“I would not have you to think,” she said, “that I am always thus late and a gadabout. But this day”—the Queen’s eyes sparkled, and her cheeks were red with exaltation—“this day and this night are one that shall be marked with red stones in the calendar of England, and late have I travailed so to make them be.”
The girl was very black-avised, and her face beneath her grey hood—for the Queen’s maids were all in grey, with crowned roses, the device that the King had given her at their wedding, worked in red silk on each shoulder—her face beneath her grey hood was the clear shape of the thin end of an egg. She worked at the unlacing of the Queen’s gown, so that she at last must kneel down to it.
Having finished, she remained upon her knees, but she twisted her fingers in her skirt as if she were bashful, yet her face was perturbed with red flushes on the dark cheeks.
The Queen, feeling that she knelt there upon her loosened gown and did not get her gone, said—
“Anan?”
“Please you let me stay,” the girl said; but Katharine answered—
“I would commune with my own thoughts.”
“Please you hear me,” the girl said, and she was very earnest; but the Queen answered—
“Why, no! If you have any boon to ask of me, you know very well that tomorrow at eleven is the hour for asking. Now, I will sit still with the silence. Bring me my chair to the table. The Lady Rochford shall put out my lights when I be abed.”
The girl stood up and rolled, with a trick of appeal, her eyes to the old Lady Rochford. This lady, all in grey too, but with a great white hood because she was a widow, sat back upon the foot of the great bed. Her face was perturbed, but it had been always perturbed since her cousin, the Queen Anne Boleyn, had fallen by the axe. She put a gouty and swollen finger to her lips, and the girl shrugged her shoulders with a passion of despair, for she was very hot-tempered, and it was as if mutinously that she fetched the Queen her chair and set it behind her where she stood before the mirror taking off her breast jewel from its chain. And again the girl shrugged her shoulders. Then she went to the little wall-door that corkscrewed down into the courtyard through the thick of the wall. Immediately after she was gone they heard the lockguard that awaited her without set on the great padlock without the door. Then his feet clanked down the stairway, he being heavily loaded with weighty keys. It was the doors along the corridor that the young Poins guarded, and these were never opened once the Queen was in her room, save by the King. The Lady Rochford slept in the anteroom upon a truckle-bed, and the great withdrawing-room was empty.
It was very still in the Queen’s room and most shadowy, except before the mirror where the candle flames streamed upwards. The pillars of the great bed were twisted out of dark wood; the hangings of bed and walls were all of a dark blue arras, and the bedspread was of a dark red velvet worked in gold with pomegranates and pomegranate leaves. Only the pillows and the turnover of the sheets were of white linen-lawn, and the bed curtains nearly hid them with shadows. Where the Queen sat there was light like that of an altar in a dim chapel, for the room was so huge.
She sat before her glass, silently taking off her golden things. She took the jewel off the chain round her neck and laid it in a casket of gold and ivory. She took the rings off her fingers and hung them on the lance of a little knight in silver. She took off her waist where it hung to a brooch of feridets, her pomander of enamel and gold; she opened it and marked the time by the watch studded with sable diamonds that it held.
“Past eleven,” she said, “if my watch goes right.”
“Indeed it is past eleven,” the Lady Rochford sighed behind her.
The Queen sat forward in her chair, looking deep into the shadows of her mirror. A great relaxation was in all her limbs, for she was very tired, so that though she was minded to let down her hair she did not begin to undo her coif, and though she desired to think, she had no thoughts. From far away there came a muffled sound as if a door had been roughly closed, and the Lady Rochford shot out a little sound between a scream and a sigh.
“Why, you are very affrighted,” the Queen said. “One would think you feared robbers; but my guards are too good.”
She began to unloosen from her hood her jewel, which was a rose fashioned out of pink shell work set with huge dewdrops of diamonds and crowned with a little crown of gold.
“God knows,” she said, “I ha’ trinkets enow for robbers. It takes me too long to undo them. I would the King did not so load me.”
“Your Highness is too humble for a Queen,” the old Lady Rochford grumbled. “Let me aid you, since the maid is gone. I would not have you speak your maids so humbly. My Cousin Anne that was the Queen—”
She came stiffly and heavily forward from the bed with her hands out to discoif her lady; but the Queen turned her head, caught at her fat hand, put it against her cheek and fondled it.
“I would have your Highness feared by all,” the old lady said.
“I would have myself by all beloved,” Katharine answered. “What, am I to play the Queen and Highness to such serving-maids as I was once the fellow and companion to?”
“Your Highness should not have sent the wench away,” the old woman said.
“Well, you have taken on
