“Romance is ever attended by Guilt,” he said casually. He drew his sword again. He motioned. “Come to me, Glory.” He glared.
“You threaten me now. With the very death from which you saved me, and so proudly, too. Very well, Captain Quire. I’ll return to the block for you.” She began to descend.
He snarled and he took her with both his hands, abandoning his blade. “Gloriana!”
“Captain Quire.” She was stone in his grip.
He dropped his hands.
She walked past him, through the cold, haunted corridors, and into the gardens. They smelled of warm autumn, still.
She crossed the gardens and went through her private gate. She passed her maze, her silent fountains, her dying flowers. She entered her own bedroom.
He had not followed.
Recalling her anxiety, she thought, for her daughter, she entered her old secret lodgings and faced the door to the seraglio.
She passed, on yielding carpet, through into the soothing dark. None lived here now. She recalled that her daughter had been sent to Sussex. She made to return, but paused. Suddenly a thousand bloody images came to her. “Oh!”
In the absolute darkness of the seraglio she fell upon her cushions and began to weep. “Quire!”
Quire spoke from somewhere. “Glory.”
A delusion. She looked up. Beyond the archway into the next vault there was a candle burning. It moved towards her, revealing Quire’s tortured face, floating.
She stood up, stone again.
He sighed and put the candle into the bracket on one of the buttresses. “I love you. I shall have you. It’s my right, Glory.”
“You have none. You are a murderer, a spy, a deceiver.”
“You hate me?”
“I know you. You are selfish. You have no heart.”
“Enough,” he said. “It was no wish of mine. I betray all my own faith. But you taught me to believe in love, to accept it. Won’t you accept mine? And love yourself, too.”
“I love Albion. Nothing but Albion. And Gloriana is Albion.”
“Is Gloriana never mere Self?”
For the brevity of an insect’s memory this notion gave her pause, placing thought where only blazing impulse ruled. Then she shook her fiery head and blood spoke: “We are the same. Gloriana and Albion are One. That is our destiny, Captain Quire.”
“It is your doom, madam.” A beast moved beneath his skin and then was immediately harnessed. His voice bore all the innuendo and amusement which had charmed her and sought to charm her still. “Shall I, then, rape Albion?” He drew his sword and as if in play placed the point to her throat. In her turn, she pressed towards it, challenging him to kill her; and her smile bore all the deadly power, all the reasoning sincerity he had seen on no other face but his own.
“Albion is not commanded by brute force, Captain Quire.” She stroked her neck like a cat’s against his rapier, her playfulness in imitation of his own, her voice a soft purr, its note as accurate as a Ludgate chorister’s. “Albion is not raped.”
The beast took control of his eyes. He reached and twisted a fold of her gown in his fingers, his shaking fingers, and he tore it away from her. The beast took control of his breath, his noises. She did not move as he tore with both his hands at her shift and tore and tore at every scrap of cloth until she was naked. And still she did not move, but now stared with contemptuous dismay into his face. She was a vibrant lioness to his thwarted lion. He dropped his sword. He seized her breasts and her buttocks, her womb, her mouth. She would not move, save to sway a little when he threatened to make her fall. He reached, half-clambering up her thigh, towards her head.
He pulled her down to the cushions. He spread her legs. He ripped away his breeches to reveal what she had seen so many times before.
It was then that a sudden determination came upon her. She refused to weep for the love he meant to destroy; she refused to plead with him not to reduce himself and her to this. She became filled by an overwhelming sense of outrage-an outrage that this should not happen to her, that he, in turn should not commit the act he intended, should not destroy the one thing, other than himself, he had ever valued.
She felt as if she were awakening at last from a trance only a shade less deep than her mother’s, and one which had like origin; a trance half Terror, half Divine Power. A burden of unseemly responsibility.
Now she understood the only way in which she might stop Quire’s terrible deed from taking place. She could not let that deed occur, be it in the name of Albion, in the name of Peace, or Revenge-or any name that disguised or brought spurious Chivalry and false Romance to the brutal actuality of his intended crime.
Now, by the medium of her furious certainty, all her emotions were brought in check. She studied his well-muscled arse as it arched to plunge. Over his shoulder she saw the knife, sheathed at his belt, its hilt easily within her reach. She found it. She took the silk-bound bone in her hand and pulled the weapon from its scabbard as he grunted and cursed and kissed and prepared for his important heave.
She raised the dagger, looking beyond him into the candlelight and a sudden image of blood-washed stone, sharp and hard, as it appeared so frequently in her dreams. The image brought burning tears, yet served only to strengthen her resolve.
She could have struck him easily, slain him almost before he knew the truth. But there was no hesitation in her actions. She had set her course and would not falter. For the first time in her life she acted with a sureness born not of physical terror but of psychic dread. Her anger grew as she thought of Montfallcon, training her like a bird, to know the fear of failing in her duties so that he might then place the burden of her blood upon her and then, again, teach her the ways not of losing that burden but of bearing it. And thus Hern’s daughter was made Albion and tranquillity enforced upon the Realm.
“No!” she cried. “No! You shall not rape me!” And with easy strength she placed the knife directly between his legs, startled to sense a power so awful that it thrilled every nerve in her body. Her queenly conscience was shed not through the familiar submissions with which she had earlier sought to grant herself release, but through this manlier understanding of habitual threat, of naked power, unchecked by courtesy or chivalry. Her threat carried with it an unwavering intention of pursuit to the bitter end. It was a threat as chilling and deliberate as any Quire had ever employed against his victims. Perhaps for the first time in his life Captain Quire knew hindrance, knew dread, knew fearful respect as she smiled, in mirror of his old habitual triumph, and she let the razoring steel rest upon his retreating manhood.
That single word, that brief syllable, had released her, had returned to her the ownership of her spirit and her flesh. She possessed her senses, her blood, her sex. She possessed them for no one else. She had responsibility to no one else. She knew an exhilaration which yet did not confuse her threat to the baffled Captain who in her face perceived something which distracted him from his own imminent unsexing and brought a different, disbelieving smile. “Glory?”
She was no longer Albion. No longer justice, mercy and wisdom, no longer the personification of righteousness, the hope and ideal of her people. She was Glory. She was Self. She was fighting not for principle but in her own interest, for everything she had ever honoured. Now she understood her commonality as well as her singularity, of what she shared with all women, of what she shared with men and of what was unique in her. At that moment she ceased to be the embodiment of anything but her own desperate, uncorrupted soul.
He stumbled back, tangled in his dark velvet clothing. The beast cowered for an instant in his eyes before fleeing entirely exorcised, and leaving him looking at her with the awesome ancient hermit might have lavished upon the face of a deity revealed, for the first time, in all its mighty omnipotence. He could not speak.