The Fifth Queen (77 page)
She went slowly down over the great stone flags of the great hall. It was very gloomy now, and her figure in black velvet was like a small shadow, dark and liquid, amongst shadows that fell softly and like draperies from the roof. Up there it was all dark already, for the light came downwards from the windows. She went slowly, walking as she had been schooled to walk.
‘God!’ Henry cried out; ‘you have not played false with Culpepper?’ His voice echoed all round the hall.
The Queen’s white face and her folded hands showed as she turned—
‘Aye, there the shoe pinches!’ she said. ‘Think upon it. Most times you shall not believe it, for you know me. But I have made confession of it before your Council. So it may be true. For I hope some truth cometh to the fore even in Councils.’
Near the doorway it was all shadow, and soundlessly she faded away among them. The hinge of the door creaked; through it there came the sound of the pikestaves of her guard upon the stone of the steps. The sound whispered round amidst the statues of old knights and kings that stood upon corbels between the windows. It whispered amongst the invisible carvings of the roof. Then it died away.
The King made no sound. Suddenly he cast his hat upon the paving.
WAS EXECUTED
ON
T
OWER
H
ILL, THE 13TH
OF
F
EBRUARY
,
IN THE 33RD
YEAR OF THE REIGN OF
MDXLI–II
F
ORD
M
ADOX
F
ORD
THE GOOD SOLDIER
At a fashionable German spa town, two wealthy couples—one British, the other American—meet for their yearly assignation. As their story moves back and forth in time between 1902 and 1914, the fragile surface propriety of the pre-World War I society in which these four characters live is ruptured—revealing deceit, hatred, infidelity, and betrayal. The “good soldier” is Edward Ashburnham, who, as an adherent to the moral code of the English upper class, is nonetheless consumed by a passion for women younger than his wife—a stoic but fallible figure in what his American friend, John Dowell, calls “the saddest story I ever heard.”
Fiction/Literature
VINTAGE CLASSICS
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