Margaret of Ashbury 03 - The Water Devil Read online

  “YOU? CONFESSIONS? Not only do you wear parti-colored hose, you CAN'T READ AND WRITE!” Denunciation had re- paired the old man's brief lapse into doubt.

  “No more than you, no more than the Duke. That's why Gilbert writes for him.” Hugo was looking smug. I could feel the old man swelling up like a bladder for the next spouting fit.

  “That's step-grandfather,” I heard Alison explaining to Madame from the far end of the hall. “Watch out for him.”The girls, seeing the horses being taken to the stable, had come in with Madame to find out what visitors had come.

  “He chopped off our half-brother's head. Right there,” said Cecily, and I knew she was trying to rattle Madame with her ghoulish- ness. “It rolled around on the floor and spouted blood.”

  “Blood does not spout from heads. It spouts from necks,” replied Madame with perfect calm, speaking French. “Now, in French, if you please, and politely. Ladies do not describe deeds of chivalry using butchers' language.”

  “Who, or what, is THAT?” said Sir Hubert, spying the stranger in black.

  “That is Madame de Hauvill. Allow me to introduce you.”

  “Me? Introduced to a dependent?” His stare was scornful. Madame, pale and straight, walked straight up to him and stared him in the eye. The girls watched, wide-eyed. This was battle by single combat. Who would win? Madame who was “too mean,”or step-grandfather, who was meaner yet? Even Hugo began to take an interest. Madame's chin was up, her eyes narrowed, and her stare unblinking. Sir Hubert, taken unguarded, blinked first, then grew angry. “And just who do you think you ARE, woman?” he said, the very picture of menace. With a gloved fist, he could still strike a man to the ground, and did it with fair frequency on his own estates. Pallid and fine boned, Madame looked as if a touch could shatter her like glass.

  “I am Lady Agathe, widow to Sir Raymond de Hauvill, and re- lated to Sir William de Vilers through his cousin, Isabelle Payton,” she said.

  “In what degree is this—relationship?” said Sir Hubert, his voice cold and arrogant.

  “A degree that does not excuse your rudeness,” said Madame, in a voice that dripped icicles.

  As the girls watched, fascinated, they dueled together, talking the arcane language of cousins-german, degrees of kinship, quarterings. Madame's voice was intense, but low. In amazement we watched as Sir Hubert seemed unable to shout, reducing his voice to a hoarse whisper to match the level of her even-toned French. The plasterers had forgotten to keep up even the pretense of work, and from their ladders, were stock still, listening. In the background, servants carrying dishes up to the solar stopped on the staircase to stare. The clatter in the kitchen ceased. Faces crowded around the kitchen screen. Who would back away first?

  “Well, it seems an introduction is now superfluous. I know who you are, Madame, that is enough.” Sir Hubert turned and clapped his hands. “Dinner! Where's my dinner? I didn't ride all this way to STARVE!” The servants scurried again. Scents and sounds oozed past the kitchen screen into the hall once more. The girls were awestruck. It was Sir Hubert who had backed down and turned away first. As if to compensate for his public loss of face, he turned and growled at me: “Margaret, since you have destroyed this hall, where is the family to be served?”

  “In the solar, my lord father-in-law.”

  “And that woman—?”

  “Madame always sits with the family.”

  “Whatever possessed you to bring a despicable creature like that into your household?”

  “My lord father-in-law, she instructs my daughters in the art of being a lady. It was Sir Gilbert's idea.”

  “Gilbert! I should have KNOWN he was in this somewhere— oh, there you are, Gilbert. I was just talking about you. What are you doing, dilly-dallying your time away with clerks? You should have been HERE! What kind of house is it, when the lord is too busy to GREET his SIRE? I should have known your blasted STOM- ACH would tell you when to come home, even if your DUTY didn't!”

  Through the open door came the sound of Paul's jacks, beating eleven o'clock. One hour. In such hours, is fate remade.

  CHAPTER TEN

  LATE AT NIGHT, VOICES CAME GRUMBLING from the parlor downstairs. I felt beside me in the bed for Gilbert and found an empty space. I pulled aside the bed curtain and found my slippers on the floor. The door had been left open, and a hint of flickering light came up from downstairs. Malkyn was snoring on her truckle bed, but Lion, who is not lion sized, but lion hearted, even if he is old, woke up with a puzzled snort and followed me about as I felt for my big robe de chambre on the perch above the bed. Quietly I crept out, blessing the fact that the floor of our bedchamber is fur- nished with a carpet, like the parlor-room downstairs, and not with noisy, crackling rushes. Following the dim light and the noise, I came upon the girls, naked as frogs, sitting on the middle step of the staircase. They were sitting together on the blanket from their bed and listening silently.

  “Mother,” Cecily whispered. “Don't make a sound. They're getting to the good part.” I sat down on the step above them, and Lion lay down beside me with a wheezing sound, and fell back to sleep.

  “No, father, you have drained this estate long enough. I have a son now, and want to leave him something.”

  “And through whose hand did you GET this estate? Who got rid of the other claimants? Who bribed the judges? Who spied out that the woman was worthwhile and carried her off for you before anyone else could get their hands on that old moneygrubber's tidy little fortune? You owe me this!”

  “Your bribes, everything, have been paid a dozen times over, father, and always from the estate. The cash is gone, and for all Margaret has done for you—and for me—you owe her the roof over her head. A roof, I might add, that Master Kendall guar- anteed her.”

  “It's just a mortgage, brother. We've got dozens, and it doesn't concern me in the least.”

  “A mortgage you have no intention of paying off. What happens to her and the girls, if, God forbid, something were to happen to me?” “Why, I'd look after them. It's my duty as head of the family.” “Exactly.”

  “Look, brother, if you stick at pledging the house as collateral, why don't you just dip into their dowries? No girls deserve that much.” The girls shuddered as if suddenly chilled, and wrapped the blanket up around themselves, huddling together.

  “Hugo, I made a pledge of honor to look after those girls. Do you think as little of my word as you do of yours? A whole year of pil- grimage, and you howled every step of the way. Except when you were chasing pucelles with your tales of religious ecstasy experi- enced in the corridors, outer chambers, and whorehouses of Avi- gnon. Did you ever visit a single relic?”

  “Just because the Cardinal sold me a pardon, doesn't mean I'm not just as religious as lowly folk who wallow on their knees in long lines in front of some dead man's bones. You're nothing but a hyp- ocrite who lectures other folks about piety and won't dip his hand into a little bit of available silver to help out his family, that's all.”

  “Tell that to Master Wengrave, their godfather. All the powers of the City will be brought to bear. He wouldn't stop short of appealing to the king himself if you try to get your hands on their dowries.”

  “Then sell their marriages. That's within your right, and it's high time anyway. Somebody ought to pay you a pretty penny to get his hands on those dowries.”

  “Mother!” whispered the little girls, shocked.

  “Sh.” I whispered back, “I'll never see you married against your will. Keep listening. The more we know about, the more things we can think of.”

  “I have promised Margaret I will never see them betrothed against their will,” I could hear Gilbert's words, terse and firm.

  “Their will, their will. Two little beasts. Why should their will count against father's trees?”

  “Your trees, you mean, brother, because it's you that will get them in the end. I tell you, their will counts because Margaret says it counts, and I keep my word.”

  “Nons
ense, Gilbert. Peregrine's trees. Hugo's wife here is as barren as a stick. Think of your son, Master of Brokesford.”

  “Master of a manor that needs roofing and hasn't got a single decent fireplace, a moat that needs dredging and breeds mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds, horses whose keep is more than they bring you, an orchard full of worms, and a bunch of lie-about peasants who can't manage to bring up a single crop in sufficiency to keep them next winter.”

  “That last bit's just temporary. And the trees, Gilbert. The woods, the meadows, the roe deer at dawn, the larks singing in the coppices, the babbling brooks and sighing reeds and the best spring of pure water for miles about.”

  “The oaks will soon be the lawyer's, and the spring's a holy well that people keep dumping things into. It's a gloomy, good-fornothing place, father. Resign yourself to losing it.”

  “Resign myself? RESIGN myself? A de Vilers NEVER resigns himself! Not an inch of land to the enemy, not an inch, I say!”

  “Look here, Gilbert, don't send him into another rage. The problem's simple. The Lombards won't accept the land with the oaks as collateral because the lawyer says the title is in question. He's gone and filed a trespass suit against us to be heard at the next assizes, and we've filed one against him. Whoever wins, gets the oaks. But we need the loan from the Lombards to bribe the judge to secure our title to the oak forest against the lawyer's claim. And we mortgaged everything else of value when we went on the last campaign. So if you put up the house as collateral, then we buy the judge, get the land, and it's all settled.”

  “Except that you have no means to repay the loan and I am saddled with the debt, which I can't repay either. No, I don't have to, I'm pledged not to, and I won't. That's all.”

  “Can this monster of selfishness be my son? The same one that I ransomed from the French?”

  “How odd. I seem to recall, it was Margaret who ransomed me from the French.”

  “I would have ransomed you from the French. You must admit, I had a brilliant plan.”

  “Well, then, you need a brilliant plan now. More brilliant than pledging land that's in litigation as collateral for a loan to bribe the judge to secure the title to the land. Besides, suppose the judge is honest?”

  “Honest? Ridiculous! What judge is honest? Besides, the lawyer has already given him twenty gold florins to settle the case in his favor. I have to better it, or I haven't a chance.”We heard a whistle of appreciation.

  “Twenty florins! That's a huge sum! Are the woods worth that much?”

  “That and more, as lumber. And the yews, too. It'll all go, every bit of it.”

  “The yews, too?” we heard Gilbert say. “They're kind of nice, in a gloomy sort of way. I was always fond of them, they were so pleasantly melancholy.” There was a long pause. “No, it seems a bit excessive, to chop down the yews. Someone planted them, you know, or they wouldn't grow in rows like that. Before the conqueror, before Christianity, before even the Romans, I imagine. That lawyer is a swine.”

  “Well then, you'll pledge the house?”

  “Mother!” gasped the girls.

  “Or will you sell the brats?” Hugo's voice, with its high, nasal accent, had never been more irritating.

  “Sh. Listen to your stepfather.”

  “No, I won't. But I'll think of something. You need a plan, a masterful plan.”

  “You? Gilbert, you were born a bumbler. I wouldn't trust a plan you laid to save me. All books, no sense, that's what you are. I regret the day I ever let you study abroad.”

  “You didn't let me study abroad, father. If you recall correctly, I ran away.”

  “Ungrateful and a bumbler. You can't expect to save my woods by bombarding the judges at the assizes with poetry.”

  “Tomorrow, father. Sleep on it, and you'll see I'm right.” Before I could bundle the children upstairs, Gilbert's long legs had carried him to where we had been listening, and he narrowly escaped tripping over the dog and spilling his lighted candle over the edge of the stair into the bundles of rushes on the floor below.

  “My God, you've been listening,” he said, “and now I've just missed setting the house on fire. Margaret, we're in trouble. Father needs a large amount of money.” The girls were silent, their eyes big in the candlelight. Perhaps never before had they truly realized how much their whole lives depended on the will of men. There was no escape. I could feel their shock as if it were a solid thing.

  “As usual,” I said, as if I were unaware how closely the girls were listening to every word.

  “I told him I'd come up with a plan. Margaret, as long as I breathe I'll not break my pledge to you. But how do I come up with that much money, without gouging it out of the estate?”

  “If I were you, my lord husband, I'd consult Brother Malachi. There isn't a thing he doesn't know about money. Besides, he's got the largest brain in London. He's never failed to come up with a plan yet. Look at how well his plan worked to ransom you from the Comte d'Aigremont.”

  “Of course,” said Gilbert, with relief in his voice. “Malachi, that old fake. He has an answer for everything. I'll sleep easier tonight, just knowing I'll be seeing him tomorrow.”

  “COME IN, COME IN, Gilbert, I recognize your footstep. What are you here for this time? More complaints about the illuminators? The price of gold leaf? Ah, the hazards of waiting on a great patron. I saw you the other day in a velvet-trimmed surcoat and the damndest hat with a feather on it. I imagine it must have been extra large, to fit your swollen head.”

  Gilbert had to duck his head to enter the low door into Brother Malachi's laboratorium. The walls still looked a bit smoky from his last accident, but otherwise everything was pretty much back where it was. Brother Malachi never looked up from his task, which was pouring molten lead into little molds. I knew the task from old times, when I once lived in Brother Malachi's household. I even used to pour the lead myself before he got Sim for his apprentice. It is for making seals. Malachi takes a bit of soft wax and gets an impression of a seal he wants, then scurries home to make up a plaster cast and get a duplicate. It's all part of his traveling business, which he undertakes in good weather, and which pays for all the glassware he breaks up in his search for the Stone.

  “Brother Malachi,” I said, when I saw him pause in the operation. “And Margaret,” he said, “why, I never even heard you! What makes you sneak in on little mouse feet? A state visit from the resident nobility of Thames Street. What has occasioned this glorious condescension?”

  “Malachi, you know that father made me buy that title. There was no way out. We needed the duke's patronage if we were going to keep Margaret's house, and the only way I could get it was by using her estate to buy the knighthood and entering his service. They caught me like a rat in a trap.” He sighed deeply.“It was all easier when everything I owned was in a bundle on my back. I was happier then.”

  “I sense from your long faces that you are in trouble again. Now that I think of it, when have you not been in trouble? Sit down over there, Gilbert, and start copying out that piece of paper. I need fifty of them, and you always did have a nice clerical hand. While you're copying, you can tell me about it. There's hardly any problem in the world than cannot be solved by the application of a truly powerful brain.”

  Gilbert sat down at the work table, beneath the shelf that held Brother Malachi's quite extraordinary alchemical library, all fifteen volumes of rare and forbidden works. Laid out on the table was a plenary indulgence, a stack of blank paper, a bottle of ink, penknife, sand, and row of quills. A little smile crossed Gilbert's long, worried face as he saw the paper he was to copy.

  “Still in the forged indulgence business? It does bring back the old days.” He inspected the quills for the most likely one, uncorked the ink bottle, and began to write. It has always been a marvel to me how precise the movements of his big hands are as the delicate and intricate lines of writing follow the moving quill. Practice, I guess. His mother always intended him for the church.


  “And you're lucky I am. I've just been to Lincoln Cathedral, where I overawed the Canon with the sight of my Papal Bull—so artistically sealed, you know. He let me into the cathedral archives, because of a professed interest in ancient history, and while I was perusing chronicles, he couldn't resist showing me some real treasures. I wrapped the impressions in wet moss and hurried straight home before the heat could melt them.”

  “It's all a disaster,” said Gilbert, never losing his place in his copying. “Courtesy of father, as usual. He wants me to pledge the house as collateral for a loan from the Lombards to bribe a judge in a law case he's involved in.”

  “Why doesn't he put up his own land?”

  “That's the problem. The only piece that isn't already mortgaged is the piece that's in litigation that he wants to bribe the judge over. The Lombards somehow seem to think that's not a sufficient guarantee.”

  “Now he wants us to sell the girls' marriages,” I added.

  “Margaret, Margaret, we won't sell your girls. My mind's already at work,” said Malachi, setting his molds out on the workbench to cool. “Now, where's Sim, that rascal? Here Hilde's been gone two days at a hard labor in Bishopsgate Street, and I'm fainting for lack of her cooking. I send the boy out for a bird or two from the bake shop, and he vanishes. Probably playing dice on some street corner.”

  “Let me see what Mother Hilde's left you, Brother Malachi,” I said, and after finding only half a loaf of stale bread in the cupboard in the hall, I went out to check the garden. There I found that Malachi had not bothered to remove the eggs from beneath the setting hens that morning, and there were onions and parsley looking good in the garden. So I set about making soppes dorre and hanoney, and as the bread was frying and the omelette stirring, and Gilbert was copying and complaining, Malachi was resting his round body on a bench in his laboratorium while he exercised his brain. The signs of brain excercise are very clear in Malachi. First his cheerful round, pink face becomes very solemn. Then if it's a hard problem, wrinkles appear between his brows, and he goes, “Ha! Hm!” After that, he taps the side of his head gently to make sure his brains haven't congealed with the effort. I was hearing a lot of “Ha! Hm!” coming out of the laboratorium as I was cooking, so I knew that all would be well.