Elizabeth, Captive Princess by Margaret Irwin

Author:Margaret Irwin [Margaret Irwin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780749012571
Publisher: Allison & Busby
Published: 2013-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Elizabeth had won. Mary had at last graciously allowed her sister to leave London, and as though it were merely to satisfy her desire for rural solitude.

So now the sisters met to say goodbye.

Seventeen years stood between them, but it might have been a century. Both were aware of the enormous gulf in time; Elizabeth knew she would have to choose and comb her words as though to her grandmother; Mary felt how hard and baffling were these young women of the modern generation, so terrifyingly self-assured. Elizabeth looked so neat and well groomed with her hair strained back under the absurd little riding-cap as flat as a plate on top of her high bold clever forehead where the fashionably plucked eyebrows made two thin half-moons. Her waistcoat was buttoned up tight to her throat; a narrow double ruffle of white lawn billowed crisply out from the high collar and at the close-fitting wrists of her sleeves. She wore no earrings, no rings, and carried a handkerchief twisted round her fingers (was it to refute Mary’s accusation of showing off her hands?).

She looked so young, spruce, new-minted, as though she would never remember, never regret, never weep nor wish for impossible things, never sap her taut vigorous life in all the useless ways that Mary had done. ‘She thinks me a muddle-headed old maid,’ thought Mary, and it was no consolation that she thought Elizabeth a brazen young adventuress.

She sought to retrieve her superiority by a spate of parting presents. This was by Renard’s instructions, but it was also her natural outlet, the act in which she had taken her most spontaneous pleasure since her starved girlhood.

‘The year is going fast,’ she said, ‘and soon we shall have Christmas upon us before we know where we are. You must let me give you my Christmas presents now.’

The first one was embarrassing; it was a book of gold with a diamond clasp containing the miniature portraits of Henry VIII and Queen Katherine of Aragon. Had Mary chosen this deliberately to put her yet again in her place? But her manner gave no hint of it, she seemed to think Elizabeth should be as pleased to have a memento of Queen Katherine as if she were her own mother instead of Mary’s. ‘The likeness is excellent,’ she observed complacently, and Elizabeth murmured politely that she wished she could have known the original. Her face had frozen into wary immobility; but it thawed into pleasure when Mary fastened an enormous brooch on her dress; on it, carved in amethyst, was the story of Pyramis and Thisbe, the lovers, in translucent purple, peering at each other through a wall of diamond. And the next moment she flung a sable wrap round her shoulders.

‘There,’ she said; ‘look at yourself in the mirror, it is becoming to your fair colouring, isn’t it?’

‘One moment she scratches, then she strokes – I can never make her out,’ thought Elizabeth as she stammered out her thinks, abashed by the generosity of this odd woman whom she had begun to think wholly her enemy.

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