No Great Magic | Page 4

least as far as her face
went--I hate to see that spooky eight-spoked faint tattoo on her
forehead (I've sometimes wondered if she got it acting in India or Egypt
maybe).
Yes, she was already all made up. This time she'd been going extra
heavy on the burrowing-into-character bit, I could tell right away, even
if it was only for a hacked-out anachronistic prologue. She signed to
me to help her dress without even looking at me, but as I got busy I
looked at her eyes. They were so cold and sad and lonely (maybe
because they were so far away from her eyebrows and temples and

small tight mouth, and so shut away from each other by that ridge of
nose) that I got the creeps. Then she began to murmur and sigh, very
softly at first, then loudly enough so I got the sense of it.
"Cold, so cold," she said, still seeing things far away though her hands
were working smoothly with mine. "Even a gallop hardly fires my
blood. Never was such a Januarius, though there's no snow. Snow will
not come, or tears. Yet my brain burns with the thought of Mary's
death-warrant unsigned. There's my particular hell!--to doom,
perchance, all future queens, or leave a hole for the Spaniard and the
Pope to creep like old worms back into the sweet apple of England.
Philip's tall black crooked ships massing like sea-going fortresses
south-away--cragged castles set to march into the waves. Parma in the
Lowlands! And all the while my bright young idiot gentlemen spurting
out my treasure as if it were so much water, as if gold pieces were a
glut of summer posies. Oh, alackanight!"
And I thought, Cry Iced!--that's sure going to be one tyrannosaur of a
prologue. And how you'll ever shift back to being Lady Mack beats me.
Greta, if this is what it takes to do just a bit part, you'd better give up
your secret ambition of playing walk-ons some day when your nerves
heal.
* * * * *
She was really getting to me, you see, with that characterization. It was
as if I'd managed to go out and take a walk and sat down in the park
outside and heard the President talking to himself about the chances of
war with Russia and realized he'd sat down on a bench with its back to
mine and only a bush between. You see, here we were, two females
undignifiedly twisted together, at the moment getting her into that
crazy crouch-deep bodice that's like a big icecream cone, and yet here
at the same time was Queen Elizabeth the First of England, three
hundred and umpty-ump years dead, coming back to life in a Central
Park dressing room. It shook me.
She looked so much the part, you see--even without the red wig yet,
just powdered pale makeup going back to a quarter of an inch from her

own short dark bang combed and netted back tight. The age too. Miss
Nefer can't be a day over forty--well, forty-two at most--but now she
looked and talked and felt to my hands dressing her, well, at least a
dozen years older. I guess when Miss Nefer gets into character she does
it with each molecule.
That age point fascinated me so much that I risked asking her a
question. Probably I was figuring that she couldn't do me much damage
because of the positions we happened to be in at the moment. You see,
I'd started to lace her up and to do it right I had my knee against the tail
of her spine.
"How old, I mean how young might your majesty be?" I asked her,
innocently wonderingly like some dumb serving wench.
For a wonder she didn't somehow swing around and clout me, but only
settled into character a little more deeply.
"Fifty-four winters," she replied dismally. "'Tiz Januarius of Our Lord's
year One Thousand and Five Hundred and Eighty and Seven. I sit cold
in Greenwich, staring at the table where Mary's death warrant waits
only my sign manual. If I send her to the block, I open the doors to
future, less official regicides. But if I doom her not, Philip's armada
will come inching up the Channel in a season, puffing smoke and shot,
and my English Catholics, thinking only of Mary Regina, will rise and
i' the end the Spaniard will have all. All history would alter. That must
not be, even if I'm damned for it! And yet ... and yet...."
A bright blue fly came buzzing along (the dressing room has some
insect life) and slowly circled her head rather close, but she didn't even
flicker her eyelids.
"I sit cold in Greenwich, going mad. Each afternoon I ride,