“Oh!” The tone was significant.
“Why, was you wanting yon maid o’ Mistress Clere’s?” said the porter’s wife. “You’ll have her safe enough, for I met Amy Clere this even, and she said her mother was downright vexed with their Bess, and had turned the key on her. I did not know it was her you meant. I’ve never heard her called nought but Bess, you see.”
“Then that’s all well,” said Maynard. “I’ll tarry for her till the morrow, for I’m well wearied to-night.”
Chapter Twenty.
Led to the Slaughter.
The long hours of that day wore on, and nobody came again to Elizabeth in the porch-chamber. The dusk fell, and she heard the sounds of locking up the house and going to bed, and began to understand that neither supper nor bed awaited her that night. Elizabeth quietly cleared a space on the floor in the moonlight, heaping boxes and baskets on one another, till she had room to lie down, and then, after kneeling to pray, she slept more peacefully than Queen Mary did in her Palace. She was awoke suddenly at last. It was broad daylight, and somebody was rapping at the street door.
“Amy!” she heard Mistress Clere call from her bedchamber, “look out and see who is there.”
Amy slept at the front of the house, in the room next to the porch-chamber. Elizabeth rose to her feet, giving her garments a shake down as the only form of dressing just then in her power, and looked out of the window.