Green Darkness (70 page)

Julian awakened that Friday morning in a very bad mood. All his joints were stiff. It took him several minutes even to reach for the chamber pot. There was also a darting pain behind his eyes. He had remedies in his coffer, but felt too wretched to get them. By the time a servitor came up to his room with the breakfast ale, early sunlight had vanished and an east wind had started to blow, bringing with it more rain. Drafts whistled around the window.

“
Clima sporco,
” said Julian crossly to the servant, whose broad Saxon face showed mild surprise.

“Sir,” he asked, “d’ye lack somep’n?”

“I merely remarked that this was a swinish climate,” said Julian, massaging his swollen fingers. “’Tis chill as a tomb in here. Make me a fire!”

The man waggled his shock of hair. “’Tis April! No orders ta light chamber fires in April . . . I dunno . . .”

“Bring me wood and tinder, you dolt,” cried Julian. “I want a small fire, at least.”

“Jest a liddle fire?” The man looked unconvinced. He went out muttering to himself.

Sancta Maria,
Julian thought, and he pulled the blankets close around his shoulders, craving Italian sunlight, craving heat with a passion nothing else could rouse in him now. Once Lady Montagu was delivered and he had received the ten gold angels which he expected, he’d try to sell the miserable little properties his wife had left him, and he’d go home. To Florence? No, that too would be chilly. South! South! Calabria, Sicily, what matter if he could find no rich patron there? Lie in the brilliant sunlight and gladly starve, or he could beg. “
Signori, gentile signori—per pietá
. . .”

He looked around hopefully at a knock on his door. So, the simpleton had come with the wood after all. “Enter!” he cried, and was bitterly disappointed to see Celia walk in.

“F-forgive me, Master Julian,” she said, taken aback by his angry face. “I asked where your chamber was . . .” she swallowed and paused.

“
Chiaro!
Obviously . . . but
why?
”

“
I—I
thought you might—that you would . . . help me. There’s nobody else. You’ve often seemed fond of me . . .” her voice trailed off.

Julian crouched in his blankets and looked at her with displeasure. The egotistical arrogance of the young! And of beauty. Some subtle change in that beauty; loss of the plaintive aura of innocence. The long sea-blue eyes were heavy, dark-circled; her mouth looked bruised; there was a red mark on her neck which he very well recognized. He had made many such marks himself on young, lovely flesh in the long ago.

“The monk, no doubt,” he said with bored contempt. “Poor fellow—and no use confessing your lechery to me, it’s quite useless. I’m not interested.”

She flushed scarlet and stepped back. “It’s
not
like that, not lechery,” she cried. “It’s love, Master Julian,
love!
Can you not understand that?”

“Ah, yes.” He gave his quick shrug. “An extremely pleasurable sensation, but you’ll find it so with young Edwin, too.
He
must have had more practice in the art. Only keep last night’s peccadillo to yourself. Women talk too much.”

Celia stared at him with such horror that he forgot his aching body. The deep buried string reverberated. It brought a hazy recollection of guilty discomfort—this has happened before—under the olive trees . . . white marble columns . . . supplication and denial.

“It’s
love,
it’s torment—I can’t live without him!” said Celia in a hoarse whisper. “And he is leaving me again, Master Julian, I can’t bear it. And yet he loves me, he
must
love me, I gave him the water-witch’s powder.” She suddenly crumpled onto a stool, and hid her face in her hands.

“You
what?
” said Julian. “You did what?”

It came out in muffled broken sentences. The visit to Melusine. The pentacle, the charm, the mandrake root. Mandragora, Julian thought, the most powerful of herbs, the Devil’s testicles they called it in Arabic. Yet, given the look he had seen exchanged between Celia and Stephen, the lightning bolt of violent desire, what herb was needed? Human passions could generate enough black magic without potions.

He had few scruples, and for ethics only the half-forgotten principles dictated by his Hippocratic Oath, and yet he felt a touch of fear. For her, for himself. “What did she say, this witch, when she gave you the powder?” he asked gravely.

Celia raised her head, her unfocused gaze went beyond Julian. “That if my heart was pure, that if I used it only to—to help my husband—there was no danger.” She spoke in a wooden tone like a child repeating by rote.

“And did you?” he asked.

She shook her head slowly.

“Did you then use this mandragora only to reinforce your own lust? Or did you use it for—for—well, Brother Stephen’s
happiness?
Was that your motive?”

He saw her widened eyes go shuttered and blank.

“I love him,” she said. “Naught else matters.”

Julian sighed. “If naught else matters, why do you disturb me?”

She clasped and unclasped her hands. “Send for Stephen. Tell him, show him—we can flee to the Continent. We could be wed. In Germany, even a priest can be wed. In Switzerland, too, I’ve heard. He can even remain a priest there. He need only give up his unnatural Benedictine vows.”

There was silence. Then Julian said, “You ask too much, Celia. And you do not understand the man you say you love. You think only of yourself. And I am a-wearied. You’ll get over this madness in a day or so, and marry as you should. Go now—and on the way back to your chamber, find somebody to bring up wood.”

Her straining face took on a hunted look; the great eyes fixed on him with piercing reproach. “You do not care what happens to me—or Stephen. Nay, why should you? Yet, I thought . . . I felt. I fancied you were trying to help me—dreams—a kind of dream, I was dying . . . great danger.”

“My dear girl,” said Julian impatiently, “you’re overwrought. You were merry yesterday morning, I heard you laughing with Lady Montagu over the decorations in the chapel for your wedding, the primrose bunches, the streamers of pink ribbon. I assure you that the unfortunate actions you encouraged last night are but a transient frenzy. You’ll soon forget.”

“
Will I
. . .?” said Celia in so harsh and peculiar a tone that Julian blinked. She gathered up her black skirts, sketched a small unsmiling bow. “I’ll give order for the wood,” she said, and left his chamber.

Julian felt dismay, tinged with anger. Unreasonable, childish behavior. Ridiculous request that he talk to the monk, who, very properly, was leaving. And then the effrontery of trying to embroil him in a particularly sordid affair, which must come to the Montagus’ attention—and redound to Julian’s own detriment. He needed those gold angels.
Per
Bacco,
I hope Lady Montagu delivers soon, he thought. I’ll stuff her with moldy rye bread, hasten the birth . . . better yet—demand to examine her and rupture the membranes. Fortunately, this lady from the rugged North was not prudish, as were so many English women.
England!
he thought, with a spasm of distaste.

What folly to waste all these years in a place so alien. What had possessed him? Some force he did not understand. A quotation from Plato darted like a spear through his bafflement. “In every succession of life and death you will do and suffer what like may fitly suffer at the hands of like . . .” Julian had once amused himself with Plato’s certainty of transmigration, how each soul selected its life—a sight at once melancholy, ludicrous, strange . . . how the experience of the former life generally guided the choice of the later one . . . 

Was that, in truth, the answer? Julian considered a moment. Then forgetful of the pains in his joints, he pulled out from his coffer an old notebook, in which he had—during the years at Padua—written down certain precepts which had struck his youthful fancy. There was one by Francesco Guicciardini, a Florentine historian attached to the court of Alessandro de Medici. Julian looked slowly through the pages until he found the excerpt: “Whatsoever has been in the past or is now, will repeat itself in the future, but with the names and surfaces of things so altered that he who has not a quick eye will not recognize them, or know how to guide himself accordingly. . . .”

Possible . . . thought Julian uncomfortably, very possible. He noted further down the page a Latin excerpt he had also copied; it was by St. Gregory of Nyssa, who had written it in the third century: “It is absolutely necessary that the soul be healed and purified. If this does not take place during its life on earth, it must be accomplished in future lives.”

“Future lives,” Julian thought. What a wearisome prospect. Back on earth again for struggles, disappointment, pain, despair.

“
Cui bono?
” he said aloud, raising his head and staring at the tiny leaded windowpanes which were clouded by cold mist.

“So that finally purged of self-will, purged of desires, the soul becomes one with God.” Who said that to him, almost forty years before at Padua? Julian remembered a very dark face under a turban. Black eyes like ripe olives fixed in yellowed corneas. An Arab, wasn’t he? There had been some Arabian students at the university. The Italian youths had made fun of them. But this man hadn’t been a student, but a visitor. He had come from Mecca, and landed in Venice, but he hadn’t been a Moslem, or had he?

Suddenly it seemed important to Julian to remember the man’s name, and what he had said in a guttural mixture of Latin and barbarous Italian. So important that Julian sat down on the hard oak chair and scarcely noted the arrival of a sulky servant, or the lighting of a small fire, though he stared into the flames until he saw the Arab clearer. Small; rough homespun robes; dirty white turban; and those black-olive eyes ringed by saffron, penetrating yet impersonal There were other students who had come to lauoh at the freak . . . a room in a palazzo . . . some banquet but the man had refused wine or meat. His name was
Nanak!
How had they come to hold private converse? Had Nanak singled him out from the others? They had certainly sat alone for a while on a cushioned marble bench, and Nanak had used odd foreign words, which he had said were Hindian, from the vast continent to the East which Christofero Colombo claimed to have reached by sailing west. Though, as to that, there had been sceptics at Padua—geographers who had heatedly denied that the Genoese had found anything more important than a few uncharted islands. No Paduan, no Horentine, no Venetian ever trusted a man from Genoa—nor each other for that matter.

A log snapped in his fire, and Julian pulled himself together with a jerk. He had started to think about Nanak, and his wits had gone rambling. He no longer wanted to remember the little man, yet for a moment he forced himself. Something about “Karma” or “Chiurma,” as it had sounded to Julian, which seemed to be equivalent to the Christian saying, “As ye sow so shall ye reap,” though not necessarily applied to this life, nor to the orthodox conceptions of heaven, hell, purgatory, but rather to a succession of rebirths called
Sumsara
, in which one experienced the result of every act good or bad, every thought, especially every strong desire. “Be careful what you crave for,” Nanak had said, “since you will eventually get it.”

The young Julian had been fascinated. He had questioned Nanak eagerly, until the dense black eyes were hooded, only the yellowed whites showed, and the little man said, “You are not ready . . . leave me alone.”

Julian had persisted, asking why he could not remember past lives, if such he had had, until Nanak—wearily tolerant, smiling a little as to an importunate youngster—said, “Sometimes,
if
it’s for the soul’s good, one remembers. It may be to prevent further harm to others, or redress old wrongs—you have one toe on the path, otherwise I would not have spoken with you. How well and fast you climb depends on you. Remember this though, that for those who have developed even as far as you have sins of omission will be punished by the law as certainly as acts of violence.”

Julian was disappointed then. In retrospect he found the admonition wordy and pithless. He remembered that later he had been chiefly struck by the realization that Nanak’s last speeches seemed to have been delivered in a completely foreign tongue, though the man had not moved his lips at all. Such, perhaps, was the power of imagination. Or was I drunk? Julian thought. We had taken much wine that night. Vexed with himself and the whole memory he got up and held his veined swollen hands close to the fire I desire warmth sunlight—his mouth took on its ironic lift—and I do not intend to wait for some possible future life to attain them!

He struggled out of his night robe, and painfully garbed himself for the day, while listening to eleven strokes from the clock tower. Dinner was not far off. Unfortunately, it was Friday and the devout Montagus never served meat. There might, however, be a fat stuffed carp. His mouth watered at the hope.

Celia did not appear in the Hall for dinner. And nobody missed her. Julian assumed that she might be upstairs with the Montagus, and was pleased at her absence. Her hysterical visit to him could be ignored. He chatted pleasantly with a lawyer from Chichester who had stopped to see Anthony about an extension of lease on one of the numerous Montagu properties, and been asked to dine by the steward as a matter of course. Julian had decided to induce labor in Lady Montagu next Monday, after the wedding. His mind was at peace.

Celia did not appear for supper either. The absence would not have been noted, except that Edwin Ratcliffe had ridden over to see his betrothed.

The Montagus received him cordially, if in a somewhat absent-minded way, and sent the nearest page to fetch Celia. The page happened to be Robin, and when he came back after a long time, his blond brows were furrowed, his beardless face anxious.

“I can’t find her, my lord,” he said dropping briefly to one knee, then gulping. “I’ve searched everywhere—Juno’s gone, too.”

“Her
mare
is gone?” said Anthony, readjusting his mind with difficulty. He and Magdalen had a hundred matters to arrange before he left for Spain. Not the least was the possible betrothal of little Anthony to the Arundel heiress. Also, Magdalen’s brother Leonard seemed to be causing trouble on the Border. If Anthony were to regain Queen Elizabeth’s favor, Magdalen’s family must certainly be kept in line.