Mark told me that when he got through with “Joan of Arc” he would tackle “this here Elizabeth proposition”—“a person full of placid egotism and obsessed with self-importance,” he called her. “If I do Elizabeth half as well as I intend to do ‘Joan’ and did ‘The Prince and Pauper,’ I will have three serious books to my credit, and after that I will be damned—‘thrice damned,’ Elizabeth would have said—if I allow anybody to take me for a mere funmaker.”
He gave me some more instructions, talking at random mostly, and paid me in advance for the work I was to do. Twenty-four hours later I landed at Victoria Station, London, for, having business in Antwerp, I had travelled via Holland.
A foreign correspondent (that was my trade then) is shifted merrily from one place to another; so it happened that I went back to France after a fortnight in England, or even sooner. The Clemenses were packing, and I had Mark all to myself for an hour or so.
“What made you first doubt the Virgin Queen’s sex?” I asked.
“Never mind—her gorgeous swearing maybe. What did you find out in Surrey?”
I duly reported that I had gone to Overcourt with a friend, had explored the Queen Elizabeth chambers, the woods and countryside, and had interviewed a lot of old and some young gossips, with this result:
Elizabeth, I was told, came to Overcourt when a child of four or five, and a young person supposed to be Elizabeth—that is, the daughter of Ann Boleyn and Henry the Eighth—left there some ten years later. When the Princess was seven or eight, King Henry, who was attending Parliament, had promised to come and see his little girl two weeks hence (Overcourt is within easy riding distance of London). But even as they were preparing to give Hal—(“Ought to be Hell,” interpolated Mark)—a rousing reception; to feed the brute in particular, Elizabeth was suddenly attacked by malignant fever and died. There was only one “in the know,” her Grace’s governess—I gave her name to Mark, but have quite forgotten it. I remember, though, that she remained in the royal service for some forty years afterwards, in fact, that she and “Elizabeth” never separated while both lived.
“I can imagine how that poor woman felt,” commented Mark—“went through all the horrors of having her hair bobbed behind, and her neck shaved—what else was there in store for her but a beheading party if Hal found his daughter dead? And when, in your mind’s eye, you see the executioner try the edge of his axe on his thumb nail, life’s delicatessen—considerations for truth, politics, and common everyday decency—lose their appeal. The axe-man was coming and that governess didn’t want to be the chicken.”
“That’s what the gossips told me, and they had it from their great-great-great-grandmothers, a blessed heritage.”