She stood up, with a smile on her thin lips, as they snatched her wheel away.
“Dispose them,” said the King, “where neither may avail the other. And, for her, take her incontinent in her sorcery, and put her where she may weave a shroud of darkness for evermore.”
He spoke, and passed out; and, as he had ordered, so was it done. The spinning-wheel was cast into a cupboard under the great staircase, and the nurse disappeared from human ken. Nothing more was heard of her for ten long years.
At the end of that time the King’s majesty lay ill. His huge bombard of a body was swollen with gout and dropsy; a mere rust of hair remained to his gross head; his hearing was capricious, and his eyes rheumy with half-blindness. He had grown slovenly in his dress; his every breath bullied the sweet air for ease and comfort; and, to cap all, his temper had grown with his deformities till hardly a man durst meet his eye.
Lying at Whitehall, he had a dream one night which troubled him. He sent for Sir Anthony Denny, always now in close attendance, and, heaving himself on his elbow, glared at the physician through a mist of anguish.
“Give me,” he said, “to mend this whirring in my brain.”
Sir Anthony, quaking in his list slippers, prescribed and administered a febrifuge. It availed little. Day and night the buzzing noise went on until it grew to madness. One morning the King groaned in torture: “It droneth, droneth for ever like a wheel!” and of a sudden sat up as if stricken.
“The old beldame’s!” he whispered. “What of it?”
It was some time before the alarmed leech could gather the import of his question, and then he hurried to have inquiries made. A special courier was despatched boot and spur to Hampton Court. But in these full years the very memory of the incident had vanished, and none knew where the wheel had been deposited. Only it seemed that others there had been haunted of late by a mysterious sound, so that none dared venture by the great staircase whence it appeared to proceed. And that was the message returned, in fear and trembling, to the tyrant.
He raged: “I will have no mysteries in my house. Pluck the stairway down.”