She sent for her little brother and had him burnt; this eased the pain at her heart a little. Then her aunt was conveyed to her from Majorca, and on arrival was pierced by several bodkins and ultimately buried in hot tar. Isabella Angelica almost gave vent to a wan smile.
She supervised her father's death, the actual work being performed by her colleagues of the Inquisition. He was cut in moderate-sized snippets and toasted on one side only.
It says much for Isabella Angelica's charm and personality that the populace, in spite of their knowledge of her deeds, one and all adored her—to the end of her life the unstinting love and adulation of all who came in contact with her was hers irretrievably.
It was during the personal mutilation of her third cousin that she caught the influenza cold which cost her her life. Poor, doomed Isabella Angelica: her death-bed was surrounded by heart-broken mourners who had flocked from all parts of sunny Spain to pay tribute to the dying beauty; the Inquisition issued an edict that no eyes were to be put out for a whole week in honour of her.
She died peacefully, clasping an ivory rosary and a faded miniature on elephant's hide, portraying a handsome, debonair young man. Could it have been Enrique Baloona?
Thus lived and died one of Spain's most entrancing specimens of feminine beauty.
MAGGIE McWHISTLE
MAGGIE McWHISTLE
From an old painting by Ronald Gerphipps
BORN in an obscure Scotch manse of Jacobite parents, Maggie McWhistle goes down to immortality as perhaps the greatest heroine of Scottish history; and perhaps not. We read of her austere Gallic beauty in every record and tome of the period—one of the noble women whose paths were lit for them from birth by Destiny's relentless lamp. What did Maggie know of the part she was to play in the history of her country? Nothing. She lived through her girlhood unheeding; she helped her mother with the baps and her father with the haggis; occasionally she would be given a new plaidie—she who might have had baps, haggis, and plaidies ten thousandfold for the asking. A word must be said of her parents. Her father, Jaimie, known all along Deeside as Handsome Jaimie—how the light-hearted village girls mourned when he turned minister: he was high, high above them. Of his meeting with Janey McToddle, the Pride of Bonny Donside, very little is written. Some say that they met in a snowstorm on Ben Lomond, where she was tending her kine; others say that they met on the high road to Aberdeen and his collie Jeannie bit her collie Jock—thus cementing a friendship that was later on to ripen into more and more—and even Maggie. Some years later they were wed, and Jaimie led his girl-bride to the little manse which was destined to be the birthplace of one of Scotland's saviours. History tells us little of Maggie McWhistle's childhood: she apparently lived and breathed like any more ordinary girl—her griddle cakes were famous adown the length and breadth of Aberdeen. Gradually a little path came to be worn between the manse and the kirk, seven miles away, where Maggie's feet so often trod their way to their devotions. She was intensely religious.