Lucifer's Crown

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  The door opened. “Thomas?” asked Gupta. “You’ve had a spot of bother? Oh, hello Mick, Rose, Maggie.”

  Rose almost laughed. A spot of bother? Yeah, right. “Tell you what, I’m going to get Mick over to the house.”

  “An admirable plan,” Thomas told her. “Would you please ask Sean to step across so Jivan can interview him?”

  “Oh aye.” Tucking the necklace into his pocket, Mick took Rose’s hand in his. Together they retrieved his backpack and a tartan carrying case from the car, then went into the house, where they met Alf lumbering down the staircase. “What’s this about Ellen getting herself kidnapped?”

  “Inspector Gupta’s in Thomas’s cottage…” Rose began.

  Alf clomped on past. “The lass needs help. Oh, hello there, Mick.” The door slammed behind him.

  Mick and Rose went on up the stairs. Anna and Sean were sitting in the gallery beside the Christmas tree, Sean shaking his head. “Hi, Mick, we saw you from the window. I figured Fitzroy was lying about you. You wouldn’t believe, he actually had a knife on Ellen.”

  “I believe it,” said Mick. “No problem.”

  “Thomas wants you to tell Inspector Gupta about it,” Rose said.

  “Let’s get that bastard Fitzroy behind bars—going after Ellen with all this woo-woo crap like she didn’t have issues already.” Sean stalked off.

  “He’ll never fully understand, but I told him enough to satisfy him for the moment. Not that I’ll ever understand it all, either.” Briskly Anna stood up. “I’ll get lunch started. No, Rose, stay with Mick.”

  No problem. The piney smell of the tree reminded Rose of the hillside where they’d found the Stone. Where a miracle had happened. She wasn’t sure what had happened today—a test of faith, probably. Mick was the miracle.

  He sank onto the loveseat, Rose beside him, and leaned his head against her shoulder. She heard his breath whistling in his bruised throat and felt his heart beating in his chest, steady as a drumbeat. Her own heart finally stopped fluttering and fell into the same rhythm. She told him about the Tor maze, Annwn, and Maddy and Calum together.

  “Oh aye.” A tear rolled down his cheek, in the Christmas lights a tiny rainbow. A moment later his breath lengthened and his head went heavy against her. He’d dozed off, drained, wrung out, and permapressed, bless him.

  Sean’s footsteps marched up the stairs. The sound of “First Rites” echoed through the house, first the rock and reel, then the quiet Gaelic blessing: “Deep peace of the running wave to you, deep peace of the flowing air to you, deep peace of the quiet earth to you, deep peace of the shining stars to you, deep peace of the gentle night to you, moon and stars pour their healing light upon you, deep peace of Christ the light of the world to you, deep peace of Mary the vessel who bore him to you.”

  The words trailed away on a sigh that was both passionate and peaceful. Then the pipes swelled again, dancing with fiddle and guitar and drum, until the song ended in a crescendo of thought and feeling intertwined.

  In that completion, Rose saw clearly that no one, human or otherwise, could deny her the presence of God so long as she chose it, freely and honestly. She kissed her fingertips and touched them to Mick’s bruised flesh. This is now, she thought. This is forever.

  Chapter Forty

  Ellen crouched in the Jaguar, watching Robin lean in the window of the other car parked in the layby. The thin wintry sunlight glinted on his hair and his teeth. He was right chuffed, wasn’t he?

  She pressed her scarf to her neck, trying to stop the bleeding. He’d put a knife to her. He’d cut her. He’d said he’d kill her. She’d have gone along, if only he’d asked.

  Rose gave up the artifact. The artifact They thought was more important than anyone’s life, Rose gave it up for her.

  “Ellen!” shouted Robin.

  She opened the door, stumbled across the gravel, took the box handed out the window and carried it back to the Jaguar. She sat down, the box on her lap. Something inside chimed. Her muscles cramped. Mustn’t hurt it. It was more important than her life. To Robin. But not to Them … I believe!

  Robin climbed into the Jaguar and switched on the engine. He was still grinning, tight-like. “Fasten your seat belt. If we stopped suddenly you’d crush the box.”

  She fastened her belt. Robin pulled onto the road. In the wing mirror Glastonbury Tor grew smaller and disappeared behind the trees and hedgerows. Ellen opened her dry mouth and said, “You scared me, there.”

  “Scared Rose, too, didn’t I? I humbled her, as I promised.”

  “Good job I was there for you, with the house and all. Part of the divine plan, wasn’t it?”

  The green eyes flashed at her. “Yes. Of course.”

  A chill like the point of a knife traced Ellen’s spine. He hadn’t ever chosen her just because of the house, had he? He wanted her for herself, not Alf’s stupid sodding house.

  “You’d like to stop at a posh hotel, wouldn’t you?” Robin asked.

  She didn’t answer. She felt the knife at her throat—he was always stabbing her, with the knife, with his body, with his words. He told her it was Them who’d hurt her. But even too-sodding-pretty-by-half Rose and too-sodding-clever-by-half Maggie didn’t stab her. Anna was kind to her, even if she was heathen. And Sean sat with her in front of the telly, rubbing her neck and shoulders. She couldn’t ever go back to him, not now.

  If she couldn’t trust Robin who could she trust? If he wasn’t the truth and the light then who was? Or was there any truth, any light at all?

  “I want you in Canterbury December thirty-first,” he said. “For the final battle.”

  “And then?” she asked.

  “Why then,” he said, not half sarkey, “I’ll prove my devotion to you.”

  Like fun you will, she thought, and took the thought back, forcing it down until it choked her. I believe.

  The mobile chirped. Robin reached inside his coat and pulled out the knife, the knife Calum gave Vivian long since, as a joke, like, but the stupid cow thought it was an artifact. Chucking it on the floor at Ellen’s feet, Robin pulled out the mobile. “Fitzroy. Oh, Mountjoy.”

  He scowled. The car swerved. Ellen shut her eyes and clutched the box in both hands. The lid went loose. The chime was loud, insistent, but Robin didn’t seem to be hearing it.

  “So some prat at the station told you Dewar took it away with him, is that supposed to excuse your losing it! May your soul scream forever in the darkness!” His voice burned like acid. “What? Yes, perhaps you can redeem yourself…”

  Forever in the darkness. By Robin’s word, that’s where Mum was now.

  “…December thirty-first,” Robin concluded, switched off, and thrust the mobile into his coat. He overtook one car, then another, whipping back and forth, faster and faster.

  The lid fell from the box. Inside Ellen saw a gold dish like a tureen. She’d never seen anything so brilliant, tiny gold beads on the handles and the base arranged in patterns that had no beginning and no end. The colors filled the swirls clear and bright. The gold gleamed.

  Robin swerved again. With a peal like a bell the gold lid slipped aside, revealing a flattish glass bowl. Ordinary glass, not especially pretty, thick and uneven. That was never Jesus’s cup, holding his wine, holding his blood. It was nothing but an idolatrous artifact.

  The glass was clear, and yet light welled from it and into it like a spring morning in the midst of winter. Robin shuddered. The car veered across the road, jounced against the far curb, veered back again. “Cover that up, you gormless bint! Now!”

  Ellen covered the box. But her eyes were still dazzled. Her ears still rang with that soft chime. If the artifact had no power why wouldn’t Robin let her look at it? If he was the truth and the light, why was it that the Cup was filled with light and he was … It was like he was afraid of it, Robin was. Who’d never shed any blood for her. It was her who was always bleeding for him.

  Robin said he’d take her up to heaven with him. What
if there was no heaven? What if death was the end and there was nothing more, no joy but no pain, either? Was that why Mum died, so she wouldn’t be frightened, so she wouldn’t doubt, not any more?

  Robin’s hands were clenched on the steering wheel, face flat white. The sun dipped behind a cloud and the landscape darkened. A thin rim of gold light showed beneath the lid of the box. Robin said it was a lie. I believe Robin.

  In the back of her mind, Ellen heard Rose’s voice asking, But does he believe in you? And she answered, No.

  Here it was December twenty-third, Maggie thought. Probably the most important two months in her life, and they were nearly gone.

  She and Thomas walked past Beckett’s Pub—“no relation,” he said—and on down Silver Street. The shop windows, filled with New Age tchotchkes, were decorated with tinsel and holly. In the cold sunlight the shadow of St. John’s steeple pointed to the northwest. Tomorrow morning Maggie and the students were heading east.

  “I hate to leave Glastonbury,” she said, trying to keep her voice relaxed. “Not all the New Age stuff makes it past the you’ve-got-to-be-kidding threshold, but loonies, theologians, whatever, they’re still trying to solve the mystery of the nature of God.”

  “Most solutions are positive ones,” Thomas said.

  “The ones that aren’t stand out because they’re unusual. Yeah, I get it.” Maggie walked beside Thomas through the Abbey gateway.

  He pointed upward. Two contrails crossed in the blue sky above the broken towers of the Abbey church. “In hoc vinces.”

  “In this sign conquer. Constantine.” Their game of literary/historical line-and-response would be the least of a hundred things she’d miss once they were separated. However they would be separated. Having him as a pen pal would be better than having him—gone.

  Maggie took his arm, lightly, knowing that clutching at him would do neither of them any good. Placing his warm, strong hand over hers, Thomas led her on toward the transept that had once been his chapel.

  Rose and Mick were standing at the spot where Vivian Morgan died. In the almost two months since then the scuffed and muddy patch of grass had healed into a thick greenish-gold carpet. Rose gestured. Mick put his arm around her. This morning they’d been working out the logistics of her transferring to Glasgow or Edinburgh for her senior year. More power to them, Maggie thought. At least they could plan a normal relationship, although whether they actually got to have one was another matter.

  Anna, Sean, and his camcorder came across the lawn from the Lady Chapel, Anna saying, “Poetic justice, perhaps, for Celt-descended Henry VIII to eject the Roman church from Britain. A shame he did it so violently.”

  Sean shrugged. “Sometimes violence is the only way to make your point.”

  “The question,” Maggie said, “is whether your point is a valid one.” Was it nature or nurture that squeezed some people’s imaginations into such small holes? The business with the Cup had left Sean bewildered, and resentful at his bewilderment. And yet he’d done well in the seminar, his literal mind grasping military tactics faster than her own often chaotic one.

  “Elizabeth I’s alchemist, John Dee,” said Thomas, “supposedly found a book written by St. Dunstan in the ruins of the Abbey. And in his day they were ruins, not this manicured park.”

  “A book telling how to turn base metal to gold,” Maggie added, “using the philosopher’s stone. In some stories that’s the stone that broke off Lucifer’s crown when he fell from heaven.”

  “I thought that was the Holy Grail,” said Rose.

  “Both are symbols of what Lucifer lost when he rebelled—wholeness.”

  “So did Dee turn metal into gold?” Sean asked.

  “He died poor in material wealth,” said Thomas.

  “Go figure.” Sean focused his camcorder and moved off toward the signpost marking the site of Arthur’s medieval shrine.

  “Jivan!” Thomas waved.

  Inspector Gupta came striding toward them. “I hear you’re going up to London tomorrow, Maggie.”

  “Yes, it’s time for us to rejoin the other groups. Mick’s coming with us.” Not, she thought with a glance at his arm wrapped securely around Rose’s shoulders, that she’d even try to unglue the young couple. They’d have to separate soon enough.

  “Thomas? You usually spend Christmas in London.”

  “I’ll be helping out at the homeless shelter as usual.”

  In his first life, he’d washed the feet of the beggars gathered at his door. Ostentatious humility? Maggie met Thomas’s wry glance with a smile.

  “We’ve turned up the couple who carried away the Cup on Wednesday,” Gupta reported. “They handed it over to Fitzroy and Ellen Sparrow, no surprise there. We’ll charge them with aiding a theft.”

  “What’s their version?” Maggie asked wearily.

  “God told them to destroy objects of superstition and heresy, the Somerset Constabulary is conspiring to restrain their free expression of religion, and their solicitor will be phoning. He’ll need to wait in the queue, we’ve already three suits pending.”

  “I see.” Rose rolled her eyes. “Freedom of religion for themselves but not for anybody else.”

  “Swenholt released both the Soulises,” Jivan went on. “They’ll also have to answer charges of aiding a theft. But just now…”

  “…they’re free to make more trouble,” concluded Mick.

  “Mountjoy was seen in Hexham on the Wednesday. If Swenholt can lay him by the heels he can charge him with assaulting Armstrong as well as theft.”

  “And my dad?” asked Mick. “And Vivian?”

  Gupta looked around the grounds of the Abbey as though seeking inspiration. A cloud passed over the sun and over his face as well. “The inquiry into Vivian Morgan’s death will run on for a time, I expect, and be shelved, and at the end of the day be filed under unsolved cases. I’m every bit as certain as you are that Fitzroy murdered her. But the only witness was your father, Mick. If it’s any consolation, now that Mountjoy’s out of the picture, no one’s likely to conclude that Calum killed Vivian himself and tried to shop Fitzroy.”

  Mick looked down at his feet, lips taut. Rose wrapped her arm around his waist.

  The sun shone out again, making Gupta’s eyes into gleaming jet—if jet, Maggie thought, could ever be intelligent. “However, Swenholt tells me that when Stanley Felton heard Reg Soulis had been released from custody, he turned Queen’s evidence. He admits to helping Soulis kidnap Calum from the phone box in Carlisle and drive him to Housesteads, where they met Fitzroy. But when Fitzroy and Soulis told Felton to wait in the car park whilst they went up to the ruins with Calum, he followed, thinking they were after cutting him out of some moneymaking plot. As they’d done before.”

  “He saw what happened?” prompted Mick.

  “He overheard a violent argument, Fitzroy tearing strips off Calum. Then he heard a blow, and a body falling. And Fitzroy, very cold and tight, ticking Soulis off for acting without orders but for doing what needed doing even so. Now Swenholt’s people are reassessing the crime scene evidence.”

  “Soulis killed my dad,” said Mick, a catch in his voice, whether of anger or sorrow Maggie couldn’t tell.

  “We’ll charge him as soon as we find him,” Gupta said. “But Fitzroy himself—well, Thomas, you said that he’s beyond human justice.”

  Mick’s face was pale but his chin was high. “Oh, we’ll bring him to justice, right enough. On Hogmanay. New Year’s Eve.”

  God help us, Maggie added to herself.

  “I’ll be there,” Gupta went on. “I don’t suppose I’ll be providing much more than moral support, but…”

  Thomas smiled. “Why, Jivan. How very good of you. Moral support is just what we’ll be needing.”

  “You can count on me, too,” said Anna with a firm nod.

  Sean came cruising back again, taped the entire group standing against the walls of the chapel, and asked, “Inspector, have you heard anything about Ellen?”


  “No, lad, we haven’t.”

  “Anna and I talked to Alf and made a case for her, you know. It wasn’t her fault Bess died, and Alf’s pissed off at Fitzroy more than he is at her. He says he’ll take her back in.”

  “If we find her,” Gupta said, “we’ll tell her.”

  “She’ll need psychiatric help,” said Rose.

  Maggie added, “Not to mention exorcism.”

  “No kidding.” Sean moved on, the camcorder whirring.

  “Was talking to Alf your idea or Sean’s?” Maggie asked Anna.

  “His,” Anna answered. “He wants to see her again before we go back home. As much to tell her ‘I told you so’ about Robin, I think, but even so, there’s hope for him yet. If only there’s hope for her.”

  Thomas stated, “There’s hope.”

  “Hey,” Sean called from the Lady Chapel. “I need some bodies in this shot.”

  “Bad choice of words,” Rose said, but still she tugged at Mick’s hand. His sober face cracked into a thin smile and they walked away with Anna.

  It isn’t hard, Maggie told herself, to figure out why Ellen had fallen for Robin. Because she was weak and he appeared strong.

  Gupta tilted his head to the side. “Thomas, I’m thinking you’re one of the old monks who can remember his past life. No,” he said as Thomas started to speak, “let my imagination enjoy itself. The next time we play chess, we can discuss it. Merry Christmas, Thomas, Maggie.”

  “The blessings of the season upon you,” Thomas told him.

  “Thank you,” added Maggie, and Gupta walked off toward the gate.

  Thomas raised his face to watch a dove land on the shattered top of the tower, a white ideogram on the gray stone. “St. Columba. Mary Magdalene. The brotherhood of the Grail. The Holy Spirit.” He looked back down at Maggie. “Sorry. I find myself continually looking out signs and portents.”

  Maggie looked for her own signs and portents in his face—the face of a man who didn’t just appear strong, but who was. “What are you seeing? The Old Church? The medieval Abbey? The ruins Dee saw?”