'I did love you once.' His words were poison, entering my ears and flooding my veins, stopping my heart.

Somehow, I had to reply. I struggled with tears, but in that effort, found the easy words 'Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.'

'You should not have believed me,' he retorted effortlessly. I searched his face for some sign of his words being false, but found no clues.

'Virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it,' he continued. 'I loved you not.'

The flood broke the banks of my lids and I sobbed, 'I was the more deceived.' I put my hands to my face to hide some of those dreadful tears, but he just grasped me tightly by the wrist.

'Get thee to a nunnery!' he shouted. I gasped. 'Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?' I reached out to touch his pale face, but he swatted my hand away like a fly.

'Where is your father?'

'At…at home, my lord,' I sobbed. He seemed to notice my tears, but reacted by covering my mouth with his large hand to muffle them.

'Let the doors be shut upon him,' he whispered in a harsh tone, 'that he my play the fool nowhere but in 's own house.' He dropped me and I sank to the floor. 'Farewell.'

'Oh, help him, you sweet heavens!' I shouted. He pulled me up by my arm and I looked into the depths of his dark eyes. No consolation could be found in them to ease my terrible suffering. No concern for my well being either. Not even a hint of worry at the effect of his words. Just a cold, hard world, desolate and stripped of reason and life.

'If thou dost marry,' he continued, 'I'll give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thou to a nunnery, farewell.' Again he dropped me, and pulled me up again. 'Or, if thou wilt need marry, marry a fool, for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them.' I sank back to the cold floor.

'Heavenly powers, restore him!' I cried. Again, I reached out, but the gentle hand that I once knew did not come to pull me from my sorrow.

Instead, he knelt beside me and grasped my jaw tightly in his hand. 'I have heard of your paintings, too, well enough,' he hissed. A hiss, a cruel, abhorrent hiss. 'God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another!'

I pulled away from him and mouthed his name slowly as he bellowed on, yearning for his madness to be ended, for his faith in me to be restored, for some ability to help this poor creature turned against his own by virulent grief.

Then, just as suddenly as he had started his anger-filled frenzy, he ended it by standing, and whispering, almost inaudible, 'To a nunnery, go.' He stepped backwards for a few strides, but broke into a run when he reached the door.

The room was a grave, silent with memories of a wonderful past. Echoes came from those walls to remind us living reprobates of the joy we once had, the joy that could never again be found in the confines of this vile place. Echoes, mocking, scornful echoes.

I found myself speaking in to fill the haunting silence. 'Oh, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!' I whispered. 'The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword, The expectancy and rose of the fair state, the glass of fashion and the mold of form, the observed of all observers, quite, quite down!' Why me? I thought. Why is it I who sees this now? Why did I have to believe his sweet vows of love, when he would so cruelly turn

their music to livid curses? 'Oh, woe is me, to have seen what I have seen, see what I see!'