The Queen let her hands fall slowly to her sides.
'Who did this?' she said, and Mary Hall answered—
'It was the King!'
The Lady Mary set her book under her arm.
'Ye might have known it was the King,' she said harshly. The Queen was as still as a pillar of ebony and ivory, so black her dress was, and so white her face and pendant hands.
'I repent me! I repent me!' the maid cried out. 'When I heard that they were dead I repented me and came here. The old Duchess of Norfolk is in gaol: she burned the letters of Dearham! The Lady Rochford is in gaol, and old Sir Nicholas, and the Lady Cicely that was ever with the Queen; the Lord Edmund Howard shall to gaol and his lady.'
'Why,' the Lady Mary said to the Queen, 'if you had not had such a fear of nepotism, your father and mother and grandmother and cousin had been here about you, and not so easily taken.'
The Queen stood still whilst all her hopes fell down.
'They have taken Lady Cicely that was ever with me,' she said.
'It was the Duke of Norfolk that pressed me most,' Mary Lascelles cried out.