30. Chapter Thirty
Chapter thirty
The castle had finally quieted into weary stillness. Even the yard had gone still. Only the rain remained, soft now against the outer stone.
Reginald came to the chapel under watch.
The guard followed at a distance through the passage and stopped outside the chapel door, close enough to remind him he was not free, far enough to allow him the dignity of prayer if prayer had been his purpose.
It was not.
Reginald found Aingeal standing alone near the front rail. He stopped just inside the doorway.
Two candles had already been lit. Their flames trembled in the draft, thin and stubborn. She held one more taper in her hand and had not yet lowered it to the wick. Gold light caught in the dark fall of her red hair and along the line of her cheek, but it did nothing to warm the grief in her face.
He had come to find her and still was not prepared to face her. He was not certain he would survive what he meant to say, and some old part of him still preferred a defended lie to naked truth, even now. It was easier.
Then Aingeal spoke without turning. “If you have come to tell me you are leaving before dawn, save it.”
His mouth tightened. “No.”
She lowered the taper at last. The third candle caught. She stood a moment longer with her head bowed, then set the spent taper aside and turned to face him.
The chapel made honesty harder. Perhaps that was why he had come there. The saints on the walls. The crucifix above the altar. The cold stone underfoot. None of it would save him from himself, but it stripped away the comfort of pretending.
Aingeal looked tired beyond what sleep could mend. There was no softness in her face tonight, but neither was there the raw, torn look she had worn after the council and the fire. She looked like a woman standing upright because there was no one left to do it for her.
Reginald came farther into the chapel, but not so near that she would think herself cornered. He stopped before the second pew and let his hands rest at his sides. To fold them would have looked too much like prayer, and he had not come asking God for anything.
God had never given him anything. He did not pretend He would start now. “I have told you what happened with Donal,” he said. “And who I am.”
Aingeal did not move. “Yes.”
“I have not told you about Canterbury.”
Aingeal’s gaze held his. She did not invite him to continue, but she did not stop him either.
“When we rode to Canterbury, I believed myself justified.” He made himself say it plainly. “I did not wake that morning hungry for blood. I did not go there thinking murder. The matter had become poison at court. In hall. In camp.”
Her face remained still.
“Thomas Becket placed himself above the king,” Reginald continued.
“Or that is how I saw him then. A man raised high who chose the Church over the crown and called that righteousness.” His mouth hardened.
“I believed the realm weakened every time such defiance stood unanswered. I believed obedience to the king was obedience to order. I believed order was mercy.”
Something sharpened in her expression.
He saw it and did not turn away. “Henry did not command murder,” he said.
“He raged. He cursed. He spoke as angry men in power speak when they are too used to being obeyed.” He drew one slow breath.
“For years, I told myself that what followed was still obedience. That a king’s fury carried enough authority that a servant should hear command in it, even when command had not been plainly given.
” He held her gaze. “I do not believe that any longer.”
Aingeal said nothing.
The chapel was so quiet he could hear the small hiss of candle flame.
“We all rode hard from rage into action,” he said.
“But the other knights listened to me. We spoke to one another as men do when they want to call haste conviction. But if I strip away all the language I have used to bear it, this is what remains.” His voice roughened.
“The king did not command murder, and I was ready too quickly to make his anger into permission.”
Aingeal’s hand tightened on the edge of the rail.
He could not stop now. If he did, he would only build another hiding place out of silence and call it restraint.
“I have said for years that I obeyed,” he went on.
“That is true. But it is not enough. Obedience was part of it. Loyalty was part of it. But not all.” His jaw tightened.
“I was not only obedient. I wanted the matter ended. I wanted the conflict cut through. I wanted steel to do what speech had failed to do, because steel was the language I trusted. And I knew too well what sort of man I was with steel in my hand.”
He closed his eyes briefly, and the cathedral came back immediately. Cold. Becket’s refusal to bend. The first blow. The speed of the second.
When he opened his eyes, Aingeal was still there. Still listening. Still making him stand beneath the whole weight of himself.
“I told myself afterward that I had served Henry,” he said. “I told myself kings are not always plain. I told myself I was the blade of another man’s will.”
Aingeal drew in a quiet breath.
“I do not say this because I have become holy enough to despise myself,” he said. “Nor because repentance has finally struck me like lightning. It has not. I do not come to you claiming I am remade.” His voice lowered. “I am not.”
Her eyes had gone bright with the effort of hearing something that mattered too much.
He took one step nearer. “But I know this now. I chose. Henry was angry, and I chose. Others rode with me, and still I chose. I pushed them forward. I led them. The Church and the crown stood in conflict, and I wanted force to settle what I believed too dangerous to leave unresolved.” His voice dropped nearly to a whisper.
“I cannot say I merely obeyed and still have the sentence remain honest.”
Aingeal’s mouth parted slightly.
She looked at him not as she had in the hall, not as she had on the battlements, not as she had in the aftermath of the rider’s accusation. Something in her gaze changed. Recognition, perhaps. The kind that wounded because it saw too clearly.
He went on because now that he had begun stripping away the old language, he could see how much of his life had been wrapped in it.
“When I first thought of telling you, I told myself I wanted your understanding.” He paused.
Then forced out the uglier truth beneath it.
“But even that was not enough. I wanted your understanding so you would see me as more than the worst thing I had done. I wanted you to believe there had been something honorable in me even then.” His jaw hardened.
“And I wanted it because I hoped your understanding might spare me the full cost of your judgment.”
Aingeal looked down.
For one terrible instant, he thought he had pushed too far. That she would turn from him and leave him standing there with his truth laid out between the candles like another body for burial. He almost stopped. Instead, he said the one thing he had not yet made himself speak to her.
“I loved you before I was honest enough to deserve it.”
Her head came up sharply.
“That is true,” he said. “And it was another wrong. Not because loving you was wrong, but because I let myself keep loving you while the lie still stood. I let myself take tenderness and hope from you without first giving you my full truth.” His voice lowered.
“That is why I am here now. Not to ask forgiveness. Not to be comforted. Not to plead for a place I have not earned. Only because you deserved the whole truth from my own mouth.”
Aingeal’s fingers loosened from the rail. She looked as if she had forgotten she was holding it at all.
For a long moment, neither of them spoke. Rain whispered at the walls. The candles burned low and steady.
At last, Aingeal said, “You chose.”
He had spent years hiding from the simplicity of that word. “Yes.”
“The king did not command.”
“No.”
“You heard authority in his anger because it suited what you were already willing to do.”
He held her gaze. “Yes.” That word cost him more than all the others.
Aingeal closed her eyes. When she opened them again, there was something in them that had not been there before. Knowledge. Not of the event. She had known that already in outline. But of him. Not the dark man half-hidden beneath Donal’s name. Not the murderer wrapped in old justifications.
The real man.
Violent. Loyal in dangerous ways. Honest, too late. Capable of love and self-deception in the same breath. A man only now beginning to look steadily at the cost of calling force duty, simply because force had always come easiest to his hand.
It was the most naked he had ever stood before another living soul.
Aingeal looked at him for a long time. “This is the first time,” she said, “I have heard you without a shield.”
The words struck him with more force than absolution ever could have.
He bowed his head, not to escape her gaze, but because the truth of it was too heavy to meet standing straight. He half expected her to flee, but when he looked up, she was still there.
Still wounded and still beyond his reach. But she had not turned away.
And for that one breath, it was more mercy than he deserved.