Chapter 1 #4
Margaret’s unfortunate new husband might be stubborn, hard-headed, and prone to growling over perfectly reasonable points of logic, but to her relief, he wasn’t nearly as committed to martyrdom as she’d feared.
When she arrived at the library the next morning, she found an ancient wooden chest sitting beside the wingchair she had claimed.
On top of the chest lay a small piece of paper covered in an untidy scrawl:
Handle with care, if you please.
Oh, for goodness’ sake! Did he still understand so little about her?
But Margaret had already spent years proving herself against every male scholar who’d been made furious by her arrival at Morningford College, including the latest smugly entitled Morningford descendant, who’d grown up on its tree-lined campus and fully expected to take every top prize himself by right of birth.
So, she only rolled her eyes at the patronizing tone of her husband’s instruction before pushing open the chest and diving into exactly the sort of wonders she’d always dreamed of discovering.
Even mere dilettantes, of course, knew that the legendary Rose of Normandy had been the means by which the first werewolves—those infamous ‘Wolves of Normandy’—had been created by William I to power his invasion of England in 1066.
Vampires had been the gem’s next magical legacy, an act of furious new creation by King John when too many of his own lupine barons collaborated with the French in their attempted invasion of England in 1216.
However, no one—except, apparently, the obscure Riven family, hidden deep within the ominous green depths of Dartmoor—had known exactly what happened to the Rose in the centuries afterwards.
For at least some time, the royal family had certainly held it with their other, less magical and dangerous crown jewels, but once the Wars of the Roses had begun and the ‘ruling family’ become more of a temporary condition, the Rose of Normandy had become a hotly-sought item of power, passed back and forth in a series of bitter betrayals and bribes.
Even now, no historian could say for certain which family—Lancaster or York—had been the one to wield it on that final, monstrous day when the shambling undead rose on Bosworth Field.
Both armies had been cut down in the wreckage of that battle, and it had taken years for the successful Richard III’s armies to destroy the final remnants of that horror.
The Yorks, of course, all claimed that it had been the vicious upstart Henry Tudor who had done it, the gem smuggled to him beforehand by his treacherous mother.
The Lancasters, licking their wounds (sometimes literally, in wolf-form) claimed that, on the contrary, it was Richard who had done it in vile desperation to hold his throne, and all his claims otherwise were lies meant to smear the blame on their dead champion.
Regardless, in the wake of that unholy devastation, both sides had agreed—with a stern Papal bull lending added weight to their final treaty—that the gem was far too dangerous to ever again be used in warfare.
It was in the wake of that same catastrophe that groundbreaking laws had finally been passed and agreed by even the highest of nobles regarding their own Rose-gifted powers, and British society had shifted—with a mere two dozen or so executions along the way—to its current code of carefully civil supernatural and human coexistence.
Over the years, of course, numerous rumors had circulated, telling conflicting stories of the gem’s travels since its final use at Bosworth.
Some swore it had been buried far beneath the Tower of London to be held under the ravens’ watchful guard forevermore; others that it had been stolen by one of Henry Tudor’s French supporters as they’d fled, and then gifted by their king to the Pope, to be held secret and safe within the Vatican itself.
If nothing else, the fact that the gem hadn’t been wielded in even the most vicious heights of the bloody religious wars that swept the nation two hundred years later had always made it clear, at least to Margaret, that Britain’s royal family no longer held the gem.
No ruler as rash and arrogant as Richard VI could have possibly restrained himself from that temptation, had it been to hand—and the satisfaction of having her longtime thesis vindicated by these records now within her grasp felt even more satisfying than winning the last department honors over her rival had, two months earlier.
If she were ever to see Gerald Morningford again, Margaret would take great enjoyment in pointing out her victory against him in this intellectual arena, too, after all of the absurd and bombastic theories that he’d shouted over her various public lectures across the years.
It would be interesting to see whether he would be able to summon any more articulate a response than the voiceless, sputtering rage and gestured threats he’d made after that most recent department meeting—or his usual bitter rants about the injustice of female students even being allowed into the college founded by his ancestors.
However, the thought of Britain’s current playboy ruler ever holding the gem in his own decidedly loose grip, with so many tensions mounting in the continent beyond, was enough to subsume Margaret’s brimming satisfaction with cold dread...and add even more determination to her cause.
By the time her husband finally deigned to appear in the library that evening, she had read every crumbling record, made ten pages of closely-scribbled notes to begin with, and was nearly bursting with the need for action.
“You rang for me, madam?” Lord Riven’s tone was wry, but he strolled forward with careless animal grace, holding a wineglass full of swirling red liquid and avoiding her carefully sorted piles of paper on the couch to sink into the generous wingchair on the other side of the empty fireplace.
For the first time since they’d met, he’d had a proper shave, revealing a strong and surprisingly well-shaped jaw, but she didn’t have time for any more than a passing note of that new shift in his appearance.
“It all comes down to the timing,” she told him fiercely.
“You said that unlike me in my own situation, you’d asked questions and found evidence to prove that the new law around undead property is real.
But I have a far more urgent question. If it took full effect yesterday, it must have been decided months ago—and debated well before that.
What was your man of business about, waiting so long to inform you? ”
“Do you imagine I didn’t ask him that as well?
” Lord Riven cocked one imperious eyebrow.
“Shaw assumed all along what anyone would—that even if that shameful act did pass, the king would veto it, as any other ruler in our long history would have done. It was a nasty shock to him, as well, and a mistake in judgement. Still, Shaw’s a good man in his own way. ”
Riven sighed, swirling the bloody vintage in his wineglass as his brows lowered and his brooding gaze turned inwards.
“Sadly, it’s my own fault that he waited so long.
Apparently, he’d been searching for months for any means by which I might evade that law, even in the remote chance that it did take effect.
..but he didn’t dare wake me from Sleep without having that clever solution already to hand.
I’d strictly forbidden him from waking me early, you see, unless the house was literally burning down around me.
Apparently, I was a bit too firm in that injunction.
I certainly didn’t intend to frighten him out of all his wits. ”
He winced. “Obviously, I hadn’t expected Parliament to act so rashly within my planned two years of rest, nor for King Whatsisname to actually allow it.”
“Thomas the Second,” Margaret told him as she put together the new points of data. “It’s been King Thomas II for the last five years now.”
“Who can keep track? I stopped bothering half a century ago.” Her husband shook his leonine mane, visibly steeled himself, and then took a fast, deep swig from his glass, his face tightening with unmistakable distaste.
Intellectual curiosity pricked at Margaret’s focus. “Is that cow’s blood or pig?” According to Mrs. Haworth, the local butcher supplied both on a daily basis.
“The taste is much the same in either case.” He gave her a tight smile, his voice taking on a wry note. “Trust me, if you’d care to offer a better option for tonight...” His gaze slid pointedly to her exposed throat, beneath her upswept hair.
She rolled her eyes. “Hardly.” They might be rubbing along better now than they had been in the beginning, but they were not sharing the sort of relationship required for that scandalous type of intimacy.
..no matter how pleasurable it was indeed widely rumored to be.
“However, I can offer you some comfort. Shelve any guilt that you’ve been feeling!
You didn’t frighten that man at all. In fact, I’d say you frightened him nowhere near enough. He’s taken shameless advantage of you.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I wasn’t the first to have read through these private records in the past year,” Margaret told him.
For a moment, her husband was perfectly still. Then he said, his voice a low and ominous rumble, “How could you possibly know that?”
“Whoever was rifling through them was careless with his packing-up afterwards—and he certainly hadn’t been trained in preservation. He accidentally included a recent gentleman’s magazine among the documents.”
His words gritted out through clenched teeth even as his skin visibly paled. “And how do you know I didn’t do that myself last night, after you retired to bed?”