CHAPTER XXXI
MARYE, THE QUEENE
Thus day followed day, whilst in the great world without, England was preparing to see her premier lord arraigned before his peers on a charge of murder. And in one of the smaller chambers of her own private apartments at Hampton Court, Mary Tudor sat alone, praying and thinking, thinking and praying again.
Not a queen now, not a proud and wilful Tudor, passionate, cruel, or capricious, but only a middle-aged, broken-hearted woman, with eyes swollen with weeping, and brain heavy with eternally reiterated desires.
To save him! to save him!
But how?
That he had committed so foul a crime as to stab an enemy in the back, this in the very face of his own confession Mary still obstinately refused to believe. The rumours anent the presence of a woman in that part of the Palace and at that fatal hour had of course reached her ears. Jealousy and hatred, which had raged within her, had readily fastened on Ursula Glynde as the cause, if not the actual perpetrator of the dastardly crime.
That a woman was somehow or other connected with the terrible events of that night, every one was of course ready to admit, but in what manner no one was able to conjecture.
A murder had been committed. Of that there could be no doubt. Don Miguel de Suarez had been stabbed in the back! Not in fair fight, but brutally, callously stabbed! and he a guest at the English Court!
Of this barbarous, abominable act the Duke of Wessex stood self-convicted.