The Girl in the Glass Tower by Elizabeth Fremantle

Author:Elizabeth Fremantle
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781405920063
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-06-02T07:00:00+00:00

Clerkenwell

Ami reads on, completely absorbed, deciphering the tangle of text; she has barely stopped to sleep or eat. The past returns vividly; she remembers it all, the old Queen’s passing and the atmosphere of tension, as if England had been a pot on the boil with its lid too tight. The coronation had felt like a great expulsion of breath across the nation. She remembers the relentless rain but no one said it was a bad omen. They were all too relieved to have avoided a conflict at the old Queen’s passing. No one so much as mentioned that it might have been Lady Arbella on the throne.

The Countess of Cumberland had invited Ami and her family to watch the procession from the window of her Westminster house. Ami had dedicated a poem to the countess and read it aloud to great delight. It felt like an achievement as she’d been labouring over it for months. But Alphonso had drunk too much of the countess’s wine, had fallen asleep, snoring through his wife’s recital, leaving her obliged to invent embarrassed excuses for him. Hal had been delighted to see the royal children pass. ‘I think I will marry the Princess Elizabeth when I’m grown up,’ he’d said, making the whole company laugh. He was nine. It chokes her to think of him now and his relentless silence.

She remembers Ralegh’s trial too. Strangely, she’d forgotten it was the Lady Arbella who’d been the focus of his plot. People only talked of Ralegh and what a filthy traitor he was. How loathed he’d become, when a decade earlier he had still been thought a hero. It had shocked her at the time to see how fortune can turn so easily; but now her own fortune has plummeted she understands that it takes only a single small event to send fate utterly awry.

Evening is falling, so she takes a stool on to her stoop to catch the last of the light, reading on like a woman possessed. She can sense that her own story is about to intersect with Lady Arbella’s. The idea excites her, makes her wonder how she will be portrayed, whether she will recognize herself. Will she be there substantially, at the heart of the story, or as a ghost in the margins?

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.