The Fifth Queen - And How She Came to Court

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Fifth Queen, by Ford Madox Ford This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: The Fifth Queen Author: Ford Madox Ford Release Date: October 7, 2009 [EBook #30188] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FIFTH QUEEN *** Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Suzanne Shell, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net Transcriber's Note. This is the First book of the trilogy, The Fifth Queen, by Ford Madox Ford. The other books are The Privy Seal and The Fifth Queen Crowned. THE FIFTH QUEEN and how she came to court CONTENTS part one The Coming, 11 part two The House of Eyes, 71 part three The King Moves, 179 [11]PART ONE THE COMING I Magister Nicholas Udal, the Lady Mary's pedagogue, was very hungry and very cold. He stood undecided in the mud of a lane in the Austin Friars. The quickset hedges on either side were only waist high and did not shelter him. The little houses all round him of white daub with grey corner beams had been part of the old friars' stables and offices. All that neighbourhood was a maze of dwellings and gardens, with the hedges dry, the orchard trees bare with frost, the arbours wintry and deserted.