Margaret of Ashbury 03 - The Water Devil Read online

  Margaret of Ashbury 03 - The Water Devil

  Judith Merkle Riley

  Crown Publishing Group (2009)

  * * *

  The final adventure in the beloved and bestselling Margaret of Ashbury trilogy, which began with A Vision of Light and In Pursuit of the Green Lion.

  Margaret of Ashbury is ready to settle down; the medieval healer is looking forward to an uneventful life in the country. And, indeed, life with her true love and a brood of rambunctious children is nearly perfect—except for her husband Gregory's ever-meddling family. Finding himself deep in debt once again, Gregory's father has plotted to sell Margaret's daughter off in marriage to save his woodlands from a greedy abbot. In a panic, Margaret turns to her old friend Brother Malachi to help save her daughter by whatever means necessary. The tension within the feuding family rouses an ancient being that dwells in a spring at the center of the disputed woodland. The watery creature has its own plans, and its eye is on Margaret's infant son.

  Favorite characters return, the stakes are high, and the air is thick with intrigue and danger. Written with the historical accuracy, supernatural plot twists, and humor that Riley's readers have grown to love, The Water Devil is a high-spirited adventure that brings Margaret's odyssey to a satisfying conclusion.

  ALSO BY JUDITH MERKLE RILEY

  In Pursuit of the Green Lion

  A Vision of Light

  The Serpent Garden

  The Oracle Glass

  The Master of All Desires

  for

  STEPHANIE

  in celebration of long friendship

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As always, I am grateful for the assistance of my daughter, Elizabeth, who read the manuscript, and for the kindly and intelligent support of my agent, Jean Naggar. But, above all, this book owes its second life to the astonishing and wonderful fans of the Margaret series. Thank you, thank you, all of you.

  PROLOGUE

  IT WAS NOT LONG AFTER CANDLEMAS IN the Year of Our Savior 1362, when I was writing down the cost of pickled fish and flour and thinking them too high, that a Voice came into the inner ear of my mind. “Margaret,” it said, “I did not so order the world that you would learn letters to waste them on account rolls. How much better if your accounting was of My glorious works?”

  “But Lord,” I answered, “You have commanded that wives serve their husbands, and my lord husband hates keeping household accounts.”

  “Margaret, how do you know that you won't be serving him better by hiring a clerk for the accounts?”

  “Full time? Lord, think of the expense. And suppose he's a rogue?”

  “Have your steward tell him what to write; then you can review it once a month, as Master Wengrave across the alley does to his great satisfaction.”

  “But, Lord, You know what happened last time I hired a clerk to write for me.”

  “Why don't you leave Me to arrange things My own way on occasion, Margaret?”

  Now who am I, a sinful mortal being, to disobey Our Lord who is so much higher than everyone, even husbands and other men? So I corked up the inkwell and put down the quill, and looked out the window of the solar, where cold February rain was streaking the glass and the tall, brightly painted houses of the merchants and vintners across the street looked all knobby on account of the many little window panes being round and bubbly. It is good to be rich and looking out of glass, I thought, watching two heavily bundled men taking a dray-cart full of wood into the courtyard of Master Barton the Pepperer's big stone house across the way. There was a time once, when I'd have been dodging between those icy drops, intent on the business of making a living. But here a glowing brazier chased the chill from the chamber, and bright tapestries mocked the gray outside. Below me in the hall, I could hear the thumping and banging of the trestle tables being set up for dinner, and the smell of pickled cabbage and salt fish cooking came sneaking up through the joints in the door like a cat on the prowl. Then there came a knock at the door, not loud, but persistent, accompanied by a distressful cry.

  “Mama, mama, come quick. Father is having another fit and says he is going to run away to a monastery where at least he'll be left in peace to contemplate his sins.”

  “Alison!” I said, running to the door, “whatever did you do to set him off? You know he's working so terribly hard these days. Next month he travels to Kenilworth, and the presentation copy has to be ready.”

  “It wasn't me, mama,” said Alison, standing framed in the doorway, her face pious. “It was Caesar who ate his pen case.”

  “I told you never to let that puppy into his office,” I said, speeding down the narrow stairway with Alison behind me.

  “Margaret,” said my lord husband, standing confused between the gangling hound puppy and the children, “this is absolutely unbearable. Do something!” His office was a chaos, the straw on the floor all heaped and scooped as if someone had been digging in it, the iron bound chests thrown open to reveal piles of tumbled manuscript and books marked at various important places with an oatstraw. There were inkbottles and a quire of paper piled helter-skelter atop the double locked steel box that held the rents and the remainder of the eighty gold moutons he had brought home from Burgundy. There were inkstains on his old ankle length wool surcoat that's split up the middle for riding, and his liripipe, wound round his head like a Turk's turban against the chill, had gone askew with all his heavy thinking, tilting precariously over one dark eyebrow.

  “I can't get a thing done here, not a thing!” he said, managing to look damaged and irritated all at once. And yet beneath it, I could also see he was secretly pleased with all the muddle. A house with many children, blazing with life and joy and troubles, so different than the cold, grim manor house of his childhood, the blood and death in foreign places he had just left behind him. His brown eyes lit up as he spied me there, and the tiniest little smile flitted across his face as he looked down at the top of my head. He is very tall and handsome, my lord husband, with his long Norman nose and dark curly hair, and our hearts can speak together when our lips are silent. Just now his heart was saying, Margaret, I was dull and sad here, working on a rainy day, and I needed a little chaos, and to see you, to make it right.

  “My treyscher lord,” I said, “you have too many worries and burdens. Why don't you hire a copy clerk to help you put together this work?”

  “But, my cher Margaret, dear heart, what of the cost?” I could see his mind already working over the excellence of the idea. A good lad to carry his books behind him when he came from the illuminators, to copy his notes in a fair hand, to run and buy that extra bottle of ink or sharpen more quills. It seemed perfect.

  “If he did the household accounts as well, the cost of his keep might be considered a reasonable expense,” I answered. In this way Nicholas LeClerk, who failed in his University studies from rioting and roistering in taverns, came to eat at our table, and God's commands were obeyed, and my paper left off midway in the accounting of money and instead was given over to the accounting of the mysteries that are concealed in creation, and how I through fate became entangled with one of the strangest ones of all.

  four childrens' caps of best wolle 3d.

  each 1 barrel of pickled sturgeon £3

  3 bushels of wheaten flour at 18d. each from Piers the Miller

  who has cheated in the measure again

  IN THE YEAR of our Lord 1360, I, Margaret de Vilers, widowed and married too often for respectability, having returned from adventures abroad with several excellent pilgrims' badges and my current husband, thought to leave adventuring alone. The whole world was then at war, our King having gone forth
to Reims to claim by force of arms the Sainte Ampoule of Holy Chrism that was brought to earth by a dove to anoint French kings, and with it to anoint himself and thus take hold of the crown of France.

  The French already had a perfectly good king, who was living in state in the Tower of London, having failed to provide the extremely large ransom he felt his kingly dignity required. So it seemed a promising moment, you understand, and our King decided he must go, and where the King must go, so must the Duke, and where the Duke must, so must his chronicler, my lord husband, Sir Gilbert de Vilers, youngest and most eccentric of the distinguished but impoverished old family into which I had married after a most brief period of widowhood. In the words of my former husband, Master Roger Kendall, who was a Master of the Company of Mercers of London and very rich if rather old, “When you think of wars and high talk, Margaret, remember it's all really a matter of money. Everything usually is.” So that is what I think was at the bottom of everything, even if everyone else does think it was all about a jug of ointment in a foreign church. So that is where my story begins, with a war, and all the warriors of England gone abroad in search of fortune. And it all goes to show that even if you hide peacefully at home from adventure, adventure will come and find you anyway if that is how God wants it.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE SHOUT OF BUNDLED CHILDREN PLAYing in the musician's gallery echoed through the dancing chamber in the heart of Leicester Castle, chief seat of that mighty warlord, the strong right hand and sage councilor of King Edward the Third, the Duke of Lancaster. Chill air, damp with spring mist, blew in through the high, unglazed windows, gusted along the shining tiled floor, and whispered along 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 Reims. Their anointed king, 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 horse shoes, 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, and his own four sons. The Duke's advice was swept away in the great plan. Loyal that he was, he stripped his estates, taking horses, knights, tents, clerks, and even his own chronicler, a scholar-knight learned in languages, to record the mighty triumph. 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, recited, or 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 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 traiterous 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 one another.

  “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 to Dame Isabella from France 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 furlined 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 silver, heavily tooled and ornamented. 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.

  CHAPTER TWO

  CECILY, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO YOUR hair? Even the tangles grow tangles. I swear, it promises to eat the comb alive! Mother Sarah, is Peregrine dressed yet?”As Peregrine's infant wail joined his older sister's in sympathy, I felt a tug on my sleeve. The morning sun had just peeped over the horizon and the cold lay like a blanket along the floor. From downstairs came the clatter and crash of pots, the sound of hurrying footsteps, and the first acrid smell of the fire being built up on the kitchen hearth.