Lucifer's Crown

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  “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.”

  “Because,” Thomas said, “through relics God allows the supernatural to enter the natural world, thereby leading us toward the divine light.”

  “Illuminating the faith,�
� interpreted Maggie.

  “Three relics in particular strengthen each other.”

  “Three? Oh, that’s right, you’ve got one yourself.”

  “Yes. I keep the Cup from which Our Lord drank at the Last Supper.”

  Maggie’s hair rose on end. She twisted around to look up at him. “You mean you really do have the Holy Grail?”

  “An element of it, yes.” His face was a sketch by da Vinci, strong lights, stronger shadows. His glasses reflected the flames.

  He is who he says he is, Maggie told herself, although whether that was thought or feeling or wishful thinking she didn’t know. And didn’t care. She looked back into the heart of the fire. “Okay. If I swallow who you are, then I might as well swallow that—that a symbol can be real.”

  “Symbols are real.” Thomas’s gentle laugh sounded like Dunstan’s purr. “The Grail is the Celtic cauldron of rebirth and inspiration, the emerald that broke off Lucifer’s crown when he fell from heaven, the philosopher’s stone beloved of alchemists. It was Robert de Boron in the twelfth century who wrote that the Grail is the chalice or cup of the Last Supper. That the Cup was brought here to Glastonbury has been implied by many writers, but no one said so explicitly before Tennyson.”

  “You’re the one who brought it here?”

  “Yes. When I found the Cup, I found the purpose of my immortal life, as well as the means of my penance.”

  “To guard the Grail and all its symbolic baggage, is that it? Because we need it—them, whatever—to get us through the End Times? But 1999, 2000, 2001—they’re all arbitrary dates.”

  “Dates that were fixed long before my birth. Although three significant stories did originate in my own twelfth century, amongst them the intermingling of the Grail stories with the stories of Arthur, bringing human emotions to the former, and providing motivation to the latter.”

  Maggie’s brain was starting to twitch. But she felt as though she were reading a good book, and couldn’t put it down. “So what’s going to happen at the beginning of the third millennium? Armageddon?”

  “I don’t know what will happen. I know what I’d like to happen.”

  What? Oh … He hoped he would die. God knew she felt alone. How much more alone had he felt, year after year after year? She bent her head again to his denim-clad thigh. He didn’t smell old at all, not sour or mildewy, but fresh and clean as a spring garden. Touch me.

  He touched her, his hand stroking her hair and settling lightly on her sweater-clad shoulder. And there was consolation, she thought, in flesh against flesh. Well, in flesh against wool against flesh.

  “I fear,” he said quietly, “that the end of the millennium—the actual end, the beginning of 2001—will indeed be the end of our world. That it will be an Endarkenment, if you will.”

  “If you lose the relics then you’re no longer illuminating the faith, proving that there’s an Unseen and that the gap between it and the Seen can be bridged. I get it. I think.”

  “Demonstrating that mankind was created with the opportunity to choose good over evil. Making sure that there is always someone who sets the example of embracing love and forgiveness over hate and vindictiveness. Of choosing inclusion over exclusion.”

  “Like you?”

  “I am but the instrument of God’s grace. As is the Grail.”

  “So Armageddon isn’t a matter of armies clashing by night. It’s a matter of individual choices. Why am I not surprised?”

  “Because you are not afraid of asking questions,” Thomas answered.

  He intended that as a compliment. “You’re part of some secret society guarding various relics?”

  “No. Secret societies and hermetic traditions are elitist games. No true conspiracy can be sustained for long. Look at Mick’s family, muddling through in the usual human fashion until their identity faded into legend. I’m one of a circle of friends. The existence of the relics is no secret, and their stories, their patterns, are common knowledge.”

  “True, yeah. But why are the Book and the Stone so important?”

  “Because with the Cup they form a triad, an echo of the Trinity—three in one, one in three. The complete Grail. The Stone, an ancient artifact of the Jewish people, is the father. The Cup, a relic of Our Lord himself, is the son. The Book, the Word decorated with images of the natural world, in a style that includes Celt, Anglo-Saxon, and Roman, is the all-encompassing Holy Spirit. Together they have what Jivan would call prana, the energy of the universe. Breath.”

  “Okay…” What had Thomas said to Rose about beglamoured? Maggie asked herself. And here she was, enchanted by his words, by his ideas, by his metaphors. Although she wasn’t about to deny his physicality. Not his sexuality, but his physicality, the abstract made concrete, like a relic. But then, while he might be almost nine hundred years old, he was no relic. “The relics sound like Tolkien’s rings of power.”

  “Without stretching the comparison too far, yes. Tolkien was a guardian in his own way, of the power of language and of the natural world. His father,” added Thomas, “was even named Arthur.”

  Maggie couldn’t help but laugh. “This is like calculus and poetry. I have to take them on faith, too.” His reply was the clasp of his hand. No teasing movement of his fingers, no inquisitive probing of his thumb, just the steady clasp. “You’ve never told anyone all of this because you never wanted help before, right?”

  “Quite right. It is for that perception, that glimpse into my pridefulness, that I need you, Maggie. I can only hope that somewhere in your heart you need me.”

  She didn’t ask herself just what she was getting herself into here. She surrendered to the caress. “I think so, yes.”

  The last incantatory phrases of Mozart, of Vaughan Williams, even of “First Rites” ebbed into silence. In her mouth lingered the aroma of sun-warmed grain, the smell of the corn dollies, the tang of water from a deep well—didn’t the Gaelic word for “whiskey” mean “water of life” … She closed her eyes. The glow of the fire was a sunrise through her lids. In just a moment more she’d sense that peace of God which passed all understanding, and grasp the state of grace.

  The knock on the door was as harsh as the sudden thrust of a battering ram. Maggie’s heart shattered and bits lodged throbbing in her throat and stomach. Thomas jerked. His voice strangled, he called, “Come in.”

  Anna opened the door. “I’m so sorry to intrude, but I just went up to the room I share with Rose, and this note was on my pillow.”

  Maggie lurched to her feet and grabbed the sheet of notebook paper. In a hurried scrawl Rose had written, “I’ve gone with Mick to Housesteads, Robin told him his father is there okay. R.”

  Thomas loomed over her shoulder. “Housesteads. The Scottish Borders. Anna, I’d be much obliged if you would ring Inspector Gupta. Ask him to come straightaway. And do you know where Sean is?”

  “I’ll find him.” Anna vanished out the doorway.

  Maggie stood reading the note over and over again, as though she could wring more than words from it. “Shit! Robin was so mad there at Sarum, I should have known he’d strike back as fast and as hard as he could.”

  Thomas’s eyes were a landscape drifted by the ashes of pride. “No. It is I who have struggled with him for long, weary, years. I should have known. But the damage is done. We shall deal with it.” He set the hot dry strength of his left hand against her cheek. With his right he made the sign of the Cross. “Magdalena, dulcis amica dei.” Then he seized his coat, handed her hers, and ran into the night.

  Dulcis amica dei, sweet friend of God. Yeah, right. “Wait for me,” Maggie called, and stumbled into the darkness.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The icy night air slapped Thomas’s face. Beside him Maggie stumbled. He grasped her arm, guiding her into the courtyard, and threw open the door of the house.

  In the light her face was white and cold, her eyes hard. A few moments ago she’d glowed in the firelight. Sulfur filled his mouth, overwhelming the last tan
g of sun-warmed grain. Damn Robin! But that was redundant, he was already damned.

  Dunstan crouched halfway up the staircase, tail twitching, eyes watchful and wise at once. “That’s why the cat ran off so suddenly. He heard Mick and Rose leaving.” Maggie reclaimed her arm and rubbed at it.

  I’ve hurt her, Thomas thought. Probably not for the last time.

  Anna walked down the staircase. “Inspector Gupta’s on his way. Sean’s coming down. I’ll get the Puckles.” She went on toward the kitchen.

  Thomas strode into the lounge and set about the fire. A vigorous bashing of the logs sent his resentment hissing like a shower of sparks up the chimney. God had given him anger to fight evil, yes, but he could not allow anger to misdirect his actions now.

  “Divide and conquer,” said Maggie behind him. “You warned me.”

  “Rose knew that Anna would come directly to you with her note. Trusting you—and by extension, me—must have been a very difficult decision for her. Just as trusting Rose must have been difficult for Mick.”

  “How did Robin get through to him so fast?”

  “By playing on his vulnerability, I expect, his guilt about not being able to help his father.”

  “And now Robin has Rose, too!”

  Thomas replaced the poker in the rack. “Robin will not have Mick or Rose alone, any more than he had you or me alone at Old Sarum.”

  Feet clattered down the staircase and Alf’s voice echoed in the hall. “What’s all this then?”

  Several people burst into the room, Anna almost obscured behind Bess and Alf, the lad Sean mussed and red in the face, a girl lagging behind him … With weary resignation, Thomas recognized Ellen Sparrow. “Well hello, Ellen.”

  “This here’s Bess’s daughter,” Alf explained to the others.

  “Yeh.” Ellen crossed her arms across her chest, concealing the bloodstained bandage on her right palm.

  Maggie looked from Ellen to Sean and his slightly shame-faced expression. She swore beneath her breath.

  “Anna,” said Thomas, “would you hand round Rose’s note, please?”