Hemmed about by halberdiers, they were paraded through the
streets to the Cathedral, where Mass was said and a sermon of the
faith preached to them by the stern Ojeda. Thereafter they were
conveyed beyond the city to the meadows of Tablada, where the
stake and faggots awaited them.
Thus the perjured accuser perished in the same holocaust with the
accused. Thus was Isabella de Susan, known as la Hermosa Fembra,
avenged by falseness upon the worthless lover who made her by
falseness the instrument of her father's ruin.
For herself, when all was over, she sought the refuge of a
convent. But she quitted it without professing. The past gave her
no peace, and she returned to the world to seek in excesses an
oblivion which the cloister denied her and only death could give.
In her will she disposed that her skull should be placed over the
doorway of the house in the Calle de Ataud, as a measure of
posthumous atonement for her sins. And there the fleshless,
grinning skull of that once lovely head abode for close upon four
hundred years. It was still to be seen there when Buonaparte's
legions demolished the Holy Office of the Inquisition.
IV. THE PASTRY-COOK OF MADRIGAL
The Story of the False Sebastian of Portugal
There is not in all that bitter tragi-comic record of human
frailty which we call History a sadder story than this of the
Princess Anne, the natural daughter of the splendid Don John of
Austria, natural son of the Emperor Charles V.
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