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I

Katherine Christian, on an early spring day in 1616, this being the morning of her sixteenth birthday, sat in the Bird-cage house in the Strand thinking back, with considerable humour, malice, and good temper, over her past life.

For some years now she and her father had been in good state, living in a little house with a pretty garden on the river above Westminster. No Alsatia, or even threat of Alsatia, for him during the last five years! This had been largely because of their Court connections, her father having become a very firm friend of Lady Frances Howard who had married Robert Carr, the Earl of Somerset, in the year 1613.

This very grand connection had meant that there was no more of the old travelling about up and down England with the old tricks of the paper cone, the falling flowers, and the rest.

They were by far too grand for that now. Grand and not so grand. Frances Howard, the lovely, the exquisite, mixed in strange company. She was often to be seen in the Christians’ riverside house, shut up in a room with Dom Christian, Dr. Pengelly, and Anne Turner, the procuress. It was Anne Turner who had two rooms at the top of this house of the Bird-cages in the Strand. She had also other resorts.

Katherine had never asked what Anne Turner, her father, Frances Howard, and Dr. Pengelly did together in the dark shuttered room by the river. Only, when she entered it after their departure, she sniffed the scent of incense, cat’s fur, burnt wax, and heartily disliked it.

She had her opinions of Frances Howard and Anne Turner; she cordially detested both the exquisite saint-like beauty and the evil silent beauty of the procuress, but long, long ago she had learned to allow neither likes nor dislikes to affect her personal balance. She was armoured in scornful indifference.

Life had made her so. Now on this her sixteenth birthday, as she sat at the window of the Bird-cage house while her father was upstairs with Anne Turner, the beauty that would one day be so famous was already fully apparent.

It is interesting and peculiar that the few allusions to her in contemporary journals, histories, or biographies give us little detail in support of that generally acknowledged loveliness. There is a letter of Elizabeth Claypole’s, Cromwell’s daughter, that speaks of her (Thurloe State Papers) as ‘dark and burning.’ In The Merchants’ Remonstrance, ‘the beautiful lady’ can be no other than she. In The Calendar of State Papers (Venetian) she is spoken of by name and called ‘exquisite.’ And there is an account of her arrival in Oxford in Lady Campden’s Oxford Treasure.

But nothing of either present or future fame mattered to her as she sat on this April morning looking through the open window at the business in the Strand below. All about her was an almost deafening chorus of bird-twittering, for the sun was shining and the birds were greeting it. All down the wall of the lower half of the house were many gilded bird-cages. Inside these and many other cages in the open shop below, were every sort of variety of bird from huge hooded falcons, enormous black crows, to the tiniest purple and gold winged miniatures. Colours flashed and flamed—orange, gold, crimson, sapphire—as the tiny birds swung on their little perches or preened their necks, or quarrelled or flew from gilded bar to gilded bar.

In the soft spring breeze the cages swung ever so slightly and the whole loud chorus was an overtone to the rumbling and rattling of wagon-wheels and coach-wheels as they trundled over the cobbles of the crowded street below.

Katherine, who knew that her father’s interviews with Anne Turner were ever lengthy, thought this an excellent occasion for reminiscence. This was her sixteenth birthday. Her father was at the moment unaware of it, but before they left that house he would be made conscious of it, for she had something to say to him.

She had been preparing what she had to say for a long time now and had always intended her sixteenth birthday to be the occasion of it.

The elements of her beauty were as evident now as they would ever be, although she was wearing a plain dress of dark gold colour and no ornaments whatever. Her hair, that fell in ringlets to her shoulders, was of a peculiar darkness. Those black depths had in them a softness and intensity of colour for which richness was a poor word. Her face now was thin and sharp, her complexion pale, her eyes dark and lambent. Her body was also thin, her small breasts firm and strong, her limbs perfectly formed. The expression of her eyes was bold, challenging, her mouth scornful. It was clear that she feared nobody. But when, for an instant, she turned to glance at the birds in their cages, all her features softened into good-humour and even tenderness. She was almost a woman, but as she swung her long legs behind her dark gold gown, humming a little broken tune, there was still something of a child in her.

She looked back over her life as it had so far gone.

She was born, within Alsatia, on April 10th, 1600, her mother dying in childbirth.

Her first conscious memory was of a man grimly murdered, and of this she would retain the details, both of sight and sound, so long as she lived.

She was an infant of four years and it was evening. In the room where she was there was an old black bed where she and her father slept, pitched in the room’s far corner. The room had a crucifix, a high, grimy stone fireplace, a table, and a stool. She remembered the colours in that room, for over one corner of it was a torn red curtain with fragments of gold stuff, and piled against the wall a green box with brass nails, a gilt wand, and a white cone. She was alone in the room and asleep.

She woke to the sound of men’s voices outside the door. These did not disturb her at all, for she was well accustomed to any kind of noise. She thought it was her father. Often he would come with friends and they would sit at the table, drinking and singing. She had already trained herself to sleep during any noise that they would make. She knew that when her father was there she could come to no harm. In any case, from her very earliest hour she had an utterly fearless spirit.

So when she heard these voices, she turned with a little sigh and settled herself to sleep again. A moon was shining in through the window and there was a moth-green light in the room.

When the men roughly entered she turned to see whether her father was among them. But he was not. There were two men who were pulling a third by the collar, his legs dragging on the floor. One of the men was laughing, and she thought that they were playing a game. One man was tall and thin, with a black beard, the other small and pock-marked. The man whom they were dragging was very fat.

The two threw the other on the floor and stood away, looking at him. The man with the beard laughed no longer and there was no sound save the snuffled breathing of the fat man on the floor, who lay in a thin pool of moonlight.

The man with the black beard began to talk, angrily, contemptuously. Katherine held herself tight against the wall without moving lest they should see her. She was in shadow.

Then the fat man pulled himself on to his knees and began with little gasps to utter broken words. He was in terrible distress and tears began to trickle down his cheek.

Then the bearded man ordered him to get up, which he did, and he stood there swaying on his fat trembling legs. The bearded man looked at him intently, quite suddenly caught him by the collar, swung him round and made a plunge with his arm at his quilted back. The fat man wore a dress of light green. The man then turned towards the bed where Katherine was. She saw his eyes, very wide-open, puzzled and frightened. Then they closed as though he were going to pray.

Quite suddenly there came a gurgle from his throat and a great rush of dark blood poured from his mouth. It seemed as though it never would be done. Then he pitched with a soft thud to the floor and lay there on his face, his legs twitching and one arm spread out in the pool of blood.

The small pock-faced man bent down and felt in his clothes; without another word said, the two men picked him up and carried him out between them; they carefully closed the door behind them.

There was nothing unusual in the room then but the pool of blood which moved a little in the moonlight and afterwards lay still.

When her father came in and saw the pool of blood he was very angry. She was not, she remembered, at all frightened. She had the sense then, as she had always, that no one could harm her if she did not wish. When her father beat her, she told herself that the pain had nothing to do with herself and it had not.

She did not love her father—she loved no one—but from her very earliest years she had a sort of comradeship with him.

From the beginning of their life together he made her share in his magic, which always seemed quite natural to her. She realized, when she was only a baby, that he could make people see things that were not there, but oddly enough he had never that power over herself. She thought people great fools because they thought they saw flowers or birds or boxes. At the same time he taught her every kind of sleight of hand so that she became most adept, but she always despised these accomplishments. They had no attraction for her. He was in some ways very tender for her, allowing her no contact with the women who were his mistresses; no man might ever put a hand on her nor address rude words to her.

She liked his indifference to everything and everybody and shared in it. The two things he liked best were drink and sleep, but sometimes he would talk and talk to her and, although she did not for some years understand what he said, she appreciated that he should treat her seriously.

II

Although they were companions, she studied him quite dispassionately. She had seen him in every possible form, action, and gesture—naked, clothed, half clothed, furious with drink, with rage, with pride, bored—bored so that he could do nothing but yawn and yawn and yawn, hungry so that he ate like an animal, kind so that in bed he would gather her to his stone-cold breast and murmur to her baby endearments, arrogant and conceited so that he would strut before a smoked cracked mirror patting his bare arms and clapping his hams in a kind of ecstasy of self-indulgence, talking most learnedly to some old stinking worthy in a peaked black hat, playing jokes, like a boy, with his magic, thinking out new tricks and hypnotizing the humpbacked adoring boy, John Pickering, who worshipped him, making him strip and crawl on the floor thinking he was a bear, and asking him whether it were a crow he saw on the ceiling or a dish-clout or a lady’s garter. Then he would laugh and laugh until the tears hopped on his big white nose.

And sometimes he was sinister. That would be when he would sit over a table with Anne Turner and another or two and they would mix powders, little quivering stamens of blue smoke would rise, thin glass bottles would gurgle as blue, red, green, or colourless liquids filled their throats.

Nevertheless her father was not much of a preoccupation. From the very first she had a life of her own. In her earliest days they lived very shabbily—in such a room, for example, as the one in Alsatia where the man was stabbed. But that was all the same to Katherine. She could always suit herself exactly to her circumstances. Poor or rich, bare or furnished, hungry or fed, cold or warm, there was nothing she could not endure, nothing she could not enjoy. From babyhood she was made free of the London streets and now, her whole life long, she was to enjoy them!

Now, as no more than a baby, she shared in all the sights, sounds, smells, accidents, crimes, triumphs, and sculdudderies. She would toddle out into the mud to watch with open mouth some remnant of the train-bands marching along with a drum and a tattered flag, the men drinking out of their cans as they passed, some lathered with mud, some with ragged gold lace and a feather in the hat; some clipt to prancing horses riding as though horse and man were one, some laughing and some drunk and some making obscene motions, some singing and some cursing—she stood, finger in mouth, watching them go by. Or a riot of the apprentices, men rushing from the shops belabouring one another with anything that was to hand, shouting and crying their cries, and twenty of them marching down the street at once to meet another twenty, and, when they met, what a smashing of heads and a running of blood and women hiding behind doorways and masters cursing and the happy adventurer stealing a thing or two while nobody was looking!

Or it might be a hobby-horse procession with a tawdry Queen in a bent and battered crown riding on a mud-bespattered horse, and the Fools with their prancing hobby-horses and the ass with his ears silvered and the mountebank turning somersaults in the mud.

Or it might be, and perhaps best of all, a procession to Tyburn, with the condemned tied on the drawn trestles and the crowd throwing stones and women crying....

Whatever it might be, there was always movement and stench and bustle, with the smells malodorous, stomach-tickling, damp-ridden, rat-poisoned, flower-fragrant (as with roses, carnations, sweet-williams), and the voices crying and shouting, cursing and kissing, singing and bewailing, and all the bodies, fat, thin, tall, short, covered with this excess of linen and cotton and wool, sweating and panting and pushing and straining and loving and kicking—Katherine was accustomed to it all, loving it, holding herself apart from it but belonging to it, tumbling about it like a little kitten, nobody caring whether she lived or died, unless it were her father.

Until she was in her sixth or seventh year she had never been in the country. Then the three of them, her father, herself, and John Pickering, set out upon that wonderful journey to Scotland that was to change their fortunes. She had never been in the country before and for a long while she could not accustom herself to the silence. They found many means of conveyance, for everywhere they went they had a wonderful welcome. The English people had a great liking for the simple and more decent kinds of magic, and when Dom Christian discovered a gold egg in a leathern pocket or a sprig of rosemary in an old maid’s ear there was no end to the shouts and cries of jubilation.

Katherine herself was the centre of admiration, for she was a beautiful baby.

She had wonderful poise and self-possession for so small a child. The inns at which they stopped for the night were noisy places. Her father had never any anxiety for her. He used to call her the Queen. Her mother had been ‘whom he knew not.’ He had been legally wed to her—she was serving at an inn in Eastcheap when he first saw her, a slight, delicate, shy creature who would not submit to him unless he married her. So marry her he did. He loved her in his own fashion, but she never belonged to him any more than his child did. He believed her to be of fine birth. She came, she said, from Devon and was related to the Raleighs—her mother had died when she was an infant and her father had sailed with Drake and never returned. She had been ruined at the age of eighteen by one of Essex’s men returning from Ireland. She was but twenty when he married her. He used to wonder why she would not tell him the name of her family—she was ashamed, perhaps. He did not care.

She died in giving Katherine birth, but rather of languor and indifference than birth-pangs. When she discovered the sort of ruffian and villain he was and how ill-judged her love had been (which she did in the first week of their marriage), she just let herself die.

Dom Christian knew nothing of his own ancestry. He had been found in a barn and bred to every sort of perversity and wickedness by an old doctor who lived in Islington. This old doctor, Ephraim Christian, was as wicked a man as ever breathed but learned and gay. He had a perverse love for Christian and taught him many a trick, also some useful knowledge.

He discovered that the boy had hypnotic powers and hoped to make great use of him, but he died breathing by mistake one of his own poisons.

For a while young Christian was the kept boy of a shopkeeper in the Strand, who beat him and kissed him all at once and together. Then Christian broke away and lived on his wits, magical wits.

Such was the history of Katherine’s father and mother. Christian told people that she was the daughter of a great Court lady who had married him secretly and died. You could believe it when you saw Katherine moving. She walked like a baby duchess. She was so fearless that no rough soldier or country man attempted any rudeness with her.

There came the day when she saw for the first time the sea. It was the same day when they acted in Tobias Garland’s courtyard and she was kissed by Peter Garland.

Her first glimpse of that wonder was when they came out on the road from Kendal to the sea-road by Black Combe. It was splendid weather of blue and gold, and the sea lazily moved on the bright stretch of sand as though it slept. She was mounted on the donkey and she stared out over the sand-dunes as though she could never have enough. The combination of the smooth dark shoulder of Black Combe, the yellow sand, and this green-purple lazy sea caught her heart as it had never been caught before. She was wedded to this country from that instant. Over and over again in her later life she would describe it.

‘I had never heard of the sea. My father had never spoken of it. I knew that men went across the sea to fight the Spaniards, but it was the Spaniards, not the sea, that I figured. The silence! The whole world has never been silent like that again. The only sound was the sea whispering. I loved it. I knew love for the first time. I could have run over the banks of sand and bended down and kissed it. I held the donkey’s ears and would have stayed there for ever. Behind me the mountains, in front of me the sea. Cleansing! It washed me clean, for I had been always in dirty rooms and filthy inns and foul beds. I wished not to move. I could have stayed there for evermore.’

But of course she had to move, and she moved into Toby Garland’s ground and was kissed by Peter Garland. This, as it turned out, was the second event of her life. She did not know it then, but she remembered it. That boy’s was the pleasantest face her baby heart had ever known. She remembered the round cheeks and the kindly eyes and the soft touch of his lips. She thought of him afterwards and wondered whether she would ever see him again. She looked for him sometimes in the streets of London. Then she saw him again at Nicholas’ feast. She was older now, but once again she thought his was the pleasantest, most honest, most kindly face she had yet seen. He became for her the type of uprightness and honesty, although she made no attempt to see him anywhere and did not perhaps wish that she should. He was a symbol for her.

At length, on this journey, they reached Edinburgh, and it was there that Dom Christian’s fortunes changed. He met in that beautiful and very smelly city a certain Sir Alexander Canslie. This gentleman, whom later in London Katherine was to see with frequency, was thin to ludicrousness, with a fine red Roman nose and bushy pepper-and-salt eyebrows.

He had been long a dabbler in magic and spent much of his wealth over necromantic absurdities. For Dom Christian he became an easy victim. When he travelled down to London he took the Christians with him, and an absurd journey it was with Christian and Sir Alexander locked into inn chambers and producing smells, blue lights, and black puppies, so that, had it not been for Sir Alexander’s wealth, they might have found considerable trouble.

Sir Alexander had a certain power at Court, being an old acquaintance of the King’s, who, although he pursued witches with fanatical hatred, had, as that hatred showed, enough superstition to be interested in an experiment or two.

So the Christian fortunes expanded, and after a year or so the little house in Chelsea village was their home. A queer little place it was, embedded in dark trees and the rooms hung with dark-green hangings. An excellent rendezvous it was for any two or three who wished for secret visitings.

Early in the year 1613 Katherine, coming in with a basket of provisions and passing quickly through the green-lit parlour, saw, sitting in the shadow, a veiled lady. The veiled lady stopped her and, raising her veil, revealed herself as the most lovely human being Katherine had ever seen. She was lovely in everything, hair, features, and delicacy of body. She had a most sweet voice and she took the child of thirteen by the hand and made her sit beside her and paid her compliments on her beauty, and sighed and talked wildly of her unhappy life, and at last kissed Katherine on the eyes and on the mouth.

But Katherine, who was always sharp to detect any falsity, did not like her and thought her eyes had a sly look and the lines of her mouth a cruel tightness.

Her father came in and seemed anything but pleased that the lady should have discovered his daughter. When Katherine asked as to her identity, Christian told her. She was the beautiful and famous Countess of Essex.

After this there were many visitors at the Chelsea house. There was a sorcerer who could make the dead walk and women turn into bats. There was constantly present the only one of them Katherine had any liking for, Mr. Richard Weston. A man, Franklin. Most unpleasant of all, Anne Turner, the procuress.

Anne Turner was the most famous procuress in London. Everyone knew her. She could procure for young men at the Court or old misers in the Strand or hearty country gentlemen up in London for a fortnight’s holiday, anything or anybody.

Katherine loathed her. Here for once the child departed out of her cynical indifference and allowed her feelings to be engaged. She felt always that Anne Turner looked on her with a speculative eye. She hated to be touched by her. The woman knew that the child hated her, but never relaxed her soft, smiling, sinewy ways towards her.

Katherine knew well that in this Chelsea house she was surrounded by the powers of darkness. It did not seem at all strange to her that the sorcerer should talk with the Devil. The Devil was always just round the corner in that green-shadowed little house.

She was afraid neither of the Devil nor of his accomplices, but she was during these years often lonely. She thought at times of that kindly fresh-cheeked boy who had kissed her in Cumberland. Her only friend during these years was poor hunchbacked John, who still persisted in his adoration of her father until, one night, he saw something that frightened him so badly that he ran away and was no more seen.

Then she herself saw something that frightened even her stalwart nerves. She slept in a small attic-room and always saw that the door was bolted, and lay with a little dagger beneath her pillow.

One early morning, between two and three, she was awakened by the horrible screaming of some animal, and curiosity having the better of her, she crept out and down the stairs and looked through an unglassed window into her father’s room. Of all that she saw there she would never tell, but there was a big wax image of a naked woman with ‘spread hair,’ another doll magnificently dressed in silk and satin; there was an animal being tortured. There were present her father, the Countess of Essex, a man called Sir Gervase Helwys, and the sorcerer.

She watched for a little and returned to her room. That night, on her bed, she swore that she would be armed for ever against the world. The world was evil and all men and women in it. She grew, during those hours, young in years though she was, from a child into a woman.

III

Towards the end of her fifteenth year there was the small affair of the little black dog. She found herself one day in Smithfield. She had always a liking for Smithfield, which at this particular time was moving away from the foul and ruinous state of Elizabethan days into the noisy, bawdy, paved conditions of Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. The ground was now raised in the middle and was a clean and spacious walk; channels were made to drain the water away; a thick railing was put up about the market-place for the safety of foot-passengers against the danger of the coaches that were becoming so common—carts, cattle, horses, too, made a terrifying battle of the ordinary ground.

The famous horse-pool was now quite decayed, the springs being dried up. What surface water there was fell into a small bottom, enclosed with brick and known as the Smithfield Pond.

Cow Lane, in which was the old house of the Prior of Sempringham, was a lane of houses, not all of them new, built over the site of the old gallows. The last of the old elms had been cut down. Hosier Lane and Chick Lane were newly become permanent resorts of trade and Long Lane was being lined with tenements for brokers, tipplers. There were brew-houses, inns, fine buildings, on the western side of Smithfield, as far as the Bars.

Smithfield was important in Katherine’s life just at this time, for it was here that she received the deep conviction that she was moving with, and into, a new world, a conviction that through all the adventures and dangers of her later life was to help her in her aloofness from her own failures and successes. It was in Smithfield that she received deeply for the first time the certainty that great world movements were independent of human lives. The citizens of Smithfield were laying down paving-stones for the better convenience of their immediate customers, little knowing and thinking that in so doing they were serving history.

Katherine learned here, what she would never forget, that there were two concurrent histories—individual man, his soul-making, and the great movements in which a thousand years are but a day upward towards universal progress. She was never to be very greatly interested in her own soul-making, but she was to detect in the signing of a parchment, the sacrifice of a loyal servant, the prayers of a fanatic, the abandonment of a city, the retreat of an army, the execution of a king, the signs and tokens of the other history.

In any case, it was in Smithfield that she saw the little black dog. In her stern resolve to yield to no submission that would weaken her strong independence, she found that animals were the devil! She could not help herself. Her heart that she was ever training for denial, refused to temper its beat at the sight or sound of a dog, horse, cat, parrot, or any small bird.

She could not be stern at the vision of this little black dog who, after sniffing at some garbage and the corpse of a donkey, swollen in death, discovered her as she watched workmen timbering a house and incontinently claimed her for his own.

It was perhaps the bright crimson dress that she was wearing or something very self-confident or independent that attracted him.

‘This girl must be able to look after herself. She will look after me.’

In any case, he attached himself and refused to leave her. There were many dogs grubbing about and this was as clear a mongrel as any of them. He was black and tousled, with bandy legs. He had, however, eyes of a passionate burning brown. She astonished herself finally by picking him up and carrying him home to Chelsea.

She travelled by the river and attracted much attention by her beauty, her bright dress, and the mongrel dog. One fellow, with gold rings in his ears and an impertinent nose, in pretence of chucking the dog’s chin, chucked hers also. She was only fifteen, but looked at him so fiercely that he shabbily apologized.

She enjoyed the pale gold of the afternoon sky, the swishing rhythm of the river, the breeze on her cheeks, but far more than these did she enjoy the defeat of the earringed man.

It was part of the unpleasantness of the Chelsea house that so little comment was made on the events that occurred in it. No one for many weeks said anything about the little black dog, although he followed her everywhere and even slept on the end of her bed.

She wished not to become attached to the animal, but attached she became. She was after all a very lonely child. For some months she was happy in its company.

Then one evening by candle-light she saw the beautiful young Anne Turner, who was frequently at supper with them, staring at it. Anne Turner had the nastiest stare in the world; when she stared at someone or something she seemed out of her body to spin some sort of glaucous web.

She had stared at Katherine many a time, but that stare had failed. Now she stood in the door of the room with green hangings, and while the candle-light flared up and down she stared at the little black dog. After she was gone Katherine felt the dog tremble against her breast.

She remembered the cry of the animal in the night.

So next morning she went down to the river, the dog following at her heels. There by the riverside she saw one of the new Puritans standing. He was a round, plump man dressed in plain black. He was saying his morning prayers, but so round and homely and kindly was his face that Katherine stood waiting beside him until he should finish.

‘I will lay me down at night as a stone,’ he said, ‘and in the morning the Lord shall make me as a loaf of fresh bread.’

He smiled at her, and the moment was very pleasant, a cool air in the trees, the river rushing swiftly by, a new bright day beginning, and this round, cheerful countenance.

She offered him the little black dog. He accepted it.

‘I do not know what my wife may say, but my little Benjamin will be joyful in the Lord.’

He laid his hand on her head, blessed her and walked away, leading the dog by a string. To her own deep indignation her eyes were misted with tears as she watched him go.

IV

So she sat, on the day of her sixteenth birthday, by the open window waiting to speak to her father. She had something to say to him. The sun was now beating warmly on the walls of the houses, and all the birds in the glittering cages were singing and twittering and chattering so that there seemed to be two worlds, one airy and of an infinite lightness and mobility, the other human and earthly, rumbling, rattling, echoing with men’s cries and all the daily traffic of the city.

She stood up and, turning, surveyed the room, which had in it a portrait of some Elizabethan in a ruff and a purple suit, a large rat-trap in a corner by the fireplace, and a table with a flagon that had fallen on its side. The room, in spite of the warm fresh air from the open window, smelt stuffy with the heaviness of a rat-liquor staleness.

She closed the window. At the same moment the door opened and her father came in.

He went to the table and set up the overturned flagon. He yawned and stared at her. She saw that he was disturbed, and then that he was frightened. His heavy white nose held drops of perspiration.

So unexpected was the fear in his eyes that she called out:

‘What is it?’

He sat heavily down on a stool near the rat-trap. Then, hearing a cheeping, he saw that there was a mouse in it. He opened the trap, took out the mouse, killed it, and threw it into the fireplace.

His terror filled all the room. She did not speak. She had intended to tell him that to-day she was sixteen and from now was a woman and would lead her independent life. She would be his daughter but not his servitor. She would find for herself some position. He must recognize and acknowledge her freedom. She had been planning what she would say for weeks. She could hear dimly through the wall the singing of the birds. A strange mingling of some sort of anxiety for him, contempt and fear for him (none for herself), kept her silent.

He stood up and she saw that he was trembling. He took out a dagger, sheathed, from his pocket-bag, released it and bent forward, chipping the table-edge.

The door opened again and Anne Turner came in.

She, too, said nothing, only stared straight through Katherine out to the window.

Their motionless silence was horrible.

Katherine said again: ‘What is it?—What has happened?’ As neither of them answered, as the room seemed hot with a deep penetrating smell, she walked past them, out of the room, then ran down the stairs.

Below in the street she looked up and saw all the gilded cages flashing and winking in the sun.