In Pursuit of the Green Lion Read Free Page A

black, so he says you are to wear color to supper tonight.” I can’t tell you how much Hugo irritates me. I have yet to decide whether it’s his stupidity or his vanity that offends me most. Or perhaps it’s because he thinks no woman on earth can resist him. At any rate, there he stood in his travel-stained surcoat, hands on his hips, with his vulgar ballocks-knife slung low down at midwaist. When he talks to women, he caresses the long handle and eyes them suggestively. It’s hard to imagine he and my husband are brothers, they’re so different. Gilbert is dark and tall, but Hugo is medium in height and rather square-looking, like his father, and light-haired like him too. Or rather, his father must have been blond once, for his hair and beard are quite white. But where his father is fierce, with ferocious white eyebrows and piercing blue eyes, Hugo travels about instead in a cloud of self-conceit that irritates my husband nearly as much as it offends me.
    “I’m wearing what I want to wear,” I told him.
    “Be careful how you refuse me, you stubborn little she-ass,” he replied. Hugo was coming much too close. I glared at him.
    “If you were mine, you’d be better disciplined,” he said, stroking the long, leather-bound hilt of his knife. “I’d tear that dress off and beat you until you begged to wear whatever I told you. Gilbert’s a fool. Unbedded women always get shrewish.” He leered and then turned on his heel. The chest had been set down in the corner of the solar, and Cecily and Alison were digging in it, looking for their things. Suddenly Cecily shouted and held up her amber beads. How could I help it? When I saw them, I thought of how her father had given them to her that last, beautiful Christmastide, and started to cry. Then Alison, who is still a baby, started to bawl, and Cecily to wail.
    I could hear Hugo’s “Women! Ridiculous!” as he thumped down the narrow, coiled stone stair to the Great Hall, leaving both the stair doors open. The stair is not designed for convenience, but for the defense of the upper part of the house—only one person at a time can go up its slippery stones, directly under the murder-holes, and the heavy oak doors at the top and bottom can stop a battle-ax. But when the doors are open, the sound from the hall rises up just like smoke through a chimney, and the goings on can be heard as clearly as if you were in the hall yourself.
    As I knelt on the matted rushes to look through my chest, I could hear the rising sounds of the quarrel downstairs.
    “You DAMNED fool! I tell you, if they find out it’s not consummated, they’ll try to get it annulled! Then where will I be?”
    “Out of purse, which you deserve for being greedy.”
    “Out of purse for your sake, you miserable whelp! Bribes for the judges, bribes for the bishop, an entire tribe of lawyers, and God knows who else will turn up! How was I to know he’d left her so much that half of London would be ready to cut my throat for it?”
    “You could have asked, before you made off with her.”
    “It was you that wanted it. It was all for your sake.”
    “My sake? MY sake? Who wanted the roof mended? You saw the money and you grabbed her! I was HAPPY the way I was! It’s YOU that couldn’t resist meddling, and got us into this mess!”
    “Mess? There’d be no mess if you’d do your duty and put a baby in that woman’s belly. What’s wrong with you anyway? Hugo could put twins in any woman! Look at him—bastards here, bastards there! Now THAT’S a man! HE doesn’t roll his eyes up at the sky and gabble about God all the time!” There was the noise of blows, before Hugo’s voice sounded cheerfully above the scuffle.
    “Come now, Father, he won’t be able to do anything if you keep bashing him like that.”
    “Then—just—have—him tell me,” said old Sir Hubert, catching his breath, “what excuse he has this time.”
    “It’s Lent. What’s more, it’s a Friday.” I could hear