A lady, accompanied by a small armed retinue, rode out of a forest
glade near Woodstock, and, pausing beside the waters of the Glyme,
which here came tumbling in a little weir, smooth as a barrel of
glass, over an artificial dam, reined in her steed, and sat gazing, in
the full glow of noon, upon the scene before her.
It was a scene of perfect pastoral quiet--woodland and meadow as far
as the eye could reach, broken by green hillocks and dominated by a
solitary keep of stone set on a leafy height in the foreground. To the
right a film of floating vapour showed where a hidden hamlet smoked.
There was no other token of human life or habitation anywhere.
The lady, halting a little in advance of her party, made a preoccupied
motion with her hand, whereupon there pushed forward to her a certain
horseman, who dragged with him a churl roped to his saddle-bow. The
knight was in bascinet and chain-mail like the others, but his shield
and _pavon_ were emblazoned with arms betokening his higher rank.
“Messer de Polwarth,” said the lady, “is not this in sooth Love’s
paradise?”
“Certes, madam,” he answered grimly; “it is the King’s Manor of
Woodstock.”
She laughed; then, stiffening suddenly in her saddle, pointed upwards.
“Look!” she said.
A poising kite, as she spoke, had dropped to the wood-edge, and thence
rose swiftly with a dove beating in its talons.
“Behold a fruitful omen,” she cried, and turned on the hind: “Dog!
where lies the garden?”
De Polwarth struck the fellow a steely blow across the scruff.
“Answer, beast!”
The man, a sullen, unkempt savage, pointed with an arm like a snag.
“Down yon, a bowshot from the lodge. Boun by the waterside.”
The lady nodded, her eyes fixed in a sort of smiling trance. She was
Eleanor of Aquitaine, no less, the divorced wife of France, the
neglected and embittered Queen of England, and she was at this moment
on the verge of flight to those rebellious sons of hers who conspired
in Guienne against their father.
But, before she fled, she had just one deed of savage vengeance to
perpetrate, and of that she would not be baulked, though to accomplish
it she must ride across half England. Somewhere, she knew, in this
place was situated that “house of wonderful working--wrought like unto
a knot in a garden,” where lived her hated child-rival, that beautiful
frail rose of the Cliffords who had borne the King a son. So much the
worse for her--so much the worse.
The Queen descended to earth, spiritually and literally. She was
dressed like a queen in a belted blue robe latticed with gold, and a
long purple cloak over. A jewelled coronet embraced her headcloth and
the headcloth her face. The rim of hair that showed under was still,
for all her fifty odd years, crow black. Her colour was high, her
frame masculine; the prominence of her lower lip gave her a cruel
expression, and without belying her.
“Nay, de Polwarth,” she said, as the knight made a movement to
dismount. “No hand in this but mine.”
He retorted gruffly: “The place is reputed impenetrable.”
She smiled. “Hate will find out a way. Rest you here till I return.”
Never to be gainsaid, she went off alone by the streamside, and soon
disappeared among the trees beyond.
Her way took her under the slope of the hill which ran up to the
King’s Manor. At first, looking through the branches, she could catch
glimpses of the strong, irregular pile, butting like a mountain crag
from the forehead of the green height; but, in a little, the density
of the trees increasing, the house was hidden from her view, and she
had only the thick, towering woods and the little stream for company.
On and on she went, resolute to her purpose, thrilled with some
presentiment of its near accomplishment--and suddenly a white rabbit
ran out from the green almost under her feet.
She stopped dead on the instant, and, as she stood motionless, the
thicket parted near the bole of a great beech-tree hard by, and a
little boy slipped out into the open. He was pink-cheeked,
Saxon-haired and eyed--a shapely manikin of five or so. Intent on
recapturing his pet, he did not at first notice the stranger; but when
he turned, with the bunny hugged in his arms, he stood rosily
transfixed. In a swift stride or two the Queen was upon him, cutting
off his retreat.
She stooped, with a little exultant laugh.
“What is thy name, sweet imp?” she said.
He pouted, half-frightened, but still essaying the man, rubbing one
foot against the opposite calf.
“Willie Clifford, madam,” he said, wondering for a moment at her
crown; but then panic overtook him.
“Nay, Willie,” said the Queen, holding him with a hand that belied its
own softness; “I like thy tunic of white lawn and thy pretty shoon so
latched with gold. Hast a fond mother, Willie--whose name I will guess
of thee for Rosamond? And for thy father, Willie--do you see him
often?”
“He hath a crown like thine, but finer,” said the child; “and when he
comes he puts it on my head.” Something in the staring face above him
awoke his sudden fear. He began to struggle.
“Let me go!” he cried--“I want to go back to my minny.”
“Thy minny?” said the Queen. “One moment, child. Is that thy secret
way behind the tree there?”
“I will not tell thee,” cried the boy. “I want my minny! Let me go!”
With one swift movement she tore the rabbit from his arms, and holding
it aloft with her left hand, with her right whipped a jewelled bodkin
from its sheath at her waist, and stabbed the little white body,
stabbed it, stabbed it. Then she flung the convulsed encrimsoned thing
to the ground, and, resheathing the weapon, held the child with a
stare of fury.
The swiftness, the savagery, the dreadful novelty of the act had had
their purposed effect on him. His eyes widened, his throat swelled;
but the scream to which he was on the instant impelled never came. His
little soul was paralysed; he was utter slave to horror. If she had
told him at that moment to lie down and go to sleep, he would have
tried to obey her will, though the unuttered sobs were half-bursting
his bosom.
“Now,” she said, “now!” panting a little. “Seest, thou harlot’s whelp?
Cross me again, and so shalt thou be served. Wait here--move one step
hence an thou darest--until I come again.”
She cast one final look of menace at him, then, stepping to the
beech-tree, parted the green and disappeared.
It was a cunning blind, as she had expected. The great trunk was so
packed amongst the thickets of the hillside that none would have
guessed its concealment of a scarce-discernible track which threaded
the matted growths above and behind it. Mounting by this, the malign
creature came suddenly upon a broken opening in the rock, so mossy and
so choked with foliage that its presence would have been quite
unsuspected from the glade below. She stopped; she uttered a little
gloating exclamation; for there, looped over a projection of the
stone, was the end of a strong green thread hanging out of the
darkness. The clue, of which she had heard whisper with but small
faith, was actually in her hand. Providence had doomed the foolish
mother to permit her child to sport with the very means designed
against her own destruction.
The cavity led into a ramification of passages, roughly trenched and
hewn out of the calcareous slate of the hill. Occasionally roofed,
mostly open, always tangled in foliage, and so cunningly devised to
mislead that it had been near humanly impossible to resolve its
intricacies without such guide to follow, the labyrinth led the Queen
by a complicated course to a sense of approaching light and release.
And then all in a moment the thread had come to an end against a stake
to which it was fastened; and there was a pleasant garden sunk in a
hollow of the hill, and a fair young woman, with an awaiting, somewhat
troubled expression on her face, standing hard by. She had evidently
spun the clue, and returned the first by it from the glade, to make
sport for her little man.
The intruder took all in at a glance--the expectant figure, the quiet,
inaccessible pleasaunce, the roof of a gilt pavilion rising, a long
stone’s-throw away, above the branches of a flowering orchard;
dominating all, and hiding this lovely secret in its lap, the wooded
hill crowned by its protecting keep.
The young woman, with one startled glance, turned to fly; but in the
very act, staggered by a recollection, turned, and came towards the
Queen, a hand pressed to her bosom. She was a frail thing, in the
ethereal as well as the worldly sense--fragile, it seemed, as china,
and as delicately tinted. All pink and cream, with pale golden hair,
her darker eyebrows were the only definite note of colour in a thin
face. Even her long robe of pale green suggested the anæmia of
tulip-leaves forced into premature growth.
“A weak craft to have borne so huge a sin,” said Eleanor, as the girl
approached. She eyed her with malignant scorn, her under lip
projecting. “So, wanton,” she said, “dost know the wife thou hast
wronged?”
The other gave a little mortal start and cry: “The Queen!” and could
utter no more.
A small, hateful laugh answered her.
“The wife, fool! the she-wolf against whom you thought to guard your
fold with straws. Why, look at you--I could peel you in my hands--a
bloodless stalk, without heat or beauty!”
“Spare me!”
“Aye, as the wolf spares the lamb, the hawk the wren. Let me look on
you. So this is a King’s fancy. I could have wrought him better from a
kitchen-scrub. Quick! I am in; I have no time to lose, and thine has
come. Poison or steel--make thy choice.”
“O, madam, in pity! My heart--I have been weak and ill--I shall not
vex thee long!”
“God’s blood! And baulk my vengeance? Come--poison----”
“O! What poison?”
“Why, that thou art betrayed--supplanted. Another leman lies in thy
bed--wife to one Blewit, a willing cuckold. Drink it, thy desertion,
to the dregs.”
“Sin must not beshrew sin. It is bitter to the death; but I drink it.”
“O, thou toad! Thou wilt not die, for all thy stricken heart? Will
this kill thee then?”
She whipped out the red stiletto. Rosamond uttered a faint shriek.
“Blood!”
The Queen brandished it before her eyes.
“I met thy whelp in the glade. It was he who betrayed the way to me.”
The girl gasped and tottered forward.
“I let him to his death. Monster, thou hast killed my Willie--my boy,
my one darling!”
She made an effort to leap forward--swayed--and fell her full length
upon the grass.
The Queen, softly replacing her blade, stood staring down. No sound or
movement followed on the fall. Stooping, she gazed long and silently
into the thin face, then, without a word, turned and retreated as she
had come.
The boy was standing, white and tearless, by his dead rabbit as she
parted the leaves and slunk forth.
“Go to thy mother, child,” she whispered, hoarse and small. “She is
ill.”