The Lost Prince by Frances Hodgson Burnett

past, had been enclosed within its massive and ancient stone walls. In this way, he had throughout boyhoodbecome intimate with people who to most boys seemed only the unreal creatures who professed to be alive in schoolbooks of history. He had learned to know them as men and women because he had stood in the palaces they had been born in and had played in as children, had died in at the end. He had seen the dungeons they had been imprisoned in, the blocks on which they had laid their heads, the battlements on which they had fought to defend their fortressed towers, the thrones they had sat upon, the crowns they had worn, and the jewelled sceptres they had held. He had stood before their portraits and had gazed curiously at their ‘Robes of Investiture’, sewn with tens of thousands of seed-pearls. To look at a man’s face and feel his pictured eyes follow you as you move away from him, to see the strangely splendid garments he once warmed with his living flesh, is to realise that history is not a mere lesson in a schoolbook, but is a relation of the life stories of men and women who saw strange and splendid days, and sometimes suffered strange and terrible things.
    There were only a few people who were being led about sightseeing. The man in the ancient Beefeaters’ costume, who was their guide, was good-natured, and evidently fond of talking. He was a big and stout man, with a large face and a small, merry eye. He was rather like pictures of Henry the Eighth, himself, which Marco remembered having seen. He was specially talkative when he stood by the tablet that marks the spot where stood the block on which Lady Jane Grey had laid her young head. One of the sightseers who knewlittle of English history had asked some questions about the reasons for her execution.
    ‘If her father-in-law, the Duke of Northumberland, had left that young couple alone – her and her husband, Lord Guildford Dudley – they’d have kept their heads on. He was bound to make her a queen, and Mary Tudor was bound to be queen herself. The duke wasn’t clever enough to manage a conspiracy and work up the people. These Samavians we’re reading about in the papers would have done it better. And they’re half-savages.’
    ‘They had a big battle outside Melzarr yesterday,’ the sightseer standing next to Marco said to the young woman who was his companion. ‘Thousands of ’em killed. I saw it in big letters on the boards as I rode on the top of the bus. They’re just slaughtering each other, that’s what they’re doing.’
    The talkative Beefeater heard him.
    ‘They can’t even bury their dead fast enough,’ he said. ‘There’ll be some sort of plague breaking out and sweeping into the countries nearest them. It’ll end by spreading all over Europe as it did in the Middle Ages. What the civilized countries have got to do is to make them choose a decent king and begin to behave themselves.’
    ‘I’ll tell my father that too,’ Marco thought. ‘It shows that everybody is thinking and talking of Samavia, and that even the common people know it must have a real king. This must be
the time
!’ And what he meant was that this must be the time for which the Secret Party had waited and worked so long – the time for the Rising. But his father was out when he went back to PhilibertPlace, and Lazarus looked more silent than ever as he stood behind his chair and waited on him through his insignificant meal. However plain and scant the food they had to eat, it was always served with as much care and ceremony as if it had been a banquet.
    ‘A man can eat dry bread and drink cold water as if he were a gentleman,’ his father had said long ago. ‘And it is easy to form careless habits. Even if one is hungry enough to feel ravenous, a man who has been well bred will not allow himself to look so. A dog may, a man may not. Just as a dog may howl when he is angry or in pain and a man may not.’
    It was only one of the small parts of the