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 'Amon^ tke greatest pleasures provided by
is tin
tkese two decades of well-edited letters
ckance to recall every love affair's keenest
intoxication —tke tkrill of kearing tke tking
you want insisting tkat you take it... Tke
result is a volume tkat reads like a kook,
I not just a gathering of marvelous scraps."
The New York Times Book Review

mt

Wm

r r ri n r
r D r
r

Vita Sackvilfe-West
TO Virginia Woo if
LOUISE DESALVD and MITCHELL LEASKA
 ickville-West ana Virginia Wbolf met
at a dinner party given by Clive Bell in
London on December 14, 1922. Their
love affair grew out or an instant friendship.
Virginia confided her impressions or Vita to

her diary: "She is a pronounced Sapphist, &

may... nave an eye on me, old though I am.
Nature might have sharpened her faculties.

Inob as I am, I trace her passions 500 ye«

hack, & they hecome romantic to me, like
old vellow wine."

Vita was quite taken with Virginia as well.

CD
cu
Jhe wrote to her husharid Harold
Nicholson: "I simply adore Virginia ^bolf, ~ C\J
and so would you. You would fall quite flat
-J
O
O
hefore her charm and personality.... Mrs

^>olf is so simple: she does give the

sion of something hig. She is

im A
utterly unaf-
II
fected.... At first you think she is plain, then c o
a sort of spiritual beauty imposes itself on is co
you, and you find a fascination in watching w o
She both detached and human,
O CO
her.... is
CO
silent till she wants to say something, and
then says it supremely well. She is quite old.

I've rarely taken such a fancy to anyone,

and I think she likes me. At least she's

asked me to Richmond where she lives.

Darling, I have quite lost my heart."

The Letters of Vita Sackville-West tp Virginia

Woolj contains over 500 letters, both from

Vita to Virginia and from Virginia to Vita in

reply, a monument to a passionate relationship

that lasted until Woolf's death in 1941.
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2012

http://archive.org/details/lettersofvitasacOOsack
 The Letters of
Vita Sackville-West
to Virginia Woolf

Edited by

Louise DeSalvo and

Mitchell Leaska

Introduction by Mitchell Leaska

CLE1S
 The Letters ofVita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf © by Nigel Nicolson 1984.
Introduction © by Mitchell Leaska 1984.
Text and commentary © by Mitchell Leaska and Louise DeSalvo 1984

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, or television

reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by Cleis Press Inc., P.O. Box 14684, San Francisco, California 94114.

Printed in the United States.

Cover design: Scott Idleman

Text design: Ned Takahashi

Logo art: Juana Alicia

Excerpts from The Letters ofVirginia Woolf, volumes 3, 4, 5, 6, edited by Nigel Nicolson
and Joanne Trautmann are reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and the
Hogarth Press ©by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980.

Photographs reproduced courtesy of Nigel Nicolson.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sackville-West,V. (Victoria), 1892-1962

The Letters ofVita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf

Reprint. Originally published: New York: Morrow, ©1985.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.
Sackville-West, V (Victoria), 1892-1962— Correspondence.
Woolf,Virginia, 1882-1941 — Correspondence.
Authors, English —20th century—Correspondence.
I.Woolf,Virginia, 1882-1941. II. DeSalvo, Louise A., 1942- .

HI. Leaska, Mitchell. IVTitle.

PR6037.A35Z497 2001 823'912 85-16903
ISBN 1-57344-136-8

Edition
First Cleis Press
pp pp
123456789 10 PR6037
.A35Z497
2001X
Table of Contents

Editorial Note 5

Introduction 7

March 1923 - Early 1924 37

March- December 1924 41

January- November 1925 51

December 1925- January 1926 65
January- February 1926 77
March- May 1926 97
May- September 1926 107
October 1926- January 1927 125
January- February 1927 143
February- May 1927 149
May- September 1927 169
October- December 1927 197
January- April 1928 207
May- September 1928 227
October- December 1928 239
January-July 1929 253
July- December 1929 283
1930- 1931 299
1932 301
1933 305
1934- 1936 327
1937 333
1938 343
1939 353
1940- 1942 363

Postcnpt 377
Index 378
Editorial Note

All the letters ofVita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, with the exception of eighteen,

are preserved in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection in the New York Public
Library. The remaining letters are at the University of Sussex Library. With one or two
exceptions, the letters are handwritten and, for the most part, legible.Vita was an accu-
rate speller and she followed the rules of traditional grammar, syntax, punctuation, and
paragraphing.
Establishing the chronological order of the letters was quite another matter. Vita
was not especially concerned with dates. Often only the day of the week is given.

Sometimes she added the numerical date, and sometimes the month. But rarely did she

enter the day, the date, the month, and the year. In almost every instance, however, after
considerable research, we were able to deduce the letter's exact place in the sequence
either from its internal evidence or from the date given in Virginias corresponding
letter—or both. All other dating information, added editorially, has been set within
square brackets.
Most of Vita's letters were written on stationery headed 'Long Barn, Weald,
Sevenoaks' or, after 1932,'Sissinghurst Castle, Kent'. These addresses have been repro-
duced exactly as they appear in the original letters. When she wrote on blank sheets,
she occasionally wrote only part of the address: 'Long Barn', for example. All informa-
tion added for fuller place identification has also been set within brackets. Sometimes
no part of an address was included in a letter. In these instances we have added nothing.
Annotations have been provided to identify peripheral characters and to clarify

otherwise obscure allusions. A brief narrative has been entered at intervals to provide
a context for the people and events about to figure in exchanges and to supply the
reader with a little background reference.
Virginia Woolf 's letters were all published in six volumes, between 1975 and 1980.
As the editing ofVita's letters to Virginia proceeded, it became clear that their friend-

ship was an extremely complex affair. Vita's letters contained numerous and often mys-
terious allusions and barely detectable innuendos that could not be adequately
explained in a footnote. It thus became clear that Virginia herself must be given a fair

hearing if we were to convey authentically something of the changing emotional tone

of their relations during their nineteen-year friendship. We have included, then, some
175 extracts from nearly 400 surviving letters Virginia wrote to Vita.
Virginia's letters, fortunately, have all been chronologically numbered by their

editors. So when the reader comes across, for instance, 'See VW 1733' in one of our
annotations, the reader should turn to The Letters of Virginia Woolf, and refer to the
letter numbered 1733.
One other small matter needs a word of explanation. There were several periods

of two or three months' duration when Vita went to Teheran or to Berlin to stay with
her husband, Harold Nicolson. During these times the sequence of dates in Vita's and
Virginia's letters may appear to be out of order. They are not actually out of sequence.
Because of the irregularity of the international postal service it was necessary to order
the letters not by the dates on which they were written but rather by the dates on
which either Vita or Virginia received a letter and subsequently replied to it.

A number of books, already published, were extremely helpful in the editing of this
collection. To the authors and editors responsible for those volumes we acknowledge
a debt of gratitude. They are, most particularly, Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann,
editors of The Letters of Virginia Woolf(6 vols.);Vita's biographer Victoria Glendinning
for her Vita: The Life ofV Sackville-West; Anne Olivier Bell, editor of The Diaries of
Virginia Woolf (5 vols.); Quentin Bell for Virginia WoolfA Biography; Nigel Nicolson for

Portrait of a Marriage; and James Lees-Milne for Harold Nicolson: A Biography (2 vols.).

For permission to quote from The Letters of Virginia Woolf and The Diaries of Virginia
Woolf we thank the Hogarth Press. We also proffer our gratitude to Lola L. Szladits,
curator of the Berg Collection, the New York Public Library, and A. N. Peasgood of
the University of Sussex Library. Dr Szladits and her staff offered generous assistance
in making the originals of Vita's letters available to us. Mr Peasgood kindly located,
photocopied, and sent us the eighteen Vita letters presently housed in the Sussex
Collection.
Our final and deepest thanks are offered to Nigel Nicolson, Vita Sackville- West's

son and literary executor. The editing of this collection was at his invitation, and
throughout its course he answered questions and provided us with information he
alone possessed. His generosity and judgement have been extraordinary. We are grateful
for being the privileged beneficiaries of his trust.

L.D. and M.L.

Introduction

by Mitchell Leaska

The letters which follow chronicle the story of two extraordinary women — Vita
Sackville-West, who quested for glory, and Virginia Woolf, who sought her love and
affection. Rarely can a collection of correspondence have cast into more dramatic
relief two personalities more individual or more complex; and rarely can an enterprise
of the heart have been carried out so near the verge of archetypal feeling. Their adven-
ture was filled with love and with expectation, and these pages effervesce with excite-
ment and hope and verbal caress. In their fertility and abundance, these documents
belong as much to literature as they do to life. In letter after letter, we come across

little dramas of daily affairs; cameos of friends caught in folly; snatches of gossip, some-
times serious, more often profane; polychrome snapshots of exotic travelogue; and
little shared confidences of literary craft. Sometimes there are muffled warnings of
wounded affection or injured pride; and as often the small benedictions of loving
appeasement. But below the surface foam of words, we sense occasionally the strange
alchemy of love mixed with uncertainty and of compulsion mingled with constraint.

Such are the hieroglyphs of emotion imprinted across these pages.

The chronicle covers almost two decades. These were years filled for each of them
with as many large public successes as there were personal failures and private sorrows.
But in their art as in their lives, however great the differences which separated them,
they were, alike, women of formidable resilience and determination. In their writing

Virginia, the innovator, tunnelled her way into the future and Vita, the traditionalist,
sorted out the past. And during these years of alternating confidence and doubt in their
private lives, Virginia learned all the adverbs of manner and motive, and Vita mastered
all the verbs of love and passion.

Virginia's early impressions ofVita are recorded in a letter to a friend. She was the

high aristocrat called Vita Sackville-West, daughter of Lord Sackville, daughter of

Knole, wife of Harold Nicolson, and novelist, but her real claim to consideration, is,

if I may be so coarse, her legs. Oh they are exquisite —running like slender pillars up
into her trunk, which is that of a breastless cuirassier (yet she has 2 children) but all

about her is virginal, savage, patrician. . .

To Vita Sackville-West, Virginia was, simply, the 'gentle genius' — lovely, idolized and
remote.
8 Introduction

Even through the calculated medium of letters, where verbal risks are minimized,
it is evident that, in the early months of their friendship, Vita's attention settled on
Virginia with obstinate concentration, and Virginia responded with a blend of appre-
hensive mockery and guarded acquiescence. Each clearly had something the other
wanted. Vita was the superior woman in Virginia's eyes, and Virginia was the superior
writer in Vita's; and it would soon become apparent to both of them that just as one
was questing for glory, the other was in search of affection. And in those dual pursuits

large loyalties and high proprietorial claims would soon emerge, and with them four
distinct personalities as well. Vita would become for Virginia the voluptuous aristocrat

some of the time, while at other times she would be the protective maternal figure,
crooning affectionate reassurance. Virginia would represent to Vita the mistress of
English letters at one moment, and at the next the helpless, affectionate child solicit-
ing Vita's custodial embraces. The rapport between them was by no means a simple

matter, and both women would eventually be reminded, more often perhaps than they
liked, that every human being needs something, and that neither of them would ever
love the other for herself alone. So that as there was passion and promise in the begin-
ning, in the end there would be compassion and compromise.

Virginia, the writer, was a woman of swift perception and incisive analytical power
an intellectual who weighed and probed and tested for the exact motives of human
action and utterance. She was by all standards a brilliant 'experimentalist in humanity';

but she appeared unattainable, unpredictable and sometimes even unapproachable.

With so much of her emotional side kept under cover, she was reserved and at the
same time mysterious. More than that,Virginia was a woman at once curious and inde-
pendent; a curiosity frequently misconstrued as affection and an independence often
interpreted as absent-minded detachment. As a result she sometimes gave the impres-
sion of being a part of everyone, yet belonging to no one. To the small Dionysian fig-

ure hidden in Vita, this Apollonian frieze of intellect and intuition was an irresistible
challenge.

There was another part ofVirginia which Vita found easier to warm towards, and
that was the childlike, affectionate side of her; the self-absorbed, impatient and demon-
strative girl who forever needed practical reassurance and confidence-bolstering; the
vulnerable creature who was prone to emotional bruising, who hated criticism,
demanded directness, craved affection — the brave 'Potto' who over and over again got
knocked down but refused to admit defeat. This was the Virginia that Vita loved and
protected and mothered.
Vita, on her side, was a catalogue of contradictions. She was rebellious and she was
reticent. She was fearless and she was frightened; she was sociable and reclusive; bold
as well as shy. She was a woman who concealed an essentially timid nature under a

carapace of managerial competence and extravagant courage. Then she was a woman
who saw only what she wanted to see, who was lavish with those of whose love and
obedience she was sure, but who neglected those whose wishes failed to coincide with
Introduction 9

her own; and she was someone who had taught herself from a very early age to spot
the weaknesses of others.
What Virginia saw in Vita, however, was a sensuous person who could be just
noticeably elusive and often puzzling. But this was 'the real woman', as Virginia often
said, and a passionate one she was too. But as with all contradictory personalities there
was something slightly deceptive about her. Not far from the surface, one could touch
the stargazer, the lonely Vita who sought privacy and shunned messy emotional
embroilments. Yet it was this same woman who lived often enough on false promise
and counterfeit hope, who seemed forever fanning the embers of love and forever step-
ping back from its blaze.

There were other sides to Vita which Virginia seems to have detected almost from
the beginning. One of them was the indomitable woman who took charge of one's
life and charted one's destiny, whose arrogance flattened obstacles and whose vanity
refused to acknowledge shabbiness, poverty or familiarity. This woman
was the exalted
who strode her own private acres and Hved in castles andwho spoke her mind with
devastating simplicity Then there was the compassionate woman who understood life's
miseries and dispensed her bounty on the world's downtrodden — the gentle Vita
whose strong hands cupped the fragile moth and nursed the injured nightingale. And
there was also the heroic Vita who worked like a slave and played like a prince and saw
the whole world as her personal challenge. All of these Vitas, wrapped into one, held
Virginia magnetized in a bright circle of high romance and adventure.

Vita's emotional terrain, however, revealed a dark sadistic province which few people
saw and still fewer acknowledged. Virginia seems to have felt it from the very start, and
there is enough in these letters to suggest that in recognizing it she assumed a role suf-
ficiently submissive to indicate to the woman she would soon love that she was pre-
pared to accept —indeed she would encourage — their relations to develop along the

lines of dominance and compliance. In Virginia's mind this stratum of friendship was
perhaps the closest she felt she would ever get to playing the part of the submissive
child to the dominant, affectionate and protective mother.
Little phrases scattered throughout the letters and cushioned in often deceptive

contexts support the notion that Virginia placed a sufficiently low value on herself in
relation to Vita to permit her to feel both helpless and needy and at the same time to
feel a certain strange contentment with whatever small abuses Vita might inadvertently
cause her to suffer. Virginia was too sensitive an observer of human behaviour not
to recognize the role she was creating for herself. 'Is it true you love giving pain?' she

asked Vita once in mock seriousness. In one of the earliest pieces of the correspon-
dence, Virginia wrote: 'I enjoyed your intimate letter.... It gave me a great deal

of pain —which is I've no doubt the first stage of intimacy. .. . Never mind: I enjoyed
your abuse very much.' Later she would beg Vita not to 'snuff the stinking tallow out
of your heart —poor Virginia to wit....' Later still: 'Chuck me as often as you like, and
don't give it a moments thought.' One year before her death, Virginia would still write;
10 Introduction

'...you'll never shake me off — .'And running parallel to this line of submission or self-

deprecation or whatever we choose to call it were two accompanying strands of

Virginia's feeling for Vita. One was her 'childlike dazzled affection' and the other was
the extraordinary serenity and comfort Vita's presence brought her during her frequent
periods of illness. It is true that these scattered citations are mere scraps of evidence,
little more than fragments broken off at odd, unpremeditated moments. Yet for all their

scrappiness and seeming irrelevance, these odds and ends of feeling do indicate the
thrust of Virginia's emotional alignment to Vita. For they illuminate the otherwise

unexplained roles of dominance and compliance which both women acted out in their
lives in the guise of parent and child, healer and patient, and, metaphorically, perhaps
even victor and victim. Virgima could only have been more explicit if she had said to
Vita: your maternal protection strengthens the lost and wandering child in me; your
healing hand soothes me in illness; and your abuses assure me that I matter to you.
There is no question that she sensed in Vita the fearless competence and mastery she
needed to demonstrate, together with the aggression she tried to conceal. By the time
she came to write the first sentence of Orlando, there wasn't the slightest doubt in
Virginia's mind that Orlando should make his entrance committing an act of vio-
lence
— 'slicing at the head of a Moor.
Vita's perception of herself is more difficult to ascertain, for, contradictory as she
was, self-deception came easily to her, and she saw only what she wanted to see. But
she did say something in a letter to Virgima which seems to sum up the way she
approached life. She would rather 'fail gloriously than dingily succeed', she wrote.
Those five words appear to hold the key to much ofVita's inner domain of feeling; for

they define the nature of her quest for glory — a quest rooted in the assumption that
the world was a potential battlefield, that people were only safe when they were in cap-
tivity, that one's resources should be mobilized not in the interest of mere survival but
indeed in the continuing struggle to triumph. No risk was too perilous and no sacri-

fice too great for that necessary achievement. Even her intimacy with Virgima she saw
as a 'catch', as a conquest: Vita was 'rather proud, really, of having caught such a big sil-

ver fish', she said to her husband, Harold Nicolson. Nor is it an accident of phrasing
that she called the novel describing her turbulent love affair with Violet Trefusis
Challenge. Everyone in her life, it seems, began as a potential challenge, and everything
she came up against was, to her mind, susceptible to conquest. Virginia summed her up
accurately when she said that Orlando 'liked to think that she was riding the back of
the world'.

'Is it better to be extremely ambitious, or rather modest?' Vita asked, regarding the
novel she was about to write. 'Probably the latter is safer; but I hate safety.. . . Anyhow
I don't care about what is "better", for however many resolutions one makes, one's
pen... always finds its own level.'

To this Virgima replied: 'Why need you be so timid and pride-blown, both at

once. . . . Please write your novel, and then you will enter into the unreal world, where
Virginia lives —and poor woman, can't now live anywhere else.'
Introduction 1

Virginia knew perfectly well what Vita's question meant, but she knew too that

living in the 'unreal world' of fantasy was also living with a sense of freedom and
power, something she had discovered on her own during the pains and uncertainties
of adolescence. For Virginia's artistic roots stretch back to the unsettled world of child-

hood dominated by an often absent mother. If one could move back in time to 25
January 1882, the day ofVirginia's birth, one would catch a glimpse of Julia Stephen,
the beautiful and mysterious mother whose chief concern in life, for some equally
mysterious reason, was nursing the sick and the dying; a woman who was convinced
that the 'ordinary relations between the sick and the well are far easier and pleasanter
than between the well and the well'. This was the woman Virginia would one day cap-
ture in the person of Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse — the mother whose mysteries
haunted the novelist for so much of her life.

Whatever her motives, however, Julia Stephen's unceasing benevolence killed her

at the age of forty-nine, leaving Virginia, aged thirteen, motherless, numb with terror,

and about to descend into her first black period of insanity. When she recovered two
years later — that is, in 1897 — she learned that private feeling and public fact were fear-
fully discrepant, and until she could correct that discrepancy, her world was in danger,
and herself at everyone's mercy. With a mother who had been away so much of the
time, Virginia's childhood had lacked plan, continuity and coherence. With her mother
now dead, there was no telling what might happen. It didn't take long for this preco-

cious girl to discover, however, that although feeling and fact were out of synchronism,
feeling and fantasy were not; and with that discovery the world of the future novelist
opened up to her: if she could teach herself to fuse feeling with fantasy, she could create

her own world — a spacious republic populated only by those she chose to put there,
a place where fact could not disturb, an invented realm entirely under her control,
where sorrow and doubt had no place. But however sovereign and almighty the story-
teller might be, there still remained the stark fact of having no mother. Until that
emptiness could be filled (which was impossible) or some reasonably satisfying substi-

tute presented itself (which was highly improbable), the safest place to live was in the
'unreal world' of imagination. Virginia, therefore, knew the power of fantasy perhaps
better than did Vita, though her way of dealing with it would always be different from
Vita's.

Thus, when the women met for the first time on 14 December 1922, two highly
organized personalities faced each other. They had much in common, but even more
differentiated them. What mattered, however, and would continue to matter in the

years ahead, was that each was in possession of something the other felt she had been
denied. Vita envied Virginia the writer and Virginia stood in awe of Vita the woman.
In the woman Virginia would find the mother, and in the writer Vita would discover
the child. It was an auspicious beginning.

Vita's earliest history also tells much about the woman who speaks in the pages ahead,
and although countless little details complicate her portrait, it is safe to say that when
Vita was born at Knole in the small hours of 9 March 1892, she already had two dis-
12 Introduction

advantages. The first was having been born female. According to the family entail, as a

woman she would never inherit Knole, the great ancestral house which had been
granted to Thomas Sackville by Queen Elizabeth in 1566. The second was being the
daughter of Victoria Sackville-West, an essentially destructive woman. She was rapa-
cious; she was ruthless; she was self-centred; she was beautiful. She was also over-

whelmed with self-doubt. Without much thought to the consequences, she bribed her

little daughter by showering her with every kind of material reward if she could make
her mother feel adored and indispensable. No matter how much the child tried, how-
ever, the effort unfortunately was never enough. Vita was simply inadequate to the task.

Lady Sackville moreover believed it her privilege, indeed her right, to indulge, when-
ever it took her fancy, in great pendulum swings of mood and temper, with Vita almost
always the innocent and confused recipient of her mother's flamboyant emotionalism.
Day after day, as a child, Vita was treated as though she were a plaything —smothered
with love one moment, hated the next; called beautiful and cherished in the morning,
condemned as ugly and unwanted in the afternoon. Throughout much of her adult
life, and even after her marriage, Vita lived in the shade of this egotistical and power-
hungry woman who 'wounded and dazzled and fascinated' her. More important, how-
ever, Vita grew up with a sense of personal impotence. Never was she allowed to feel

herself a separate person with rights of her own.

Before and even during marriage, Lady Sackville's beauty had attracted countless
suitors, and she continued, after her separation from Lord Sackville, to attract a good
many more —John Murray Scott, Pierpont Morgan, William Waldorf Astor — all men
of fabulous wealth and influence. It is not hard to see how Vita, when she was old
enough to acknowledge her sex, became fearful that it might put her in deadly com-
bat with her mother for male favour. And so she subconsciously did what must some-
how have seemed to her the most logical thing to do: she suppressed her feminine side
and, when it was safe enough to do so, granted ascendancy to masculine behaviour,
male pursuits and boyish mannerisms. What better way was there of avoiding con-
frontation with her mother in the arena of male contestants? And what more effective

way was there than this not only to imagine herself male, but to imagine herself as suc-
cessor to Knole as well?
Somewhere in the confusion of these early years, Vita assimilated her mother's
conviction that 'the world was a hard place where one must fight one's own battle for

one's own best advantage'. In addition to the fighting spirit, Vita appears also to have
learned some conjuring tricks from Lady Sackville, who 'possessed more than anybody
I have ever known the faculty of delusion. . . . She entered the only world she knew,
the world of unreality which she made real to herself, and into which she persuaded
other people by the sheer strength of her own personality and conviction to enter.' As
long as one was in her presence, one was almost 'tempted to believe in all the fables
she told one'.
Thus raised in the shadow of a mother whose life was disordered, whose habits
were erratic and whose affections were unreliable, it was perfectly natural for Vita to
realize at some early period of her life that, if she genuinely needed stability, order and
Introduction 13

permanence, she would have to invent them for herself. And this she did. How easy it

is to imagine her as a child roaming the hundreds of rooms of Knole, rooms which
had survived for hundreds of years, acknowledging their durability, imagining their his-
tory, inventing little fables of beauty, valour and bloodshed. Those ancient paintings and
tapestries —each of them must contain some magnificent tale hidden somewhere. Each
of them must hoard some mystery of forsaken honour and defeated love.One sees her
in the guarded secrecy of an impressionable youth stepping timidly down the silent
corridors of the past, searching the farthest corners of antiquity, where all had once
been solid and unchanging.
Vita's retreat into the past was her defence against the present. Knole was the only
place she knew, and it grew to symbolize for her all the permanence and security her

present life was denied. Knole also carried with it all the ceremony of history and the
poetry of romance, and in these Vita sought refuge. In history and in romance, she
could put aside her confusion and fear, and imagine herself to be anyone she chose.
This step backward into antiquity was only one short move from freedom. IfVita

could shed her bondage to the present altogether, she might be tree to invent a new
persona to bear the weight of heroism and reflect the burmsh of glory. But there was
one obstacle: she was female. The legislators of the Sackville family had long ago
decreed that Vita Sackville-West would never govern Knole. Of that she was certain.
But there was no rule on earth, past or present, which could prevent her from stretch-

ing her fantasy to the extent of changing her sex. Of that too she was certain. And so,

step by step, with trial and caution, Vita moved towards the ground which men cus-
tomarily trod; and as she did so, a substantial part of the female persona receded, made
room for the new male figure she was constructing, a figure of power and courage and
a certain lusty recklessness.

This might all have remained a child's game, a fantasy of adolescence to ward off
the unhappiness of growing up under Lady Sackville 's dictatorship. But for Vita the

feeling of dominance was magnificent, and the male self she had created would
become the personal myth which would govern the way she lived for the remainder
of her life. As a male, moreover, there was nothing to discourage her from courting her
mother with the same ceremonious rituals as did her other suitors. This was something
she could have done as Vita the daughter. And there was a certain high drama in Vita's

adoration for her beautiful, wicked mother, something lusty and primitive. Lady
Sackville might abuse or humiliate her in any way she chose, and still 'I would have
died for her', wrote Vita, 'I would have murdered anyone that breathed a word against

her. I would have suffered any injustice at her hands.'

But as with all attempts to establish harmony, however artificial, out of the chaos
of one's life, this attempt too would produce a conflict with unhappy results. Vita had
learned from childhood that she needed autonomy as well as affection, privacy as well
as intimacy, but she had also learned under her mother's disobliging hand just how
unlovable she was. She must have realized, too, that being loved and being free somehow
didn't go together. Independence required emotional distance from others, just as

affection called for submission and acquiescence. This was the awful tug-of-war which
14 Introduction

Vita had no way of resolving, but she learned with the passage of time that negotiation
and compromise might go a long way towards bridging the rift. In her future love
affairs with women, the compromise she settled on to reconcile these opposing urges
took the form of deep maternal compassion accompanied by extravagant gestures of
passion — a combination which these women interpreted as love. But passion and pity,

neither singly nor in sum, equal love. It was in fact this very combination which caused
her so much heartache. Yet however much turmoil her amorous embroilments
caused her, Vita could not live without love — or, more accurately, without the idea of
love — in her life, another conviction she seems to have inherited from her mother.
'Mais enfin, ma cheriel Lady Sackville insisted in her characteristic mix of languages,
'...you know love is the most beautiful thing on Earth? Et c'est ce qui le plus to most
people.' One of the little ironies in this story was that Lady Sackville herself became
the principal beneficiary ofVita's love.
It was thus through many conflicting shades and tangled paths of childhood that
Vita grew up to become the woman who would one day write these letters. She car-
ried with her, in fantasy at least, the banner of conquest, the emblem of history and
the shield of manhood.These were her defences for fighting 'one's own battles for one's

best advantage', as Lady Sackville had taught her, and 'one's best advantage' to Vita

meant personal franchise and self-jurisdiction. These she must have if she was eventu-
ally to gain fame and prestige, the only really enduring safeguards in what she felt to

be a potentially hostile world. The sadistic streak in her, of which so few people knew,
was rooted not in the desire to inflict pain, but rather in the urgency to feel in posses-

sion of sufficient power to direct the course of her life as a separate and autonomous
woman own locus
with her of rights. Only in her fiction do we find scenes of physi-
cal violence. The women in her factual life dramatize a different story.

In this distant light. Vita's preferring to 'fail gloriously than dingily succeed' assumes a
larger significance. It speaks ot her attitude towards life, and it lays bare the range of
her striving for domination, authority and control. It was an attitude of aggressiveness
reflected even in her letters to Virginia. How often we come across phrasing like
4

I don't want to drag you down here VI shall pin you down'; 'Let me come and carry
you off'; 'The wish to steal Virginia overcomes me'; 'I shall have to make you come by
main force', and so much more. These citations are indeed so slight that they might
pass unnoticed, and some of us might even insist upon seeing them as negligible. They
are nevertheless from the lexicon oi abduction and they belong to the language of
aggression.

With the same pen she used to write her letters to Virginia, Vita would in a few
years write a novel in which her sadistic hero would say to his lover: 'I would like to

chain you up . . . naked and beat you and beat you till you screamed.' This is of course
very strong fantasy, but we need no psychoanalytical assistance to interpret the under-
lying message, which, stated simply, runs something like this: 'Only when I've relieved

my inferior sense of myself by putting you in bondage can I feel comfortable with you
emotionally —and sexually' This was a language Vita understood perfectly.
Introduction 15

The same tough strand of muscle runs through these letters, though certainly no
violence was ever directed toward Virginia. It is important only to notice the sponta-
neous word choices, for they bespeak Vita's buried conviction that life, in all its diver-

sity, was something which needed to be fought and conquered; something which
required competence and force. This was clearly the emotional atmosphere in which
Her smallest acts of affection were coloured and often twisted with the
she lived.
romance of power and ravishment. Such was the cast of her mind. Vita's dream world
was a world fraught with danger —and the prospect of conquest. We need to remind
ourselves, however, that the Vita who fantasized about muscular force and sadistic tor-

ture 'was the woman who, first of all, had all her life been overwhelmed and dimin-
ished by a grasping mother; and secondly, who, in losing Knole, was daily reminded of
the inferior place of her sex in a world assigned to male governance. It is little won-
der that she should learn to see the vulnerable spots in others; less wonder still that she

should emotionally brutalize anyone who threatened her precarious sense of

sovereignty. 'Social relations', said Vita, 'are just the descendants of the primitive tribal

need to get together for the purposes of defence.' In her interior world only the 'fittest'

survived. Weakness was devoured by strength.

In a letter to Virginia — Vita was tending the Woolfs' spaniel, Pinker, at the time
she wrote:

Pinker and I try to console one another. She sleeps on my bed, and clings to me as

the one comparatively familiar thing in a strange and probably hostile world. ... I had
to explain that Mrs Woolf lived in London, a separate life, a fact which was as unpleas-
ant to me as it could be to any spaniel puppy. ... I explained that everybody always
betrayed one sooner or later, and usually gave one away to somebody else, and that

the only thing to do was to make the best of it.

People were not kind and nature was indifferent to human wishes. This was an atavis-
tic world ruled by laws which inevitably destroyed what one loved. 'Something always
does, when one wants a thing too passionately,' she had written just a little earlier.
Just how savage or indifferent people could be, to Vita's way of thinking, emerges
in a letter written during her first voyage to Persia. En route, she fell ill and 'all last

night I had a fever and a sore throat, and was quite certain through my nightmares that
I should be put ashore at Karachi with diphtheria and left there alone.. I am all alone,
. .

and there is no one on this ship who cares whether I live or die.' Of course a great

many people cared very much whether she lived or died, but the subjective world she
experienced was under the primeval powers of the jungle, and it was from its dense
and perilous growth that her emotional life drew its characteristic mood. If she didn't

master life, she would forever be its slave, at its mercy. What looked like overpowering
aggressiveness on Vita's part was fundamentally a determination to survive through the
exercise of personal might. She had to deal competently with the techniques of life in
order to master it —or to be mastered by it. It is unlikely that Vita herself would have
articulated her feelings in quite this way, but it is clear from hundreds of accumulated
details scattered throughout these letters that the atmosphere of combat was the one
16 Introduction

in which, much of the time, she genuinely felt herself to be.

Her superior sense of efficiency often led her into misunderstanding and difficulty.

In a letter to Virginia in the earliest months of their friendship, for example, Vita sug-
gested an expedition to the Basque provinces. Thinking that Virginia might need some
powerful incentive for going, Vita suggested that she look on the trip 'as copy, — as I

believe you look upon everything, human relationships included. Oh yes, you like

people, through the brain better than through the heart, — forgive me if I am wrong.'
Virginia was justifiably hurt by that remark and said so. What is so astonishing,
however, is that Vita didn't have the slightest notion of what she had said to hurt

Virginia. This was the truth. What someone else might consider a heartless remark
not understanding her hidden motives — Vita regarded simply as a suggestion of effi-

ciency. Four years later, when Vita's father lay dying at Knole, she said again, and with
the same disconcerting directness, 'What good copy it would all be for Virginia's book
[Orlando]. The whole thing', she added with her characteristic penchant for high
romance, was a 'mixture of the tragic, the grotesque, and the magnificent.'

By the time she met Vita Sackville-West in 1922, Virginia Woolf had survived three
major periods of insanity and had published three novels. She was forty, and already a

writer of acknowledged importance, but she had not yet had a commercial success.Vita
had already published several volumes of poetry and fiction by this date, and was also

an established author. She was thirty years old, ten years Virginia's junior.
The day after that first encounter on 14 Dec ember, Virginia recorded in her diary
meeting 'the lovely aristocratic Sackville-West last night at Clive's. Not much to my
severer taste... with all the supple ease of the aristocracy, but not the wit of the artist.

She writes 15 pages —a day has finished another book — publishes with Heinemanns
knows everyone —But could I ever know her?'

Up to this time,Virginia had had only two infatuations in her life, one in her teens

with Madge Vaughan (after whom Clarissa Dalloway was modelled), and one in her
early twenties with Violet Dickinson, a woman many years older than Virginia. Her
willing surrender to Vita Sackville-West's magnetism would therefore be the first in

Virginia's adult life, andVita would be the first woman to appear on the domestic scene

of Virginia's married life with Leonard Woolf. But Vita was something special, and
Virginia appears to have been willing to search out the possibilities. 'Mrs Nicolson
thinks me the best woman writer' — Virginia wrote in her journal, '& I have almost got
used to Mrs Nicolson's having heard of me. But it gives me some pleasure.' If Mrs
Nicolson liked Mrs Woolf 's writing, well... at least she had that much in her favour.

More important than that, however, Vita had aroused something childlike in Virginia:
'The aristocratic manner is something like the actresses —no false shyness or modesty:
a bead dropped into her plate at dinner — given to CHve — asks for liqueur — has her
hand on all the ropes —makes me feel virgin, shy, & schoolgirlish. . . . She is a grenadier;

hard; handsome, manly.

Following their first meeting, there was a quick exchange of dinners and books.
Virginia read Vita's novel and poems with approval, and confided again to her diary:
Introduction 17

'She is a pronounced Sapphist, & may... have an eye on me, old though I am. Nature
might have sharpened her faculties. Snob as I am, I trace her passions 500 years back,
& they become romantic to me, like old yellow wine.' It is clear that Virginia would
not have minded at all ifVita had 'an eye' on her, for she was fascinated by this 'pro-

nounced Sapphist'.

The fascination was reciprocal.Vita's letter to her husband, Harold Nicolson, dated
19 December 1922, just after their meeting, fills in her page of the story.

I simply adore Virginia Woolf, and so would you. You would fall quite flat before her
charm and personality.... Mrs Woolf is so simple: she does give the impression of

something big. She is utterly unaffected. ... At first you think she is plain, then a sort
of spiritual beauty imposes itself on you, and you find a fascination in watching her. . .

She is both detached and human, silent till she wants to say something, and then says
it supremely well. She is quite old. I've rarely taken such a fancy to anyone, and I think
she likes me. At least she's asked me to Richmond where she lives. Darling, I have
quite lost my heart.

Virginia was indeed 'both detached and human', as Vita had observed, and in the
next nineteen years she would learn in full measure exactly how detached Virginia
Woolf could be — as well as how human. The detachment, however, held a certain mag-
ical pull for Vita, and she saw it as a challenge. Didn't winning the friendship of this

genius of letters mean a kind of triumph? After all, Virginia was a 'big silver fish', and
to land her would be indeed a conquest to be proud of. Vita would say as much to

Harold in the months ahead.

But here a long pause interrupted the proceedings of love. Whether their first

steps had been taken too quickly, or whether Virginia became apprehensive, or whether
Vita simply grew impatient, is not clear; but for many months an almost complete

silence separated them. In March 1924, however, when the Woolfs moved from
Richmond who
to Tavistock Square,

would Vita come and have lunch

Bloomsbury,
in the new
it

flat
—was Virginia
'but prepare for a
broke the
complete picnic,
silence:

among the ruins of books and legs of tables, dirt and dust and only fragments of food'.
This was the first time they had ever been alone together, and Vita went away with her
'head swimming with Virginia'.
Something of greater importance was in the offing, however —an opportunity
that would serve Vita's ambitions as a novelist. Would she write a book for the Hogarth
Press to publish, Virginia asked her in May. 'If so, what and when? Could it be this

autumn?' This was rather a challenge, being asked to produce a book at three months'
notice. But Vita thrived on challenges — the bigger, the better. Of course she would
give them a book. Better still, she would write it during her holiday on the peaks of
the Italian Alps! But that was really no challenge. How could Virginia so underestimate
her? Writing a book was a mere 'commercial proposition'. The real challenge was
Virgima's charging her with writing 'letters of impersonal frigidity'. Well, now, that
was quite a different proposition. First, however, the book must get written, as indeed
it was; and it turned out to be perhaps Vita's most imaginatively conceived novel. Its
1 Introduction

title was Seducers in Ecuador. She dedicated it to Virginia, and with that dedication the

first real step was taken towards a deeper intimacy.

When the manuscript arrived, Virginia wrote again for her own eyes:

Vita was here for Sunday, gliding down the village in her large new blue Austin car,

which she manages consummately. She was dressed in ringed yellow Jersey, & a large

hat, & had a dressing case all full of silver & night gowns wrapped in tissue. Nelly said
'If only she weren't an honourable!'.... But like her being honourable, & she
I is it,

a perfect lady, with all the dash & courage of the aristocracy. She left with us a story . . .

which really interests me rather. I see my own face in it, its true. But she has shed the
old verbiage, & come to terms with some sort glimmer of art; so I think; & indeed, I

rather marvel at her skill, & sensibility; for is she not mother, wife, great lady, hostess,
as well as scribbling? How litde do of all
I that: my brain would never let me milk it

to the tune of 20,000 words in a fortnight....

But, she went on, Vita

is like an over ripe grape in features, moustached, pouting, will be a little heavy; mean-
while, she strides on fine legs, in a well cut skirt. .has a . manly good sense & simplic-
ity.. . . Oh yes, I like her; could tack her on to my equipage for all time; & suppose if

life allowed, this might be a friendship of a sort.

The Hogarth Press published Seducers in Ecuador in November of that year.

Virginia offered small criticisms, but it was, she said to Vita, 'much more interesting (to

me at least) than you've yet done. ... I am very glad we are going to publish it, and
extremely proud and indeed touched, with my childlike dazzled affection for you, that

you should dedicate it to me.' Thus, little by little, visit by visit, and letter by letter, the
friendship grew —Aphrodite was beginmng to exert her influence.

In 1925, both Virginia's T\\e Common Reader and Mrs Dalloway made their debut.

Vita was in awe of their brilliance. One thing that Mrs Dalloway had done for her, she
said to its author, was to make it unnecessary ever to go to London again, for the 'whole

of London in June is in your first score of pages. (Couldn't you do a winter London
now...)' (She could not of course foresee that in three years' time she would be read-
ing about herself, garbed as Orlando, skating on the Thames during the Great Frost.) By
late summer, while Vita was writing Vie Land, which would become her most endur-
ing work, Virginia was forced to retire to bed suffering from headaches and exhaustion.
Once more their letters alone carried the weight of their developing intimacy.
Harold Nicolson had been informed by the Foreign Office in September that he
was being posted to the British Legation in Teheran, and it was arranged that Vita

would join him there in January and remain until May. This news made Virginia see

for the first how much Vita had come to mean to her.
time, and to her surprise, exacdy
Vita was 'doomed to go to Persia; & I minded the thought so much (thinking to lose
sight of her for 5 years) that I conclude I am genuinely fond of her. There is the glam-

our of unfamihanty to reckon with; of aristo cracy... of flattery. All the same, after sift-
Introduction 19

ing & filing, much, I am sure, remains. Shall I stay with her?'
By December Virginia was pronounced sufficiently recovered to brave a change
of scenery, and on 17 December was efficiently 'carried off' by Vita to Long Barn,
where she stayed for three nights. It was during this weekend that the goddess Astarte

descended upon them and advanced their friendship to the deeper level of love. Vita
made a note in her diary for 17 December: 'A peaceful evening.' For the eighteenth,
however: 'Talked to her till 3 a.m. —Not a peaceful evening.'

Virginia too recorded the event — a little defensively: 'These Sapphists love women:
friendship is never untinged with amorosity.' But, she went on,

I like her & being with her, & the splendour — she shines in the grocer's shop in
Sevenoaks with a candle lit radiance, stalking on legs like beech trees, pink glowing,
grape clustered, pearl hung. That is the secret of her glamour, I suppose. Anyhow she
found me incredibly dowdy, no woman cared less for personal appearance —no one
put on things the way I did. Yet so beautiful, &c.What is the effect of all this on me?
Very mixed. There is her maturity &
much in full sail
full breastedness: her being so

on the high tides, where I am coasting down backwaters; her capacity I mean to take
the floor in any company, to represent her country. .to control silver, servants, chow .

dogs; her motherhood... her being in short (what I have never been) a real woman.
Then there is some voluptuousness about her; the grapes are ripe; & not reflective.

No. In brain & insight she is not as highly organised as I am. But then she is aware of
this, & so lavishes on me the maternal protection which, for some reason, is what I

have always most wished from everyone.

From Long Barn, Vita wrote about her side of the adventure to Harold. Having
suffered only a few years earlier through Vita's devastating affair with Violet Trefusis as

well as through the slightly less destructive liaison with Geoffrey Scott, Harold was
understandably worried. But he had no reason to be, Vita assured him on 17 December,
for she would not 'fall in love with Virginia', nor would Virginia fall in love with her.

On the eighteenth,Vita assured again: 'She says she depends on me. She is so vulnera-

ble under all her brilliance. I do love her, but not b.s.ly [back-stairs-ly, i.e. homosexu-
allyJ.'And again on the nineteenth: 'We have made friends by leaps and bounds in these
two days. I love her, but couldn't fall "in love" with her, so don't be nervous.'

In the years ahead Virginia would return again and again to that precious image ofVita
'pink with pearls' in a Sevenoaks fishmonger's. In her mind, that memory marked a

change in her life. But here and now, in January 1926, Virginia realized that she was
almost completely in Vita's thrall, and the departure for Teheran was dreadful. 'Parting',
as the poet said, would 'turn their hearts into clocks.' They were both dedicated, liter-

ary women, however, and in the months that followed they created an epistolarium of
love that was large, complicated and obsessive.

So the weeks passed —and the months. Vita returned to England in May, and
Harold, who had remained in Teheran, needed once more to be reassured: 'Oh my
dear, I do hope that Virginia is not going to be a muddle! It is like smoking over a
20 Introduction

petrol tank.' But there was no muddle, Vita insisted.

I love Virginia — as who wouldn't? But really, my sweet, one's love for Virginia is a very
different thing: a mental thing; a spiritual thing, if you like, an intellectual thing, and
she inspires a feeling of tenderness, which is, I suppose, owing to her funny mixture
of hardness and softness — the hardness of her mind, and her terror of going mad
again. She makes me feel protective. Also she loves me, which flatters and pleases

me.... I am scared to death of arousing physical feelings in her, because of the mad-
ness. I don't know what effect it would have, you see: it is a fire with which I have
no wish to play. I have too much real affection and respect for her.. . . Besides, Virginia
is not the sort of person one thinks of in that way. There is something incongruous
and almost indecent in the idea. I have gone to bed with her (twice), but that's all.

Now you know all about it, and I hope I haven't shocked you.

Vita was an impressario of passion and there were times when her life rang with
a chorus of lovers; but she showed great wisdom in having 'too much real affection and
respect' for Virginia to play with her emotionally. Virginia possessed artistic genius,
something Vita greatly valued and would have liked herself to have had. It is true that
the few sexual episodes between them flattered Virginia's vanity, but their real emo-
tional centre lay elsewhere. Vita idolized the mistress of letters and felt compassionate
who resided within; and with Vita's extraordinary com-
love for the vulnerable child
much on display, it was easy for Virginia to forget that underneath was a
petence so
woman who also needed understanding and love. As usual, however, the old conflict
reared its uncompromising head: so long as Vita's need for affection vied with her need
for independence, and so long as both of these opposing urges claimed equal ascen-
dancy, she would never be on open and equal terms with anyone, Virginia included.
Nor, it seems, did Virginia realize how often she threatened Vita's loyalty v/ith her
inquisitorial cross-examinations and sometimes exasperating demands for attention. It

is no wonder that below her patrician surface Vita felt unsatisfied and solitary; even less

wonder that she was promiscuous and sometimes ruthless with her lovers. They did not
understand her, and she simply could not help them to. That would have amounted to
confessing how much she needed their affection, and that would have betrayed her
own weakness. It was easier to see herself in command in a world of strife. Maintaining
that magisterial posture at least justified her craving for And so she contin- autonomy.
ued to force the own limitations. What Vita
people in her universe to conform to her
did not perhaps realize was that at the loneliest of times, when she managed to laugh,
she should have permitted herself to weep. For with the laughter, the real woman went
deeper into hiding, and the Sovereign Vita climbed a step higher, hardening even fur-
ther the already brittle architecture of conflict.
The nicknames Virginia and Vita used with one another identify the alternating

roles they assumed. When Virginia addressed 'dearest Vita' she was appealing to the lov-
ing, protective maternal figure. When 'Donkey West' was summoned, she sought the
haughty and glamorous woman who wrote novels and poetry. On Vita's side, when a

letter began with 'My dearest Virginia' she was talking to her 'lovely and remote' mis-
Introduction 21

tress of prose. When 'Potto' was called upon, it was the child in Virginia who was being
invited out for a romp.
Thus at least two Vitas were in constant negotiation with at least two Virginias.
Their ten-year age difference really mattered very little in the organization of their
relationship, although Virginia did occasionally resort to her seniority when it suited
her plan or when she needed to scheme for sympathy. And there was plenty of room
for confusion in the intense, and sometimes untidy, game of love they so beautifully
dramatized. How often Virginia, with one breath, shouted at 'Donkey West' for mud-
dling up human relations and, with the next breath, implored her 'Dearest Vita' to
repeat to her on which 'rung of the ladder' Potto stood in Vita's affections. In other

words, at any given moment the elegant writer of prose called upon the aristocratic
woman and wheedled her into repeating how much the dominating mother loved the
anxious child. This could be very confusing indeed.

There is something 'obscure' in you, Virginia unexpectedly wrote to Vita one day. It

was a flaw in Vita's make-up which affected everything she did and everything she
wrote. 'There's something that doesn't vibrate in you: It may be purposely —you don't
let it: but I see it with other people, as well as with me: something reserved, muted
God knows what. . . . It's in your writing too, by the bye. The thing I call central trans-

parency —sometimes fails you there too.'

Who can say from what depths of perception Virginia came to identify the very
conflict which Vita worked so hard to conceal. It was a conflict, nevertheless, which
Virginia thought responsible for blocking her expression of feeling with people as well
as in her books. Vita wrote to Harold,

Damn the woman, she has put her finger on it. There is something muted....
Something that doesn't vibrate, something that doesn't come alive. ... It makes every-
thing I do (i.e. write) a little unreal; gives the effect of having been done from the
outside. It is the thing which spoils me as a writer; destroys me as a poet. But how
did Virginia discover it? I have never owned it to anybody, scarcely even to myself. It

is what spoils my human relationships too. . .

Virginia saw it,Vita should have realized, because Virginia suffered from the same afflic-

tion — the need of affection in combat with the need for independence. There was one
great difference between the two women, however. Virginia, we know, like many
another writer, shielded herself from life's insults with pen and ink. But her particular
sense of intellectual superiority, pressed directly beside a pronounced emotional sub-
missiveness, permitted her as a novelist to surrender herself completely and willingly
to the mental atmospheres of her characters. With astonishing ease she could crawl
in and out of her characters' minds, however different from one another they might
be, and record for each of them feelings so deeply wrought as to bear the stamp of life-
like authenticity. That is, she was sure enough of herself intellectually and compliant
enough emotionally to abdicate her deepest self in order to imagine the emotions of
others during the act of creation. And this was something Vita simply could not do.
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"Nor any man, it seemeth," smiled Halifax sadly. "For my part I
am weary of all of it—and so, I think," he added, "is His Majesty. He
is greatly angered that the Bill of Indemnity is changed into a Bill of
Pains and Penalties, and there are such heats over it——"
"What course doth he think to take?" asked Shrewsbury
abruptly.
"He said very little to-day," answered Halifax. "Our talk was all
of business; he is of an extraordinary industry," this with admiration,
"and hath mastered the details of the government already. Were he
a stronger man I should have no fear for England——"
"Talk—antic talk!" cried Caermarthen impatiently; "and are no
nearer a solution——"
 The sound of the opening of the heavy carved door caused
them all to pause. Godolphin, who was the only one facing it, rose
respectfully; the others turned.
It was the King.
His bright glance went from face to face. He came slowly to the
head of the table, and seated himself in the wand-bottomed chair
there; his ministers were on their feet waiting for him to speak.
Surprised as they were by this unexpected appearance, their
agitation showed in their faces, Shrewsbury in particular was
colourless; only Lord Godolphin remained perfectly composed.
The King continued to look from one to the other; he wore a
heavy brown velvet thickly braided with gold, and held in his right
hand a paper written upon, and folded across.
"Affairs," he said, in his tired voice, with his peculiar short
manner of speaking, "have reached a crisis, my lords, and I have
come to acquaint you with my resolution."
He leant forward a little, and rested his right arm on the table,
keeping his dark, powerful eyes fixed on these ministers whom he
read so perfectly.
"My lords," he continued quietly, almost gently, "it is a year
since I took up the government of this country, and in that time I
have done nothing to please any one of you." He coughed and
pressed his handkerchief to his lips. "I have done my best to govern
justly," he added proudly, "but I confess I took up a task beyond my
powers. My lords, I cannot rule a disaffected country with
disaffected ministers. I admit I do not understand you. As I am often
reminded, I am a foreigner."
 The five nobles made a common movement as of painful
expectation. The King's plain speaking took all words from them;
Shrewsbury was painfully agitated.
"What doth Your Majesty propose?" asked Halifax anxiously.
The King opened out the paper on the dark walnut table, and
laid his right hand on it. He wore round this wrist a bracelet of red
glass or crystal, cut into facets, that caught and threw back the light;
it gleamed now strongly through the thick Bruges lace of his ruffles.
"I mean," he said, "to resign the crown and return to Holland—
where I am needed," he added strongly.
"My God!" exclaimed Caermarthen; the rest were silent.
The King surveyed their changed and utterly amazed faces with
a gleam in his eyes.
"My convoy is in readiness," he said, "and here, my lords, is the
speech in which I announce my intention to Parliament"—he glanced
at Sidney Godolphin—"my lord," he added with dignity, "will do me a
last service and correct my poor English——"
Caermarthen broke out passionately—
"Sir, you cannot know what you are saying—this is unheard of
——"
"I know very well what I am saying, my Lord Marquess,"
answered William. "I cannot please you, but I think the Queen can. I
believe you would be faithful to her—she is English; but as for me,
you can manage your business better without me—and I am needed
on the Continent."
He rose, and Halifax, rather pale, came up to him.
"What is to become of England if Your Majesty leaveth us?"
"The Queen will please you," repeated William.
 "This action on the part of Your Majesty will mean chaos," cried
Shrewsbury desperately.
The King smiled sternly.
"No confusion could be worse than what we now endure—
perhaps alone ye can put it straight."
They looked at each other. In their hearts they all knew that the
King, and the King alone held them together and kept them from
France; to the Whigs his departure would mean ruin, and among the
Tories there was not one man capable of undertaking a tithe of what
the King—who had foreign affairs exclusively in his hands—
performed.
"What is Your Majesty's reason for this bitter resolve?" cried
Caermarthen.
"I am needed in Holland," said William. "I have, my lord, my
lifework to do. There are certain things put to my hand for me to
accomplish, and I have pursued them through too many difficulties
to be thwarted now by the disputes of the English Parliament——"
He spoke with a sudden force that lashed them.
"I took this crown," he added, holding his hand to his breast,
"that I might, with God His help, put England in her ancient place
among nations, not that I might lose myself in heated factions and
blind animosities."
"If Your Majesty desert us we are all undone," said Caermarthen
passionately.
"Ah, my lords," answered William, "I am not of a nature to be
the puppet between your parties. God gave me a disposition
different—I cannot mix in these your politics."
 His cough interrupted him; he gave a little shudder, and sank
back into the walnut-backed chair.
"There are some things beyond a man's strength," he said
hoarsely, "and I, hampered as I am, cannot govern England."
"I," cried Halifax sincerely, "have tried to help Your Majesty——"
"And what is your reward?" asked William quickly. "Parliament is
so pressing on you, my lord, that I shall have to forego your services
—what is any honest man's reward in this country? As angry dogs ye
rend each other. My God, will there never be an end to these
dissensions?"
He crushed the rough draft of his speech up in his hand and
flung it on the table.
"There is my answer to this question," he said, and made to rise
again, but Shrewsbury came forward and cast himself on his knees
before him.
"I entreat Your Majesty to consider—to reflect—to spare us, to
spare this unhappy country——"
The King looked wildly but not unkindly into the fair, agitated
young face.
"I cannot do what you want of me," he answered. "Everything I
do displeaseth—I stand for toleration and ye will have no manner of
toleration—hath not the Indemnity Bill become a Bill of Pains and
Penalties? Is not Parliament busy looking up charges of twenty years
ago against men of position? Is not the Church crying out against
the Dissenters, and the Dissenters against the Papists?"
They were all silent; Shrewsbury on his knees by the King's
chair.
 "As to the civil government," continued William, "ye know
perfectly well what corruption is there. For the last two reigns every
honour in the gift of the Crown hath been put up to sale with
women and priests for brokers—I can trust no one save, of course,
yourselves, my lords," he added, with a faint sarcasm. "There is
neither honesty nor industry nor credit in any department of the
administration. I can do no more."
Lord Godolphin came forward from the window; he was known
to be higher in favour with the King than any there, and the others
waited with a silent, anxious curiosity for him to speak.
"I think Your Majesty will change your resolution," he said, with
sudden warmth, "for the sake of Europe."
"For the sake of Europe, my lord, I shall persist in it."
Sidney Godolphin looked straightly at the King.
"No—Your Majesty is not the man to shirk difficulties—bear with
us a little."
"My lord," answered William, "if all were as you I should have
no difficulties—rise up, my lord of Shrewsbury; this is not your fault."
The Duke got to his feet and retired to the deep window-seat;
he appeared utterly overwhelmed.
"I undertook to serve a King," said Godolphin, deeply moved.
"Let me resign that service while you are still my King—if Your
Majesty becomes Prince of Orange I become a private gentleman. I
pray Your Majesty accept my resignation."
"And mine, sir," added Halifax.
"I hope that you will serve the Queen," replied William; he leant
back in his chair and his face was colourless against the red brocade
cushion.
 "It was to Your Majesty I swore obedience," said Godolphin
firmly.
"I set you free of those oaths—all of you, my lords—my convoy
waiteth at Gravesend. In Holland I can be of service—not here." He,
with infinite weariness, sat up and took his speech from the table.
"Take this, my lord." He held it out to Lord Godolphin.
The minister went on one knee.
"I cannot be a party to this," he said. "Your Majesty must
forgive me—but I cannot——"
The blood rushed into the King's thin cheek.
"What do you want of me?" he cried passionately. "You know I
do not shirk labour. I have worked like a government clerk since I
have been in London, and I am well used to it—but it is no use."
Godolphin answered him with equal passion.
"Is all this labour to come to nothing, sir? If Your Majesty giveth
up, there will be no heart in any of us—everything will fly asunder,
and we be unprotected for the French and Irish to overrun. Your
presence, your Dutch troops alone keep order. Without you we are
lost again, and worse than we were before '88——"
"Your Majesty cannot—Your Majesty must not," cried
Caermarthen.
Shrewsbury raised his face; he was trembling, and weeping
softly.
"God in heaven!" he whispered, under his breath.
Nottingham looked at him with contempt.
"Will Your Majesty forsake your friends?" he asked sombrely.
"Where do we stand if Your Majesty resigns the position we asked
you to accept?"
 "Sir," said Halifax firmly, "the Prince of Orange cannot go back
on what he hath undertaken."
William leant forward, resting against the table; his eyes filled
with tears, and he gave a short cough as if he caught his breath.
"You ask too much of any man—to rule this country under the
disadvantages that whelm me," he said faintly. "I was not made to
be cabined in these small factions——"
"We cannot do without Your Majesty," said Halifax sharply. "Are
all your glorious deeds and achievements to end in this, sir?"
The King put his hand before his eyes and sobbed heavily.
"O God," cried Godolphin, in bitter distress, "what pass is here?"
He turned on the others. "Is this to what we have brought the Prince
who saved us?"
The tears were in his own eyes, and his voice was broken.
Halifax spoke to Caermarthen.
"This is like to be the end of us, my lord," he remarked. "Cry
'finis'! for the play is over now."
The King continued to weep; his whole frail figure was shaken
with his passion. The last cold daylight was over his gold broideries
and the crimson bracelet round his wrist. Caermarthen was pacing to
and fro in a kind of frenzy.
"What is to do!" he asked himself. "What is to do!" and he
clutched the cambric ruffles on his bosom.
Godolphin again dropped on his knees before the King and took
William's cold left hand to his lips.
"Your Majesty will not leave us," he murmured, in a quivering
tone.
The King lifted his great eyes, blurred, yet bright, with tears.
 "If I stay," he answered, "it is on certain terms—I will not be the
puppet of factions." He stopped, exhausted; he composed himself
and flushed feverishly; his speech was interrupted by continual and
painful coughing. "I will not be a party to persecution." He clenched
his thin hand on the smooth curved arm of his chair, and spoke with
a force and energy that gripped and almost frightened his listeners.
"A measure must be passed to prevent it—and I must go to The
Hague next spring."
"Ireland——" began Caermarthen.
William caught up the word.
"I will go to Ireland—since ye think so much of that wretched
country I will get it——"
Even in the midst of their relief that they had moved him the
ministers were shaken at this resolution.
"Your Majesty cannot be spared from London," exclaimed
Halifax.
"I shall prorogue Parliament before I leave," answered William
fiercely. "That or nothing, my lords. I do not stay here to be King
Log——"
They bowed before his terms as they had done in the crisis of
'88; only Shrewsbury, who saw the downfall of his party in the
prorogation of a Whig Parliament, made a feeble protest.
"Fever is epidemic in Ireland—the health of Your Majesty——"
"You fear to lose me, my lord, before I have served your turn!"
was struck out of the King; then he amended his contempt, for he
was ever fond of Shrewsbury. "It is the only thing to do—if the
reduction of Ireland is necessary before the Continental Campaign—I
must go." He looked sharply round. "Gentlemen, do you take these
terms—will you unite to help me to them?"
"We have no choice," said Lord Godolphin, and he tore the draft
of the King's speech across.

CHAPTER III
THE BEST OF LIFE

It was early May; the King was walking in his park at Kensington,
with his friend, William Bentinck, Earl of Portland.
It was the eve of his departure for Ireland; he had yesterday
prorogued Parliament, and laughed a little as he related the
discomfiture of the Whigs at his speech.
"I shall be glad to be under canvas again," he added. "For
myself it will be a holiday, but I pity the poor Queen." He repeated
with great tenderness—"the poor Queen!"
"How doth she take your going?" asked the Earl.
"Ah, heavily—what have I brought her but affliction?—
sometimes I think of that——"
He spoke sadly, and pressed Bentinck's hand.
"Be good to the Queen," he said wistfully. "As you love me,
William, help the Queen when I am not here.... I think women have
the harder part."
"I have great faith in her courage and wisdom, sir," said the
Earl.
 "There is no woman like her," answered the King, under his
breath. He added aloud, with a flashing smile, "As there is no friend
in the world like you!"
"Ah, sir," cried Portland, much moved, "you ever flattered me."
He was not so reserved as the King nor yet so demonstrative.
William could express by word and letter, strong passion, but this
was not possible to William Bentinck. Devotion to his master was the
motive power of his life, but he could not say so.
The King again pressed his hand affectionately. They were
walking under limes, and hawthorns white with blossom. The sky
shone cloudy blue, and the pale English sunshine was over the
young grass.
William looked round him with the sick eyes of exile; thoughts
of Holland tugged so sharply at his heart that he gave a little
suppressed sound of pain.
"What of this Crone and Fuller plot?" asked Portland suddenly.
"I am sorry to leave that on the Queen her hands," said William
quietly; "but I do not think it serious."
"Some great men are implicated?"
"I do not doubt it."
Portland hesitated a moment, then said—
"Nottingham's spies intercepted letters to St. Germains, he saith
—who were they from?"
"People of no station," answered the King. "Nottingham is over
zealous."
"And you, sir, are over easy."
William smiled at him, and seated himself on a wooden bench
under one of the limes.
 "That is an old complaint between us, is it not?" he said kindly.
"Dear lord, let it be——"
Portland smiled also; he was not satisfied; he stirred his cane
among the scattered hawthorn flowers and his fair face hardened.
After a little he asked his dismissal, and turned towards Kensington
House.
The King remained alone in the park, sitting a little droopingly;
he hardly ever held himself erect now; he had shifted his sword-belt
so that the weapon was across his knees, and he held pommel and
point of the scabbard with his bare, delicate hands; his clothes were
dark and plain; he wore high riding-boots and a beaver with a great
plume of white feathers. So still he sat, and so shaded was his figure
in the deep glowing shadow cast by the lime boughs of budding
foliage, that a young man coming moodily along the path was upon
him before he noticed that any sat there.
"Ah, sire!" he exclaimed, in confusion, and pulled off his hat.
William looked up at him; it was the Duke of Shrewsbury.
"I am glad to see you, my lord. I wished to speak to you."
"I was about to seek an audience of Your Majesty."
Shrewsbury was in a painful agitation, further increased by this
sudden meeting with the King, utterly unlooked for. It was rare to
find William at leisure or on foot.
The King's deep eyes regarded him sadly and kindly.
"Was it to a second time offer your resignation?" he asked.
Shrewsbury went crimson under his powder; he seemed to find
it difficult to maintain even a show of composure.
"Yes, Your Majesty," he answered.
 "Very well," said William quietly. "I am sorry that you will not
serve me till my return from Ireland."
"Sire, my health," murmured the Duke faintly—"I have had a fall
from my horse—I am not fit."
Still holding his sword in both hands, the King rose.
"My lord—is that your sole reason?" he asked gently.
The blood ebbed from the young man's soft face; he answered
with an effort.
"My sole reason, Your Majesty."
William continued to fix his eyes on him.
"My lord, when did you last see Roger Fuller?"
Shrewsbury shivered; he stammered painfully.
"I—I—do not know—the fellow——"
"I take your word, my lord," said William gravely.
He dropped his sword, and laid his hand with a gentle dignity on
the young man's heaving shoulder.
"Remember I trust you," he added quietly.
"Sir," cried Shrewsbury, through pale lips—"what is your
meaning—do you think——"
"I think that you are a man of honour," said William. "You have
given me your word, and I trust you. Remember it."
"Your Majesty," began the Duke wildly, "I never meant——"
"Hush," interrupted the King. "I know nothing. Take care of your
health, my lord."
He touched his hat and moved on. The young Duke looked after
him with eyes of agony, then stumbled wretchedly away through the
trees.
 William proceeded slowly to the privy garden, which was full of
stocks, pinks, wallflowers, aloes, and early roses.
He found the Queen and Lady Nottingham seated in front of a
great bush of box clipped into the shape of a peacock. Between
them was a length of yellow silk that they were sewing with blue
beads in little crosses and stars.
At the King's approach Lady Nottingham rose and retired with a
courtsey. Mary looked after her kindly.
"She is a sweet lady—I like her vastly," she said.
"You find most ladies sweet, do you not?" answered the King;
he seated himself beside her on the bench, and took up the end of
silk Lady Nottingham had laid down.
"I have spoilt your work. But I wished to tell you something,
Marie."
Mary glanced at him anxiously; she was slightly pale, and wore
a black scarf wrapped round her head and shoulders; her petticoat
was striped red and frilled at the foot, her over-gown dark blue and
spread round her in circling folds of glittering silk. For all the sombre
heaviness of this stately dressing she looked very young—sad, also,
for all the desperate gaiety to which she was continually nerved.
The King looked about him to see that they were not overheard,
then said, in a low voice—
"I have accepted my Lord Shrewsbury his resignation."
Mary waited, catching her breath.
"He," continued William, "hath tampered with His late Majesty."
The Queen gave a little sound of distress, and dropped her
sewing.
"Shrewsbury!" she whispered.
 "I have sure proof of it," said the King. "I am sorry for him," he
added simply; "and for myself, it something moved me, for I ever
liked my lord."
Mary flushed and clenched her hands on her lap.
"How base every one is," she cried, and the angry tears
glittered in her eyes.
"There is not much honour in England, Marie. Have a care of all
of them—particularly of that knave"—he spoke with strong force
—"that villain, my Lord Marlborough——"
"Need he be of the Council?" she asked eagerly.
"Child, he is the best soldier in England, and if I was to leave
you a Council of honest men they could not be of this nation—trust
none of them."
"God help me," said the Queen. "I know not how I shall support
myself when you are not here—but how weak I am to talk thus—my
part is little compared to yours."
She smiled with a pitiful brightness, and the King, looking at her,
flushed as if he had been hurt and suppressed the pain.
"Talk no more of this," he said quickly—"in this little time we
have together——"
Mary laid her hand on his.
"How pale the sunshine is—not thick and golden like The Hague
—the flowers seem so different too; is not that a silly fancy?" She
smiled again, and her voice quivered.
"You are not happy here, Marie."
She answered hastily.
"Happy wherever I have your dear company—but I confess I am
a coward without you—but God is greater than our hopes, our fears,
our desires; He knoweth best."
When her soft voice ceased the only sounds were those of
water running in the lead basin of a fountain hidden somewhere
behind the alleys of wych-elm, and the occasional distant blows of a
hammer from the workman engaged on the scaffolding of
Kensington House.
She spoke again at last, her white fingers tightening over his.
"I wonder if you will ever rest—if achievement will ever come—
at last, if you will ever think your work done——"
"How can I?" he answered. "That is my sole excuse to live—that
there is something for me to do—and I am so used to work I think I
could not rest——"
"It hath been hard—hard and long," said Mary. "You must be so
weary of it all—the lying, the treachery, the weakness, the
opposition, the delays, the disappointments——"
The King smiled faintly.
"Yet I have done something——"
"So much!" exclaimed Mary proudly. "But I do long for you to
have some leisure now ... for both of us ... to be alone, at last——"
"When the war is over——"
She interrupted gently.
"When the war is over! Alas!" She shook her head. "So long still
to wait." She smiled. "I would that you had not been a great man,
dear—but just a simple citizen." She laughed charmingly. "And we
would live at The Hague always and have a great garden where you
should grow 'La Solitaire' for the thousand gulden prize—and I would
polish all the furniture myself—and I could call you 'Willem' then
before all the world, and we should have long days together ... and
you would read of great events in the Gazette and never want to mix
in them, and I should laugh at those unhappy kings and queens——"
Her husband looked at her in silence.
"So you see I am a good housewife, no more!" she continued,
in a kind of wild gaiety. "Alas, I have no brains for business!"
"I have thought, too," said William, "that I would like to be a
mere gentleman watching events, not guiding them; but these
thoughts are beneath us—and idle visions."
"Idle visions!" repeated the Queen. "And you must go to the
war again—Death's target—and I must stay behind and keep my
countenance! I am such a poor weak fool!" she added, in bitter self-
reproach.
The King raised her head and pressed it against his heart.
"That kind of fool I could never have done without," he said
impetuously. "If I have ever achieved anything, the credit is to you,
my dearest, my dearest——"
He dropped her hand, and abruptly broke his speech.
"What more can I want than to hear you say that?" answered
Mary. "Only love me and I can bear anything——"
The King's brilliant eyes rested on her pale but smiling face; he
spoke slowly, and his tired voice was hoarse and unequal.
"When I was a boy—a youth—I was so proud, so self-
confident.... I remember I thought I was capable of anything—I took
my inexperience, my handful of soldiers, into the field against France
—against Condé! I had been very much alone, and so learnt reserve
that I had almost lost the power of expression—I was also very
unhappy—I think I had no support in the world but my pride—I
thought God had elected me to be his Captain——"
 He paused, but Mary did not speak. Only the little gurgle of the
unseen fountain broke perfect stillness.
"I remember," continued William, "the first time I went to
Middleburg and heard the people shout for me—and saw the Town
Council bowing.... I never had felt so lonely. Twenty years ago—and
I have greatly changed, but in a fashion I have kept the vows I
made then to God—I have not turned back from defending His Faith
—but that was before He pleased to humble me by constant defeat.
I was so confident, Marie! Ah, could I recapture that exaltation of
the morning it would all be so easy—I felt so glad of what I had to
do—but now!"
He raised his hand lightly and lightly let it fall; his profile was
towards the Queen now, and his gaze directed towards the English
hawthorns that showed above the box hedge of the privy garden.
"But though," he added, "it hath all darkened since then, I think
God meant me to go on—for He sent you, my wife ... and you are
the one thing that hath never failed me."
She hid her face in her hands, and sat trembling; the little tray
of blue beads fell from her lap, and they were scattered over the
gravel path.
"If I am not good at gratitude," said the King haltingly—"yet
believe me—while you are there I can endure anything. After all,
there is nothing in the world for me but you and Holland, and while I
have both why should I complain of any difficulties?"
Mary raised her face.
"If I could think I made that difference to you!" she said.
"You have given me the best of life," he answered gravely.
 CHAPTER IV
THE SECRET ANGUISH

In that ancient palace called Hampton Court, on the banks of the

Thames, the Queen of England walked through the rooms that were
rebuilding, and tried to subdue her soul to peace.
The King was at the war in Ireland, and she, with the aid of the
nine councillors—men divided by personal spites and party
differences—was ruling England through a bitter and desperate
crisis.
Mary, a woman and utterly unused to business (though she had
always taken an intelligent interest in politics), yet found all these
men, on whose wisdom she was supposed to rely, peevish and silly.
Marlborough was using her sister to stir up opposition against the
Government,—she strongly suspected him, Godolphin, and Russell of
having made their peace with King James; Caermarthen she
personally disliked; the Crone and Fuller plot had proved to be a
widespreading affair, in which there appeared every possibility of her
uncles being involved; the country was denuded of troops, and the
fleet in disorder; the treasury empty, and the French threatening the
Channel.
These were the first few moments of leisure the Queen had
known since her husband's departure; she was eager to have
Hampton Court ready for his return, and so had come eagerly to see
the progress of the rebuilding and alterations.
Here again she was met with difficulties and humiliations. Sir
Christopher Wren, the architect, was in want of money, the workmen
were unpaid, the contractors refused to deliver any more Portland
stone on credit.
Mary had no money, and knew not where to get it; she soothed
Sir Christopher as best she could, and desperately resolved that
these debts should be paid; the thought of them was an added
vexation. She felt there was a kind of meanness in so lacking money,
and that the rebuilding of Hampton Court, which had been her one
pleasure, was a reproach and a mistake.
M. de Ginckle had written to her from Ireland that they were so
straitened in the camp that the King had refused to sign for wine for
his own table, and was drinking water with the men.
Mary thought of this passionately as she surveyed the
unfinished building the grumblers declared such an unwarranted
luxury, and remembered the noble fortune William had lavished on
the public cause.
Under some pretence, she slipped away from her ladies and Sir
Christopher, and, with a wild longing to be alone, made her way to
some of the old deserted Tudor rooms of the palace, opened now for
the first time for perhaps fifty years.
In the wing in which Mary found herself there were near a
hundred chambers, and she, new to the palace, was soon lost in the
maze of apartments.
She was wildly glad to be alone, to drop, for a moment, the
mask of composed gaiety that she ever kept over her anxiety.
Door after door she opened, and room after room she
traversed, until she reached a little winding stairway that led to a
chamber in one of the fine red turrets with the graceful decorated
chimney-stacks that Sir Christopher was so calmly destroying.
 Stairway and chamber were both covered with thick white dust;
the bolts on the door were rusty and loose; there was no furniture
save an old rotting chest, rudely carved; but the walls were
beautifully panelled with oak in a linen pattern, and the low lancet
window disclosed a perfect view.
Mary went straight to it, leant her sick head against the
mullions, and gazed over the fair prospect of unkept garden, field,
meadow, and river, all shimmering under a July sun. The Thames
showed argent gold between banks of willow and alder; stretches of
daisies, buttercups, clover, and poppies reached to distant groves of
elm, oak, and beech.
In the nearer glades deer wandered in and out of the sweeping
shadows, and the air was soft with the whispers of the ringdove.
Such a different England this seemed from that England shown
in London, so far removed from war and discord, danger and alarm.
The lonely young Queen felt her own desolation heightened by
the solitude; she became almost afraid of the silence.
When she reflected that the person who was everything to her
was distant, exposed to many perils, that her father was opposed to
him in battle, that the great responsibility of government was
intrusted to her, and that she had no one on whom she could rely or
even to whom open her heart (for William Bentinck had, after all,
been summoned to Holland), she felt a melancholy creep over her
spirit that was near despair.
The sun was warm on the sill where her hand rested and on her
cheek; she leant a little farther out of the narrow window, that had
neither glass nor casement, and fixed her eyes on the pulsing flow
of the river.
 A little sound behind her caused her to turn quickly with a
nervous start.
Before a small worm-eaten inner doorway that she had not
noticed stood a comely child of five or six years, gazing at her
intently. The colour fluttered into the Queen's face; they stood
staring at each other—the woman and the child—as if they were
both afraid.
"What are you doing here?" asked Mary coldly, after a second.
The child did not answer; he had as little expected to see this
tall young lady in the fine blue gown as she had expected to see
him.
"You have no business here," said Mary, in the same tone; "this
is private. Go, find your people."
And she turned towards the window again so that she could not
see him.
He answered now.
"I have lost my way."
"There are the stairs," said Mary, without looking round. "Go
down there, and you will find your way."
There was silence, and she waited a little; then looked over her
shoulder to see him still standing there, staring at her.
"Why don't you go?" she asked harshly. "You are not allowed
here."
"Yes, ma'am, I am," he replied. "Father said I could go where I
liked."
"Who is your father?"
The child laid a delicate finger on the smooth carving of the
wall.
 "He maketh—these," he explained.
"A carver," said Mary. "Is he working here?"
"Yes, ma'am. We come every day; there is another little boy—
you are the mother of the other little boy?" he questioned.
"No," said Mary coldly.
"He isn't here to-day," remarked the child rather sadly. "When
he is we go out, because he is a bigger boy than me. If you had
been his mother I thought you might have taken me out."
"Your father can take you out."
"Father is working with Master Wren. Do you know Master
Wren?"
"Yes."
"He goeth up and down in a basket outside the house. Once I
went too, and he held me so tight that it hurt. He is too old to play
with."
He came a little farther into the room, eying Mary wistfully. She
was stately as well as tall, and the high lace commode she wore,
and the stiff arrangement of her heavy curls, further added to her
dignity. The child looked at her in some awe.
"Are you cross with me?" he asked gravely.
"No," answered the Queen—"no—but your father will be looking
for you—best go and find him."
"I have lost my way," he said, subdued by her coldness. "I was
asleep in there." He pointed to the little sunny annexe to the turret
from which he had come. "I am glad I met you, ma'am."
"Why?" asked Mary.
The child smiled, in an effort to win her.
 "I get frightened when I am alone," he said. "Don't you,
ma'am?"
"Sometimes," answered the Queen; she bit her lip and fixed her
narrowed brown eyes on the boy; he was fair, and rather delicate,
and wore a shabby suit of red tabinet.
He slowly and reluctantly moved towards the narrow dark stairs.
"I wish this house was finished," he said plaintively. "It is so
large. The King will live here," he added. "I saw the King talking
once to Mr. Wren."
Mary gave him no encouragement to stay, but he still lingered
by the rotting door, that swung back against the wall, and looked at
her with wide, puzzled eyes.
"I am going now," he said at last; his hands went to his cravat,
which was sadly knotted. "Would you tie this for me first? Father
don't like me to look untidy."
"Come here," said Mary.
He came at once and stood before her.
"I don't think I can do it," said the Queen unsteadily.
She took hold of the scrap of cambric awkwardly, while he
obediently held his head up; but her cold fingers bungled, and the
bow was clumsy.
"I can't do it," she murmured.
"You are so tall, ma'am!"
She looked into his upturned face.
"Too tall to be so stupid," she answered, and untied the bow.
"Have you a mother?" she asked suddenly, holding his shoulder
gently.
"No, ma'am."
 "Ah, poor soul!"
She spoke so sadly that he was distressed.
"What is the matter, ma'am?"
"I was thinking of what we both have missed," said Mary gently.
His bright eyes were bewildered. The Queen drew him to the
old chest, seated herself there, and again tied the cravat.
"What is your name?" she asked, as she smoothed it.
"James, ma'am—it was the King his name when I was born," he
added proudly.
Mary drew a quick breath.
"But you serve King William."
"I know," he answered dutifully. "He is a soldier, father saith. I
would like to be a soldier, ma'am."
Mary smiled; though she had done with his cravat she still kept
her hands lightly on his shoulder.
"Not a wood-carver?"
He shook his head.
"Father saith, 'Better be a soldier these days—there is no living
else,'" he quoted wisely.
"There is time enough to decide," said Mary softly; her ringed
right hand timidly caressed his hair, scarcely touching it. "Have you
many toys?"
"No, ma'am."
"Do you care for them?"
He considered.
"Books," he said, with a little frown, "that you can tear the
pictures out of—pictures of fights, ma'am—and blackamoor's teeth."
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