--even without the red wig yet,
just powdered pale makeup going back to a quarter of an inch from her
own short dark bang combed and netted back tight. The age too. Miss
Nefer can't be a day over forty--well, forty-two at most--but now she
looked and talked and felt to my hands dressing her, well, at least a
dozen years older. I guess when Miss Nefer gets into character she
does it with each molecule.

That age point fascinated me so much that I risked asking her a
question. Probably I was figuring that she couldn't do me much damage
because of the positions we happened to be in at the moment. You see,
I'd started to lace her up and to do it right I had my knee against
the tail of her spine.

"How old, I mean how young might your majesty be?" I asked her,
innocently wonderingly like some dumb serving wench.

For a wonder she didn't somehow swing around and clout me, but only
settled into character a little more deeply.

"Fifty-four winters," she replied dismally. "'Tiz Januarius of Our
Lord's year One Thousand and Five Hundred and Eighty and Seven. I sit
cold in Greenwich, staring at the table where Mary's death warrant
waits only my sign manual. If I send her to the block, I open the
doors to future, less official regicides. But if I doom her not,
Philip's armada will come inching up the Channel in a season, puffing
smoke and shot, and my English Catholics, thinking only of Mary
Regina, will rise and i' the end the Spaniard will have all. All
history would alter. That must not be, even if I'm damned for it! And
yet ... and yet...."

A bright blue fly came buzzing along (the dressing room has _some_
insect life) and slowly circled her head rather close, but she didn't
even flicker her eyelids.

"I sit cold in Greenwich, going mad. Each afternoon I ride, praying
for some mischance, some prodigy, to wash from my mind away the bloody
question for some little space. It skills not what: a fire, a tree
a-failing, Davison or e'en Eyes Leicester tumbled with his horse, an
assassin's ball clipping the cold twigs by my ear, a maid crying
rape, a wild boar charging with dipping tusks, news of the Spaniard at
Thames' mouth or, more happily, a band of strolling actors setting
forth some new comedy to charm the fancy or some great unheard-of
tragedy to tear the heart--though that were somewhat much to hope for
at this season and place, even if Southwark be close by."

* * * * *

The lacing wa