Story of the Month: ...And I Shall Kill My Love Who Sleeps in My Heart

War was raging between Edward III and the Scots. The Scots laid siege to the fortress of Roxburgh and took its governor, Lord Salisbury, prisoner; and his wife, Lady Salisbury, defended the fortress with the defense of heroes, until, as King Edward drew near the fortress, the besiegers abandoned it and fell back in flight before the king's armies.

Lady Salisbury opened the gates of the fortress to the king, who with his retinue became her guests. Scarcely had the king seen the mistress of the castle when he felt her love assail his heart and sensed the awkwardness of his position. The Lady came upon him standing at the window of the hall, lost in thought, and this dialogue passed between them:

The Countess — It pains me to see the marks of sorrow plain upon my lord the King. What can your handmaid do to rid your soul of the causes of this frowning grief and this enveloping gloom?

Edward — Forgive me, my lady; my mind is astray, and I cannot scatter the flowers of consolation upon a ground of scandal and shame. For I have erred, Countess, since I entered this place.

The Countess — God forbid, my lord, that there should be anyone in this house able to see my king in error!

Tell me, my gracious lord, the causes of your vexation.

Edward — And how near should I come to a cure, if I told you what you ask?

The Countess — As near as all my woman's powers can spend in the purchase of the remedy.

Edward — If you speak truly, then in that lies every cause of contentment. Employ all your powers, then, to bring about my happiness; and then, Countess, I shall be happy — or die.

The Countess — I shall do, my lord, what you desire.

Edward — Swear it, Countess.

The Countess — I swear by heaven that I shall.

Edward — Then step aside a little way, and remember that here is a king enamored of you; remember that it lies in your power to make him happy, and that you have sworn to spend, for the sake of his happiness, every means of comfort your strength can bring about.

Do all this, then tell me when my happiness shall be accomplished.

The Countess — I have done all this, my lord, majestic King.

I have offered you, in tokens of obedience and devotion, all the power of love with which I am able to surround you.

Tell me then, my lord, what proof beyond this do you require?

Edward — You have heard me say that I am enamored of you.

The Countess — If it is my beauty you are enamored of, take it if you can; slight as it is, in my eyes it is not worth a tenth of its price. And if it is my virtue you are enamored of, take it if you can, for the selling of virtue enriches in the measure that it is spent.

Let your passion, my lord, be for whatever I am able to give and you are able to take — may you inherit it from me.

Edward — It is your beauty I would enjoy.

The Countess — I could wish, my lord, that my beauty were paint; then I would wipe it away, deprive myself of it, and present it to you.

But it, my lord King, is fastened to my life and cannot be parted from it.

If you take the one, you take the other with it; for my beauty, like a humble shadow, follows the light of the shining sun through the summer of my life.

Edward — But you can lend it to me, and I shall enjoy it.

The Countess — It would be no easier to lend my soul away from my body — the body still living — than to lend my body — which is my soul's dwelling — away from her,

while I keep her still.

My body is my soul's chamber, her courtyard, and her temple; and my soul is an angel — pure, chaste, heavenly, undefiled.
If I lend you the house of this angel, my lord, I kill my poor soul, and my tormented soul kills me.

The king then demanded of the Earl of Warwick, father of the Countess of Salisbury — by virtue of the oath of obedience he had sworn to him — that he go to his daughter and command her to obey the king's desires. The Earl feigned obedience, though his position was awkward in the extreme. In the dialogue that follows between him and his daughter, the measure of that awkwardness appears, as does the Earl's adroitness in performing both the duty of fidelity to the oath he had sworn and the duty of honor and care for his daughter's dignity.

Warwick — How can I perform this cruel errand? I must not call her my daughter; for where is the father who, in such a wretched pass, would consent to incite his daughter to adultery? Then I shall call her Salisbury's wife... Shall I speak?

No... Salisbury is my friend, and where is the friend who would wound friendship with such a disgrace?

Then I shall call her neither my daughter nor my friend's wife.
No — for I am not Warwick, as you imagine. I am but an attorney come from the court of hell,

whose soul is not the body of Warwick,
to bring you a message from the king.

For the great King of England is enamored of you, lady; and the man who can take from you your life, if he wishes, can likewise take from you your honor... Obey him, then, and lend him your honor, that you may save your life.

For honor is often lost and then recovered; but life, once lost, never returns. The sun that dries the hay revives the grass, and the king who defiles you is able to raise your station.

The poets say that the spear of great Achilles healed the wounds it dealt — the meaning of which is that the strong man can mend what he has spoiled.
And the lion is able to wipe his bloodied jaws clean, and to cover his cruelty with a show of gentleness,

while his terrified prey trembles at his feet. And the king, in his greatness, is able to cover your shame.

Those who dare to look his way, searching for you, lose the blessing of sight by gazing at the disk of the sun.

And how much harm can one drop of poison do in the vast ocean? The greatness of the ocean suffices to purify whatever corruption is cast into it, and to strip it of its power to hurt...

The great king's name excuses your ill deed, and coats the bitter draught of remorse with a shell of sweet-tasting sugar.

Remember, too, that there is no harm in doing what you cannot in any case keep safe from shame.

And here I stand, at my sovereign's command, having dressed vice in the garment of virtue.
And I await your answer in my lord's suit.

The Countess — An unnatural siege... How wretched I am, then — to escape the peril of enemies only to be plunged by my friends into a peril more hideous and more cruel! Has the king no other means of defiling my noble blood than to corrupt the very begetter of this blood in my veins, and to make him his wicked advocate and shameless messenger?... No wonder, then, if the branches rot, when corruption has crept into the trunks. No wonder the leprous child dies when the teat of the udder is fouled and its spring run dry. Give the sinner free rein, then; hand heedless youth the bridle of absolute liberty; strike down the stern forbidding laws; and blot out every rule that repays shame with shame and meets crime with punishment. No — rather let me die, if the king's angry will insists upon nothing but what it desires. Let me die before I obey his will and play the part he would have me play in the comedy of his scandalous lust.

Warwick — I see you speak as I wished you to speak. Listen to me, then, for I shall not repeat what I gave you to hear before: an honorable grave is a nobler place than the king's defiled chamber. The greater a man's station, the greater the weight of his deed, be that deed noble or shameful. The paltry mote that dances in the sunbeam appears to the eye at many times its true worth. The clearest of summer days is quick to taint the lifeless corpse it seems to kiss. Deep are the blows dealt by the mighty axe, and the crime committed in a holy place has its sin multiplied tens of times over. The evil deed done by the power of authority is a double sin, coupled with incitement; and the ape clothed in fine garments of gaudy colors becomes only the more ridiculous and contemptible to look upon. I could, my daughter, speak at length in describing the king's greatness and the enormity of the shame that would come upon you from behind it; the golden cup only makes the poison look the more hideous. The black night seems blacker still when lightning flickers through it. The rotted lily smells fouler than the rank weed. And every glory that sinks into baseness doubles the shame that springs from it. I leave you now, having placed in your keeping my blessing — which will turn into a curse of the harshest cruelty if you stain your noble golden name with the stain of a shame tricked out in the semblance of greatness and glory.

The Countess — I shall follow you; and should my mind ever turn in that direction, my body will drown my soul in a grief without bound or end.

Amid the tumult of Edward's passions his son the Prince of Wales arrives at the castle of Roxburgh, and a fierce battle breaks out in the king's head, its effect appearing in a dialogue between him and the prince, in which his conjugal duties are recalled; he wavers between holding fast to them and rushing after his sudden, insistent lust. While he is in the midst of this dialogue the lord comes forward and announces the arrival of Lady Salisbury; the king orders his son to withdraw and amuse himself with his companions. Lady Salisbury enters, and this dialogue takes place between the king and her.

The King — Now you have come, friend of my soul, to give me more of your holy words, setting your bewitching beauty against my love!

The Countess — My father commanded me, blessing me as he did...

The King — To submit to my will.

The Countess — That is indeed your right, my lord.

The King — Yet this, dearest of all creatures to me, is only right met with right, and love exchanged for love.

The Countess — Rather sin exchanged for sin, and enmity for enmity.

But I see Your Majesty is bent upon this thing; and neither my resistance, nor my husband's love, nor your own exalted station, nor the respect that is owed it — none of these can save me. And since your power must prevail and override all these considerations, I exchange refusal for consent.

And I shall force myself to do what I would never have done.

Only I make one condition, my lord: that you sweep away those obstacles that stand between Your Majesty's love and mine.

The King — Name these obstacles, my beauty, and I swear by heaven that I shall remove them.

The Countess — It is their lives that stand between our loves.

And I choke as I say it, my king.

The King — Whose life, my lady?

The Countess — Let my beloved lord the King know that it is the life of your queen, and of Salisbury, my lawful husband; for in that capacity he will stand between our loves so long as he lives, and we shall never taste our joy except by the death of them both.

The King — What you ask is beyond the reach of our laws.

The Countess — So too are your desires. If the law can prevent you from carrying out the one, then let it likewise prevent you from attempting the other. And I cannot believe you love me as you profess unless you keep the oath you swore.

Edward — Enough... let your husband and the queen die. You are lovelier in beauty than Hero ever was, and Leander was not stronger than I when he breasted the running water in quest of his beloved. As for me, I shall wade through a hell of blood to reach the temple of my idol.

The Countess — And you will do even more than that: you will dye the river's water with the blood of their two hearts, which cleave our love and part us. And my husband's share of that blood and your wife's are equal.

Edward — Your beauty lays upon them the crime

of their own deaths, and furnishes the proof that decrees they must die. And in the name of that proof, and as their judge, I shall condemn them.

The Countess — O God — what counterfeit majesty! What a judge of corrupted conscience!

And when the high court of heaven convenes its general assembly above our heads and begins the reckoning of mankind, and calls us to account for this evil made flesh, can we do anything, the two of us, but tremble at the horror of the crime?

Edward — What does my beloved say? Is she resolved?

The Countess — Resolved to loose myself from my bonds. Then hear this:

Keep your promise, great king — I become yours.

Stand where you are, and I shall step a little away from you; then you shall see how I deliver myself into your hands. Here at my side hang my two wedding knives. Take one of them and kill your queen with it — and learn from me where she lies sleeping; with the other I shall kill my love, who sleeps a deep sleep in the innermost core of my heart. And when we are all gone, I shall make your passion plain to your will.

Do not try, lecherous king, to stop me, for my resolve is swifter in its motion than your attempt to save me. If you stir, I strike. Stand where you are, then, and hear what I tell you.

Either you swear to renounce your wicked desire, never to speak to me of it again, or I swear by heaven that this keen knife shall stain this ground with that blood of my poor breast which you sought to defile. Swear, Edward — swear!

Or I shall strike here, and die at your feet.

Edward — I swear by that power which even now lends my soul the spirit of shame that I shall never again open my lips upon a word that points toward this wicked thing.

Rise, true English lady, of whom our island shall boast forever — better than any Roman can boast of her whose ransacked treasure has vainly wearied so many pens in the attempt to describe her.

Rise, and let my sin be the pillar of your honorable fame, of which you shall sing down the generations.

Rise — for I have wakened from that loathsome dream!