Chapter Twenty-Seven

Margaret had decided, only a little reluctantly, to hope for death. She knew she should not, especially as William had commanded her to live. But death seemed the most acceptable of the fates on offer.

Lifelong imprisonment, after all these months at the abbey, had become unthinkable. She thought that, after spending so much of her life in practicing the necessary deceptions – and much of it in perfecting entirely voluntary ones – it should be nothing to contemplate years confined to a nunnery, day after day filled with empty prayer and false humility. It should be easy enough to accept. A woman's life is pretending, after all.

But. That is not a life .

She had heard it said so many months ago, when the trees were not bare and the frost did not form on the sill. When the world was still green, and such weary words were easily dismissed.

That was before the mask had dropped away. Before she knew what it was to speak without apology in every breath. Before she had twined her fingers in his hair, demanded what she wanted, and saw adoration in his eyes.

She could not go back. Not for a lifetime. Not even for an hour.

"These are trying times, to be sure," said Brother Matthew when he found her staring listlessly out her window. There was a kind of earnest despair in him these days, as though he was responsible for her faltering soul. "Take comfort in your faith."

"I do," she assured him. Faith that her friends were safe away from here. Faith that William would not be ruined. Those were the only beliefs that comforted her anymore.

Two weeks ago, the questioning had abruptly stopped. A pause in the trial, for some mysterious reason that they did not deign to share with her and that she did not care enough to ask.

All she knew was that William had stopped coming to view the spectacle before this pause began. She had looked out among the spectators every day and seen him, until one day he was not there. Some part of her understood that this meant terrible things for her – a confirmation that she was to be found guilty, that he must now distance himself as much as he could. It was perfectly reasonable. It was clever.

Abandonment was no more than she deserved, or so she told herself. And in the cold, dark nights she reminded herself of who he was. Who she'd always known he was, and what she admired and loathed in equal measure about him: he would do whatever he must to survive, and even more than that to prosper.

Then one day without warning or explanation, the pause in the proceedings ended.

They brought her back to hear them read out more statements submitted by witnesses who could not be present. She pressed a smile from her lips when she heard the short and vague account that young Henry had provided. It was not nearly as damning as they had obviously hoped. He was learning, then. How not to trust, how to maneuver in treacherous waters. Poor boy. Smart man.

She listened without speaking for a day – two days, three days. It was fragmented, an hour or two of interminable droning about this or that doctrine, and then more hours of waiting alone in a small room until they called her to hear some debate over precedent, or a scrap of testimony, before dismissing her again. It was a game. They meant to drive her mad with the anticipation, or at least make her weary enough that her mind would weaken.

It was working, because she did not care. Let her lose her wits. What did it matter anymore, now that she had lost all?

"Do you believe in one God, who made the heavens and the earth?" they asked her one day.

It was stripped of all context, because she had only been half-listening. But she knew what the answer was supposed to be. Her father's people had believed in two equal Gods – one of good and one of evil – and she was meant to deny such heresy. She did not bother.

Instead she looked at the beam of afternoon light that streamed in at an angle, standing briefly between her and her questioners, and thought of that other light she had seen. The piercing light that she had believed to be a vision. How it had made the air throb, how it had stolen her breath. It felt so far away now.

She had never asked Quinten about it. But then he had proven himself to be an ordinary, foolish man. Better to attempt to solve the mystery of it herself.

"Do you believe in the full divinity of Jesus Christ, Lady Margaret?"

The inquisitor sounded almost bored. She looked up and saw his faint distaste at her disheveled appearance – the gown that hung too loosely after weeks of indifferent eating, the signs of her fitful sleep, her eyes red and puffy from her nightly weeping. She had tried very hard not to weep. But it was one thing for a foolish girl to imagine a brave and defiant martyrdom, and another thing to actually live it.

The light, though. That was what she wanted to think about now, not their tedious interrogation. The light had meaning; their questions did not.

She lowered her head again, letting their voices tangle together at the edges of her awareness while she considered the light. It had poured forth when friends clasped hands in the birthing room. It washed over the hall of Ruardean as an old man doted on his companion. It beat behind her eyes when she looked upon William in the quiet hours of the morning. It seemed to flutter within her now at the mere thought of him.

So insistent had it been, so urgent and so very, very real – it would not have affected her as it had, did it not mean something. The answer seemed near, as though she need only listen closely and it would whisper its secret in her ear.

The inquisitor was shouting at her now, but she must think. Her hand reached instinctively to the beads that hung from her belt, the tokens of William's lost regard, of all the things he had once seen in her. She held tight to the memory of him and thought of all that achingly beautiful light as she looked into the face of the inquisitor, twisted and red in his anger, beside a bishop who radiated malice.

And she knew. Suddenly, certainly, and with a quiet inevitability that made her laugh at herself. So lost had she been that God must shine a light, repeatedly, to remind her of the purpose she had deliberately turned from again and again. She laughed more to think it might not even have been from God, because she doubted now there was any such a thing as a God who sent messages to mortals. It might only be her own heart, which had known the truth before her mind had.

It was love, of course. The only message that mattered. So simple. So impossible. So seemingly absent here, yet always present when she dared to look for it. Love.

Perhaps someone more worthy would feel serene at this realization. She only felt stupid and slow. She might have known it long ago, if she had ever been as virtuous as she had believed herself.

"Do we amuse you, lady?"

She looked up. It was Stowell, incensed by her laughter. How strange it was, that this understanding came to her in this moment, in this place. She could not imagine why. It could not save her now, and there was little room for love in her when she looked on these men who poured their hostility over her.

"I pity you," she answered. It was not love, but it was the softest thing she could feel for them. "Your philosophy allows for no doubt. It seems as a prison to me."

"It is doubt that has made a way for your wickedness to spread." He waved off the younger inquisitor, who looked like he might interrupt. "You have sought to divide the loyalties of our Welsh brethren by preying on the doubts born of their ignorance. How much more detestable your actions when we consider that you knowingly choose the most vulnerable to corrupt."

"In faith, it is just that point that concerns us most of all," agreed one of the inquisitors. "We take the care of their poor souls most seriously, for those who are childlike and without guile are most easily led astray."

She looked on the assembly of concerned faces and furrowed brows, and her pity was lost. This was all a game to them, a great chance to demean their Welsh "brethren" and paint themselves blameless emissaries of God, all while lying through their teeth. The disgust and rage simmered within her breast as she listened to their sanctimony, until she could not help but interrupt them.

"Oh you generation of vipers," she said through clenched teeth, and turned her eyes to Stowell. "How can you who are evil speak good things?"

He merely raised his brows at her. "Do you quote scripture at us, Lady Margaret?"

"It is written that evil men sleep not, except they have done evil."

"Do you call me evil then, lady?"

"I say only that I think me you sleep very well, lord bishop." There was a ripple of nervous laughter through the crowd. Too late, she thought of William's admonishments about provoking this man. "But I pass no judgment, and seek no quarrel. I am so weary."

She felt it as she said it, a weakness descending on her all at once, replacing the anger. Horribly fragile tears came to her eyes but she swallowed them, and breathed deep. "Surely you must tire of this too," she said, looking at the men who had been chosen to condemn her. "Come, proclaim my guilt now, and let us be finished."

They bent their heads, each murmuring to the other, conferring together while the crowd around her speculated in whispers. She let her eyes wander over the sea of faces that surrounded her and saw William standing among them, tall and commanding as ever, no longer hidden in a shadowed corner.

It was a long, long moment that she spent believing he was not real. It must be his ghost. Or an illusion. A vision born of too little sleep and too much dread. It could not be real. The way he looked at her was too soft, too kind, to be anything but a hopeful dream.

Then he spared a glance at the inquisitors, and the illusion became reality. There was the piercing gaze that made men falter, the disdainful expression that had infuriated her for so many years, the wry lift to the lips that she had kissed so often.

It was him, and a swell of feeling rose inside her, a great crashing wave that broke on the shores of her heart. She would drown in it, she thought – right here, standing before him, swallowed up by the whirl of love and regret. And he only stood there, calm and rational, watching her with that infinite stillness in him.

"If you would but attest to your faith, lady."

It was the chief inquisitor whose voice broke through. He spoke patiently, barely concealing his exasperation, as though they had said it many times already. She realized too late that this was what they had been asking for all day.

It was the final piece, the last step in this trial. Her faith must be declared, given as evidence and judged. Only then it would be over.

"You must affirm your belief," he explained, and his eyes seemed to plead with her a little, to just say what they wanted. " Can you say you will submit with humility to the wisdom of the one true and holy church ?"

They would like her to say that. And it should be easy to say, yet her mouth would not open.

"The day is long, and you are weary," said the oldest inquisitor, striving for patient understanding. "Tell us first, i s it your desire to turn from sin and live among God's faithful people?"

"It is not," she heard herself say, because t he truth came out of her now as it had done so often these last months: easily, insistent, relentless. "There are many things I desire much more than that." Like William, and her friends. A child, an end to needless suffering, laughter in the darkness of night, a soft and easy daybreak. She wanted all those more than to live among faithful people.

But at her answer, the inquisitors displayed varying degrees of consternation and outrage, and in the bishop's case, grim satisfaction. She did not concern herself with them. Once she had cared – about winning, about coming out of this alive and undamaged. Now that hope was gone. She only cared that William watched her. God, if there was a God, watched her. She would not be false before either of them, ever again.

"You see her arrogance–" Stowell began, only to be silenced by the chief inquisitor.

"Lady Margaret," he said, with a stern look at her. "You are asked to proclaim your beliefs and we will have an answer . Now say if you believe in one God, in Christ and the Holy Spirit." His face grew yet more severe when she said nothing. "Only tell us what you believe, lady!"

"I do not know."

The words fell out of her, the plain admission of that thing she had not dared even to think to herself. It felt like a betrayal to say it. Like letting go of the only thing that tethered her to all she had ever known. What was she, what was life – what was anything, if she did not believe?

"Certes you believe in divine judgment," interjected another frowning inquisitor. "What of Heaven and Hell?"

"They are but words to me." There was a gasp at this – from them, from the onlookers – and she understood their shock. It terrified her, to know how true it was. But a relief, such a relief to put it in words. "And for that, you would say I will burn for an eternity. Only because I do not know."

She looked up at them, these men who were so sure, who were aghast at her uncertainty. It was clear that they were sure she would burn in hellfire. Their faces were not filled with condemnation or fury, but with great pity. It distressed them to know she was so lost. It distressed her .

"What would you have me say?" she burst out. "That I believe in God's goodness, when the world that God is meant to have created is this one? This cruel and brutal place?" Her voice was rising now, a kind of confused anger stealing her tongue. "Nor can I say I believe in the forgiveness of sins when there are sins I do not want to be forgiven, ever. I could not want any God who could forgive them."

Her arm came up to gesture at Stowell. "I do not know if any one man should be put above others, if any soul can be always good and holy and right. I do not know why it is so hard to be good, if it is what God wants!" She shook her head, knowing it was senseless to shout her despair like this, to men who did not care and would not hear. "I am sure of nothing, do you understand? I know not if the meek will inherit the earth. I know not if there is justice for the wronged or if there is comfort for the suffering and I cannot say if good will triumph over evil because I do not know !"

She turned until she found William's face in the crowd, his steady grey eyes on hers, and spoke to him. Only him. "I know only that I have loved you," she said. "And it has made a heaven of this earth."

There was talking, murmuring, perhaps even shouting. She only looked at him, taking in the details of his face, sure it was the last time she could. The doubt and helplessness and bitterness that had held her for so many weeks – it did not matter. It was nothing, because she looked at him and did not see the light, but felt it course through her. Everything and everyone else was just noise.

They were saying something to her. She heard her name just as the crowd around her moved to obscure William's face. When he was lost from her sight entirely, she turned back to the inquisitors.

"I have finished with my answers," she declared. "Nor more can I say, for no more do I know of myself. Judge me as ye will."

She turned away again and walked up the aisle, brushing past the young guard who tried to halt her. He did not lay hands on her, despite the shouting that came at her back – the bishop, outraged. Instead the guards flanked her, guided her through the swirl of the clamorous crowd, and saw her safely out the door into the sunlight again.