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The Queen vanished in a little thunderclap, and Essex swore and A
"If I'd been your son—" said Essex.
"If," said A
"They'll all be disturbed downstairs," said young Edward. "They are, when she comes through." They faded. . . all but Marc.
"They don't change my mind," said Bettine. "The Queen was rude."
"No," said Marc. "Queens aren't. She's just what she is."
"Rude," she repeated, still smarting.
"Be what you are," said Marc, "I'll go. It's your moment."
"Marc?" She reached after him, forgetting. Touched nothing. She was alone then, and it was too quiet. She would have wanted Marc to stay. Marc understood fear.
Be what she was. She laughed sorrowfully, wiped at her eyes, and went to the bath to begin to be beautiful, looked at eyes which had puffed and which were habitually reddened from want of sleep. And from crying. She found herself crying now, and did not know why, except maybe at the sight of Bettine Maunfry as she was, little slim hands that had never done anything and a face which was all sex and a voice that no one would ever obey or take seriously. . . just for games, was Bettine. In all this great place which had held desperate criminals and fallen queens and heroes and lords, just Bettine, who was going to do the practical thing and turn in Tom who had never loved her, but only wanted something.
Tom's another, she thought with curiously clear insight, a beautifulperson who was good at what he did, but it was not Tom who was going to be important, he was just smooth and good and all hollow, nothing behind the smiling white teeth and clear blue eyes. If you cracked him it would be like a china doll, nothing in the middle.
So with Bettine.
"I love you," he had protested. As far as she had known, no one had ever really loved Bettine Maunfry, though she had sold everything she had to keep people pleased and smiling at her all her life. She was not, in thinking about it, sure what she would do ifsomeone loved her, or if she would know it if he did. She looked about at the magazines with the pictures of eyes and lips and the articles on how to sell one's soul.
Articles on love.
There's love and love, A
Pleasing people. Pleasing everyone, so that they would please Bettine. Pretty children got rewards for crying and boys got spanked. While the world was pacified, it would not hurt Bettine.
Eyes and lips, primal symbols.
She made up carefully, did her hair, added the last items to her packing. Except her handwork, which kept her sane. Click, click. Mindless sanity, rhythms and patterns. There was light from the window now. Probably breakfast would arrive soon, but she was not hungry.
And finally came the noise of the doors, and the steps ascending the tower. Richard Collier came. He shut the door behind him and looked down at her frowning; and she stood up in front of the only window.
Look them in the eyes, the Queen had said. She looked at Richard that way, the Queen's way, and he evidently did not like it.
"The name," he said.
She came to him, her eyes filling with tears in spite of herself. "I don't want to tell you," she said.
"It would hurt somebody; and if you trusted me you'd let me straighten it out. I can get your file back for you."
"You leave that to me," Richard said. "The name, girl, and no more—" She had no idea why she did it. Certainly Richard's expression was one of surprise, as if he had calculated something completely wrong. There was blood on her, and the long needle buried between his ribs, and he slid down to lie on the floor screaming and rolling about, or trying to. It was a very soundproof room; and no one came. She stood and watched, quite numb in that part of her which ought to have been conscience; if anything feeling mild vindication.
"Bettine," she said quietly, and sat down and waited for him to die and for someone who had brought him to the tower to miss him. Whoever had the numbers was free to use them now; there would be a new order in the city; there would be a great number of changes. She reckoned that if she had ordered her life better she might have been better prepared, and perhaps in a position to escape. She was not. She had not pla
And did London's life. . . lead to Bettine Maunfry? She suspected herself of a profound thought. She was even proud of it. Richard's eyes stared blankly now. There had not been a great deal of pain. She had not wanted that, particularly, although she would not have shrunk from it. In a moment, there was not time to shrink.
There was power and there was love, and she had gotten through life with neither. She did not see what one had to do with the other; nothing, she decided, except in the sense that there really never had been a Bettine Maunfry, only a doll which responded to everyone else's impulses. And there had been nothing of her to love.
She would not unchoose what she had done; that was Elizabeth's test of happiness. She wondered if Richard would.
Probably not, when one got down to moments; but Richard had not been particularly smart in some things.
I wonder if I could have been Mayor, she thought. Somewhere I decided about that, and never knew I was deciding.
There was a noise on the stairs now. They were coming. She sat still, wondering if she shought fight them too, but decided against it. She was not, after all, insane. It was politics. It had to do with the politics of His Honor the Mayor and of one Bettine, a girl, who had decided not to give a name.
They broke in, soldiers, who discovered the Mayor's body with great consternation. They laid hands on her and shouted questions.
"I killed him," she said. They waved rifles at her, accusing her of being part of the revolution.
"I led my own," she said.
They looked very uncertain then, and talked among themselves and made calls to the city. She sat guarded by rifles, and they carried the Mayor out, poor dead Richard. They talked out the murder and wondered that she could have had the strength to drive the needle so deep. Finally—incredibly—they questioned the jailer as to what kind of prisoner she was, as if they believed that she had been more than the records showed, the imprisoned leader of some cause, the center of the movement they had been hunting. They talked about more guards. Eventually she had them, in great number, and by evening, all the Tower was ringed with soldiery, and heavy guns moved into position, great batteries of them in the i
But of her nightly companions. . . nothing. Perhaps they were shy, for at night a guard stood outside in the anteroom. Perhaps, after all, she was a little mad. She grieved for their absence, not for Richard and not for Tom, living in this limbo of tragic comedy. She watched the city burn and listened to the tread of soldiers in the court, and watched the gun crews from her single window. It was the time before supper, when they left her a little to herself—if a guard at the stairside door was privacy; they had closed off the anteroom as they usually did, preparing to deliver her di