Now Bolingbroke had turned his piercing eyes back to Neville. “I don’t know, Tom. It was a question I was about to ask you.”
Neville jerked his eyes away, studying Emma. Jesu, these were ordinary men and women, doing the best they could in their daily travails. And for this God has lashed them with His disgusting pestilential vengeance? Then Neville jerked slightly on his stool as a revelation—it was too powerful to be called a thought—surged through him. God and his angels, and their Church on earth, were nothing but vehicles of hate and fear and vengeance. The demons, the angel-children, embraced Christ’s message of love.
Emma moaned, louder now, and Mary leaned forward to add her hand to that of Jocelyn’s as it held Emma’s. “Your agony will ease soon,” she whispered.
Emma opened her eyes—mere slits now between her swollen lids. “Mary,” she whispered, repeating what she’d said when she’d first realised Mary was in her chamber. “Blessed Mary!”
Mary shifted uncomfortably on her stool, a faint flush of embarrassment on her cheeks. “Her mind wanders,” she said to Margaret, who was looking at her with an odd expression in her eyes. “The liquor is so strong.”
“Maybe,” murmured Margaret, remembering the strange things that Mary herself had said while under its influence.
Emma now freed her hand from her daughter’s, and gripped Mary’s hand tightly. She twisted her head on her pillow so she could stare Mary directly in the face.
“Mary, Mary,” she said. “What you have lost you will find again.”
“Emma, I have lost nothing, I want for nothing—”
“Save your husband’s love,” Emma croaked. “Never mind, sweet Mary, Blessed Mary, it shall be yours again soon.”
Now Mary’s flush deepened, and she studiously avoided looking at Bolingbroke. “Emma—”
“You have loved, you are loved, and you will be loved,” said Emma, and then she died with nothing more dramatic than a long, comfortable sigh.
There was a lengthy silence, eventually broken by Jocelyn, who began to cry anew. Margaret gathered her into her arms, comforting her.
But she kept her eyes on Mary, sitting straight and still on her stool.
“We will wash her, and make her clean,” Mary said. “And then we will have her conveyed to a churchyard where she shall be buried.”
“Mary,” Bolingbroke said, rising from his stool. “This is not a task you should be engaged in. I can find—”
“No, Hal. I would like to do this for Emma. It will not take long, and it will be no effort.”
“Mary,” Bolingbroke said in a stronger voice, “I cannot allow it. You have already exposed yourself far too much to the pestilence, and I will not have you handling this woman’s noxious corpse!”
“I am dying anyway,” Mary said in a matter-of-fact tone, “and whether it be from the black imp eating me within, or the black pestilence that will swell me without, is neither here nor there.”
“Mary—”
“I can do good here, Hal, not cloistered up in some silken chamber. If nothing else I can bring comfort to the dying. I can let them know that their queen cares about them, and suffers alongside them in their extremity.”
“It is the same reason you are here, Hal,” Neville put in quietly. “London cannot be left to suffer alone. And Mary has Margaret and myself to care for her. When we see that she needs to rest, then she will rest. When we see that she needs to eat, then she will eat. And when we see that she needs to—”
“Then she will do it,” Mary finished for him, with a smile. “Hal, please, do not worry about me. If you wish I will go to one of the hospitals, and do what I can there, rather than wander the streets.”
Bolingbroke looked at her, knowing that if the hospitals were filled with the victims of the pestilence then they might be more dangerous than the streets.
But then, did she not say she was dying anyway? Who was he to gainsay her?
He nodded tersely. “Very well. Tom, Margaret, I charge you with her care. Keep Culpeper close by you at all times, and if at any time it appears necessary, then you escort my queen to the Tower…no matter how she protests.”
Everyone nodded agreeably, even Culpeper, who looked resigned to the prospect of spending the next hours, or perhaps days, couched with his queen inside some pestilence-riddled hospital.
“Come, Margaret, Jocelyn,” Mary said. “Gather together some water and some towels, for we have Emma to see to.”
Bolingbroke watched for a brief moment, then turned to Neville. “Keep her safe,” he said, then left the room. Neville heard footsteps outside, then hooves as Bolingbroke and his escort rode away.
“I will wait in the outer chamber with Culpeper,” he said to Margaret. “For this ritual is women’s business.”
Much later, when the women were done, and bearers arrived from St Mary-le-Bow church to escort Emma Hawkins’ body to the churchyard, Mary finally consented to allow Margaret and Neville, Jocelyn close behind, to help her outside.
As they stepped into the tiny courtyard, they halted in amazement. Some forty or fifty people—ordinary Londoners—had crowded into the confined space.
“What is this?” said Neville.
The crowd parted a little, and Dick Whittington stepped forth. “One of Emma Hawkins’ neighbours saw our queen enter her lodgings,” he said, “and word spread. My queen, I speak for all these good people here, and for all Londoners, in thanking you for your mercy and goodness.”
And he dropped to one knee, sweeping his cap off his head as he did so.
One by one the other people in the courtyard did likewise, and as Mary moved slowly towards her donkey, many reached out and touched the hem of her gown.
“Beloved lady,” they whispered.
VIII
Sunday 26th May 1381
—i—
For three days the Dog of Pestilence stalked London, striking down innocent and sinner alike, leaving thousands to perish alone huddled in gutters or slumped in darkened alleyways. The stench of ripe decay hung like a pall over the city as muffled church bells pealed an incessant mournful toll and masked and cloaked men walked the streets, escorting creaking carts laden with the dead to the death pits dug in orchards and gardens within the city walls. In some churchyards the ground level rose two feet or more as the soil absorbed scores and scores of freshly swollen and ripening corpses; some crypts were filled to the ceiling with bodies; some wells had to be closed, as body fluids from over-packed graveyards seeped into them.
Scavenging dogs and pigs scrambled over the humped soil of the churchyards, digging with feet and snouts for the food so close beneath.
Church wardens could shoo them off, but they returned, along with the ravening crows, as soon as the wardens turned their backs.
The city gates were closed and locked. No one was allowed in or out.
The city’s population gradually sank beneath the soil.
Mary based herself at a hastily established hospital within the guildhall.
The guildhall’s internal spaces were given over to row after row of low, wide and commodious beds, each accommodating two or three victims of the pestilence. Nuns and monks moved among the rows, doing what they could for the desperate souls writhing and tossing in agony. Mary, with Jocelyn almost constantly at her side, and Margaret, Neville and Culpeper helped as best they could. Even Culpeper forgot his airs and distaste as he pierced buboes, lanced arms and legs, and trickled potions down throats swollen with pustules and fever.
Neville did his best when he saw the opportunity, offering comfort to the dying and aiding here and there by feeding fluids to those who could take them, but mostly he was concerned with Mary. He made sure she slept and rested regularly, encouraged her to eat broths and morsels to keep up her strength, and fed her small sips of Culpeper’s liquor whenever he thought the shadows of pain behind her eyes grew too dense. Faced with so much suffering, Mary was disinclined to pamper her own pain, and so Neville often had to fight to ma
ke her sip some of the liquor. Those times when he managed to get her to take enough of it that she slipped into a sleep were occasions he counted as small victories.
Sunday evening was one such victory. Mary had been on her feet for hours, moving from bed to bed, and in the end Neville almost had to hold her down and force the liquor down her throat. But eventually she took it, and consented to lie down on the bed that Neville and Margaret had caused to be made up for her in a small alcove.
Margaret and Jocelyn, exhausted, lay down on pallets beside her, and within minutes all three had slipped into a deep sleep.
Satisfied, Neville sank down to the floor himself. He leaned against the wall, relishing the coolness of the stone as it seeped through his clothes, and rested his head back. He did not mean to sleep, for the women needed to be watched, but within heartbeats his eyes slowly closed, and moments after that his chin sank down to his chest, and a low snore rumbled from his throat.
Neville jerked awake. What had happened? Something was different…something wrong…he turned his head. Mary, Margaret and Jocelyn still slept. He looked back to what he could see of the hall.
No one moved.
Neville blinked, coming to his senses.
No one moved? Someone was always moving…the nuns, a monk, a physician, or the porters come to drag away yet another victim.
But now no one moved.
Neville rose to his feet as silently as he could, again glancing at the sleeping women to satisfy himself that they were alive.
Then he looked back to the hall, taking the few steps to the edge of the alcove and looking up and down the hall’s length.
Rows upon rows of beds, filled with the writhing, tossing ill.
But no one moved among the beds. No nuns, no monks, no porters, no weeping, wailing family members come to farewell their loved ones.
An eerie silence hung over the hall. The people on the beds moved, but they made no sound.
Strange, for normally their moaning and weeping filled every hour of the day.
And the light was different. The guildhall was lit from windows high in the walls, and this natural light was augmented with torches and lamps. Now the windows were dark, for evening had fallen, but the torches still guttered in their sconces, and the lamps still glowed.
Over and above this, though, shone a silvery light.
A most unearthly light.
Neville moved forward a few paces, coming to a stop in one of the aisles.
The sick twisted to either side of him, their eyes staring, their mouths gaping in agony, their hands clutching at bed covers.
Neville paid them no heed. He looked over his shoulder, again satisfying himself that Mary, Margaret and Jocelyn remained safe.
When he turned his head back, there was a man standing in the now open doorway at the far end of the hall. A bright, silvery light shone from behind him, so Neville could make out no features, but he knew instantly who it was.
Archangel Michael.
The archangel slowly stepped forward. He was different from how Neville had ever seen him previously. Normally the archangel hid the majority of his features inside a great golden light. Now that light was gone, and the archangel strode forth in what Neville instinctively knew was his natural form.
He was incredibly beautiful. Heavenly, as only an angel could be.
His naked body was slim but well-muscled, and glimmered with a faint silvery air. The hair on his head, in his armpits and at his groin was glittering white and tightly curled. His skin glowed with the faintest undertone of pink. His face…his face was both majestic and sensual at the same moment. Beautifully proportioned angles and planes framed a well-shaped, full-lipped mouth, straight nose, and deep, black eyes.
He was wingless.
The archangel strode close to Neville, then stopped. A smile played about his lips.
“I have come to take you into the Field of Angels,” he said. “What mortals call the Kingdom of Heaven.”
IX
Sunday 26th May 1381
—ii—
“How long has it been, archangel?” Neville said. “I thought you had forgot me.”
The archangel smiled, but it was a cold, hard thing. “Forget you? Never, Thomas. You have always been at the forefront of my thoughts.” His voice was strong, and strangely melodious, as if it were underscored with the music of bells.
“And yet—”
“And yet I have left you to the lies and manipulations of the demons? Yes, that I have. And you know why, Thomas…don’t you?”
“So I could see the lies and manipulations for what they were.”
“Yes. Margaret and her ever-damned brother have shown themselves for what they are. Cursed manipulators, destroyers, murderers.”
“Your children.”
The archangel smiled. “Yes. My children. But this place of stench and suffering is not the right place to discuss this, Thomas. Will you come with me now? Into the Field of Angels?”
Neville hesitated, not willing to leave what remained of the earthly realm, even if it were a place of stench and suffering. “Am I dead?”
“No. You cannot—” the archangel broke off, and a sly expression slithered over his features. “But I go too fast. Thomas, you are not dead, and you will not die this day. I invite you into the Field of Angels as a guest only. You may leave when you wish.”
If you wish. The qualifier hung in the air between them.
Neville hesitated, then gave a curt nod.
“Then discard your clothing,” Archangel Michael said, “for it will corrupt Heaven with its mortal stench.”
Neville did as he was commanded, unbuckling his sword belt and letting it slide to the floor, drawing his tunic and undershirt over his head and dropping them at the foot of the nearest bed, then stepping out of his boots, hose and under-drawers. He turned away as he disrobed, strangely uncomfortable that the archangel demand he be naked.
When Neville turned back to face the angel, slowly letting the final article of clothing slip to the floor, Archangel Michael allowed his black eyes to travel infinitely slowly up and down Neville’s naked body, as if assessing. “You have no scars,” he remarked. “Your body is very beautiful, indeed. Strange, perhaps, for a man so committed to war.”
“I have always healed well,” Neville said.
And yet again the sly expression slithered over the archangel’s face. “Of course you have,” he said, turning to walk towards the doorway. “Follow me.”
Neville followed the archangel, the silvery light beyond the door growing stronger with every step closer they took. As he walked he allowed himself to study the archangel’s body as the archangel had so recently studied his. It was almost impossibly beautiful: muscles strong and rippling beneath unflawed skin, sinuous movement that combined both masculine and feminine qualities, limbs so well-shaped that they seemed as perfect as marble carvings.
I am very lovely, said the archangel in Neville’s mind, and Neville found it impossible to disagree with him.
Then, abruptly, they were through the door, and Neville left the mortal world behind him.
Archangel Michael had led him into what appeared to be an infinite gently undulating field of multi-coloured flowers. The flowers were such as Neville had never seen before. They were massive, almost grossly so, reaching upwards on leafless thick stems to thigh height. Their colours were over-rich—tawdry—and their texture was heavy and fleshy. They gave off a scent which hung so intense and cloying in the humid air that Neville felt slightly nauseated by it.
The field was dotted with hundreds of stumps of long-dead trees, the wood grey and split.
Above all hung, not a sky, but a heaviness of silvery light.
Everything about the Field of the Angels seemed to Neville to be false and oppressive. He had an almost panicky urge to cover his genitals, only managing to keep his hands at his side with considerable effort.
This was heaven?
They walked forward, and as Nevi
lle stepped into the field of flowers he brushed against some of the gaudy blooms.
They were cold, and brittle, as if made of ice, and they shattered as he touched them.
Neville jumped, then walked more carefully, trying his best not to touch these strange, counterfeit flowers.
Or were they perfection, and the soft, gentle blooms of earth the lie?
The archangel led Neville further into the Field of Angels, and as they walked angels in the hundreds rose from their hiding places among the brittle flowers. They were all made as Archangel Michael: the white-marbled bodies, impossibly beautiful, with chiselled features dominated by their black eyes and crisp white curls.
None of them was winged.
“Wings are but a figment of the mortal imagination,” said the archangel, now walking at Neville’s side. “We are not so flawed that we need wings to fly.” The archangel’s voice was thick with sarcasm.
Neville nodded, but did not respond, working to keep both his thoughts and his face bland although every nerve in his body was at screaming point, every muscle knotted and fearful, and every thought jumbled and confused.
This is heaven? This?
The other angels, their black eyes fixed on Neville’s every movement, sat down on the tree stumps, one angel to each stump. There they crouched, legs drawn up, arms locked about their knees, only their eyes moving as Michael and Neville walked through the field.
Neville thought they looked a little like the gargoyles he’d seen so many times crouching at the top of cathedrals and churches.
As the gargoyles crouched on churches, so the angels crouched in heaven, looking down, watching, watching, watching…
Desperate to keep his mind away from the imagery that flooded it, Neville addressed the archangel some two paces ahead of him. “You told me the demons were from hell,” he said. “Foul creatures that needed to be destroyed. But I find that instead they are the by-products of your lust, begotten on the bodies of unsuspecting women. They are not minions of Satan at all, they are heaven’s children! How can I condemn them for that?”