Читать книгу Fanfare for Elizabeth - Edith Sitwell - Страница 10

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But now she, a little child, who knew nothing of that despite, is singing in imitation of the music.

Yet even now she was the heroine of a triumph brought about by death—that of her mother’s rival. To her mother, and to many others, her birth had been like the birth of Fate. The fires and the rivers of blood of the martyrdoms, the death of the old order, heralded her coming; and, from her first cry, Death followed her everywhere. Sometimes it would seem only a shadow in the heat of the day. She would be playing, perhaps—and there would be Death, waiting quietly. Or Death’s voice would sound through the lips of people she knew, or, still more, through their silence. Soon, when she was old enough to speak, she would ask, “Has the Queen my mother gone away?” But that would not be yet, for there were still four months between this time and the day of her mother’s beheading—and then Elizabeth would not be three years old. “Where is she? at Hampton Court?” ... Silence. Then Death would come again. Her stepmother, Queen Jane, would vanish, and could not be found in the great staterooms or in the unoccupied rooms of the Palace. “The Queen’s grace is dead.” “Why did she die?” “She died when the Prince’s grace was born.” Then that later stepmother, the lewd, sly, pitiable little ghost Katherine Howard, who came back to haunt the King from the tomb of her cousin, Elizabeth’s mother—she too would vanish. “Why has she gone away?” “The King’s grace was angered against her. She is dead.” “Dead?” “Yes, the King’s grace has had her put to death because she was wicked.”

Thus the word Death echoed through the Palace.

The various fates of these three women were to alter the whole of Elizabeth’s life, coming, as they did, at the most impressionable ages of her childhood: they were to affect her sexually, laying the chill of death on her hot blood, in the midst of passion; they were to instil moments of cold fear into the veins of this lion-brave creature. But that was to come: now Elizabeth is a little child, clapping her hands at the sound of the trumpets and the triumph, and because she saw everyone laughing.

The balls, the joustings, continued.

But on the 24th of the month, the King fell from his horse. ... He was unhurt, but the fall seemed to him a warning,—perhaps of the wrath to come. The gaiety, the rejoicings, stopped. Darkness fell. But not before Henry had instructed his Ambassador in France to point out to Francis I that, Catherine being dead, there was no longer any need for the King of England to fear the hostility of the Emperor. The French King might find himself forestalled, if he did not immediately accept the proposals of the King of England—and by the Emperor Charles, the nephew of the dead woman whose plaints could no longer disturb the peace of Europe.