Anne Boleyn, had fallen by the axe. She put a gouty
and swollen finger to her lips, and the girl shrugged her shoulders with
a passion of despair, for she was very hot-tempered, and it was as if
mutinously that she fetched the Queen her chair and set it behind her
where she stood before the mirror taking off her breast jewel from its
chain. And again the girl shrugged her shoulders. Then she went to the
little wall-door that corkscrewed down into the courtyard through the
thick of the wall. Immediately after she was gone they heard the
lockguard that awaited her without set on the great padlock without the
door. Then his feet clanked down the stairway, he being heavily loaded
with weighty keys. It was the doors along the corridor that the young
Poins guarded, and these were never opened once the Queen was in her
room, save by the King. The Lady Rochford slept in the anteroom upon a
truckle-bed, and the great withdrawing-room was empty.

It was very still in the Queen's room and most shadowy, except before
the mirror where the candle flames streamed upwards. The pillars of the
great bed were twisted out of dark wood; the hangings of bed and walls
were all of a dark blue arras, and the bedspread was of a dark red
velvet worked in gold with pomegranates and pomegranate leaves. Only the
pillows and the turnover of the sheets were of white linen-lawn, and the
bed curtains nearly hid them with shadows. Where the Queen sat there was
light like that of an altar in a dim chapel, for the room was so huge.

She sat before her glass, silently taking off her golden things. She
took the jewel off the chain round her neck and laid it in a casket of
gold and ivory. She took the rings off her fingers and hung them on the
lance of a little knight in silver. She took off her waist where it hung
to a brooch of feridets, her pomander of enamel and gold; she opened it
and marked the time by the watch studded with sable diamonds that it
held.

'Past eleven,' she said, 'if my watch goes right.'

'Indeed it is past eleven,' the Lady Rochford sighed behind her.

The Queen sat forward in her chair, looking deep into the shadows of her
mirror. A great relaxation was in all her limbs, for she was very tired,
so that though she was minded to let down her hair she did not begin to
undo her coif, and though she desired to think, she had no thoughts.
From far away there came a muffled sound as if a door had been roughly
closed, and the Lady Rochfor