Tears of pain sprang to her eyes. She swallowed them down. Mustn’t blub. He wouldn’t comfort her, not like Sean did do. Robin was strong.
“Are you after betraying me as Calum did do? Do you want to risk your immortal soul by defying my word?”
“No, no, never.” Even his fury was cold. “I’ve been watching the traitor and the others, just as you said.”
“When they have their days out, or just at the house?”
The last time she’d gone away with them she’d seen Robin himself drawing down the wrath of God … Oh no, hadn’t she done right? “They’re off to Bath Saturday, and Stonehenge Tuesday, I’ll ride along, see if I don’t.”
“See that you do.” His voice was satin-smooth. Dropping her arm, he ran his gloved fingertip down the side of her face. The leather was cold. The car was cold. The windows fogged over, so that the shoppers pushing their trolleys were only smears of color. In the orange light of the street lamps Robin’s red hair was the color of dried blood.
Ellen’s hand felt numb. So much fresh red blood was seeping through the bandage a drop fell onto her jeans. His lip curled in disgust and he pushed her away. “I have work for you to do, Ellen.”
Oh, Ellen thought, sick with relief. He wanted her after all. If she could do this right, then Mum didn’t die for nothing. Even though Mum was gone, and Calum was gone, Robin would be with her always. Save for funerals, that is. “Yes, yes, Robin. Tell me what needs doing.”
He leaned so close the cool breeze of his breath tickled her cheeks and raised gooseflesh on the back of her neck.
Chapter Thirty-five
After three days of sullen clouds, stubborn winds, and several varieties of precipitation, frozen and otherwise, Maggie took Thursday’s clear, quiet evening as an omen. This was it. Now or never.
She didn’t ask herself what she was doing. She knew. Choosing truth and trust couldn’t be any more painful than living a lie. If she’d learned nothing else from Thomas over the last six weeks or so, it was that. And that even stubbornness had its limits.
Carrying a plastic bag filled with warm cookies, she shut the door firmly behind her and strode off through the courtyard. Perfect timing—Thomas was emerging from the Puckles’ station wagon. Maggie intercepted him outside the garden. “Lovely evening, isn’t it?”
He smiled. “‘No thought, no action, no movement, total stillness; only thus can one at last become one with heaven and earth.’”
“One of the psalms?” Maggie hazarded.
“Lao Tzu.” Thomas opened the door of the cottage for her.
She kept returning to the cottage, moving inward to the center of the labyrinth. Why shouldn’t the center of the labyrinth be a cozy room filled with books and a cat dozing on the hearth? Maggie paid homage to Dunstan while Thomas poked the fire into a blaze.
“What do I smell?” he asked. “Ah, biscuits!”
“Cookies, please—biscuits are lumps of flour and lard, vehicles for honey or gravy. Rose’s folks sent cookie cutters, and we didn’t think Bess would mind our taking over her kitchen and laughing.”
“She’d be delighted.” Thomas chose a bell-shaped cookie and munched. “Ah, the blessings of cinnamon and vanilla upon the tongue.”
The tongue that cannot lie? Maggie asked herself. “You should’ve seen Sean and Ellen inhaling cookies and milk like kindergartners.”
“And how is Ellen faring?”
“Like an abused animal. You want to help, but she might bite.”
Thomas shook his head sadly. “And Rose?”
“Thoroughly spooked. Afraid of Robin, afraid for Mick.”
“Robin’s emotional threat can be worse than his physical. Whiskey?”
“Ah, no, not tonight, thank you.” Maggie’s stomach was already uneasy. She wondered why the expression was, “get it off your chest,” when “get it off your stomach” was anatomically correct. “So what saint’s day is today?”
“On December sixteenth we celebrate Saint Sophia, Holy Wisdom. An aspect of the Lady.”
“We could use some holy wisdom. Catholics bombed a Protestant church outside Belfast, so Protestants burned a Catholic church. Arabs and Jews got into it in Bethlehem—rocks, rubber bullets, you know the drill. And back home a skinhead tattooed with ‘Jesus Saves’ beat a homosexual to death.”
“Robin’s allies are formidable adversaries.”
“And our score is tied, one to one. How about the tie-breaker?”
“The third relic? Next Tuesday, I think, we shall remove it from its hiding place. On the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.”
“That’s your birthday.”
“Yes.” With his forefinger Thomas wiped away a smudge of flour on her cheek. Suddenly shy, she dropped her eyes. He turned away, and flipped through his tape collection. “Bach? Debussy? Hildegarde von Bingen?”
“Silence would be nice.” Maggie plunked her pillow down on the floor.
“Very good then.” Thomas lit a squat candle sitting in a dish on the table and turned off the light. “Excuse my indulgence in nostalgia.”
“You’ve lived most of your life in world lit only by fire.”
“Whilst I would be the last to scorn the virtues of electricity, I must admit that at times its light can be overly harsh. Even though we use the metaphor of darkness to describe evil, shadow can be very sympathetic.”
He knows why I’m here, Maggie told herself. The odors of smoke and beeswax hung on the air, mingling with a suggestion of cinnamon, a scent so heady it should be a controlled substance. Like truth serum.
With a sigh, Thomas sat down in the chair. “Once I thought the Scottish Highlands to be a fearsome wilderness. Now they’re picturesque. Once I thought the crossbow to be the most dreadful invention of mankind. Now I should like to arm the soldiers of the world with nothing but crossbows. History is a very uneven stumble, but I do think we are inching closer to enlightenment.”
“So far.” Maggie stroked Dunstan, eliciting a rumbling purr, and kept herself from leaning against Thomas’s leg as she usually did.
“What I was about to tell you on Sunday, before we heard Robin speaking with Rose, is that in all these long years I’ve never returned to Canterbury. I think now that I shall not be redeemed until I do, and there accept at last the full measure of absolution.”
“Come with us, if that would help.”
“Thank you.” His hand squeezed her shoulder and retreated. “You’re wearing your red jumper.”
“Oh.” She glanced down. The sweater glinted blood red beneath the shadow-pattern cast by the interlace of the cross.
“Red is the color of martyrs. Of passion. Of Christ’s Passion. Of the Magdalene, the original ‘scarlet woman.’ It takes courage to eat of the tree of knowledge, but we are not fully human until we do.”
She leaned gingerly back against the corner of the chair. “And then we get Christianity. Judgmentalism. Guilt.”
“No, no.” Again his hand fell firmly upon her shoulder, and this time it stayed. “Christianity is the resolution of guilt. The contrition that leads one to confession, penance, redemption, and joy. Even the Dies Irae, the Wrath of God, is at heart a plea for mercy. It is God’s role to judge. Not yours. Not mine.”
Pressing her lips together, Maggie watched the flames dance in that alchemy of light and dark that created shadows. The light sparked in her eyes. Damn it, she’d known his compassion would make her cry. “It’s stupid, but all I want is to love and be loved.”
“There’s nothing stupid about loving.” His hand caressed her hair. “I love you, Maggie.”
She knew her face was as red as her sweater. The tears bloated her chest to bursting. “You love everyone, Thomas. It’s your job.”
“It’s my choice. And I choose to love you more than on principle.”
“You wouldn’t, not if you knew me.”
“If I knew why Robin was taunting you the night of the Guy Fawkes Festival? But how could I not guess?”
/> Robin told her faith wouldn’t save her. But how many leaps of faith had she already made, with her heart if not her mind? Didn’t she know better than to listen to Robin?
“Like you, my pride keeps me from surrendering,” Thomas said. “My pride murdered a man. It led me to spend many lifetimes, if not lying about the murder, at least concealing its truth. Being unfaithful to my own identity. I pray that soon I can at last make atonement not only for my crime, but for my pridefulness. At-one-ment, the wholeness that comes from accepting your own imperfect humanity.”
The words, the tears, squirmed in her chest.
Thomas’s fingertips stroked her cheek. “‘For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.’”
As if drawn by that touch the tears burst from her chest and flowed down her face. Like mud, like sludge, like lava from the deep earth’s core, thick and hot. “It hurts,” she said, her voice trembling.
“Lancing a wound always hurts. But pain comes before healing.”
“Yes.” The tears clogged her throat and she sobbed. Thomas’s hand appeared in her peripheral vision, offering his handkerchief. A square of crisp, clean linen, like a priest’s robe. Priests conducted rituals of connection. She mopped her face. “I never thought that marriage and an intellectual life would be mutually exclusive. I mean, Danny was very supportive—you go ahead and get that advanced degree, you can make a bigger salary that way.”
“He didn’t match you intellectually?”
“No, but it’s really petty to say so. And there was more to it, like the never-ending snide remarks because I kept my maiden name.”
“How long were you married?”
“Fifteen years.”
“One can hardly accuse you of not trying to make it work.”
Dunstan stretched. Maggie blinked—gauzy wings made slow figure eights above his sleek fur and then settled, disappearing. The tears caught in her lashes making prisms, no doubt. “We just didn’t speak the same language. For a while we fought all the time. Then we stopped even trying. I came home one afternoon because I felt horrible—a cold, a nervous breakdown, whatever—and there was Danny with Melissa, one of my students.”
The tears ran again. She sponged and sniffed. “I lost it. I screamed, I swore, I threw things. Melissa dropped out of school rather than face me. Danny said it was my fault for turning frigid on him—like I wasn’t burning up inside. Then I went off to a conference in Boston. Anthony was there. One of those guys who looks like a Ken doll, too handsome to be real.”
“Aware that his smile makes him look good?”
“Not like your smile, which makes me feel good.” Maggie squirmed. “I’d known Anthony for ages. We’d flirted. Big deal. But that night we had sex. We didn’t make love, we had sex. You think if I was going to break a Commandment I’d do it out of love instead of spite. But no.
“Then Anthony commented that he always went off to conventions hoping to get lucky. Did that make me feel like a worm or what? He’s married, too, by the way. Just to double the felony. The sin. Not that chastity was my strong point before marriage—estrogen overload, low self-esteem, weak morals, acting out—take your pick. But I could at least have honored my marriage vows.”
She took another deep breath. Funny, how empty her chest felt. Her head lolled heavily back against Thomas’s leg. Instead of slapping her silly he caressed her hair again. “I was so ashamed I thought, okay, Danny and I have both made mistakes, we’ll forgive each other and go on. So I confessed to him. He looked at me like I had leprosy, moved out, and filed for divorce. It became final last Sunday.”
“Ah,” Thomas said. “I see.”
Her tear ducts should’ve been drained, but no, here came a fresh spate. She was going to subside into a puddle there on the hearth, boneless, gutless, leaving Thomas to get a mop and bucket and wash her away. “That’s my Story, and a tacky one it is, too. I can’t even sin with distinction.”
“I have too much respect for you to scorn even your sin. I know very well that mankind has a deplorable tendency to lead with the genitalia rather than the heart.”
“Yeah, well, celibacy is an unattainable ideal for most of us.”
“Celibacy means giving the gift of sexuality back to God, thereby centering oneself on the Holy Spirit. For we are made in His image, Maggie. The lure of the flesh is powerful but it isn’t evil, not when it’s tempered with the heart’s affection. It was the breaking of your vow that was the sin, and your damaging the integrity of your soul.”
The heart’s affection. The integrity of your soul. She liked those ideas. She like his hand on her head, his fingers laced in her hair.
“Now. You have admitted you did wrong, and you have resolved never to do so again. But not until you ask for forgiveness, and forgive, can you be restored to the grace of God which you have been trying your hardest to reject, and yet which is there for you even so.”
That subtle crackle was either the fire or the ramparts of her ego crumbling into dust. Holy Spirit strong when my flesh is weak—from the world, the flesh and the Devil make me anew—when I open my heart to you … Heedless of her smudged and swollen face Maggie looked up at him. “I forgive Danny. I forgive Anthony. I forgive my poor pathetic self. God help me and take me back, yes.”
Thomas extended his hand. “Come here.”
She crawled to her feet. By turning sideways and folding her legs over his she managed to fit into the chair beside him. She worked her left arm behind his back and laid her head on his shoulder. Like a child with a parent. Like lover with lover.
On the hearth Dunstan stirred, stretched, and began to bathe himself. Each lick of his pink tongue sounded like a drop of water—the quality of mercy dropping as a gentle rain from heaven. Again tears welled from Maggie’s eyes, not grief but gratitude. Thomas’s thumb touched her cheeks, collecting the tears, and with them made the sign of the cross on her forehead. The dampness glowed hot and cold.
“In the Greek, the word ‘baptism’ means catharsis,” he told her.
“It would.”
“Ego te absolvo. If you’ll accept absolution from such as me.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Pax domini sit semper tecum.”
The peace of God be with you always—in his first life the peace of God not only meant an actual kiss, it guaranteed a contract—when he’d come out of his vision at Old Sarum he’d given her the kiss of peace. She looked into his face, each eye lit by a tiny flame, the curve of his mouth no longer haughty as a Norman arch but soft as a Celtic hillside. He’s not going to…
Thomas kissed her mouth. Firmly, with a passion even more stirring for being controlled. Her breath stopped, then started again. She’d wanted to suckle the truth from his eloquent tongue. She’d needed to. And now she did, reveling in vanilla and cinnamon, incense and smoke. His lips and tongue were gentle, delicate, subtle. She kissed him back, giving him fervor for delicacy, and soaked pore by pore into his being.
When they at last separated she lay back against his shoulder in utter contentment. She’d been going about physical intimacy all wrong, she thought, throwing her body into the ring first and leaving mind, heart, and soul to play catch-up. And now, past hope, she’d fallen in love so deeply she wondered if she’d ever known the meaning of the word. Fallen for not only a priest, but a saint—which might be safer than falling for an ordinary man, but which also proved God wrote divine comedy.
Thomas murmured, “Her lips suck forth my soul.”
“Shakespeare?”
“Marlowe. Dr. Faustus, inappropriately.”
She smiled. “The love you take is equal to the love you make.”
“Eliot?”
“The Beatles.”
With a chuckle, Thomas pulled off his glasses and squinted at them. Maggie could see the smudges made by her skin on the glass. She offered him the wet, crumpled ball of his handkerchief, grimaced, took it back again. He shrugged and set the glasses down by the chair.
Dunstan scruti
nized their intertwined limbs. Maybe he was sending an alarm through the Pearly Gates—got a backslider here, mobilize the seraphim. “You’re not going to go off on a guilt trip?” she asked. “You know, put on a hair shirt and moan about Lancelot betraying his king for a woman?”
“For a queen,” Thomas corrected. “I cannot believe that acknowledging the power and mystery of the physical world with one kiss is a betrayal of any sort.”
“Not like this it’s not, no.”
His smile deflated into a sigh. “I must confess myself to you as well, Maggie. I implied that I wanted to die. But now—now I want to live. Even if I were never to see you again, I would want to know that somewhere in this world you lived, joyful in the presence of God. For to me, Maggie, you are a pearl beyond price.”
Maggie watched his lips forming the words she’d been dreading.
“But loving my life may well make its sacrifice all the more necessary. Because giving up something that has little value is no sacrifice…” His voice caught and broke.
She snugged her arms around him, willing her heart to beat in the same rhythm as his. “I love you. That’s my penance, isn’t it? Knowing that I might lose you just as I’ve found you.”
“I’m sorry,” he returned, his breath tickling her temple, “that your love might bring you pain as well as redemption. Might. I don’t know.”
“I think we’re going to have to pray not for a happy ending but for the right ending. As Eliot’s Becket said…”
“…I have consented.” He cupped her face in his strong, capable, kind hand. He leaned forward so that his forehead touched hers. His lips moved an inch from her own, making Word and Flesh and Spirit into one. “Set me as a seal upon thy heart, for love is as strong as death.”
“Yes,” Maggie said.
Dunstan slept. The flames died. Beyond the Word, the Lady had said, beyond the Blood, lay silence. But Maggie had never heard silence before. A rock thrown into the silence of this room would take a full minute to hit bottom. A minute in which eternities rose and flourished and passed away. A minute of infinite grace.
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