Mistress of mistresses (31 page)

Lessingham
studied a season and at last said: 'In plain terms, cousin: this is not an
overture of marriage?' 'Footra! I ne'er dreamed on't.'

"That
is well; for 'pon first bruit of that, you should incur the hatred of them all,
and all our work fly again in pieces. Well, I will undertake it, if your
highness will wisely give me a large discretion: for it is a thing may seem
mischievous or profitable, and whether of the two we know not till I be there
to try.'

'Enough:
you know my mind,' said the Vicar. 'Try how she stands affected to me, and do
what you may. And now,' he said, 'let us go down and drink with them. Cousin, I
do love you, but by my soul you have this fault: you do drink commonly but to
satisfy nature. Let's you and I this night drink 'em all speechless.'

Lessingham
said, 'Wine measurably drunken delighteth best. But to humour you to-night,
cousin, I will drink immeasurably.'

So
came they again to the feast, in the hall of the great carven faces of black
obsidian-stone whose eyes flung back the lamplight; and straightway there began
to be poured forth by command of the Vicar cup upon cup, and as a man quaffed
it down so in an instant was his cup brimmed a-fresh, and the Vicar shouted at
every while that men should swiftly drink. And now he bade the cup-bearers mix
the wines, and still the cups were brimmed, and swiftlier drank they, and great
noise there was of the sucking down of wines and clatter of cups and singing
and laughing and loud boastings each against each. And now were the wits of the
more part of them bemused and altered with so much bibbing and quaffing as
night wore, so that some wept, and some sang, and some embraced here his neighbour,
there a cup-bearer, and some quarrelled, and some danced; some sat speechless
in their chairs; some rolled beneath the table; and some upon it. The heat and
sweat and the breath of furious drinking hung betwixt tables and rafters like
the night mist above a mere in autumn. It was ever that the Vicar and
Lessingham set the pace, carousing down goblet after goblet. But now the high
windows, all wide open for air, began to pale, and the lamps to burn out one by
one; and not a man remained now able to drink or speak or stand but all lay
senseless among the rushes, or in their seats, or sprawled forward on the
table: all save the Vicar and Lessingham alone.

The
Vicar now dismissed the cup-bearers,, and now they two fell again to their
drinking, each against each, cup for cup. The Vicar's countenance showed
scarlet in the uncertain light, and his eyes puffy like an owl's disturbed at
noon; he spoke no more; his breath laboured; the sweat ran down his brow and
down nose and cheeks in little runlets; his neck was bloated much beyond its
common size, and of the hue of a beetroot. He drank slowlier now; Lessingham
drank fair with him as before, cup against cup. All that night's quaffings had
lighted but
a
moderate
glow beneath the bronze on Lessingham's cheek, and his eyes were yet clear and
sparkling, when the Vicar, lurching sideways and letting fall from nerveless
fingers his half-drained cup, slid beneath the table and there lay like a hog,
snoring and snouking with the rest.

Two
or three lamps yet burned on the walls, but with
a
light that weakened moment by moment before the
opening dawn. Lessingham set cushions under his cousin's head and made his way
to the door, picking his steps amongst bodies thus fallen ingloriously beneath
the cup-din. In the darkness of the lobby a lady stood to face him, goblet in
hand, quite still, clothed all in white. 'Morrow, my Lord Lessingham,' she
said, and drank to him. 'So you go north, at last, to Rialmar?'

There
was a quality in her voice that swept memory like harp-strings within him: a
quality like the unsheathing of claws. His eyes could not pierce the shadow
more than to know her hair, which seemed to have of itself some luminosity that
showed through darkness: her eyes, like a beast's eyes lit from within: a glint
of teeth. 'What, dear mistress of the snows?' he said, and caught her. 'Under
your servant's lips? Ha, under your servant's lips! And what wind blew you to
Laimak?'

'Fie!'
said she. 'Will the man smother me, with
a
great beard? I'll bite it off, then. Nay and
indeed, my lord,' she said, as he kissed her in the mouth, 'there's no such
haste: I have my lodging here in the castle. And truly I'm tired, awaiting of
you all night long. I was on my way to bed now.'

He
suffered her to go, upon her telling him her lodging, in the half-moon tower
on the west wall, and giving him besides, from a sprig she had in her bosom, a
little leaf like to that which Vandermast had given him in the boat upon Zayana
mere, that month of May. 'And it is by leaves like this', said she, 'that we
have freedom of all strong holds and secret places to come and go as we list
and accompany with this person or that; but wherefore, and by Whose bidding,
and how passing to and fro from distant places of the earth in no more time
than needeth a thought to pass: these are things, dear my lord, not to be
understood by such as you.'

Lessingham
came out now into the great court, with broadened breast, sniffing the air. In
all the hold of Laimak none else was abroad, save here and there soldiers of
the night-watch. Below the walls of the banquet-chamber he walked, and so past
the guard-house and Hagsby's Entry and the keep, and so across to the
tennis-court and beyond that to the northern rampire where they had had their
meeting in June. Lessingham paced the rampart with head high. Not Maddalena
treading the turfy uplands in the spring of the year went with a firmer nor a
lighter step. The breeze, that had sprung up with the opening of day, played
about him, stirring the short thick and wavy black hair about his brow and
temples.

He
stood looking north. It was a little past four o'clock, and the lovely face of
heaven was lit with the first beams thrown upward from behind the Forn. The
floor of the dale lay yet under the coverlet of night, but the mountains at
the head of it caught the day. Lessingham said in himself: 'His Fiorinda. What
was it she said to me? "I think you will find there that which you seek.
North, in Rialmar."

'Rialmar.'
A long time he stood there, staring north.

Then,
drawing from the bosom of his doublet the leaf of sferra cavallo: 'And
meanwhile not to neglect present gladness—' he said in himself; and so turned,
smiling with himself, towards the half-moon tower where, as she had kindly let
him know, Anthea had her lodging.

xiii

Queen
Antiope

another kind of cousins
 
a royal wooer
 
misery of princes
 
happy diversion
 
the
queen  and her
captain-generaL      but
lookt to neare
 
a king in waiting
 
princess zenianthe
 
uses of friendship
 
the hall of the
sea-horses
 
qualities and conditions of derxis
 
campaspe lifts
A
curtain
 
the queen
in
presence
 
anthea: derxis: the pavane
 
vertigo
 
the seahorse  staircase.

Through
the
wide-flung casements of the Queen's bedchamber in the Teremnene palace in Rialmar
came the fifteenth day of August, new born. Over a bowl of white roses it
stepped, that stood on the windowsill with dew-drops on their petals, and so
into the room, touching with pale fingers the roof-beams; the milk-white figured
hangings; the bottles on the white onyx table: angelica water, attar of roses,
Brentheian unguent made from the honey of Hyperborean flowers; the jewels laid
out beside them; the mirrors framed in filigree work of silver and white coral;
gowns and farthingales of rich taffety and chamblet and cloth of silver that
lay tumbled on chairs and on the deep soft white velvet carpet; all these it
touched, so that they took form, but as yet not colour. And now it touched
Zenianthe's bed, which was
made
crossways at the foot of the Queen's, betwixt it and the windows; and her hair
it touched, but not her eyes, for she was turned on her side away from the
light, and slept on. But now the day, momently gathering strength, fluttered
its mayfly wings about the Queen's face. And now colour came: the damask warmth
of sleep on her face; her hair the colour of the young moon half an hour after
sunset when the pale radiance has as yet but the faintest tinge of gold. With a
little comfortable assenting sleepy noise she stirred, turning on her back. The
day kissed her beneath the eyelids, a morning kiss, as a child might kiss awake
its sleeping sister.

She
threw back the clothes and leapt from the bed and, in her night-gown of fine
lawn, stood in the window, looking out. Seventy feet beneath her the wall had
its foundations in native rock, and the cliff, greatly undercut, fell away
unseen. The drop from that window-sill was clear eight hundred feet to the sea
of cloud, dusky, fluffed like carded wool, that overspread the river-valley of
Revarm. North-westward, to her left where she stood, the walls and roofs swept
down to Mesokerasin, where, in the dip between this horn Teremne and the lower
horn Mehisbon, is the main of Rialmar town; horns which overhang the
precipitous fece north-westward, so that both the royal Teremnene palace and
the houses and temples upon Mehisbon are held out over the valley dizzily in
air. To her right, south-eastward, the blanket of mist hid the harbour and the
river and the Midland Sea. Overhead, in a stainless sky, night still trailed a
deeper intensity of blue westwards towards the zenith. The whole half circle of
the horizon was filled with the forms, diamond-clear against the saffron of
the dawn, of those mountains Hyperborean that are higher than all mountains
else in the stablished earth. Upon all these things the Queen looked: beholding
in them (but knew it not) her own image in a mirror. A lark singing mounted
from height to height of air till it was level now with her window.

After
a little, 'Cousin,' she said, without turning: 'are you awake?'

*No,'
answered she. 'Are you asleep?' 'No.'

'Get
up,' said the Queen.

'No,'
she said, and snuggled down a little more, so that the sheet was nicely
arranged to cover her mouth but not her nose.

The
Queen came and stood over her. 'We will wake her up ourselves, then,' said she,
picking up from the foot of her own bed a little white cat, very hairy, with
blue eyes, and dangling it so that its paws were on the sheets above
Zenianthe's chin. 'Now she is at our mercy. Wake up, cousin. Talk to me.'

Zenianthe
took the little cat into her arms. 'Well, I am talking. What about?'

'You
must think of something,' said the Queen. 'Something useful. "How best to
rid away an unwelcome guest": a lesson on that would be good now.'

'You
have nothing to learn from me there, cousin,' said Zenianthe.

Antiope's
face was serious. ‘I have flaunted flags enough,' she said, 'to show what way
the wind blows. A year ago it should not have been so.'

'Perhaps,'
said Zenianthe, 'a man might think it fit to stay till he had the Lord
Protector's word to bid him be gone. But you might try with your own word. And
yet some would like well to hold a king, and so goodly a young gentleman
besides, at their apron-strings.'

'You
can have him for me,' said the Queen.

'I
am humbly beholden to your highness; but I think he is not a man to take the
sorb-apple and leave the peach on the dish.'

Antiope
said, 'You are both naughty and dull this morning. I think I'll send you away like
the rest.' She surveyed her cousin's supine form, brown hair spread in sweet
tangled confusion on the pillow, and morning face. 'No, you're not good,' she
said, sitting down on the bed's edge. 'And you will not help me.'

'Do
your hair in some nasty fashion. That may disgust him.'

'Well,
give me a scissors,' said the Queen: 'I'll cut it off, if that might serve. But
no. Not that: not even for that.'

'Might
fetch you a back-handed stroke too, reverse the thing you played for. High
squeaking voice: if he be but half a man (as you said t'other day), half a
woman should be nicer to his liking than the whole.'