In Pursuit of the Green Lion Read Free Page B

Gregory’s voice. It sounded prim and righteous. I knew him well. He’d have turned up his nose and looked at his father with that priggish look that drives the old man crazy. Just thinking of it made me smile. I sat back on my heels to listen better. In all the time I’d known Gregory, thorny-tempered as he is, I’d never imagined he had a family like this. That’s the problem with marriage. You don’t just marry a person, really, you marry a whole family.
    “What has that to do with you failing your family?”
    “All the Authorities agree, that if a man dedicated to religion finds it necessary to marry, he should forswear carnal relations on holy days.”
    “Just what sort of holy days, you holy imbecile?” rose up the staircase in a low growl. There was a crashing and a rustling in the rushes below, as if someone had leapt aside to escape a blow. I could hear Hugo laugh.
    “Lent, Advent, Sundays, feast days, the eve of feast days, Wednesdays, and—also”—another crashing and rustling, and the sound of a bench hitting the wall—“Fridays.”
    “Mama, they’re smashing the furniture,” whispered Alison, her eyes big.
    “Don’t you think to go down there, Cecily, get away from the stairs at once.” When I saw her reluctantly pull her tousled red head in from the doorway, I looked again in the chest. Beneath a pair of little shoes and the folds of my blue wool kirtle, the spine of a book peeped out. I felt a brief start of joy. Gregory must have slipped it in when they’d gone through the London house. I pulled it out and ran my hand over the initials embossed on the binding. M. K. —Margaret Kendall. My Psalter. Maybe God hadn’t abandoned me after all. Voices echoed up the stair.
    “I tell you, Father, I intend to see God whether or not I’ve left Witham, and you’re not going to stop me.”
    “See God? SEE GOD? Didn’t the abbot knock that idea out of you for once and for all? What makes you think God has time to see you? God’s a busy man! He doesn’t waste his time seeing younger sons who disobey their fathers! I tell you, you take care of your family’s business, and God will take care of you!”
    “Try all you want, I refuse to let you distract me. My conscience belongs to me, and I’ve got plans….”
    “To spend your time listening for voices in the air? Quit trying to distract me with moonshine and play the man, or I tell you, I’ll lay on stripes that make that priest’s look like a baby’s handiwork….”
    I picked up the book, opened the pages, and ran my finger along the neatly written lines marked off with the red capitals. All English. Beneath them, the lines marked by blue capitals were in Latin, and a mystery to me. My good dead husband had had the idea of the book, and he had commissioned Gregory to do the translation, because he said he knew a first-class scholar when he saw one, even if he was as prickly as an entire basketful of nettles. Who had ever loved me as much as Master Kendall, to think of something as a gift that meant the whole world to me? It was at that very moment that I felt the eyes watching me, and a sort of cold breath on the back of my neck.
    “Who’s there?” I whirled around in a panic, but I didn’t see a soul. Except for the two girls, who were now standing on their toes at one end of the long window seat, trying to peep out the window, there wasn’t anyone in the room. It was a big room, the entire second story over the kitchen, buttery, and pantry, and a “solar” only by courtesy, since it didn’t catch that much sun. The walls were eight feet of solid stone, pierced by high, narrow, unglazed and shutterless windows that let in thin columns of pale sunlight when the weather was good. Long stone window seats, devoid of cushions or comfort, were set perpendicular to the windows in the wall openings. Nothing could hide there. Was there something in the shadows? I looked along the walls and checked the corners. The long perches on the