In Pursuit of the Green Lion (22 page)

We turned left, passing the Bishop’s palace, which to this day fills me with a sort of horrid, prickery feeling, and turned into the Shambles toward the Cheap. Chickens and geese were hanging by their feet in the poulterers’ shops, and we had to step carefully to avoid the heaps of butchers’ offal.

“Mama, this isn’t the way home, is it?” asked Cecily as she and her sister toiled along beside me. Alison tugged at my hand before a display of ribbons laid out on a market woman’s shawl in the Cheap. “Pretty, Mama. Buy me that red one.” I shook my head.

“No, Cecily, we’re not going home. If I were Hugo, that’s the first place I’d look. We’re going to Mother Hilde’s. Hugo has no idea who she is, and he’ll never find us there. Besides, she can help me think of what to do.”

“Mother Hilde has sweets!” announced Alison joyfully, and the girls began to skip along the street, leaping over the gutters with joy at the thought of it. I only wished I could renew my energy the way that they did. But I always get tired quickly in the first months of making a baby.

But as we turned down Cornhill and the houses got shabbier, my heart started to beat faster and hope began to sing within me. Mother Hilde can fix anything! She’ll see it in a dream, or she knows someone who did just the same, only better. A broken heart’s nothing to Mother Hilde, she can mend anything! I’ll tell her about Gregory’s horrible family, and she’ll cluck and say, “My, my! That’s bad, but I’ve known worse! Do stir up the fire for me, dear, and pour yourself another mug of ale. Have your babies seen how to make dolls out of a dried apple yet? Let me sing them a song I know about the grasshopper and the ant.” Wherever Mother Hilde is, that’s better than home.

We were almost at the place; the narrow opening of St. Katherine’s Street, which is really rather a grand name for an overgrown gutter, was almost obscured by the displays that street vendors had hung up. Nothing matched: a cup, some spoons, a hood, a pair of well-used gloves, some battered-looking pots. Most people call St. Katherine’s Street “Thieves’ Alley,” because if you’re looking for ruffians, or a place to sell stolen goods secretly, it’s one of the best. But the rents are cheap, and most of the folk there have honest occupations, despite the name.

A man on the street brushed me, then opened his cloak to show me a polished silver mirror and a comb.

“For you, such a bargain!” he said. I shook my head and smiled. Stolen, of course. I certainly was near home.

“A widow needs to make herself pretty to catch another man. Think it over—I’ll be here the rest of the afternoon, if you change your mind.” Here? Yes, here—at the opening between two sagging tenements. A woman selling sour milk from a bucket, two lounging apprentices negotiating with an old lady for one of her store of greasy and no longer hot pies. Laundry hanging like pennants from second story to second story. “Thieves’ Alley,” Mother Hilde, and home, thank the Blessed Lord.

We carefully skirted a massive pig enjoying himself in the oozing muck in the center of the alley, and passed beneath the overhanging second stories of the tenements, where women leaned from between their open shutters to gather in laundry and shout gossip across the narrow way. A bird in a cage chirped somewhere above, and an old yellow dog raised his sleepy head from his paws and barked at us from a doorstep. Midway down the alley we stopped before an old two-story house that seemed to lean drunkenly against its neighbors. The front room on the second floor, seemingly added as an afterthought, was built so far into the street that it cast the front door into perpetual shadow, and prevented a mounted man from riding the length of the alley.

The door had a new knocker on it, made of iron but brightly painted, in the shape of a monkey’s face. Above us, marigolds in a second-story window box caught the sun, and the timbers at the house front shone with new color. Mother Hilde’s prospering, I thought. I remember when we first came here, there were holes in the roof. I lifted the knocker. It won’t be Brother Malachi who answers, I said to myself. The weather’s still good, and he never gives up his summer business until the weather shifts. He’ll be on the road, selling things. Mother Hilde lives with Brother Malachi, who’s nobody’s brother, but I think he was a monk once, before he took up his trade of forging indulgences. He sells relics, too, which he makes himself out of bits of this and that. He says you shouldn’t consider that he sells false goods because he sells very genuine goods—faith and hope—and that paper and pig bones are simply methods of conveying them to others. Besides, he gives good bargains. At least, that’s what he says.

In the winter Brother Malachi stays home and works on his true profession, which is finding the Philosopher’s Stone. This takes up the entire back room of the house, for the Philosopher’s Stone cannot be found without a lot of strange equipment and positive clouds of bad smells. When I lived here last, he had a boy named Sim, whom we’d found in the street, to pump the bellows and build up the fires and run errands for him. Perhaps Sim would answer my knock.

But I was stopped short when a strange woman opened the door. She was a bit taller than I, with a strong, rawboned face and fading, darkish hair tucked beneath a simple kerchief. Behind her in the room I could see a girl of about twelve, who had left off sweeping the hearth with a twig broom, and turned to see who was at the door. But it was the room itself, Mother Hilde’s cramped little hall, that looked strangest of all. True, the fire still leapt on the hearth, and the boiling kettle’s lid still clattered, as they had in the old days, but everything else was different: the low rafters had been painted bright red, and the ceiling between them was now dark blue, like the night sky, with the constellations picked out on it in bright flecks of gold. At the center of each a fanciful depiction of the proper sign of the zodiac was painted in bright colors. The twins, entirely nude but for two large fig leaves, the scorpion with his poisonous tail, Capricorn the goat with his little beard and curling horns. The walls beneath the crimson beams were painted as green as a new leaf. New paint, not yet begrimed by the smoke of candles.

I was suddenly terrified and speechless. Who on earth could be living here now? Had Mother Hilde died?

“Were you looking for a midwife?” said the woman, not unkindly, as she surveyed my frightened face and the two little girls clinging to my skirts.

“We’ve come for Mother Hilde,” Alison spoke up from her safe place behind me. “She has sweets.” The woman smiled.

“She is here, isn’t she?” I asked, my voice rather shaky.

“Why, yes—who shall I say is calling?”

“Tell her it’s Margaret, and I need her dreadfully.”

“Oh,
Margaret,”
responded the woman, as if she’d heard of me. “Of course, she’s in back—go right through.”

As we passed, the girl tugged at my sleeve and said shyly, “I’m Bet; that’s my mother. She’s learning from Mother Hilde now too.”

And Cecily, turning her wide eyes on her, asked, “If you live at Mother Hilde’s, do you eat sweets every day?”

“Of course,” said Bet, leaning on her broom. “It’s what we have for meals instead of vegetables.” And before her mother could stop her, she’d launched on such a ridiculous tale that we both had to laugh.

“Tell us more,” said Cecily, and she and Alison sat down on the bench and tucked their feet up underneath them to listen, as I passed through the back room to find Mother Hilde in the garden behind the house. In Brother Malachi’s dark and shadowy room, I could see his things were neatly packed, all except for the athanor, which is bulky. My eye caught the little crucifix in his oratory corner, and I crossed myself, thinking again of all the mornings—or even the dead of night—when I’d seen him there, praying by the light of a single candle to purify himself before a particularly difficult experiment.

God, I wish I could see his round figure now, turning around to shush me: “Margaret! I suppose by that infernal thumping you think you’re sneaking by on little mouse feet! Don’t you know better than to disturb me at a time like this? There’s no reason, absolutely no reason at all, to come through this room when I’m working! How many times do I have to tell you to go out the front door and around by the side gate? Is there no respect, absolutely none left in the world, for a man in search of Truth? Unless, of course—ah! Is that food you’ve brought? Set it down on the bench. I’d quite forgotten I was hungry—” Malachi would have choice words about Hugo, and say something humorous that would mend everything, if only he were here.

For a moment the light at the back door dazzled me, and then I could make out Mother Hilde in the yellow autumn sun. She was spreading chicken manure around her cabbages with a rake, and as she raked she leaned over to speak personally to each cabbage head. She didn’t have to lean very far, not only because she’s not very tall, but because her cabbages are immense—vast green globes all beskirted with great ruffled leaves that stand well over knee height. Everyone thinks it’s the seeds, which she saves especially each year from the biggest ones, but I know the secret’s not in the seeds, but in what she says to them.

“You’re looking a little yellowish and pale today,” she’ll say, and then cock her kerchiefed head as if she’s listening to it. Then she’ll fetch it a bucket of water from the well, or dig around its roots, until it’s straightened up. That’s how she made roses climb all over the donkey shed, where nothing but weeds grew before. And her herbs, all growing higgledy-piggledy here and there in the garden, have a sharp, wild scent as if they grew in the country.

“They’re like people, Margaret, you have to put them where they like the company,” she’d say, setting a little marigold among the carrots, or moving a new sprout of fennel to a sunny spot by the shed wall. “Now you must know parsnips don’t need company, Margaret, they’re like contemplatives; they grow by themselves and nobody bothers them. But lettuces, oh, they’re social. And frail. And the minute it gets warm, they’re so frivolous, they just go to seed.” Her bean poles, like little tents, stood among the roses. They’d be needing picking soon. Above this little kingdom, Mother Hilde’s big rooster, as vain a creature as ever lived, postured and strutted on the donkey shed roof, surveying his hens behind the wattle fence and showing off his tail feathers to the world. Within the shed, I could hear the tuneless humming of Peter, Mother Hilde’s last remaining child, who’s not right in the head, as he cleaned out the stalls.

Mother Hilde’s shapeless gray gown was covered with her big apron—white, like her kerchief, and I could see that she had on her old clogs. Behind her trailed a little dog that looked like a mound of hair very nearly the same at both ends. It was my own dog, who’s named “Lion-heart,” or Lion, for short, on account of his great deeds. He’d been left behind when I was taken off so suddenly, and he must have run straight to Mother Hilde’s, which is what he does whenever he’s let out.

“Mother Hilde!” I called, and as she turned, Lion gave a great leap of joy and bounded toward me barking like a crazy thing.

“Why, Margaret!” Mother Hilde exclaimed with delight. “You’re back! I knew you’d come. See? I kept Lion for you. He ran directly here when you left so suddenly.” With Lion leaping on me and wagging his whole body, we embraced there, among the cabbages, and I began to weep for joy and relief in seeing her face again.

She stepped back at arm’s length, to look me over better. Her face grew serious.

“What’s wrong, Margaret? You’ve got something cold and dark all around your shoulders, and your bosom’s all lumpy, as if you’d fled with your life’s possessions tucked inside. And where’s Brother Gregory? I thought you’d gone and married him.”

“The Cold Things are ghosts, Mother Hilde, and Brother Gregory’s in France, given up for dead.”

“Ghosts? Goodness me, that sounds serious. Come inside and let’s talk,” said Mother Hilde.

“Now, what do you think of our beautiful new hall, Margaret?” asked Mother Hilde as she checked the contents of her kettle and poured me a mug of ale. “Isn’t it splendid? Malachi took it in trade.”

“In trade for what, Mother Hilde?”

“Oh, the Elixir of Life,” said Mother Hilde, giving her kettle a stir. “Sir Humphrey was very happy with it, and sent his own painter all the way from Dorsetshire.”

I couldn’t help gasping a little, and as my eyes opened wider I put my hand over my mouth, which had dropped open. Selling to the gentry? Malachi was getting bold beyond belief. I could spy Mother Hilde looking up from her kettle with that amused, indulgent look she gets whenever I’m shocked.

“Mother Hilde, what on earth will Baron Humphrey do when he finds out the Elixir doesn’t work? He’s got one of the nastiest reputations in Christendom.”

“Well, first of all, he was visiting and isn’t likely to come back for a while, since he’s headed abroad. And second, Malachi told him it wasn’t proof against weapons—only natural death. Any man who lives as wickedly as Sir Humphrey, he says, is bound to be murdered by his heirs anyway. So, Malachi says, there’s no problem at all, as long as he sells the Elixir only to men who aren’t likely to die in bed.”

“But what was in it, that convinced Sir Humphrey that it worked?”

“Remember the
aqua ardens
he used to make for coughs? It makes a man powerfully drunk in absolutely no time at all.”

“Oh, Mother Hilde, there’s no stopping Brother Malachi, is there?” I put my hand on her arm.

“That’s because he’s a genius, my dear,” said Mother Hilde with calm pride.

But then I had to tell everything that had happened to me since the day that Sir Hubert and his retainers had burst into our parlor, fully armed, and left my wicked stepsons in pieces on the floor. By the time I had finished my story, dusk was beginning to fall, and the whole household, consisting of the strange woman, her daughter, Peter, and old Hob, the handyman, had gathered silently to listen.

“I need him back, Mother Hilde. I’d give anything to have him back. I know I can find him—find the money—anything—if I just try hard enough. He loves me, he said so, and I can’t let him go. Oh, Hilde, he might die alone, and I’d never see him again—”