to hand. I am not known to be a Jew. We were so many, I was not noticed among so many. Now we are one.’

He stopped, his breath coming fast, then rolled on his side to face her. ‘And you, my Mirabel?’

‘We were people,’ said the girl, in her quietest voice, ‘of a far foreign land, which I think you would call Tartary. As children, my brother and I were stolen away. We were brought by sailors to Ipswich to be sold as slaves.’

The young man stroked her hair, all his speech in his eyes.

‘There we escaped,’ said the girl, ‘and lived in the woods, on the heaths. We were very young. How long it lasted is all unclear. We lived like deer or squirrels, on whatever fruit or green things we dared try. The greatest joy I remember was discovering a field of beans.

‘As we weakened, our skins began to change. We became green children. When we fell into the pit near the harvest field, we were weak to the point of death. And my brother’s end I attribute to that weakness, that long green hunger.’

‘Mirabel,’ said the young man, ‘are you telling me the truth?’

‘Does it matter?’ asked the girl, with a shy laugh. ‘I have so many truths to tell.’

The young man stood up in his nakedness and searched for his clothes. ‘We shall go tonight,’ he said. ‘To these people who have been kind to you you will write, for I know you can write. But tonight you and I must vanish, vanish for ever, into a hut by the sea at Lynn.’

The girl rose beside him, and twined around him her elder-white body. ‘Oh my love,’ she said. ‘Oh my own one. Oh my home.’

Many years later the priest received from a traveller a grimy letter. ‘I am sick and alone,’ it said, ‘and would wish to speak with you. For the love you vowed, undertake the journey. I am the widow of Matthew Pedlar of Lynn.’

In a hut by the grey winter sea, with a leaking roof and a window rimmed with snow, on a musty bed tossed by fever, the grey-haired priest discovered the green girl. But green no longer, and a girl no longer, for her silken hair was white, and in her wandering eyes there was only a freckling of their old hue.

The priest, kneeling beside her, said the prayer of intercession to Saint Martin, and then the Pater Noster. But she seemed not to understand, nor to know him, so he took her hand and made her his farewell.

‘In love is grief,’ he said, ‘in grief is love. As your grief for him is love, so is my grief for you. Pity my grief. Let my grief teach you to love mankind.

‘Truly there is in the world nothing so strange, so fathomless as love. Our home is not here, it is in Heaven; our time is not now, it is eternity; we are here as shipwrecked mariners on an island, moving among strangers, darkly. Why should we love these shadows, which will be gone at the first light? It is because in exile we grieve for one another, it is because we remember the same home, it is because we remember the same father, that there is love in our island.

‘In the garden of God are regions of darkness, waste heaths and wan waters, gulfs of mystery, where the bewildered soul may wander aghast. Do not think to rest in your village, in your church, in your land always secure. For God is wider than middle earth, vaster than time, and as His love is infinite, so also is His strangeness. For His love we love Him, and for His strangeness we ought to fear Him, lest to chastise us He bring us into those dark and humbling places.

‘I, even I, have known a prodigy and a marvel, and I have wept for two children, and feared in their plight to see an image of my own. Nevertheless I did not despair, for them or for myself, knowing that even in their wandering they rested still in reach of God’s hand. For no man is lost, no man goes astray in God’s garden; which is here, which is now, which is tomorrow, which is always, time and time again.’

Mirabel’s eyes, which had been closed, slowly fluttered open. Into them there seemed to come the paradox of a green flush as she died.

‘This I believe and must,’ said Jacques Maunoir. ‘I believe, and must.’

In the bar of the Shoulder of Mutton Clare sat alone. He was barman for the night, but had had no custom since the darts team and its supporters went away, and had settled in the pub’s most comfortable chair beside the empty grate.

From his pocket he took two opened letters, and putting aside the long envelope, began to re-read the one with a letterhead from a hotel in Alaska.