Lucifer's Crown (17 page)

Odd, how the cut had opened up again. She was too clumsy by half. “Don't fuss, Mum,” she said, and escaped out the door and up the stairs to a crash of theme music from the video.

Chucking her bag into the lumber room, she tiptoed—easy to do in the bloody heels—to the door of her old room and set her ear to it. Nothing. She turned the knob. The room was dark and empty. The bed was made, if rumpled. On the chair sat a tray of dirty dishes.

So then, the Scots git was doing as he was told. Robin was brilliant, dead brilliant. And she'd already seen the trout—the teacher—and the traitor London, the degenerate priest, together in the cottage. They weren't having it off as she'd expected, though. Past it, most likely.

Footsteps bounded up the main staircase. The dishy American lad. Better and better. She knew what to do to turn the unbeliever to the truth. Ellen thrust one leg forward, shortening her skirt, and looked up through her stiffened lashes.

The lad came to an abrupt halt on the top step. “Oh, hi."

"I'm Ellen Sparrow, Bess's daughter. Haven't seen you before, have I?"

"Er—no. Sean MacArthur. I'm with the seminar group from Texas."

"Aren't you the clever one, then? Which is your room?"

"There, with the slanting ceiling."

Ellen linked her arm through his. “Let's have a dekko, shall we?"

"Yeah, sure.” Flushing, he let her maneuver him down the hallway. When she stumbled over her shoes—no accident, that—he caught her. She nestled against his side. Thought he'd struck lucky, did he? Not bloody likely. A bit of snogging, that was all, to keep him hungry.

Ellen remembered Bess's joyful smile. Then she remembered Robin's voice, and Robin's eyes, and Robin's hands. The end justified the means, didn't it? She'd do Robin proud, and no mistake.

Sean opened the door, walked her inside, and shut it behind them.

Maggie stepped out into the twilight and shut the door. Its solid thunk was reassuring. She could believe in the reality of the wooden door and the cobblestones beneath her feet. Whether she was actually hearing the music dwindling behind her was another matter.

When she'd heard that melody the night of the All Souls’ Bell, the instrument had been a flute, and the music so high and clear that even in memory she ached with longing. Mick was playing a chanter. Its tendency to squawk only made the music more compelling, transforming it from ethereal to physical, deepening the ache to ravenous hunger.

Stopping on the doorstep of Thomas's cottage, she knocked. He didn't answer. She walked around to the door of the chapel and looked into its dim interior.

Thomas lay before the altar, forehead to the cold stone floor, arms extended, glasses folded to one side. His hands were splayed as though embracing the earth itself.

He lay in the pose of penitent. Maggie made a swift about-face. Surprising someone at prayer seemed more disconcerting than surprising someone naked. Emotion revealed the soul—not the cheap and easy soul used to peddle self-help books, but that kernel of the Unseen lurking in every human body, making it more than a piece of meat. The soul that she wanted to believe in.

Maggie turned her face toward the west. The land fell away into a ruddy golden haze, as though El Dorado gleamed just beyond the horizon. But she lived beyond that horizon. She knew El Dorado was nothing but illusion. As was Camelot and other human—dreams? mirages? aspirations?

To the south, inside Temple Manor's boundary wall, a tangle of bushes marked the site of St. Bridget's well. With St. Joseph's well in the crypt of the Lady Chapel at the Abbey and Chalice Well in its modern garden below the Tor, St. Bridget's well made a triad of ancient holy places. A Celtic triple spiral as well as the Christian Trinity. Was holiness inspiration or illusion? Maggie wondered. Could holiness really bring healing?

Darkness rolled across land and sky alike. Orange vapor lights sprang up like tiny campfires, tracing roads and parking lots. The cold wind hinted of car exhaust, dinners cooking, and farm animals safe in their barns. The Tor stood up hard and black against the deep indigo of the eastern sky, marking the entrance to the Underworld. No wonder St. Michael's church had been planted on top of it, the archangel's spear transfixing the pagan dragon—a depressingly male image.

But then, Arthur, devotee of the Virgin, was also identified with the red dragon of Wales.
Faith as metaphor
, Maggie told herself,
literally false but symbolically true
. Was it both literal and symbolic truth that Thomas was really Thomas Becket, born in 1120, died—more or less—in 1170? Could she afford to believe him? Could she afford not to? The melody of flute and chanter swelled inside her mind—
the words made flesh in the world made true
.

Stars appeared, one by one, in the vault of heaven. A Sunday school teacher once told the child Maggie that stars were God's lighted windows, telling us He was home. And if He was at home anywhere, it was here, in this place, where the past welled upward through the weight of time. Where pilgrims drank deep of belief, and healed.

Maggie's sigh was a frosty cloud that blended light with dark. She could no longer feel her feet, and she suspected her ears were going to break off her head. Either she had to go inside or ... The door of Thomas's cottage opened, emitting a soft ray of light. A small four-footed shape slipped inside. The door closed.

All right, then. She blundered toward the cottage. The majestic peals of Mozart's
Requiem
filtered through the door as she knocked. Thomas opened the door so quickly she hadn't time to lower her hand. She waggled her fingers in a wave. “Ah—you may be sick of me by now..."

"I was expecting you,” he said. “Come in."

She went in. A fire leaped in the fireplace, spilling a warm radiance into the room. Dunstan reposed on the hearth in the feline version of prostration before an altar. The taped choir sang the
Dies Irae
, the day of wrath. The End Times. Judgment Day.

Thomas's face seemed freshly scoured, less deeply lined. His eyes, which this morning had been the scorched brown of fields burned before an advancing enemy, were now warm and calm.
There is something to be said for the power of prayer
, Maggie thought. Of confession. And of the courage to make both.

He took her coat. “Whiskey?"

"Oh yes, please."

"Lovely evening, isn't it? One understands why many ancient peoples saw the natural world as God."

"Yeah, we've lost touch with Creation.” She stretched her hands to the dancing flames. “Mick was playing the same melody I heard outside, here, when you rang the All Souls’ bell."

"Was he now? We must ask him where he heard it."

"All part of the historical, mythological pattern, right?"

"Myth is the history of the soul."

Maggie shook her head. “I feel like one of the characters in
The Lord of the Rings
. The one who asks if he's walking around in the old tales or on the earth beneath the sun."

"And he's told he can do both at once.” Thomas handed her a glass of liquid that glinted like amber. He clinked his own against it. “Wi’ usquebaugh we'll face the Devil. Robert Burns."

"L'hayim. No attribution.” Maggie sipped. Smoke and fire exploded in her mouth, sending a wave of heat up into her sinuses and down into her throat. “Last week I was washing my socks, paying the mortgage, and assuring my mother that they have toilet paper in England. And I was assuring myself that coming here wasn't running away from my own angst. Not that angst is something you can run from."

"At times, confrontation is necessary."

Again Maggie ducked Thomas's scrutiny by turning to the bookcase. She ran her fingertip along the spines of novels from Chaucer and Malory to Austen, Hemingway, Tolkien, and Clarke. Between the novels sat studies of myth, history, and the ambiguous shore between. The texts, approved and apocryphal, of every religion of mankind. The handbooks of philosophers and nuts alike. Scientific primers from astronomy to zoology. And a copy of the
Malleus Maleficarum
, the fifteenth-century tract which authorized centuries of witch-hunting—a cautionary tale, if ever there was one.

Along one shelf stood a row of corn-dollies, figurines twisted out of wheat strands—a Celtic cross, a woman, a horse. “Harvest fetishes?"

"Christianity is deeply rooted in such ancient images and rituals,” said Thomas. “That's why it's such a strong and vital belief."

"That's not an orthodox perspective."

"Faith is a continuum, not a dead end. We refine it like precious metal."

"Well, yeah...” Maggie sidled back into the fire's warm aura. “Tennyson wrote
Idylls of the King
to express the reality of the Unseen. I guess what I saw today did just that, didn't it? I mean, I'd like to suspend my disbelief. It takes a lot of work to be cynical about everything."

"Then sit here with me, Magdalena, and I'll show you how.” Smiling, Thomas offered her the large wing-back chair facing the hearth. Instead she folded herself down beside Dunstan, leaving the chair to Thomas.

The choir sang the
Agnus Dei
, “Lamb of God which takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us, grant us peace.” The cat's fur was warm and soft beneath Maggie's hand. He started to purr. Purring had to be a form of meditation.
This isn't happening
, she thought. Except that it was.
Believe it
. “So where do we start?"

"In the Grail stories, the Fisher King is healed by the asking of questions."

"Are you the Fisher King? Or Arthur, the folk hero who never really died? Or Lancelot, who lived out his life as a hermit in Glastonbury?"

"I'm Thomas, the poor clerk, who became a folk hero because David did die."

"Did you come to Glastonbury because of him?"

"Yes.” The
Requiem
ended with a stirring
Lux aeterna
, Eternal Light. In the ensuing silence Dunstan's head shot up, his eyes flashing, his ears pricking. Maggie looked toward the window but saw nothing. Outside the wind muttered, inside the fire crackled.

Dunstan trotted purposefully to the outer door. Getting up, Thomas let him out. Then he returned to the shelf and slotted a new tape into the player. “Recorded music is one of the modern era's finest inventions—when you listen by choice, that is. Would you care for a cushion?” Thomas handed Maggie a floppy chintz pillow and sat down to the soaring violin solo of Vaughan Williams's
The Lark Ascending
.

"We have only a few ways to bridge the gap between the Seen and the Unseen,” he went on, “between real time and the Dreamtime. Mathematics. Music. Poetry. Religion, myth, and the consolation of metaphor."

"The consolation of metaphor. I like it.” Maggie settled onto the cushion. The music built, measure upon measure, the melody swelling higher and clearer until it gained the threshold of heaven and hung there quivering with both joy and heartbreak ... The violin slipped back to earth on the satiated sigh of the full orchestra.

She realized she was leaning her head against Thomas's knee. His hand grasped her shoulder, warm and firm. “Lord,” he murmured, “lift up the light of thy countenance upon us."

She floated, the hot, sinuous flames dazzling her eyes, the silence pealing in her head, the whiskey blessing her mouth. Then, suddenly, she jerked away from his hand.

"Not every caress expresses lust,” Thomas said quietly.

"Sorry. Count me as one more victim of the sexual revolution."

"My generation exploited the flesh just as heedlessly. I did do myself, once."

"Sex is the original sin, isn't it? All Eve's fault."

"Not a bit of it. The original sin is pride, thinking that our own definitions of good and evil are God's. The flesh demonstrates the power and mystery of the physical world. Sexuality is only sinful when it is misused."

"And let me count the ways.” Maggie emptied her glass, holding the whiskey in her mouth for a long moment before letting it sear its way down her throat. Setting the glass aside, she wrapped her arms around her knees. “What's the Book Robin was talking about, a Bible?"

"The Lindisfarne Gospels. It was worked by the saintly hands of first Aidan and then Cuthbert, who in their humility never claimed authorship."

"Even an atheist could appreciate that, it's a work of art. But I thought it had been moved to the new British Library."

"Ivan O'Connell, the canon of Canterbury who is the Book's guardian, thinks it was switched with a forgery at that time. He rang just this morning to tell me that the removal men passed a security screening before they were hired on. And yet one of them, a Stanley Felton, gave in his notice the day after he handled the Book. Scotland Yard interviewed him, but he says he knows nothing."

"Great,” said Maggie. “And the Stone?"

"The Stone of Scone, an ancient altar, a relic of St. Columba of Iona."

"It's on display in Edinburgh. Or was there another switch?"

"Yes, save this switch took place in 1296. The stone on display is a simple block of masonry. Like Arthur's lead cross, it expresses its own truth. Unlike Arthur's cross, we know that it's not the original Stone."

"So Mick's family has the real one?"

"I suspect it's still hidden, and that no one, not even the Dewars, knows where it is. Much to Robin's frustration.” Thomas shifted uneasily.

No
, Maggie thought,
Robin frustrated is not a pretty sight
. “He's some kind of demon, isn't he? The flip side of a saint?"

"Yes,” The sibilant lingered on Thomas's tongue.

Maggie thought of those brilliant green eyes, like gem stones, beautiful, cold, sterile. But Robin's identity was a little more than she wanted to tackle right now ... A scraping noise came from the window, as though one of the shutters had moved. She glanced around—was the wind rising? Or was it the cat, wanting in again?

Thomas, too, looked toward the window. Backed by darkness, the glass reflected the glow of firelight from inside but revealed nothing from the outside. “I think we're a bit nervy,” he said.

"You think?” Maggie let herself lean backward just far enough to touch the edge of the chair. Thomas's body was warm beside her, but he made no move to touch her again. Rats. His hand had been reassuring. “So why is it better for Calum and Mick to be in danger than for the Stone to be stolen? Why is it and the Book so important? Other than being valuable objects of art and antiquity."