Now here was Margaret, recently widowed and now pregnant with a lover’s child that would be passed off as her husband’s posthumous get.
The difference between Margaret’s situation and Katherine’s was that Margaret’s lover would not stand by her.
Katherine understood why Raby had distanced himself from Margaret. Indeed, her maternal instincts applauded him for it, for her daughter Joan would thereby win herself a husband unencumbered with a mistress and bastard child, but Katherine still felt for Margaret.
When the woman had been brought into her presence earlier this afternoon Katherine’s heart had instantly gone out to her. Margaret was fearful and looked thin and ill… and ill-cherished in that threadbare robe.
“Perhaps we can find her a husband at court, my sweet,” Katherine said. “Ah!
Now I know why I cleave so strong to you. You have spoken well, my dear. Yes,”
John rolled onto his back and stared at the shadowy vaulted ceiling of their chamber,
“we shall find her a husband.”
It would not be difficult. Margaret was a beautiful woman, and between them, Lancaster and Raby would ensure she was endowed with enough land to make her doubly desirable. That she had a bastard child (her husband’s posthumous child) would be no matter at all. Indeed, it would only increase her value, showing as it did her ability to breed heirs.
“But not until she has had the child,” John continued. “No man would want to take
to his marriage bed a woman so swollen with child he could not top her.” “None of my bellies stopped you, my lord!” “Ah, but there has never been a woman as desirable as you.”
She giggled again, and, encouraged, John slid his hand to regions still hot from their previous lust.
She wriggled, heating his desire. “Thomas has much changed.”
“Ah!” John rolled away again. Would she never tilt her mind back to the matter at hand? “Alice’s death caught him hard,” Katherine said.
John was silent some time before he replied. “Thomas behaved badly toward Alice and her husband, and then behaved even more poorly toward his own family as well as his liege lord in escaping into holy orders. He has run far and fast to escape the consequences of his actions. It has not become him.”
“And yet… yet you said that there was some holy duty that he has been charged with? Something of such great import that you have allowed him back into the heart of your court?” John lay silent again, then, his love and trust of Katherine so strong and true it formed one of the cornerstones of his entire existence, he told of her the demons that had taunted the Black Prince, Hal and Thomas, and of Thomas’ desire to find this casket that would contain the secrets to the demons’ destruction.
Frightened beyond anything she had yet experienced in her life, Katherine clung close to John.
“What can we do?”
John shrugged slightly. “As much as we can.” Then he tightened his arms about her. “As much as we must.”
“Thomas is such a strange man,” she said, not knowing quite what she meant by that. “Strange indeed,” John said, sliding his hand once more into the realms of temptation, “if he gave up the feel of womanly flesh for the scratch of clerical robes.”
This time Katherine did not discourage John. Nothing would so ease her fear or make her feel so safe as the weight of John atop her again.
“If what you say is true,” she said, then moaned involuntarily as her lover’s hand stroked and teased her flesh, “then perhaps Thomas was meant for a life as a priest, after all.”
“Enough of Tom and of the Church,” John said. “What I have here for you, my lady, has nothing to do with either!”
THOMAS SPENT the night in prayer. He valued the privacy of his chamber, as well as its sparseness that recalled the many years Thomas had spent immersed in spiritual contemplation within the family of the Church.
Over the past weeks and months the constant traveling had meant a deepening distance from the order and discipline of a friary, and Thomas had missed that deeply. He’d become too absorbed in the secular world—its people and intrigues—and had become distracted from his purpose.
Katherine inferred he had taken holy orders in order to escape the guilt he felt for
the deaths of Alice and her children.
Had he?
Aye, he could not deny it, although for years Thomas had blindly argued with himself that their deaths had merely opened a door for him, and made him realize that his true purpose in life was not to dabble in the intrigues of the nobility, nor to run his vast estates, nor even to participate in the glorious practice of war, but to serve God as best he could.
At the thought of Alice, Thomas’ mind turned to Margaret, and, for an instant, he felt guilt. She had no one, was carrying a child that was likely his, was possibly as innocent as he in the matter of its conception, and was desperate …
Thomas forcibly hardened his heart. No! This was how the demons wanted him to think! They knew the tragedy of Alice, and were hoping his guilt over her death would make him doubly vulnerable to Margaret… and to handing her his soul on a platter and thus damning all mankind.
Well, he would not do it. No! He would not! Appalled at how close he had drifted toward allowing himself sympathy for Margaret, Thomas now opened himself to a thousand other doubts about his ability to carry through his mission for St. Michael.
What of Jeannette? Why had God also sent St. Michael to prepare her for the same fight? Did God think he needed a reserve in case he failed?
Did God not have faith enough in him?
Thomas bent his head and wept, now completely distracted from the comfort of prayer and contemplation. Perhaps he had failed, for here he was in the worldly luxury of the Savoy Palace and not at Bramham Moor friary, learning the secrets of Wynkyn’s casket.
Thomas.
Thomas lifted his head, his face wan and tear-streaked. “Saint Michael?” he whispered.
There was nothing before him save the freezing pre-dawn gloom. Nothing …
Thomas.
He twisted, looking behind him. Nothing but the bare stone of the outer wall of the chamber.
He turned back, and gasped.
Some two feet before him two hands hung in the air, suspended in a soft golden glow. They were the worn, comforting hands of an old man, held out palm upward as if to offer Thomas their warmth.
Without thinking Thomas reached out his own hands, and at the same moment the archangel reached forward and took Thomas’ chilled hands in his.
Thomas, you must not doubt, even though the path seems dark.
“I have wasted so much time, the demons will have snatched the casket, I—”
Thomas, trust. Even if the demons seize the casket, they will not— they cannot—
destroy either it or its contents. And while the casket and its secrets survive, the demons can he Jailed. You are Wynkyn’s successor. You alone can use the casket’s mysteries against them. It may take you a month, it may take you a year or more, but they cannot keep that casket from you for much longer. It will he as drawn to
you as you are to it. Trust.
Thomas wept anew, but this time for the warmth and comfort of the archangel’s touch and words.
“Blessed saint, thank you!”
The archangel’s hands tightened about his, and filled Thomas with a sense of urgency and dread.
Thomas, even if the demons cannot destroy the casket, nor keep it from you forever, the means they have chosen by which to work their evil within Christendom is devilish beyond words.
“They use ideas as their weapons, making men discontented with their lot, and with God.”
Yes.
“Their persuasions must be great, to have so many willing servants within the realm of mankind.”
Thomas felt the archangel hesitate, and now he shifted his grip so that he could grasp the archangel’s hands, and give back as much reassurance as he’d received.
There is more, Thomas. The power of the demons has grown, but it has also grown desperate. They fear you, and they fear Jeannette— Joan. For many years they have nurtured within their midst a dark, cancerous mass they call their Crown Prince. Soon they will enthrone him, and he will become the great Demon-King whose task it will he to frustrate you and Joan, and to seize for all time this world for theirs.
Thomas opened his mouth to ask a question, then remembered something the archangel—and Joan—had said to him when he’d been blessed with a visitation in Domremy.
“The English king …”
Witt be one and the same, yes. In order to give their prince the greatest power possible, the demons will crown him.