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then the wars began. The wars that ruined us all.
    Most blamed you, some blamed me, but underneath the blaming of our love, hid many other wraths, restless to be vented. What began as good reason became good excuse. The war was pursued long after any advantage for either side.
    I was riding through the burnt fields and bloodied streams, looking for you. My horse picked her way with delicate hooves over the bodies of the dead.
    I had been told you had entered a nunnery, and I found you there at last. Dismounting from my horse, I walked to the walled garden and looked through the little grille.
    You were unaware of me. You were sitting on a low stone bench with your hands in front of you, palms up, as though you were a book you were straining to read. Though you were all in black and I could not see your face, the arch of your back, your shoulders, your neck, made a curve I knew from loving you.
    I looked at my own hands that had touched you everywhere, and I took hold of the grille, as I had done before, and I would have torn it out of the wall to get to you, but suddenly you looked up. You saw me. You fainted.
    I ran to the Abbess and begged her to allow me into the garden. Reluctantly she did so, for you are still the Queen, and I am still Lancelot, though the meaning of those names has become a noise.
    In the garden you had recovered yourself. You were tall, upright, stern. As I approached, you held up your hand, and I would gladly have plucked my heart out of my body to make you hold it as you once held it—the core of me in your hands.
    ‘This love has destroyed us,’ you said.
    ‘Not love, but others’ envy of it.’
    ‘I had no right to love you,’ you said.
    ‘But you did love me and you love me now.’
    I took a step forward. She shook her head.
    ‘You will never see me again while I am alive.’
    ‘Let me kiss you.’
    She shook her head.
    I rode away and my tears made a lake of me, and for seven nights I rode continuously, not knowing where, under desolate cliffs and through exhausted valleys, until I came to a chapel and a hermitage.
    I took the robe of hermit on me and did penance there for seven years, and in the seventh year I had a dream three times in one night.
    The dream told me to take a funeral bier to Almsbury, where I should find the Queen dead. I was to walk beside her body to Glastonbury and bury her beside her lord and my King.
    The next morning I set out and after two days came to my destination. The Queen had died half an hour before, saying to her women that she prayed her eyes would never have the power to see me again while she was alive.
    I walked beside her, and it seemed to me that the years had sprung back and it was May again. TheMaytime when I was sent through the forest to bring Guinevere to marry King Arthur.
    All that long journey we had talked and sung together, and eaten privately in a jewelled tent. I fell in love with her then, and I have never been able to stop loving her, or to stop my body leaping at the sight of her.
    There is no penance that can calm love and no regret that can make it bitter.
    You are closed and shuttered to me now, a room without doors or windows, and I cannot enter. But I fell in love with you under the open sky and death cannot change that.
    Death can change the body but not the heart.

great and ruinous lovers
    The great and ruinous lovers.
    Lancelot and Guinevere.
    Tristan and Isolde.
    Siegfried and Brünnhilde.
    Romeo and Juliet.
    Cathy and Heathcliffe.
    Vita and Violet.
    Oscar and Bosie.
    Burton and Taylor.
    Abelard and Heloïse.
    Paolo and Francesca.
    There are many more. This is a list you can write yourself. Some are greater than others. Some more ruinous. Some tales have been told many times, others privately and by letter. Love’s script has no end of beginnings. The characters and the scenery change. There are three possible endings: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness.
    The stories we sit up late to hear are love stories. It seems that we