In Pursuit of the Green Lion A Margaret of Ashbury Novel

CHAPTER ONE Most love stories begin in May sunshine, with secret glances at a dance or feast, or stolen conversations in a hidden garden. But mine begins in winter, with a funeral, when my heart's love was sealed into the tomb forever. It was only duty then that kept my soul from following Master Kendall's into that long sleep. Nothing but the tears of the two little daughters he had left me bound my unwilling heart to the earth. So I resolved to stay yet a while for Cecily's and Alison's sakes, but to give myself only to their upbringing, and never to another man. For having once been wed to Master Kendall, who would be the spouse of a lesser man? There were others who were lords in rank, but who more lordly in manner than Roger Kendall, mercer of London? And who could ever be his equal in kindness, or greatness of spirit? His memory strengthened my resolve against the ever growing numbers of badgering suitors who hoped to obtain his fortune by marrying his widow. But what men cannot achieve by cozening or guile they will have by force. Master Kendall's memorial was scarcely set into the wall at St. Botolphe's when I found myself stolen from a house spattered with the blood of failed contenders and would-be heirs by the most shameless, fortune-hunting family in the entire realm: the impoverished, quarrelsome, pretentious tribe of the de Vilerses. And worst of all, it was I myself who had foolishly let the first of them into my house, in the form of a scapegrace younger son, a failed monk and poetic scribbler who went about town under the name of Brother Gregory. For it was through my intervention that he'd got himself retained by my husband as a clerk. And now, grief, self-pity, and rage at my own weakness contended for first place in my heart when I found myself wedded to him by the sword in the chapel of his father's house. It was one of those gray, drizzling days in early spring, when the sky seems that it might almost touch the ground. Here and there the snow, standing in unhappy piles crusted by slippery ice, broke apart to reveal a bit of dead grass or frozen mud. Along a rutted track that wound across a frozen meadow and through a village of thatched huts, a party of riders approached their destination: Brokesford Manor, a fortified house built in the old Norman fashion, half hidden behind a tumbledown wall at the end of an avenue of bare-branched trees. At the village, a dozen peasants, barefooted in the icy mud, stood in a cluster by the road, while children peeped out of the windows to see the spectacle. It was mid-February in the Year of Our Lord 1356, and the Sieur de Vilers was returning home from an adventure to which he had ridden out at full canter less than a week before, followed by his sons, squires, grooms, and an arms-laden packhorse. A murmur went up from the group as the party came closer. It was not the same group that had set out. At its head, it is true, rode old Sir Hubert himself, straight and arrogant, on his tall red palfrey, followed by his eldest son, Sir Hugo, on the bay. Then a groom, leading the packhorse. But--after that--something different altogether. Robert and Damien, the two esquires, were riding double. Before their saddles were the small figures of two children. Girls, by the look of them, though they were heavily bundled. Behind them, in a shapeless gown and sheepskin cloak, rode Sir Hubert's younger son, the one who'd been seized by a religious mania and run off heaven knows where for years, causing his father untold trouble. But the most delicious scandal of all was that he'd got a young, pretty woman riding pillion behind him. A frail-looking, pale-faced woman, with red, swollen eyes, wearing a rich, deep black cloak and gown. Even before the grooms at the end of the party were within the gates, the gossip had spread that the woman was a wealthy widow, an authentic heiress from the City, rescued from certain death by the bold lords of BrokeRiley, Judith Merkle is the author of 'In Pursuit of the Green Lion A Margaret of Ashbury Novel', published 2006 under ISBN 9780307237880 and ISBN 0307237885.