And the next day news came to the castle that Sir John had died in a
burning fever. So then Sir Simon went out of the castle and mounted his
horse and rode away to the bishop and told him everything. And the
bishop sent his men, and they took the Lady Avelin, and everything she
had done was found out. So on the day after the year and a day, when she
was to have been married, they carried her through the town in her
smock, and they tied her to a great stake in the market-place, and
burned her alive before the bishop with her wax image hung round her
neck. And people said the wax man screamed in the burning of the flames.
And I thought of this story again and again as I was lying awake in my
bed, and I seemed to see the Lady Avelin in the market-place, with the
yellow flames eating up her beautiful white body. And I thought of it so
much that I seemed to get into the story myself, and I fancied I was the
lady, and that they were coming to take me to be burnt with fire, with
all the people in the town looking at me. And I wondered whether she
cared, after all the strange things she had done, and whether it hurt
very much to be burned at the stake. I tried again and again to forget
nurse's stories, and to remember the secret I had seen that afternoon,
and what was in the secret wood, but I could only see the dark and a
glimmering in the dark, and then it went away, and I only saw myself
running, and then a great moon came up white over a dark round hill.
Then all the old stories came back again, and the queer rhymes that
nurse used to sing to me; and there was one beginning 'Halsy cumsy Helen
musty,' that she used to sing very softly when she wanted me to go to
sleep. And I began to sing it to myself inside of my head, and I went to
sleep.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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