Avon Modern Short Story Monthly #36 — page 11: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

HISTORICAL NIGHTS? ENTERTAINMENT ~— pine eo sick at heart and shivering, for all that her wasted body was swathed in a long cloak of-deepest purple reversed. with.ermine. Her face was thin sud of a transparent pallor, her eyes great pools of wistfulness amid the shadows which her illness had set about them. “I do wish I could be dead!” she sighed. Bothwell’s eyes narrowed. He was leaning on the back of her*tall chair, a long, virile figure with a hawk-nosed, bearded face that was sternly handsome. He thrust back the crisp dark hair that clustered ©: about his brow, and fetched-a sigh. “It was never my own death I wished when a man stood in my road to aught I craved,” he said, lowering his voice, for Maitland of Lethington—now restored to hts secretaryship—was writing at a table across the room, and my Lord of Argyll was leaning over him. She looked up at him suddenly, her eyes startled.. * “What devil’s counsel do you whisper?” she asked him. And when he would have answered, she raised a hand. “No,” she said. “Not that way.” / “There is another,” said Bothwell coolly. He moved, came round, and stood squarely upon the hearth, his back to the fire, confronting hér, nor did he further trouble to lower his Voice. “We have consid- ered it already.” “What have you considered?” Her voice was strained; fear and excitement blended in her face. “How the shackles that fetter you might be broken, Be not alarmed. It was the virtuous Murray himself propounded it to Argyll and Lethington—for the good of Scotland and yourself.” A sneer flitted across his tanned face. “Let them speak for themselves.” He _ raised his voice and called to them across the room. They came at once, and the four made an odd group as they stood there in the firelit gloom of that November day—the lovely young Queen, so frail and wistful-in her high-backed chair; the stalwart, arrogant Bothwell, magnificent in a doublet of peach-coloured*velvet — that tapered to a golden girdle; Argyll, portly and sober in a rich suit of black; and Maitland of Lethington, lean and crafty of face, in a long furred gown that flapped about his bony shanks. It was to Lethington that Bothwell addressed himself. “Her Grace is in a mood to hear how the Gordian knot of her comicbooks con