He marched toward the chamber where the witch was seducing Thomas—
—and stopped dead as he saw who stood outside the door to Thomas’ chamber, his legs apart, both hands leaning on the unsheathed sword whose point rested on the floor between his feet.
Well met, Dark Prince!
“A good night, indeed,” Bolingbroke said. As the Archangel Michael’s face was suffused with
fury, so Bolingbroke’s was suffused with triumph… and something else … love, perhaps.
Let me pass.
“No.”
The archangel raised his fists and screamed. Let me pass!
“No,” whispered Bolingbroke.
The archangel’s form blurred as he fought to contain his rage and maintain control of himself.
You cannot think that with this night’s work you have won.
“Nay,” said Bolingbroke, “I do not. I do not share your arrogance.”
He will recant his words and his love when he knows your and her foul secret.
“I do not think so.”
You cannot keep the casket from him for much longer.
“Long enough. Longer perhaps, for methinks he no longer lusts for that casket as once he did.”
He cannot keep himself from the casket. It will find its way to him!
“Do I detect panic in your voice, Michael? Does love terrify you that greatly?”
The archangel did not answer. His form had now dissipated into a swirling, blinding confusion of light.
“Begone,” said Bolingbroke. “You have no place here tonight.”
Thomas will recant, the archangel said yet again, when he learns your foul secret.
Bolingbroke’s face darkened with rage and he hefted the sword, and taking a single pace forward, levelled it at the archangel at shoulder height.
“My foul secret, Michael? This is not my secret alone, nor Margaret’s, but the dark foul secret of the angels!”
Now the archangel was nothing but a throbbing ball of light. He will recant when he finally faces the ultimate choice: earth’s eternal damnation, or the love of a whore. He will sacrifice her for that… believe me.
And then he was gone, and Bolingbroke was left alone in the corridor.
“The love of a whore?” Bolingbroke whispered. “Nay, Michael, he will not do it for the love of a whore, but for the love of all mankind.”
“YOU CANNOT say you love me! You cannot!”
“I have run from love all my life, Margaret. I will run no longer.”
“You will not stand by it—tonight you will say you love me, but in a month’s time, or a year, or whenever it is that the choice is laid before you, you will choose mankind’s salvation before you choose me.”
Neville dropped his eyes, again playing with the thread in the blanket. “I cannot believe,” he said finally, “that God would ask me to sacrifice that which I love—”
“He asked it of Abraham! He asked Abraham to murder his son Isaac in order to prove his love for God.”
“And did He not then grant mercy to Abraham?”
“God murdered his own Son.”
To that Neville had nothing to say.
“If He was prepared to so crucify His own Son, I do not think that God will grant me mercy,”
Margaret whispered.
“Margaret…I will not condemn you again. I cannot! Sweet Jesu, Margaret, I have come to loathe the man that sent you into Richard’s chamber. I was so fixated by that damned, cursed casket that I was prepared to sacrifice you to gain it. And for what? For what?”
She was silent.
Neville took a deep breath. “I let Alice murder herself rather than stand by her, or admit to her that I loved her. I will not allow you to be murdered also.”
“You have a greater cause than me, Tom. You cannot love me.”
“I have no greater cause than you, Margaret,” he said with boundless gentleness.
She began to weep. “You cannot say that—”
“I have the most infinite joy in saying that. Margaret… I have fought against loving you for so long. When Hal suggested to me a means whereby we might snatch that—”
Neville hesitated, and Margaret could see that he was trying to bring a deep anger under control, “that casket, then I justified the risk to you with the thought that achieving the casket was worth it. But the casket wasn’t worth it, was it? No, Margaret, let me finish.”
He slid a little way along the bench and reached out to take her hand through the cloak she still had wrapped tight about her. “Margaret, even had that been the right casket it would not
have been worth the pain that you, and Mary, endured.
“Do you remember what you said to me later that night? You said that God and the angels had chosen me because I was a cold, pious priest, cold enough to cast the innocent into the flames for God’s cause. Margaret,” his hand tightened about hers, forcing her to look into his eyes, “that cold, pious man cracked apart that night. He cracked apart when he realized what he had done—that once more he’d sent a woman into the flames to suit his own cause. Mary said it had been me who had raped you that night. She was right. Margaret…”
Neville’s voice broke, and he had to look away for a moment. “Margaret, you have been gone from my life for three months now, and these months have been so empty … so bleak. I want you back, yet I have no right to ask.”
She stared, silent.
“Dear God,” Neville whispered, desperate to find the right words to reach her, and to find the right manner in which he could atone for what he had done to her. “Margaret, I loved you from the moment I saw your face hovering above the woman that I lay with on that day in July last year, the afternoon we got Rosalind. Yet I clothed that love in hatred, because that was the only way I knew how to deal with it. It was the only way I could feel safe. It was how I dealt with Alice, and with her death. It was how I dealt with the death of my parents. I wrapped myself in the twin cloaks of piousness and coldness, and told myself it made me a great man, God’s man.
“But it only made me a foul man. A despicable man—surely ugly in God’s sight, as well as in yours.”
“And in Saint Michael’s sight?”
“Saint Michael will surely understand—” Margaret’s mouth twisted.
“Margaret, Margaret, the attainment of that casket is never, never going to compensate me for not having you or your love.”
“But one day you will attain that casket,” Margaret said brokenly, “and learn its secrets. One day you will have to make the choice that, if mankind is to be saved, must see me burned.
You know that!”
Neville let go her hand and took her face between his hands. “Margaret, I swear before you now, that when that day comes I will allow love to make the choice for me—not cold callousness, not fear, not pious bigotry, and not what some archangel whispers in my ear.
This I vow as the only way I can atone for what I have done to you, and for what I did to Alice, the child she carried, and the three daughters she took with her. Sweet Jesu, Margaret,” now Neville broke down, “what more can I do? What more can I do?”
It was enough, and it was all she could ask. Margaret lifted her arms, throwing back the cloak, and wrapped them about Neville’s body, drawing him close to her.
“No more, Tom. You need do no more.”
He kissed her eyes, her forehead, and finally her mouth, his every move hesitant and fearful.
She tightened her arms about him, and thought his kiss the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to her throughout the desolation of her life, for it was full of love rather than lust or the need to dominate.
“Do you love me?” she said.
“Oh aye, I love you.”
She smiled, and put her lips against his, and said, “That is all that matters.”
Neville shuddered, then gathered her into his arms and carried her back to the bed, away from the chill of the window.
He laid her down and slowly folded the last of the cloak away from her nakedness.
He had not seen her unclothed—save for a brief flash of pale flesh as she climbed into or out of their bed—in three months, and what he saw now shook him.
Scars, on her breasts and along her inner thigh.
Richard’s marks.
She looked at him silently, seeing the tears well in his eyes, allowing him this moment of reflection. Sweet Jesu, he was handsome! Margaret had always known that, but now that his facade of coldness had been stripped away she suddenly realized how strong and seductive his features were.
She reached out a hand, and touched his face.