She began to unpin her coif, laying the golden pins in the silver candle-dishes. When her hair was thus set free of a covering, though it was smoothly braided and parted over her forehead, yet it was lightly rebellious, so that little mists of it caught the light, golden and rejoiceful. Her face was serious, her nose a little peaked, her lips rested lightly together, and her blue eyes steadily challenged their counterparts in the mirror with an assured and gentle glance.
“Why,” she said, “I believe you have the right of it—but for a queen I must be the same make of queen that I am as a woman. A queen gracious rather than a queen regnant; a queen to grant petitions rather than one to brush aside the petitioners.”
She stopped and mused.
“Yet,” she said, “you will do me the justice to say that in the open and in the light of day, when men are by or the King’s presence demands it, I do ape as well as I may the painted queens of galleries and the stately ladies that are to be seen in pictured books.”
“I would not have had you send away the maid,” the old Lady Rochford said.
“God help me,” the Queen answered. “I stayed her petition till the morrow. Is that not queening it enough?”
The Lady Rochford suddenly wrung her hands.
“I had rather,” she said, “you had heard her and let her stay. Here there are not people enough to guard you. You should have many scores of people. This is a dreary place.”
“Heaven help me,” the Queen said. “If I were such a queen as to be affrighted, you would affright me. Tell me of your cousin that was a sinful queen.”
The Lady Rochford raised her hands lamentably and bleated out—
“Ah God, not tonight!”
“You have been ready enough on other nights,” the Queen said. And, indeed, it was so much the practice of this lady to talk always of her cousin, whose death had affrighted her, that often the Queen had begged her to cease. But tonight she was willing to hear, for she felt afraid of no omens, and, being joyful, was full of pity for the dead unfortunate. She began with slow, long motions to withdraw the great pins from her hair. The deep silence settled down again, and she hummed the melancholy and stately tune that goes with the words—
“When all the little hills are hid in snow,
And all the small brown birds by frost are slain,
And sad and slow
The silly sheep do go,
All seeking shelter to and fro—
Come once again
To these familiar, silent, misty lands—”
And—
“Aye,” she said; “to these ancient and familiar lands of the dear saints, please God, when the winter snows are upon them, once again shall come the feet of God’s messenger, for this is the joyfullest day this land hath known since my namesake was cast down and died.”
Suddenly there were muffled cries from beyond the thick door in the corridor, and on the door itself resounding blows. The Lady Rochford gave out great shrieks, more than her feeble body could have been deemed to hold.
“Body of God!” the Queen said, “what is this?”
“Your cousin!” the Lady Rochford cried out. She came running to the Queen, who, in standing up, had overset her heavy chair, and, falling to her knees, she babbled out—“Your cousin! Oh, let it not all come again. Call your guard. Let it not all come again”; and she clawed into the Queen’s skirt, uttering incomprehensible clamours.
“What? What? What?” Katharine said.
“He was with the Archbishop. Your cousin with the Archbishop. I heard it. I sent to stay him if it were so”; and the old woman’s teeth crackled within her jaws. “O God, it is come again!” she cried.
The door flung open heavily, but slowly, because it was so heavy. And, in the archway, whilst a great scream from the old woman wailed out down the corridors, Katharine was aware of a man in scarlet, locked in a struggle with a raging swirl of green manhood. The man in scarlet fell back, and then, crying out, ran away. The man in green, his bonnet off, his red hair sticking all up, his face pallid, and his eyes staring like those of a sleepwalker, entered the room. In his right hand he had a dagger. He walked very slowly.
The Queen thought fast: the old Lady Rochford had her mouth open; her eyes were upon the dagger in Culpepper’s hand.
“I seek the Queen,” he said, but his eyes were lacklustre; they fell upon Katharine’s face as if they had no recognition, or could not see. She turned her body round to the old Lady Rochford, bending from the hips so as not to move her feet. She set her fingers upon her lips.
“I seek—I seek—” he said, and always he came closer to her. His eyes were upon her face, and the lids moved.
“I seek the Queen,” he said, and beneath his husky voice there were bass notes of quivering anger, as if, just as he had been by chance calmed by throwing down the guard, so by chance his anger might arise again.
The Queen never moved, but stood up full and fair; one strand of her hair, loosened, fell low over her left ear. When he was so close to her that his protruded hips touched her skirt, she stole her hand slowly round him till it closed upon his wrist above the dagger. His mouth opened, his eyes distended.
“I seek—” he said, and then—“Kat!” as if the touch of her cool and firm fingers rather than the sight of her had told to his bruised senses who she was.
“Get you gone!” she said. “Give me your dagger.” She uttered each word roundly and fully as if she were pondering the
