TO MY HUSBAND
To you belongs, for many a reason, this, my first essay in history, which I have carried to its end with many misgivings, but with much delight in the matter itself.
The orthodox may be affronted at two brief incursions into fiction which they will find in it. Let them skip these judiciously, magisterially. For my own part, I needed consolation at times for certain hard and bitter facts of the history. Therefore, since the way was sometimes long, and the wind, in my imagination, very cold—as it whistled in and out of the ruins of those manors and castles where the Scots Queen and her married gaolers dwelt, or as it drove the snow across the splendid grey façade of Hardwick (to say nothing of the draughts of the sombre, public research libraries)—I first drew my Countess down from her picture-frame to marshal her household, and then lured her child and her child’s lover after her to gladden your road and mine.
And so I give you—besides all the thoughts which have gone to every scrap of writing I have ever done—these last, which curl and stiffen and again uncoil themselves about this hungry woman of Elizabethan days. Into her life and much-abused toil, we, who have neither gold nor heirs for whom to store it, can look together in love and pity.
Thus even while we rejoice over our diminutive home, may we never forget to give thanks to the spirit of those who built the great houses which nourish the little ones, and who, in place of the “scarlet blossom of pain” that grows at great door and little, shall give to us in the end the perfect English rose.