“Nay,” Bolingbroke said in a voice full of exquisite gentleness and love. “You have been betrayed, aye, but neither by myself nor by Margaret, nor by any of our kind … but by the angels.”
“Tom,” said Margaret, and she risked stepping forward and laying a hand on his trembling arm. “How can we be demons, if we be the children of angels?”
He did not throw off her touch. “I don’t understand… I don’t understand…”
“You will,” said Bolingbroke, “when you read what is within the casket. Tom, come with us, please. You know we cannot hurt you. You know that.”
But Neville remained still, his eyes jerking wildly between Bolingbroke and Margaret. “Sweet Jesu, what have I done? What? Have I betrayed mankind to the Devil?”
“Not yet,” said Margaret, her tone suddenly impatient. “But you know that you shall eventually have that choice.”
Then she turned with as much grace as she could muster, and stalked out of the bower.
“Come with us,” Bolingbroke said to Neville, then followed Margaret.
Neville stared as Bolingbroke walked away, then somehow managed to get his legs to work.
He stumbled after the others. “Demon!” he hissed as he caught up with Bolingbroke.
“I dare you to say that to my face after you have read—and fully understood—what lies within the casket,” Bolingbroke said with a dark, unreadable look at Neville.
Neville stopped in his tracks, his mind in such a turmoil that he could make no sense of anything. Then, having decided that motionlessness would solve nothing, he slowly followed Bolingbroke and Margaret.
BOLINGBROKE LED them to a small chamber off his own apartments. There he told Neville to wait before he disappeared.
The chamber was bare of almost everything save a small table, several chairs, two large chests used for storing linens and a poky, unlit hearth.
Margaret sat down on one of the chairs, easing her back as she did so and trying to quell her fears. Sweet Jesu, everything depended on how Tom reacted over the next hour or so.
Neville stared at her, then sat down himself, turning his eyes into the hearth.
“I had not known that you were a party to your own rape,” he said in a harsh voice.
“I knew I would be so violated,” she said. “But that does not mean I was willing. It was Hal’s idea … and one I railed against. Tom, that rape abused me as much as it abused you.”
He slid bitter eyes her way. “Why? Why?”
She took a deep breath. “Because you needed to love, and yet you had erected such vile barriers of hate against love. Something needed to break them down. Tom, we—”
“You allowed yourself to be raped to make me feel guilty enough to love you!”
She flinched, and her cheeks reddened. After a moment she dropped her eyes.
That was all the answer he needed. “Unnatural bitch,” he said.
Her flush deepened, with anger now, rather than guilt. “You needed to love. Tom—”
“I needed to love you? Ha!”
“Love does not doom,” Margaret whispered, “it only saves, and you need to understand that.”
Neville’s head jerked up, not believing he heard aright. Those were the words Christ had spoken to him.
“You were wrapped in lies, Tom,” Margaret continued, still quoting Christ, “and you needed to be freed. You needed to love.”
“How do you know—?”
Margaret smiled sadly. “How do I know what our Lord Jesus Christ said to you on your journey from Kenilworth to London, Tom? Because Christ is my Lord, as He is Hal’s Lord. We are Christ’s servants, Tom.”
“You have powers of evil… how else could you have known …” Neville drifted to a halt, not even convincing himself with those words.
Margaret started to say something, then stopped as a footfall sounded at the door.
“Ah,” she said, “here is Hal now.”
She rose, leaning heavily on the arms of the chair as she did so, then smiled at Bol-ingbroke as he entered carrying a small brass-bound oak casket in his arms.
Neville rose also, unable to tear his eyes away from what was in Bolingbroke’s arms.
Bolingbroke walked to the table and set the casket down with a thump. His face was red, and trails of sweat ran down his forehead.
“Damn thing,” he said.
“I… I have seen that casket a hundred times!” Neville said, still staring at it.
“Aye,” Bolingbroke said. “It has been rattling about with all the other of my chests and caskets and cabinets. You have worked beside it for many a month at my business, Tom.”
Neville could not tear his eyes from the casket. St. Michael had said the demons could not keep the casket away from him, and he had been right. He’d seen this casket every time he’d entered the chamber where rested all of Bolingbroke’s bureaucracy. Sometimes it had sat next to the desk he’d worked on, sometimes closer to a window, sometimes under a sheaf of documents or one of the never-ending piles of petitions.
And sometimes he had leaned down to it, curious, but every time—every single time— he had done that, something had occurred to disturb him, and to turn his mind from the casket.
“This has traveled everywhere you and I have,” Neville said. “From the Savoy to Ke-nilworth and back again. From the Savoy to Gravensteen, then to Sluys and thence back here.”
“It had to follow you, Tom,” Bolingbroke said.
Neville looked up, unable to say anything, not knowing what to say. He was no longer angry, only consumed with such a sadness that he did not think he could bear it.
Margaret leaned close to him, and kissed him on the cheek. “Know that I love you, Tom,” she
said, then turned and walked from the chamber.
“You will need this,” Bolingbroke said, lifting a key from a purse at his belt.
Neville slowly reached up a hand and took it.
It felt cold and nasty against his flesh.
“Know also that I love you,” Bolingbroke said, and Neville looked into his eyes, and knew it for the truth.
He nodded, unable to speak.
Bolingbroke stared a moment longer, then he, too, walked from the chamber, closing the door behind him.
Neville stood there for a long time, looking neither at the casket nor at the key.
Then, slowly, his hand shaking, he lifted the key to the casket’s lock, fitted it, and turned it.
The lock gave way without a murmur.
Suddenly trembling too much to stand, Neville sat down with a thump.
He knew that what was inside this casket had the power to destroy his entire life.
CHAPTER III
Horn Monday
In the second year of the reign of Richard II
(l0th September 1380)
— III —
THERE WAS A GREAT, heavy book which took up most of the space within the casket—its pages were curiously inscribed with thick, threatening writing.
Spells … incantations.
Neville glanced at them, then shuddered, and closed the book.
He did not want to read such dark magic.
Besides the book, there were some loose pages, and because these appeared to be less threatening than the volume of incantations, Neville chose to read these.
The writing was that of an old man—Wynkyn de Worde—and his words were filled with an old man’s impatience and ire. Neville quickly regretted having chosen these pages above the book, but once he’d begun to read, he could not stop.
Listen you, whoever you are. If you read this then I am dead and have not been able to teach you myself. Fools! Fools! Fools all!
Listen you, whoever you are. You have no time, for if I have been dead longer than one year then evil will already be crawling unhindered over God’s good earth.
Sweet Jesus! Wynkyn de Worde had been dead for over thirty years! Neville took a deep breath, and continued.
Ah! But there is evil everywhere, even in heaven, and it angers me that I must speak of it to you in this manner. This evil, these twisting words of depravity, should have been spoken, not written.
Listen you, whoever you are. Listen to the angels’ secrets.
Women are the curse of man—and heavenkind, do you understand that? Ah, but you must, if you read this, for the angels would let no one read who did not understand it. Women are filth, whores, their weeping clefts tempting man into corruption and depravity and hell—filth!
Filth, all!
Wormy dark temptresses! They are corruption made flesh, bitches burning with diabolical lusts, incubus-suckling sows, and sucklers themselves of Satan’s hot poker…
Neville skipped over the next page and a half until de Worde managed to tear himself away from his tirade on the frightful corruptions of women.
“Lord Christ,” he whispered, “you had the soul of a madman, de Worde.”
And then he paused, his stomach twisting in a tight knot as he remembered how he’d treated the prostitutes in Rome. How he’d treated Alice …