In the Shadow of Lions (3 page)

Chapter Four

At the next moment we were in the lobby, staring at an aquarium of gorgeous blue and yellow cichlids, devilishly fat fish that would eat us if they were any bigger. They zipped around the tank and darted away when we pressed our faces near.

“What do they see?” he asked me.

“A distortion,” I replied. “A distortion of the world beyond them.”

He smiled, and the blood drained from my legs again. I wished he wouldn’t do that.

“What do we see?” he asked.

“We see everything. And we control the lighting, the food, the temperature, their tankmates. We scare them when they see us, but they don’t see us clearly. They don’t understand who we are.”

“So they don’t know the truth?” he asked.

“
Their
truth is not
the
truth,” I said.

We walked back to my room, though how I had arrived at the tank I couldn’t remember. We passed Crazy Betty’s room, and he walked in as I grimaced. Mercifully, Betty was sleeping deeply, a marvel of pharmaceutical intervention. Mariskka told me that Betty’s blood type was B positive, because she usually came in positive for barbiturates. She had been scheduled for surgery last May and was put on a diet of nothing but clear liquids the day before as they prepped her. Mariskka found her in the courtyard drinking pilfered vodka a few hours later. She had protested that it was clear.

He adjusted her covers that had begun to slip down and looked around the room. Seeing the blanket across the chair, he motioned for me to grab it. I handed it to him, and he draped it over her.

“It’s too cold in here,” he said. “She has bad dreams when she’s cold. Mariskka blames the drugs and never checks the thermostat.”

We walked back to my room, where he continued the story.

“The one on the path with her was Aryeh, the guardian of her line. He is more lion than angel, but these things are hard to explain in your words. She smelled her son because Aryeh had held him.”

“An angel held her son? So is he dead?”

“Let the story continue,” he replied.

“How can I be her heir if her son died?”

The words glowed like burning coals, and I heard a noise like a broken bow being dragged across violin strings. The words strained against the page. I could see them rising up. I swallowed and sat back, my fingers returning to the keyboard.

She came to in a large bed with an embroidered coverlet, in a room of tapestries and tables laid with pitchers of wine and a bowl of dried apple rings. She could hear the soft warblings of a lute being strangled, its player having not much skill, and children’s laughter.

An elderly man, possibly a doctor because of his thick spectacles and a faint odour of vinegar, pulled the coverlet up around her shoulders and patted her cheek, having a few whispered words at the door with a younger man. She could remember nothing but images: her son, a great horse bearing down on her, his cold snorting breath clouding her vision of his rider, and … something else. A warmth, a cocooning sleep in which she felt nothing but peace.

The younger man approached her, his hands behind his back, his face fleshy and soft, with rough whiskers all around his cheeks. He had a peasant’s broad nose and whip-thin lips. He eyes were wide and brown, much like the eyes of a boy, with thick lashes … eyes that lingered innocently, revealing no fear or desire.

“What is your name?” he asked.

“Rose.”

“Rose, I am Sir Thomas More, and this is my home. Do you know how you arrived here?”

The name disturbed her, but she could not think why. She could only remember those last moments. “I threw myself in front of your horse, and you saved me.”

“No,” he said, frowning. “I quite trampled you. In my horror, I could not turn the horse fast enough, my reflexes being frozen. But you survived, though you have lost much blood. To my poor mind, it is a miracle, God’s work.”

Rose turned her face to the wall. Little images strung themselves together—beads of thought and memory making an unbroken line at last, and she groaned. The blood was not from the horse.

“Why did you want to die?” he asked.

“Because I could not afford a pilgrimage,” she replied, thankful to be facing the wall so the sarcasm would show itself only in the turn of her mouth. “And I was wearied of my sin.”

“My child.”

The words carried such tenderness that she turned to him. He was so kind. Had she witnessed the burning, or was that a dream? The man she saw was too tender and soft to commit such strange violence.

“Do you have a home?” he asked.

“I am an orphan.”

“You are not married or betrothed?”

“No. I have never known a man’s love,” Rose lied. It was true.

He was silent for a moment. “You will stay on with us as a house servant. If your great passion for God is matched in obedience to men, you will find this day to be the happiest moment of fortune to befall you.” He smiled at her. “I am a gentle master. You will have no harsh treatment and the best of provision. This is a home of great peace.”

She hardened her eyes and watched him. He was a man, despite all his words. And men didn’t keep promises to helpless women. Not without some enticement. She waited for the flicker of his eyes as she lay there, the upturning of a corner of his mouth.

She could see nothing, and it made her want to vomit. He was treating her as he would a proper woman, a clean one.

“I cannot accept this grace,” she whispered. “You must send me from here.”

He moved as if to touch and reassure her, but she saw his muscles twitch and reverse, a set coming to his mouth as his hands returned behind his back. “You must rest.”

He left and she turned back to the wall. These waking moments were as strange and terrible to her as the dreamed ones. The memory of something pressed against her as the horses thundering overhead returned.

“Let me die,” she whispered. No one answered.

With her eyes closing, stray golden hairs on her gown caught her attention but did not hold it as she sank into her dreams. Once in the night she awoke and sat up. She sensed someone’s eyes upon her, but the room was dark and the candle extinguished. She was not afraid.

“You’re showing this story to me because I want to die too?” I yelled at him. “You think I’ll root for her to live, and remember everything good I have left to live for, that I’ll skip out of here and head straight to some
It’s a Wonderful Life
matinee?”

“You don’t want to die,” he said, still sitting in his chair. His shadow rose above him on the wall, growing larger, with wings spreading out, touching each of the walls surrounding me. “You want to run away. The afterlife is not a place for cowards.”

Fear dripped from my heart to my stomach. “I don’t want to do this anymore. I just want to die.”

“You don’t want to live,” he said. “They are not the same. Death is no escape.”

“Let me die!” I screamed, throwing the computer on the floor. The screen went black. “What’s the use of writing a book if I’m going to die?”

“Perhaps you never really loved words,” he replied.

He waved his hands over the Tablets of Destiny and another story sprang to life. I got a flash of my book, sitting on top of a best-sellers list with people lined up to buy it. One face in the crowd saw me, too. I reached out to him, but the vision fled back into the pages, and the other story leapt into action again.

“Wait! Fix it!” I screamed, pointing to the computer.

He shrugged. “Call customer support.”

I scrambled for the bedside table, finding a pen but no paper. I wrote what I saw next on my bedsheet. I would have to move on to the walls before he paused again.

Within weeks Rose had established herself among the servants as a relentless worker, a woman who accepted work from the hand of her master without complaint. It saved her the grief of talking to anyone. She rose first in the servants’ quarters, washing her neck and face, pinning up her hair, and being away before the others woke.

Sir Thomas moved her from laundry and feeding the animals to tending his children. It horrified her. Their high voices and quick little movements, like a pack of young rabbits who knew nothing of the world of blood and terror just beyond their door. Their innocence made her worry that at any moment she would be discovered and turned out. She wondered that they could not smell the past as she could, her sins that had decayed and piled up. She could no more be free of them than these children could perceive such a woman existed.

Sir Thomas had built a world for them where suffering was light and food was fresh and no one was damned at birth. Children all over London were whipped for disobediences. Sir Thomas believed in whipping, he said, and produced a peacock’s feather to punish the children with. He was too casual about their innocence, and it made her nervous. He did not know how it could be shattered.

Being utterly unnerved by the children, she unwittingly became a good mistress to them, watching them constantly so they would not stumble and touch her. She resolved their squabbles so there would be no need for tears and the hugs those required.

Sir Thomas bragged about her often to those who came to the home. “This is Mistress Rose, a poor child plucked from the streets of London, fatherless, motherless, but with a heart of devotion to Christ. I have seen no other maid give such love and care to my children.”

Sometimes his eyes rested not so much on the children but on Rose. She always averted her face. His gaze made her stomach leap. Sometimes she thought he would speak something more, something just for her, but he moved on each time, with his hands behind his back, returning with his guests to the parlor. It was a stupid thing, she knew, to have desire for a man, but she had not known her heart was still alive. She had forgotten its language.

The gentlemen would nod and move on with him, and the muscles in her back would release, so that she slumped down and caught a full breath. He would never suspect he had left a fool in charge of his children. There could be nothing to fear from her past, either. Sir Thomas never brought men from filthy Southwark into his home. No one who knew her could ever cross that threshold, save for one, and his name had never been mentioned. Still, at the first blooming of the hawthorn in a few weeks, she would tie a bundle above the door to keep that evil out.

She stiffened as one of the children grabbed her hand, leading her into the garden after breakfast. There were rows of fruit trees, entire plots of herbs and vegetables for the kitchen, ornaments and flowering bushes, whose blossoms the gardener clipped often to fill the house until it smelled of nothing but roses and kitchen stews, children and drying apples. The sun was not unkind as it burned, making the garden stretch and grow. There were grand trees, yew and beech, with drooping leaves that the children sought refuge under before dinner. She listened to them recite their psalters and poetry as the squirrels dashed past them, maniacally stripping the bark from the yew trees.

“Aye, your father is a great believer in God,” she commented.

Margaret piped up first, her earnest face already showing a woman’s frown lines above her brow. “God is everything to Father. There is nothing besides God, is there?”