- Guinevere sits in a dim room at the Abbey of Almesbury, alone except for a young novice. A white mist clings to the dead earth. Spooky, no?
- Guinevere has fled to Almesbury because of Sir Mordred, who has been hovering around Arthur’s court for a long time waiting for his chance to stir up all kinds of trouble.
- Mordred’s hatred for Lancelot began on the day Lancelot caught him spying on the queen and her ladies over a wall and knocked him down to the ground.
- Despite Lancelot’s graciousness once he realized Mordred’s identity, Mordred has hated him since that day.
- When Sir Lancelot told Guinevere about the encounter with Mordred, she laughed at first, then had a strange premonition that Mordred would be her doom.
- After that day she was plagued by visions and nightmares. She dreamed that the shadow of a horrible beast touched her before she saw the edge of her own shadow destroy all the cities of the realm. Well that's not exactly a pleasant dream, now is it?
- Finally, Guinevere can no longer bear her premonitions and nightmares, so she asks Lancelot to leave court for his own lands. Maybe then she won't feel so guilty.
- Before he leaves, Lancelot and Guinevere plan a meeting to say goodbye. Vivien hears about it and tells Mordred. Scandal.
- While Lancelot and the queen sit in her chamber, hand-in-hand, Mordred and his men surround the base of the tower. Mordred calls to Lancelot to come out.
- Lancelot leaps from the tower and knocks Mordred to the ground, then tells Guinevere that he will take her to his lands and defend her.
- Guinevere refuses Lancelot’s offer, asking him to take her to Almesbury Abbey instead.
- As they ride through the night, Guinevere hears the moaning of the spirits. Seeing a raven, she guesses that the beasts of battle are gathering because they sense the bloodshed that is about to occur. Way to have a positive attitude, Gwen.
- At Almesbury, the nuns are charmed by Guinevere’s grace and beauty and agree to shelter her without knowing her identity.
- Guinevere keeps to her room, speaking only with the maid, whose babbling distracts her from her troubles.
- At Guinevere’s weeping, the maid tells her she is sure that the queen’s sorrows cannot come from any evil she has done. She's so nice and pretty, right?
- The maid tells her to compare her sorrows with those of the king, whose nephew Mordred has usurped the throne while he is warring with Lancelot. (Remember, she doesn’t know she’s talking to Queen Guinevere.)
- The maid declares herself happy that she is not an important person, for no matter how much important people may desire to hide their shame from the world, they can't.
- Even here at Almesbury, she says, people are talking about the great king and his wicked queen.
- Okay, this is just getting awkward.
- Guinevere muses to herself that the child will kill her with her “innocent talk,” then asks the girl if she should not grieve in common with the people of the realm over events.
- The maid answers that all women should grieve that it was a woman, Guinevere, who destroyed the Round Table Arthur founded among wonders and miracles.
- Guinevere asks the maid what she can possibly know about wonders and miracles, since she has spent all her life in a nunnery.
- The maid says her father was a knight of the Round Table and told her all about the wonders he witnessed as he rode to Camelot from Lyonesse:
- He saw strange lights on the sea, mermaids, mermen and elves calling to one another, fairy-circles flying, and people dancing.
- At Camelot he partook of a wonderful feast served by invisible hands. Spirits and men were so happy before the queen came.
- Guinevere asks why no one could foresee the grim future.
- The maid replies that a famous, experienced bard sang at the feast that night about how baby Arthur was discovered on the sands of Cornwall and became king by a miracle.
- The bard sang that if Arthur could find as great a woman as he was a man, he might change the world. But at that point, he faltered, stopped singing, and had a vision.
- The bard refused to tell his vision, but ten bucks says he foresaw the evil deeds of Lancelot and the queen.
- Guinevere wonders if the nuns have sent the maid to torment her. It sure seems like it.
- Seeing Guinevere’s distress, the maid apologizes for her chatter and says she really doesn't want to shame the memory of her father, the noblest of knights.
- She asks Guinevere who is nobler: Lancelot or the king?
- Guinevere replies that Lancelot and Arthur are equally noble. She describes good manners as the result of a loyal nature and a noble mind.
- The maid responds that Lancelot’s manners must therefore be a thousand times less noble than Arthur’s since he has been such a disloyal friend to the king.
- Guinevere tells the maid to pray that Lancelot never be less noble than himself, and weep for the woman who caused his destruction. A.k.a. herself.
- The maid says she prays for both of them but that she can’t believe Lancelot’s manners are as noble as the king’s, just as she can’t believe that this lady’s manners would be so noble if she were the sinful queen.
- At this, Guinevere yells at the maid that she is a traitor sent to distress and vex her and orders her to leave.
- Guinevere asks heaven to help her, declaring her true repentance. She feels really bad, Shmoopers.
- Her thoughts turn to the days when Lancelot escorted her to Camelot to meet the king. When she finally met him she found him cold and aloof. In other words, he was no Lancelot.
- Suddenly, an armored warrior rides through the doors of the abbey and Guinevere hears whispers that the king is there.
- She falls to the floor in a posture of repentance, hiding her face from the king, who pauses before her.
- Arthur asks Guinevere if she lies dead from her shame. He says it’s good he had no children with her; her children now are war, ruin, and lawlessness.
- He says he has come from waging war on Lancelot, who at least refused to lift his hand against the man who made him a knight. Many others were killed, though.
- See, a bunch of Arthur’s men left him to follow Mordred. Of the few he has left, he says, he will leave some with Guinevere to protect her.
- Arthur knows he will die in the next battle. He says Guinevere has not made his life so sweet to him that he cares if he lives or dies.
- Guinevere, he says, has spoiled his life’s purpose. He asks her to listen to what her sin has caused:
- After the Romans left Britain, the realm descended into lawlessness. Only a few principled knights stand up for what's right on occasion. Arthur united these men together to serve as a model.
- He made them swear an oath:
- To revere him as if he were their own conscience, to defeat the heathens and uphold Christ, to redress wrongs, to speak no slander nor listen to it, to honor his own word as if it were God’s, to lead lives of chastity, and to love and be faithful to one maiden only, letting their love for her inspire them to greater and greater deeds.
- His order thrived before he married Guinevere, whom he believed would be his partner in making the world a better place.
- Instead Guinevere cheated on him with Lancelot, then came the affair of Tristram and Isolt, until finally, following the example set by noblemen, Arthur’s knights, too, lapsed into sin and dishonor. Let's just say things didn't go according to plan.
- Arthur does not care if he dies; he would rather die than sit alone in his hall, missing his knights and the talk of noble deeds that echoed there before Guinevere’s sin.
- He would be haunted by Guinevere’s shadow even if she were not there, though, because he loves her—despite everything she's done.
- And yet. Though he loves her, he must expose her to public shame and ditch her altogether, for he believes the worst public enemy to be a man who lets the wife he knows to be false continue to rule the household.
- Arthur insists he has not come to curse Guinevere. His anger, which caused him to contemplate burning her for treason, has passed, and his sorrow and tears are partially over.
- He forgives Guinevere, he says, as Eternal God forgives.
- He cannot touch Guinevere’s lips, for they belong to Lancelot. His flesh cries out its loathing for her.
- His hope is that Guinevere can purify her soul and meet him, as his wife, in heaven, finally acknowledging him as her husband. (What happens when Lancelot gets there?)
- He hears the trumpet summoning him to battle in the west against Mordred and the heathen lords. He'll never again see Guinevere, so this is good-bye.
- After Arthur departs, Guinevere rises in an attempt to see Arthur one last time. She watches him ride away through the mist.
- She cries out Arthur’s name, calling him her one true lord, then renouncing her right to call him “hers.”
- She thinks about killing herself, but asks what good it would do, since even death cannot kill her sin.
- Arthur’s forgiveness, and his hope to meet her again in heaven, gives Guinevere hope that she can make up for her sin.
- She once thought Arthur was too noble for her, and that she could not possibly be noble enough to match him.
- She turned to Lancelot because she preferred his “warmth and color” to Arthur’s “perfect light,” but now she realizes that she loved the wrong man.
- She wonders what effect she might have had upon the world if she had loved the right man. She understands now that it’s our obligation to love the best and greatest when we see it.
- Guinevere asks the nuns to allow her to stay in the nunnery and live a cloistered life to try to make amends for the wrong she has done. They're all for it.
- After the abbess dies, Guinevere herself serves as abbess until her death three years later.