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Anne rose beside me, crying out with them, her red mouth open and curved, and I knew her for a vampire, eager for blood, as she had sucked mine and turned me, too, into a creature of the night, a creature who had changed into something alien, and lived by others’ blood, even the blood of his friends.

She took my hand, and I rose with her. I had become as she was: just as evil, just as bloodthirsty, just as tainted. Her lips had infected me, corrupted my being. Yet I would not be that way, I would be redeemed.... In vain I looked for an angel. I saw only a dismembered wing lying on the floor, torn from its shoulder harness and with its wax frame sagging and trampled.

My head spun; my senses were suspended. I felt myself following Anne, letting myself be pulled along a dark, muffled, secret passage leading away from the Hall. Westminster was full of such secret ways and connections, fashioned as it was in ancient times. Anne was taking me away, away from the safety of the others, and this moment was one I could no longer avoid or postpone.

Her fingers were slender and cool as the jewels upon them. Her face was seen only in brief licks of light from the guttering torches in their iron sockets. Behind her, her costume streamed out—great, billowing, smokelike puffs. I was drugged; the opium smoke had stunned me, like the smoke from Jane Seymour’s torch putting the bees to sleep.

We were in a chamber. It was a small chamber, hung with filmy draperies. There was a strange odour within. I had never smelled it before, and it bore no lto any other; therefore I cannot describe it, save that it was sweet and caressing.

“The end of the fête,” I said slowly. It seemed my lips were numb.

She drew back her hood, which shrouded her face. The coverings fell and her face, unique and entrancing, was revealed. To see it was to remember, and to relive, and then to enter once more into the past, when it had commanded supreme obedience and longing in my heart.

I knew better, and yet I loved her once again. Almost all of me did. The conquest was not complete, for there were parts of me new-formed since first I had loved her, and those were not in her power to reclaim; those stood apart in clucking denunciation. But for the rest, they rose up like the dead at the Day of Judgment. And once again there was that rush of feeling, of transport, of excitement.

But not quite. It was not quite the same. I knew more now, it had all been spoilt somewhere along the way, and that lodged itself like a stone in a shoe; we may run, and leap, and bound, yet the landing is sharp, and so we do not bound quite so high or exuberantly ever again.

I loved her with all my might and heart; but soul and mind did not enter in. This time they demurred.

She came to me and kissed me.

How many months, how many years ago had I longed for her to do exactly that? There had been a time when I felt near death because she did not. Yet here it came to me, unbidden and unsought, with her body pressed up against mine, and all the gestures I had once so coveted, and while it was exciting, it was not soul-satisfying. I had grown beyond whatever hunger she once could have satisfied.

Yet my body—my Judas-body, ever the betrayer—responded and for an hour or so helped me believe that I had not changed, that all was as it once was.

“My Lord, my love, my dearest—” Her words poured, molten, in my ears. There was, of course, a bed, all bedecked in the sheerest linen, laid with furs and pillows of swan’s down. Anne had arranged all this, had had servitors set it all up, much as I had once done in heated anticipation in my own chambers.

Her words, her hands, her voice, all reached out to me and sought to claim me. Because I was stronger now, and essentially free of her, the appeal was all the more poignant. I could appreciate, as I never had before, the exquisite little things about her: the way she drew aside her clothes, even folding them without actually folding them; her dramatic ability to turn a little