Christ’s word, or that of God?
Freedom and love, or hatred and entrapment?
Rosalind was tottering about the garden, laughing and clapping her plump hands as her mother laughed with her. Neville watched as Rosalind stepped close to Margaret and was swept up in her mother’s arms to be kissed and cuddled with total abandon.
Rosalind shrieked with joy, and her joy intermingled in the sunshine with Margaret’s throaty laughter and with the heavy, honeyed fragrance of the herber.
Neville remembered Bolingbroke’s love of children, and thought he understood why.
Abandoned and unloved themselves, all demons … all angel-children spent their lives compensating every child they encountered.
How was that “evil”?
Rosalind had wrested herself free of Margaret’s arms and tottered to within a pace of where Neville stood behind the hedge.
Suddenly she saw him, and crowed with delight, weaving over to him and wrapping her arms about his knees, begging to be lifted up.
Neville hesitated only a heartbeat before he bent down, gathered her into his arms, and slowly walked into the herber’s sunshine.
Margaret looked up from where she sat, and her smile faltered a little as she saw her husband with their daughter. He wasn’t surprised. No doubt this was a trying time for all her kind… waiting for him to speak… to act.
He sat down cross-legged on the lawn and Rosalind wriggled out of his arms and sat between her parents, her fingers picking small flowers from the lawn. In an instant shed forgotten them, as she became totally absorbed in the flowers.
“Tell me about Wynkyn de Worde, and those who went before him,” he said softly.
Margaret took a deep breath. “After Christ died, heaven decided it needed to be more careful.
It created an antithesis of itself, hell, a jail for all those who threatened it.
“And the priests—”
“The Keepers, we called them.”
“The Keepers were the ones who thrust the … the angel-children down?”
“Yes.”
“Why did the angels not do it?”
“The angels are of heaven, and thus are of the spirit. They can accomplish nothing in this tangible world. Besides, they fear the Cleft greatly.”
Neville nodded, but did not reply. For a while he played with Rosalind, running the fingers of a hand through her black curls as she smiled and laughed at him.
“What have you done with the book, and pages?” Margaret eventually said.
He gave a little shrug, as if the subject did not interest him. “I have put the book and de Worde’s writings back into the casket, and I have shut it. I left it in the chamber. I do not think anyone will touch it. Margaret…” “Yes?”
He looked up. “If I am Wynkyn de Worde’s successor, why can I not simply take up where he left off? Go to the Cleft at Midsummer, speak the incantation of Calling, and then return on the Nameless Day to thrust… to thrust you and all yours into hell?”
“Because too long has passed,” Margaret said. “We have grown too strong, and we have so badly ‘infected’ mankind with our ambitions—with the taste of freedom—that heaven well knows that the day of final battle over the souls of mankind beckons. The decision is no longer who to find to thrust us into hell, but to find a choice-maker to decide which path mankind will take. You are that choice-maker.”
Again Neville was silent for long minutes.
“After you had been raped in my futile bid for the casket,” Neville said, “I spoke with Saint Michael and told him to stay away from me. But,” he shrugged a little, “what I have wanted has never influenced the archangel’s actions. Margaret, Saint Michael must have known how close I was drawing to you and Hal. Why has he left me alone for so long? Why let me wander deep into a situation that could mean the end of everything he stands for?”
Margaret’s smile slipped. “Tom, I don’t know.”
And that admission frightened her, terrified her, because it meant that the angels felt confident enough in Thomas’ eventual decision to allow him to wallow in the bed of the angel-children for the time being.
What was it that the angels knew about Thomas that she and her kind didn’t?
“Will you be with me for the birth of our child?” Margaret said, needing the reassurance of his answer.
She did not get it.
“I do not know.” Neville leaned a hand forward and rested it on her belly, feeling the movements of the child within.
“You said that you allowed yourself to be raped in order to break through the walls of hate that bound me. But, Margaret,” he sat back, lifting his hand from her belly, “why is it that I am the one who feels raped?”
Then he stood, picked up Rosalind, and, turning his back on his wife, walked away.
PART EIGHT
Bolingbroke!
Bishop of Carlisle:
… if you crown him, let me prophesy— The blood of English shall manure the ground, And future ages groan for this foul act; Peace shall go sleep with Turks and infidels, And in this seat of peace tumultuous wars Shall kin with kin and kind with kind confound; Disorder, horror, fear and mutiny, Shall here inhabit, and this land be call’d The field of Golgotha and dead men’s skulls.
—William Shakespeare, Richard the Second, Act IV, sc. i
CHAPTER I
Monday 24th September 1380
TWO WEEKS PASSED, and for Neville it felt as if he spent much of those weeks drifting from day to day in a strange, dreamlike state. He thought a great deal of what Bolingbroke and Margaret had said to him, and what he had read in Wynkyn de Worde’s papers. He went back to the chamber, where sat the casket, on several occasions and lifted out the book of incantations and read through them.
Always they sickened him, for like de Worde’s testament, they were constructed of hatreds.
The angels’ hatred and fears of their issue.
When Neville did not revisit Bolingbroke and Margaret’s shocking revelations, or reread the contents of the casket, he remembered.
He remembered how Etienne Marcel had taken him to the carpenter’s shop in Paris, and shown him how the man and his family suffered under the “blessed patronage” of the Church.
He remembered some of what John Wycliffe had said to him. There are some who say the world is entering a new age . . . the age of man. An age where salvation and fulfillment can be found in this life rather than the next. An age where a man owes his king and country, even his wife, more loyalty than he does a distant, arrogant God.
He remembered Gilles de Noyes, standing in that frightful village common with the body of his dead niece in his hands, screaming, “I say fuck to God’s will! How can God will such as this! Eh? Tell me that, friar.”
He remembered Bolingbroke, on his way to witness the signing of the Treaty of Westminster, lifting the stranger-child from its mother’s arms, and holding her close with such utter love that tears ran down his cheeks.
He remembered how he had felt when Rosalind, so tiny, so bloody, so near death, had been placed in his arms, and oh! sweet Jesu, how desperately he had wanted her to live.
And he remembered how the archangel had appeared to him: It is better she dies, Thomas.
Better far you …
And every night, when he cuddled Rosalind in his arms before he set her down to sleep, and every night when he wrapped himself about Margaret’s body and felt the strength and hope of the new child growing within her, Thomas Neville knew how wrong the archangel had been.
How could it have been better for him that Rosalind die? How could it? Was a salvation on God’s terms worth the life of a child?
And whenever his memories and thoughts grew too troublesome, Neville prayed to Christ.
Even though what he had learned about Christ had shocked him deeply, Neville found that his awe and trust and love of Christ had not diminished. It was almost as if there was such a strong bond between them that no revelation, however shattering, could serve to sever it.
Love only saves, Thomas. It does not damn. Remember that.
ON THE second to last Monday in September, on the Feast of In-Gathering, Parliament met again to decide Richard’s successor.
Neville attended with Bolingbroke. The two men had talked little in the past two weeks save to pass pleasantries and to exchange those words needed to complete the business of each day. Neville knew that Bolingbroke watched him, but he did not feel threatened, nor did he feel that Bolingbroke exerted any pressure on him.
He simply watched.
This day, the Feast of In-Gathering, Neville and Bolingbroke stepped from the barge onto Westminster’s pier, richly robed in velvets and the finest linens, and attended by Raby, the Earl of Westmorland, Roger Salisbury and Robert Courtenay, as well some eight other knights.