Free Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers Page A

fingers, and next to her a dark, beautiful one, for whose face men might have sacked cities, if it had had any sort of animation; and there was a gawky and unfinished-looking young person, very badly made up, who had a pathetic air of seeking to win hearts and never succeeding; and, most interesting of the bunch, a girl with a face like eager flame who was dressed with a maddening perversity of wrongness, but who one day would undoubtedly hold the world in her hands for good or evil. The rest were nondescript, as yet differentiated—yet nondescripts, thought Harriet, were the most difficult of all human beings to analyse. You scarcely knew they were there, until—bang! Something quite unexpected blew up like a depth charge and left you marvelling, to collect strange floating debris.
    So the Hall seethed, and the scouts looked on impassively from the serving-hatches. “And what they think of us all, God only knows,” mused Harriet.
    “Are you plotting an exceptionally intricate murder?” demanded Phoebe’s voice in her ear. “Or working out a difficult alibi? I’ve asked you three times to pass the cruet.”
    “I’m sorry,” said Harriet, doing as she was requested. “I was meditating on the impenetrability of the human countenance.” She hesitated, on the verge of telling Phoebe about the disagreeable drawing, but her friend went on to ask some other question, and the moment passed by.
    But the episode had troubled and unsettled her. Passing through the empty Hall, later in the day, she stopped to stare at the portrait of that Mary Countess of Shrewsbury, in whose honour the college had been founded. The painting was a well-executed modern copy of the one in St. John’s College Cambridge, and the queer, strong-featured face, with its ill-tempered mouth and sidelong, secretive glance, had always exercised a curious fascination over her—even in her student days, a period when the portraits of dead and gone celebrities exposed in public places incur more sarcastic comment than reverential consideration. She did not know, and indeed had never troubled to inquire, how Shrewsbury College had come to adopt so ominous a patroness. Bess of Hardwick’s daughter had been a great intellectual, indeed, but something of a holy terror; uncontrollable by her menfolk, undaunted by the Tower, contemptuously silent before the Privy Council, an obstinate recusant, a staunch friend and implacable enemy and a lady with a turn for invective remarkable even in an age when few mouths suffered from mealiness. She seemed, in fact, to be the epitome of every alarming quality which a learned woman is popularly credited with developing. Her husband, the “great and glorious Earl of Shrewsbury,” had purchased domestic peace at a price; for, said Bacon, there was “a greater than he, which is my Lady of Shrewsbury.” And that, of course, was a dreadful thing to have said about one. The prospect seemed discouraging for Miss Schuster-Slatt’s matrimonial campaign, since the rule seemed to be that a great woman must either die unwed, to Miss Schuster-Slatt’s distress, or find a still greater man to marry her. And that limited the great woman’s choice considerably, since, though the world of course abounded in great men, it contained a very much larger number of middling and common-place men. The great man, on the other hand, could marry where he liked, not being restricted to great women; indeed, it was often found sweet and commendable in him to choose a woman of no sort of greatness at all.
    “Though of course,” Harriet reminded herself, “a woman may achieve greatness, or at any rate great renown, by merely being a wonderful wife and mother, like the mother of the Gracchi; whereas the men who have achieved great renown by being devoted husbands and fathers might be counted on the fingers of one hand. Charles I was an unfortunate king, but an admirable family man. Still, you would scarcely class him as one of the world’s