The Crippled Angel (36 page)

Neville shuddered, feeling the weight of the angels about him, and the terrified eyes of Margaret upon him.

So, Thomas
, Michael said,
whither goest your soul? To this Margaret—being all you have to hand—or to us?

He stepped forward, so close now that Neville could feel the angel’s cold breath on his cheek.

Michael leaned closer yet, and lifted a hand to stroke softly at Neville’s cheek.
You are one of us, Beloved. Fight it no longer. Accept it. Join your soul with ours.

“No,” cried Neville, wrenching away from the archangel’s touch.

You have no choice, Thomas. You are one of us, one with us
—

“No!”

—
and you must hand us your soul, and mankind with it.

He paused, and the ghastly rictus of a smile re-formed on his face.
But you want to try, don’t you? Go on, then. Try and give Margaret your soul. Try it. Try and give this falsity your soul.

Neville stared at Margaret, and took two stumbling paces towards her. She held out her arms, her face—her entire being—beseeching him, and he ran to her, and grabbed her
from Raphael’s grip, hoping that in touching her, something within him would give.

Give enough to enable him to hand her his soul.

She clung to him, wrapping her arms about him, sobbing almost uncontrollably, and Neville’s heart broke.

“Margaret…” he whispered.

She lifted her tear-stained face to his, and he bent to kiss her, and as he kissed her he tried, he tried with every part of him, every fibre of his being, every piece of want and desperation within him, to hand to her his soul…

And it would not budge.
Every time he tried he felt as if he were being flung against a rockface, and that rockface was the dark irk that had grown within him ever since he’d learned of her trickery in making him love her.

He tried to shove it aside, tried to move about it, but he could not…he could not…he could not…again and again he dashed against it.

He broke down, weeping, and Margaret cried out again in terror, and slumped to the ground.

Neville was dimly aware that Bolingbroke was on his feet in the stand, his face horrified. He was shouting at Neville, but Neville could not make out the words.

About him the angels were closing in, laughing, gloating, knowing they had won.

You cannot deny our will
, said Michael,
nor the path destined for you. Come join with us, Thomas, join the brotherhood. It is so easy…after all, you only have to do…nothing.

Neville could feel their words pulling at him, feel their effect within him. Michael was calling him home, and his soul was responding.

Michael screamed, and all the angels screamed with him, and Neville’s soul screamed, too, terrified and jubilant at the same moment.

“No,” Neville shouted, dropping to the ground beside Margaret and covering his ears with his hands. “
No!
”

There is no choice, Thomas. There never has been. Come home. Gift us your soul
—

He could feel it within him, tearing loose, responding to the calls of the angels.

He screamed, but that only jerked his soul looser.

One more moment, and it would fly home…

“Tom.”

Everything stopped, even, so it felt to Neville, the beating of his heart within his chest.

“Tom.”

The voice came again. Deep. Calm. Loving.

And the voice of a woman.

Neville jerked, pressing his hands tighter to his ears, wondering what new trick this was.

“Tom.”

The angels screamed, and it was the anger and fright contained in that sound that finally made Neville lower his hands from his ears and look about.

A woman stood at the edge of the crowd.

NO
, roared Archangel Michael, and all the angels roared with him.
NO! NO! NO!

A woman, James standing a pace behind her, looking tenderly at where both Margaret and Neville sat slumped on the ground.

Neville slowly rose to his feet, his eyes unable to move from this strange, compelling woman. She was tall, and wondrously striking in appearance. Her hair was very dark, bound in a crown about her brow. Her eyes were the deepest blue he had ever seen, almost violet, their colour accentuated by her pale, fine skin. Her body was exquisitely formed, slim and graceful, and with the round bulge of a five- or six-month pregnancy straining the front of her white robe. A sky-blue robe sat about her shoulders.

Her face…Neville blinked, knowing her face from…from…he gasped.

It was Mary. Mary Bohun…and yet
not
Mary Bohun.
She was too tall, her hair and eye colour too wrong, her health too startlingly good.

And yet it
was
Mary. The Mary who
should
have been.

She smiled, her face full of pity, and Neville suddenly remembered where he had seen
this
face before.

It was the face of the woman who had knelt at the foot of the cross when Neville, on his way from Kenilworth to London, had been graced with a vision of Christ.

And then, suddenly, the third option, the third path, opened up before Thomas Neville.

No wonder the angels had attacked her. No wonder they had called her whore.

No wonder they were so afraid of her.

Neville took a slow step forwards, his eyes riveted on Mary’s face.

She smiled, and moved a little, almost suggestively, as if she knew the power of her own body.

Mary…not Mary Bohun, but Mary Magdalene, the prostitute that Jesus had pitied, then befriended, and then loved.

The woman the angels feared before all others.

Mary Bohun…Mary Magdalene…one and the same woman.

The third path, the third choice. Mary, who he had loved and respected without reservation. Mary, who represented neither the angels nor the demons, for she was of neither, but mankind.

The woman who represented mankind’s salvation and freedom…freedom both from the angels, and from the demons. Freedom for mankind…into their own destiny, whatever they might make of that.

The whore to whom he could hand his soul on a platter.

Neville took another step forward, then another, and then Mary laughed and she ran lightly to meet Neville. They met halfway across the square, their arms wrapping tight about each other, their bodies hugging close, and Neville spun her about, laughing and crying at the same time.

“Mary,” he cried. “
Mary.
”

About them the world erupted. The angels were screaming, Bolingbroke was screaming, and a sobbing Margaret still
sprawled on the ground stared at Neville and Mary—but of none of this did either Neville or Mary take any note.

“Lady,” Neville whispered, “I beg of you, will you accept my soul?”

“Gladly,” she whispered.

Hesitating an instant, but only because at this moment his love seemed too overwhelming, Neville slowly bent his head to Mary’s face, and kissed her.

Deeply and passionately, the kiss of a lover.

Her arms entwined about his shoulders, her hands buried deep in his hair, her body pressed tight against his, Mary took his kiss deep into her being.

And Thomas Neville’s soul slid easily, gratefully, lovingly and with the utmost joy into her keeping.

He ended the kiss, and leaned back his head, and laughed with the sense of total freedom that enveloped him. Mary, still clinging tight to him, joined in his laughter, and together they spun about the cobbled square, laughing and dancing, surrounded by the throng of horrified black robed angels.

Finally, panting with both breathlessness and joy, they came to a halt.

“I had thought that my being would collapse when I gifted my soul,” Neville said. “Why is it then that I still breathe, and feel, and move?”

“Because,” said Mary, “when you gift something wholly and completely and unhesitatingly it returns to you doublefold.”

Then she leaned up to his face and kissed him again, softly, but not lingeringly. “Thank you, Tom. For your friendship, for your love, and, above all, for your gift.”

Neville’s smile suddenly dimmed. “Will I lose you?”

“I must return to my husband, and you to your wife,” she said. “But we will not lose each other.”

And with that she pulled out of his arms, paused, almost regretfully, then turned away and walked slowly back to where James waited for her.

Neville watched her go, his being equal parts of sadness and joy.

Mary reached James, kissed him, then took his hand and turned back to face Neville.

She nodded.

Neville himself turned back to those staring at him.

The angels, their entire beings still and silent as they watched.

Their eyes flat. Unbelieving.

Margaret, on her knees now, her own eyes wide, but with disbelief and relief combined.

Bolingbroke, still furious, his fists clenched at his sides.

Catherine, watching from her chair beside Bolingbroke, weeping with joy.

Neville looked back to Archangel Michael. “Enjoy your cold, bitter flowers for eternity, Michael,” he said, “but enjoy them without me, and without mankind. I have made my choice, and I
deny
you.”

And at that instant of denial, Neville felt the power of the angels flood through him.

I deny you
, he whispered with his mind, and more power filled him.

Is this how Christ managed his miracles?
he wondered in a tiny, distant part of his mind as he stared unblinkingly, coldly, at Archangel Michael.
Because in denying the angels he gained their power?

But now was not the time to ponder such things, for Neville understood that this power might not last long.

And so Thomas Neville smiled, cold and hard, knowing the vengeance he would exact on the angels.

On his brothers.

He opened his mouth, hesitated, then spoke the incantation of Opening, the incantation that all Keepers spoke when they wanted to open the cleft into Hell.

Michael’s face opened in an horrific, but completely soundless, scream. He tried to tear himself away from Neville’s smile, but he could not, for he was trapped by the incantation.

“I deny you, and all yours,” Neville said. “Go forth to your own creation, Michael, the bitter fields of hell, and never trouble this mortal realm again.”

There was a terrible grinding sound, and a fifty-foot-long rent appeared in the centre of the square. Steam and sulphur rose from it in great loathsome gouts, and flames flickered high into the air.

The angels screeched, twisting this way and that, but Thomas Neville, brother angel, was speaking again, completing the incantation.

When it was done, he spoke each of the angel’s names, knowing them as part of their shared knowledge, and as he spoke each angel’s name, so a tongue of flame twisted out of the Cleft and enveloped the shrieking angel, dragging him down into hell.

Neville left Michael to last. “Farewell brother,” Neville said. “I embrace mortality—may you embrace your new eternity. Farewell…Michael.”

Michael surged forward towards Neville, his face twisting in his hatred and fury…but just as his hands reached for Neville, so the flame enveloped him, dragging Michael screaming into hell.

There was a moment left, only a moment, and Neville knew what he had to do in that moment. He spoke one more word, and Wynkyn de Worde’s Book of Incantations appeared in his hands.

Neville stepped forward, and, as the Cleft started to grind closed, threw the book down into hell.

There was a sudden surge of sulphurous flame, a shriek from beyond the Cleft as if this was, indeed, the final indignity, and then the ground closed, and there was nothing left to remind the watchers of what had just occurred save a faint odour of sulphur in the air.

There was a long moment, a long drawn-out gasp, an instant of silence, and in that instant several things happened.

All power seeped away from Neville, and he felt himself mortal, and vulnerable, and felt joyous in that mortality and vulnerability.

Freed from the angels.

Bolingbroke strode to the front of the stand, shouting: “I
will
still have France, Neville. Nothing you have done here this morning can stop that.”

And after France, the world
, Neville thought. He began to say something, but was stopped by Mary, who had again walked forward.

This time, however, she did not look at Neville. She walked slowly and confidently to within ten or fifteen paces of the stand where Bolingbroke stood, looking furiously down.

“You did not love me,” she said, “when that would have been the easiest thing in the world to have done.” Her face softened into regret as she saw shock spread across Bolingbroke’s face.

In that moment he had realised who she was and who she had been.

“France will
eat
you,” she said, her voice soft yet carrying easily, then she swung about, and walked a little more slowly towards the cart which held the iron-caged Joan. Mary climbed agilely onto the large wheel, and from there took a firm grip on the iron bars of the cage.

“Joan?” she said. “Joan?”

Joan, whom everyone had forgotten in the past extraordinary minutes, crept forward towards the woman clinging to the side of her cage.

“I know you,” she said. “You were the woman at the foot of Christ’s cross. You were kind to me. And you were the Queen Mary, who was kind to me also.”

“Aye,” said Mary, “I was both those women. Come here, Joan, and kiss me.”

Wondering that she should be so blessed, Joan moved to the side of the cage, and leaned close enough to Mary that their lips could briefly brush.

“Go home, Joan,” said Mary, and smiled, suddenly and brilliantly.

Joan stared in amazement, and then her face went blank, and her eyes lifeless.

Her breast might still rise and fall with breath, but Joan was no longer there.

She had gone home to her father’s sheep.

Mary smiled once more, soft and sad, then climbed down from the cart. She walked back to James, took his hand, and without a backward glance both of them faded into the crowd.