Under One Sceptre, or Mortimer's Mission: The Story of the Lord of the MarchesHolt, Emily Sarah
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Under One Sceptre, or Mortimer's Mission: The Story of the Lord of the Marches
Holt, Emily Sarah
Historical fiction; Mortimer, Roger de, Earl of March, 1328-1360 -- Fiction
Guenllian made no answer. She only threw open the door of the Lady
Anne’s apartments, and motioned to the new disposer of the child’s
destiny to enter. If she thought that both the Countess and the Lady
Agnes Mortimer mistook their pearls for pebbles, and their pebbles for
pearls, she gave no hint of doing so.
The funeral procession set forth, and the lonely and sorrowful child who
had been one of his dearest treasures, followed the coffin of the dead
father. Lady Agnes Mortimer had taken Anne’s future into her own hands,
and being Guenllian’s nominal superior, the latter was bound to obey.
She was about to deliver the child into the yet more nominal care of the
Countess, to be plunged, when she grew a little older, into all those
pomps and vanities of this wicked world which her father had foreseen
and feared for her. So sorrowfully reckoned Guenllian ap Evan: but the
God of Roger Mortimer reckoned very differently. The lot He had
prepared for Anne was far away from pomp and vanity,—a long, eventless,
monotonous imprisonment in Windsor Castle, with her sister and
brothers,—the bitter disappointment of an attempted and almost
successful rescue, for the lot of Roger Mortimer seemed to pursue his
children—an imprisonment straiter and sadder than before, until that one
of them whom the usurper had really cause to fear, Roger’s bright little
namesake, his own true son, fervent and energetic like himself, died in
his weary prison; till a greater King than Henry of Bolingbroke undrew
the bolts, and set the prisoner free. Then the other three were allowed
to come forth. The King was not afraid of Edmund,—dreamy, indolent,
ease-loving Edmund—nor of Alianora, who shared his character. He gave
to Edmund, to ensure his safe keeping, a wife of a different type from
himself, a daughter of the Romish House of Stafford, and a
grand-daughter of Gloucester. Alianora was handed over to the care of
the heir of Courtenay, ever a Lancastrian House. The most wary and
cautious men sometimes blunder. And surely it was in a moment of blunder
that that wariest and coldest-hearted of English kings and statesmen
permitted Anne Mortimer,—the heir of Duke Lionel of Clarence if her
brother should die issueless, as he did—to wed the loyal and
true-hearted Richard of Conisborough, a Prince of the Blood, in whose
eyes Richard of Bordeaux, whose godson he was, was the King, and Henry
of Bolingbroke a usurper. Richard of Conisborough was the one love of
Anne Mortimer’s true heart. Every fibre of that sterling
character—silent, shy, undemonstrative, but deep and loyal to the
heart’s core,—wound itself around him by whose side she dwelt in a dream
of bliss for three short years, and then God called her away from the
evil to come. He lies—murdered, or rather martyred—in the precincts of
"God’s House" at Southampton, she in the Abbey Church of King’s Langley.
They have met in the Garden of God. And if a text were to be engraven
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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