'Doctor,' I said entreatingly, 'I am your girl. Your sweet singer, you know,' I hurriedly explained, seeing that he did not understand. 'I can sing very sweetly, though I say it myself. Take me to Queen Mary.'
'You!' The good man looked amazed. 'I am afraid it would not do,' he said. 'Supposing now that Her Majesty found out that you had been in the Tower with Queen Jane?'
'I don't think that that would make so much difference,' I said. 'A singer may sing to any one.'
After a little more demur, to my intense satisfaction, Dr. Massingbird consented to take me, only stipulating that I should conceal my real name and position from the queen, and appear before her as a professional singer only. He also made me promise that I would do Queen Mary no harm in any way when admitted into her presence—for these were days in which treachery was common.
Under his care, escorted by him, in scarcely an hour from the time in which we met in Thames Street, I was entering the royal apartments of the ancient palace[[1]] in the mighty Tower of London.
[[1]] This palace of the old kings of England has long since disappeared. It was at the south-east of the Tower.—ED.
I must confess candidly that, whilst outwardly appearing dignified and calm, I was inwardly in a state of great trepidation and timidity. Always overawed by the vastness and gloom of the mighty fortress, even when there with Queen Jane, while she was in power and every effort was made to display its riches and magnificence, it can easily be understood, that I was many times more so now when, late at night under an assumed character, yet at heart an adherent of the imprisoned ex-queen, I ventured alone, except for the presence of the physician, himself a servant, into the palace of the reigning monarch. Curious glances were cast at me by guards and sentinels, squires and dames, lords and ladies, as we ascended the great oaken staircase and passed through a long gallery into a spacious hall, with narrow Gothic windows of stained glass, hung with tarnished cloth of gold curtains. Here the furniture was large and splendid, the windows were in deep recesses, whilst there was a gallery round the upper part of the room.
'Wait a little here, until I return,' said my guide, signing to me to sit down on an old oak chair.
The physician went away, leaving me, as I at first thought, alone, but, in a little while, my eyes became accustomed to the dim light, and I saw that in some of the embrasures by the windows, men and women sat, or stood engaged in earnest conversation. A few of them appeared to be foreigners; from their dress I imagined they were Spaniards, and two or three of these were monks, the sight of whom there recalled to my mind Sir Hubert Blair's prediction in Woodleigh Castleyard, that if Mary reigned, the country would be plunged into Roman Catholicism and brought into alliance with Spain, upon which a door would be thrown open for the Inquisition, with all its horrors.
At that moment I heard a girl, standing in a recess near, saying to a tall man, who from his dress and bearing seemed to be of noble birth—