Sheen on the Silk - Anne Perry [234]
It was a moment before Anna’s voice would come, and even then it was husky, a little tremulous. “Yes, Majesty. Thank you.”
Nicephoras reached out his hand and took her elbow, guiding her backward, out of Michael’s presence.
As soon as they were alone, in a corridor beyond the great hall, she turned to him. “Will they imprison Helena? What happens when the city … falls?”
“The Varangian Guard will break her neck,” he told her. “With Charles’s fleet on the horizon, no one will care. Come. I will find women’s clothes for you, and while you are changing, I will write the letter and the emperor will sign it. Then you must go.” He smiled. “I will miss you.”
She touched his hand. “I will miss you, too. There is no one else with whom I can talk as we have.” Then she looked away, in case he found the loneliness in her too much an echo of his own.
Nicephoras went with her down to the quayside. The summer night was brilliant with stars, but it was too late for the water taxis. Instead there was one of the emperor’s barges waiting to take her across the Golden Horn to Galata. This was the last time she would set foot in Constantinople. She was glad it was too dark for him to see the grief in her face, the love of all that was over and on the brink of destruction.
“You cannot come back,” he warned. “I will send messages to your servants. It is better if they stay here for a few days, at the very least. Helena’s friends and allies will be watching. Esaias and whoever else, Demetrios, perhaps, and others. Helena was like her mother in one thing: Come victory or despair, triumph or ruin, she never forgot a vengeance. You do, sometimes easily, and Zoe thought that was a weakness in you. It kept you from being truly like her.”
She was surprised. “Like her?”
“She saw in you her own passion for life, but weakened by the power to forgive. But I think in the end she realized it was really your strength. It made you whole, where she was not.”
A tide of guilt swept over Anna that she was not worthy of this praise. Certainly she had forgiven many things, small and unimportant. But she had kept the greatest ones, where the injury had wounded her where no healing was possible. She had never forgiven her husband, Eustathius. She had hidden the revulsion she had felt, the guilt because she could not love him, could not bear to carry his child, or for the hunger that had burned inside her, unanswered. She had never let go of blaming him for her own act of provoking that terrible searing, debasing fight. She remembered the shame even more than the pain and the blood.
Was she blaming him because he had allowed all his frustration, his fury of helplessness, confusion, and defeat, to explode in violence? Or was it her own guilt because she had half wanted him to descend so far?
Yes, he had been brutal, but that was a burden on his soul that she could not reach or help now. The time when perhaps she could have was past, and she had wasted it. That was something else for which she needed forgiveness.
She tried to think of what had been good in him. It was difficult, until she thought first of what had been wounded also, and then the pity came, scouring deep with the awareness that she should have been gentler. If she had helped him, instead of lashing out from her own hurt, he might have found the best in himself.
She remembered his skill with animals, how he spoke softly to his horses, sat up all night with them when they were wounded or ill, his total joy at the birth of a foal, and how he had praised the mare, stroked her, loved her. She found the tears wet on her own face with regret that she had let that slip away from him, selfish with her own need.
She let go of her anger and in the darkness bowed her head.
I’m sorry. She said the words in her mind, humbly and passionately. Please God, forgive me. Help me to be whole in spirit, to give others the