The Strangled Queen Read Free

uneasy than usual.
    He lowered his eyes.
    "I shall come to speak with you, Madam, he replied, "as soon as I have done my rounds and changed the guard."
    Then he ordered Sergeant Lalaine to accompany the Pr incesses, recommending him in a low voice to behave with particular correctness.
    The tower in which Marguerite and Blanche were confined had but three high, identical, circular rooms, placed one above the other, each with hearth and overmantel and, for ceiling, an eight - arched vault; these rooms were connected by a spiral staircase constructed in the thickness of the wall. The ground-floor room was permanently occupied by a detachment of their guard - a guard which caused Captain Bersumee such anxiety that he had it relieve d every six hours in continuous fear that it might be suborned, seduced or outwitted. Marguerite lived in the first-floor room and Blanche on the second floor, At night the two Princesses were separated by a heavy door closed half-way up the staircas e; by day they were allowed to communicate with each other.
    When the sergeant had accompanied them back, they waited till every hinge and lock had creaked into place at the bottom of the stairs.
    Then they looked at each other and with a mutual impulse fell into each other's arms crying, "He's dead, dead."
    They hugged each other, danced, laughed and cried all at once, repeating ceaselessly, "He's dead!','
    They tore off their hoods and freed their short hair, the growth of seven months.
    Marguerite had little black curls all over her head, Blanche's hair had grown unequally, in thick locks like handfuls of straw. Blanche ran her hand from her forehead back to her neck and, looking at her cousin, cried, "A looking-glass! The first thing I want is a looking-glass! Am I still beautiful, Marguerite?"
    She behaved as if she were to be released within the hour and had now no concern but her appearance.
    "If you ask me that, it must be because I look so much older myself," said Marguerite.
    "Oh no!" Blanche cried. "You're as lovely as ever!"
    She was sincere; in shared suffering change passes unnoticed. But Marguerite shook her. head; she knew very well that it was not true.
    And indeed t he Princesses had suffered much since the spring: the tragedy of Maubuisson coming upon them in the midst of their happiness; their trial; the appalling death of, their lovers, executed in their presence in the Great Square of Pontoise; the obscene shouts of the populace massed on their route; and after that half a year spent in a fortress; the wind howling among the eaves; the stifling heat of summer reflected from the stone; the icy cold suffered since autumn had begun; the black buckwheat gruel that formed their meals; their shirts, rough as though made of hair, and which they were allowed to change but once every two months; the window narrow as a loophole through which, however you placed your head, you could see no more than the helmet of an invisible archer; pacing up and down the battlements - these things had so marked Marguerite's character, and she knew it well, that they must also have left their mark upon her face.
    Perhaps Blanche with her eighteen years and curiously volatile character, amounting almost to heedlessness, which permitted her to pass instantaneously from despair to an absurd optimism Blanche, who could suddenly stop weeping because a bird was singing beyond the wall, and say wonderingly, "Marguerite! Do you hear the bird? " - Blanche, who believed in signs, every; kind of sign, and dreamed unceasingly as other women stitch, Blanche, perhaps, if she were freed from prison, might recover the complexion, the manner and the heart of other days; Marguerite, never, There was something broken in her that could never be mended.
    Since the beginning of her imprisonment she had never shed so much as a single tear; but neither had she ever had a moment of remorse; of conscience or of regret.
    The Chaplain, who confessed her every week, was shocked by her