Lucifer's Crown (29 page)

The Story rooted, grew, and branched. But Maggie missed one blossom, a red-haired woman in a green cloak, the light in her eyes penetrating every defense, seeing all.

She looked around. Now Thomas had disappeared. But there was Rose, across the street in front of the Rifleman's Arms Pub talking to Sean and Ellen. All three looked like they were waiting outside the principal's office: Sean stiff, his hands on his hips, Ellen with her arms crossed truculently, Rose half-turned to the side, plotting her escape.

"Well hello, Maggie!” said a male voice. “Small world, isn't it?"

She spun around with a gasp. He was lean and sandy-haired, with shrewd brownish-green eyes. His voice was flat American, but the voice she heard in her head was Thomas's:
This is the worm that dieth not, the memory of things past.
“Anthony! Where did you come from?"

"I ran into Bart Conway at the British Museum. He said you were here with a seminar group. I heard the Carnival was worth a look, so here I am."

Once she'd thought he was handsome. Now his face seemed a caricature, each feature, each expression overplayed. “What are you doing in England?” she asked, backing away a step.

Anthony came two steps closer. “Research. Same project I told you about in Boston. You remember the conference in Boston. Ironic that I'd run into you again at a carnival. You know, ‘farewell to the flesh.’”

"I know the etymology of the word ‘carnival.’”

"But with us it's ‘hello to the flesh,’ isn't it?"

Maggie's shoulders hit the garden wall. She stepped to the side, toward the woods. Another float was passing, drums beating and bagpipes blaring—Arthur in his Scottish avatar, no doubt.

She remembered the afternoon she found Danny with Melissa. She remembered the shouts, the hateful words, the slamming doors. She'd steeped her soul in anger, hurt, and fear for a month before that conference in Boston. There she'd encountered Anthony's handsome face. His purring voice. His deliberate charm, a dream then, now a nightmare.

He was smiling at her. His eyes glittered, but there was no humor in them.
Okay
, she thought,
if it really is Anthony he'll think I'm an idiot, but then, he already knows I'm a fool
. “Go away, Robin. There's nothing for you here.” She raised her hand, but making the sign of the cross didn't come naturally to her.

Like the wind ruffling a reflection on the surface of a pool, Anthony's face dissolved into Robin's. “You're wrong,” he said, his voice cutting through the music. “You're here. It's time we had a bit of a chin wag, you and me."

Even as Maggie told herself not to be afraid of him, she took several more steps to the side and back. Her feet left the cement of the sidewalk and landed on dirt.

He followed her, his eyes glittering as brightly as the lights behind him even though his face was in shadow. “Don't bother making the sign of the cross. Or parroting Thomas's feeble buzz words. You know only too well that faith means hypocrisy, repression, and shame."

Her hand dropped back to her side and closed into a fist.

"You don't believe in Thomas. You feel contempt for him, for what he did that night in the cathedral. When he stood by and watched his young, innocent brother be hacked to death."

"You killed your brother on purpose,” Maggie retorted. “Thomas is sorry for what he did. You're not."

Robin laughed. “Thomas is proud of his own guilt. You'll take him despite his crime? Well then, you must have your reasons. Playing at Guinevere, I expect, as he plays at Arthur, so noble, so sad."

"What?"

"Guinevere was a strong woman. Hungry for power. That's why she betrayed Arthur, isn't it, for power?"

"In some of the stories, yes. In others she betrayed him for love."

"Oh well, that's all right then. Love cancels out faith. That's how you're excusing your plans for Thomas, is it?” He cupped Maggie's face in his hand. His skin was cold, smooth, and dry.

She flinched away. “Plans?"

"To lure him into your bed. To show him all the ugly, degrading ways of the flesh that he's forgotten in his celibacy.” In Robin's satiny voice the word was obscene. “Like Guinevere, you're jealous and you want to bring him down."

Maggie backed up again and collided with the trunk of a tree. “Jealous?"

"Of Her. Regina. Kyria. The Lady. Of what she means to him."

"Like I'm going to be jealous of a goddess? The Goddess?"

"You think he'll find your flesh sweet,” Robin went on. “He'll take you, he's only mortal, after all, and what man passes up cheap meat? But once he realizes what you've done to him, how you've betrayed that perfect image he has of himself, then he'll hate you. And you'll not be part of his plots any more."

Quickly Maggie stepped to the side, intending to dodge around him, but he blocked her way. He was driving her deeper into the wood, deeper into the uncompromising dark. Already leaves fluttered across the lights of the parade and the music was muffled, oddly distant.

Seizing her arms, Robin pulled her against his chest. The night was cold but he was colder. His icy breath, invisible in the darkness, smelled of rotten flowers, cheap cigars, and mildewed basements. She gagged. “You want to drag him down with you into that monstrous wallow of flesh that is woman, and you'll call it love as you do it. But then, you've degraded yourself again and again. Men had only to tell you they loved you and they had free use of your flesh. A whore has more honor, more truth, than you do."

The last sentence was a chill explosion in her face, sending shivers down her back. “God, no!” she shouted, at Robin, at her own memories, and wrenched herself away from his grasp.

Maggie turned and stumbled into the trees, into a dark intensified by the brightness of the lights along the street. His voice followed her. “God can't help you. Thomas won't help you. They're powerless against your truth!"

Hot tears stinging her eyes, she blundered against one tree trunk and another. Maybe she could avoid him by paralleling the street—she glanced over her shoulder. The trees stood up like black bars against the lights but Robin was gone.

Robin Goodfellow. The King of the Wood. The Green Man, the spirit of the forest. Forests weren't always peaceful places for the environmentally-inclined to hold picnics. They used to be fearsome wildernesses, filled with wild beasts and monsters, like the dark places of the psyche ... She stopped. She could hardly hear the music beyond the sound of the trees creaking, the wind sighing, and her own feet shifting among the leaves. Was that Robin, that shape in the darkness—no, just a low branch—a leafy face leering at her, skeletal hands reaching out for her, furtive footsteps closing in ... “God help me,” she whispered.

A man's voice, textured as velvet, called, “Maggie, where are you?"

The Green Man was also the symbol of re-birth, she told herself, and had been since time immemorial. Croaking, “Here,” she blundered toward the light.

Thomas was standing on the sidewalk. His strong right hand took her elbow and buoyed her up. “What's wrong? What happened?"

"Robin.” She stood for a long moment, catching her breath, then she pulled her arm away. Without Thomas's hand it was cold, but with his hand it was false.

He frowned down at her. “Whatever he said to you may have some basis in truth. But remember, I beg you, that it is in his best interests to separate us. He knows that I am incomplete without you, because you know the truth about me."

But you don't know the truth about me
, Maggie returned silently. And she couldn't tell him.

The last floats passed by, Merlin shut up in a rock by Nimue and Guinevere ending her life as a penitent. Rose threaded her way through the crowd toward them. “I am trying to set that good example, but Ellen isn't interested."

"She may well see you as a rival for Robin's affections,” said Thomas.

"Oh yeah, right!” Rose exclaimed.

"What of Sean?"

"I think he sees her as a reclamation project. You know, a fixer-upper."

"It boosts his ego to help her,” Maggie translated for Thomas.

"Ah,” he said. “A benign aspect of the desire to control others."

Whatever blood had rushed to Maggie's face under Robin's taunting drained away, leaving her chilled. The last strain of music hung on the air and died. The crowd began to break up. “We ought to be getting back. It's late. Where's Anna?"

Thomas collected everyone and led them back toward Beckery, Ellen and Sean lagging behind. Now it was a parade of car lights that passed, strobing in Maggie's head. Only now did she realize how tired she was.

After the lights and the music the grounds of Temple Manor seemed unusually dark and quiet. A lamp beside the parking area and another beside the front door barely dispelled the night. The chapel was invisible. Thomas opened the door, courteously took his leave of the others, and shut the door before Maggie could slink inside behind them. “I have something for you.” He reached into his pocket and handed her a small box.

She looked up at him. The face of one's age, she thought, owed less to genetics than to appetite. Lust accumulated in bags beneath the eyes. Gluttony padded the once clear-cut edge of the cheekbone. Anger deepened the crows feet at the edge of the eyes and despair cut lines between nostril and mouth. A face was the outer expression of the mind within. The unseen made tangible.

Except for Thomas. After so many centuries he should have had a face like a 3-D map of London. But he had the face of a fifty-year-old man, haughty, sensitive, strong, fragile. Faithful ... He was looking at her every bit as intensely as she was looking at him. “Open it, Maggie."

The box was stamped, “Moon Childe Shoppe.” That was where she'd stood talking to Gupta, the place advertising discounts to Bodhisattvas. She wondered whether Thomas had gotten his.

Inside the box lay a necklace, a pewter Celtic cross carved with simple interlace, no beginning, no end. She picked it up by the chain and it swung back and forth, gleaming in the lamplight. “For me?"

"Mick and Rose have their talismans. I wanted you to have one as well, as a token of my respect and affection."

No
, she thought. She said, “I don't know what to say."

"'Thank you’ is generally considered appropriate."

One corner of her mouth turned up in a wry laugh. “Thank you."

He took the chain and lifted it over her head. The cross settled just where her sweater began to curve over her breasts.

Maggie said with a rush, “When I told Mick it didn't really matter whether he believed you or not, and implied I didn't, I didn't mean it as an insult."

"I know."

"It's not that I'm not with the program. I mean, with all the evidence the last few days ... Well, my mother always said I was stubborn as hell. So did the Mother Goddess, I think."

"You can explain away the most inexplicable event or accept the most obvious hoax, but ultimately you believe because you choose to believe."

"Yes.” She half-turned away from him. The courtyard of the house was like an Elizabethan theater, galleries, windows, doors encircling the actors on stage. “Did you ever want to marry?"

He tilted his head curiously, but he had to realize where that question came from. “There was Alice at the time of the Reformation, and Joan at the time of the Enlightenment. She stitched the samplers which are in my cottage. But no, whilst I felt a—personal attraction—I never seriously considered marrying. To petition to be released from my vows would have compounded the presumption of my ordination."

"Why bother to petition? No one knew who you were."

"I thought of that, yes, but I had already dishonored myself quite sufficiently without entertaining such a rationalization."

Yes, faith demanded honor. “Thomas, I'm not too good at keeping commitments."

"I've seen no evidence at all of that. Good night, Magdalena.” With a smile that was either wistful or distant, he turned and strode away.

Holding the cross, Maggie watched him disappear into the darkness. Despite every wound she'd ever taken from the war between affection and desire, despite every sling and arrow in Robin's unctuous voice, still she wanted to pull Thomas's face down to hers, open his lips, and suckle the word from his eloquent tongue.

She was too old for a stupid schoolgirl crush, she told herself sternly. But she wasn't as old as Thomas. She wasn't a schoolgirl. It wasn't a crush. And while she'd had many stupid moments in her life, this wasn't one of them.

A ray of sun pierced the clouds and winked out. But not before it illuminated Rose, standing in the garden talking into Thomas's mobile telephone. Appreciating the vision, he went on toward his cottage.

Intellectually he knew that he'd once been that young, but emotionally he had little memory of himself at twenty beyond a fleeting image of a bright arrogant boy, master of hawks and horses but not of his own ambition. Maggie now, Maggie was closer to his own age. At times Thomas wanted to shake her. More often he wanted to embrace her, no more so than last night, as she'd obstinately clutched the guilt with which Robin had hounded her. Not that he wasn't clutching his own guilt, he supposed, it being easier to see the mote in another's eye than the beam in one's own.

Inside the cottage he took off his coat, loosened his tie, and lit the fire. He warmed his hands in the heat of the yellow flames as he'd warmed his soul in the Lady's presence. She'd given him not only direction but blessing. Whilst he was properly grateful, still he couldn't help wishing she'd also provided him with a map, “x” marking the spots where Book and Stone were hidden.

Dunstan leapt down from the chair and rubbed against his thigh. Thomas stroked the cat's soft, warm back and went to put the kettle on.

It was whistling when Rose knocked at the door and returned his telephone. “Mick talked to Superintendent Mackenzie about the inquest, the funeral is Thursday, and a couple of his father's Foundation friends dropped by this morning. He said it was hard to be polite, considering."

"Most Foundation members are quite well-meaning,” Thomas told her.