A Monstrous Regiment of Women - Laurie R. King [42]
“Does Margery know it was suicide?”
“Oh no. I’m sure she doesn’t. She was devastated.”
“How sad.”
“It was. Mostly it’s sad Delia couldn’t have made a match. She would have made someone an utterly devoted wife.”
“Even if that someone was another woman.”
“Well, yes.”
“Would Margery have approved?”
“There are several woman couples in the Temple, she certainly doesn’t seem to mind them. She seems to feel it depends on the people, that the love is the important thing.”
We walked a few steps before I passed judgement.
“Strikes me as dead boring,” I said flatly, and she started to giggle.
“I’d have to agree,” she said finally, and then: “Are you a virgin, Mary? Oh dear, that sounds blasphemous,” and she giggled again.
“Yes, I am,” I replied. She looked sharply over at me.
“But only just?” she asked shrewdly.
“But only just,” I confirmed. “And you?”
“No. We were engaged, after all.”
“Don’t apologise, for heaven’s sake.”
“Oh, I don’t regret it, not at all. To tell you the truth, I’ve missed Miles terribly. Not having him at all is almost worse than having him drugged. I hope to God…”
She didn’t need to say what she hoped. I put my arm across her shoulder and hugged her, thickly through all the garments, and we walked on in friendship to hear the words of Margery Childe.
As we approached the building, the air came alive with the vibration of voices raised in harmony. Ronnie smiled and quickened her step.
“Good, they’re still singing. We haven’t missed Margery. Come on.”
She led me, not in through the ranks of double doors that opened into the back of the hall, but up a side stairway marked ticket holders only. The usher/guard nodded at our greetings and we hurried as the noise from inside came to an end. Amidst coughs and shuffles and the dying hum of speech, we entered a door marked private. Inside was the Temple’s Inner Circle, most of whom I had met the other night. They made room for us, a couple of them looking me over and dismissing me because of my clothing, and then the hall dimmed and fell quiet as all eyes went to the diminutive figure on the stage.
She was wearing a robe of darkly luminous silver-grey, and she seemed to glow. It took me some minutes to realise that she was in fact being followed by a spotlight only marginally brighter than the stage lights, and I smiled at the professionalism of the effect. However, I had to admit that not all the glow was an artifice. The magnetic pull I had begun to discount as my imagination was there, stronger than on Monday already and building as the evening—I cannot bring myself to call it a service—wore on. Her movements were languid, her eyes dark as she talked about the nature of love.
She waited for complete attention, for utter silence, before she dropped her first words into the packed hall, nearly seven hundred pairs of ears, I heard later, a quarter of them men.
“My friends,” she said, her voice low and vibrant, “tonight’s topic is love.” Inaudible ripples ran through the room. She let them die down, then suddenly smiled. “On the other hand, love is hardly a topic about which we can speak. Love is the force behind speech. Love is the thing that speaks us. To quote my friend John, ‘God is love.’ A person who does not love does not know God. And, when one loves, one loves God.
“But, what does he mean by love? What do we mean by love?
“Think for a moment about another word: light. Light. If I were to take a stack of paper and give a sheet of it to each one of you and ask you to use it to describe what the word light means, do you imagine I should find even two pages that matched? I would get drawings: a lightbulb with its twist of filament, a gas fixture, a candle, the sun.” She