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And so you ask me about the two of them, my sweet one, and I must say I am not surprised. Their legend has flourished in these last few years and I am faced with more questions than I care to answer. Everyone wants to know absolutely everything, and when they do not get it from me – the tight-lipped old owl, the mean guardian of secrets – they simply invent it. Everybody, from the dirtiest little kitchen maid to the most revered historian, has their own version, and they seem to be shouting it from the rooftops these days.

I can see you frowning now, my dear, and I know what goes through your head. “Why don’t you stop it?” you want to ask me. “Why don’t you tell them the truth?”

Ah, the truth. The most abused term in history. The precious line of light over the gorge of lies. That truth?

They do not deserve it, sweetheart, and they would not like it. They have already turned the two of them into story material, cut them out of colourful paper, stuck them together with sugar and honey, and hung them out to dry until they fade. She was so pretty, I hear the ladies gush in the garden. He was so brave, I hear the squires bluster. And their love, their love was…

Oh dear, I am cynical, and I should not be, not with you. You deserve to know them as they were. Not perfect – or perfectly dull, as I see them represented now – but extraordinary, brilliant in their own ways. I remember them so clearly, still: this girl who was far too beautiful for her own good, and this man who had too many enemies to live long.

You would have loved her, as I did, as everybody did. The quicksilver child, the nightingale, the darling of the court, my only faithful friend and companion. Reckless, true and braver than most men I have seen, she would have chuckled if she heard my ladies comparing themselves with her, she would have laughed at their faces, she would have howled. “I do not care,” she was always saying to the whole world. And it was true, most of the time. But the one thing she did care for, she lost.

It was him, of course; and him I did not know half as well as her. I do not think anybody did. He was too high up, too exposed, too endangered to reveal himself like that. He once told me that he existed as two people. “One is my private self,” he said, “and the actions of this person are the result of the impulse that comes from within. What I do is determined by who I am. The other is my public self. And with this person, the process is opposite. The actions, the visible part, determine the person hidden behind them.” I had no idea what he was talking about at the time. Now I understand him too well, and remember the little bits I saw when he took off his mask: his kindness, his fairness and, most of all, his energy – that light that shone so brightly inside him.

“And love?” I hear you asking impatiently. “What about love?”

Well, it was there, I can tell you that for sure. As for the rest, I will leave it to poets and scribblers of all sorts – let them shuffle their words and coin their rhymes and try to describe what cannot be described. But I will tell you this: sometimes, as I lie in my bed, wide awake before dawn, tortured by insomnia and worries of a silly old woman, I can still hear them talk under the window. Their voices entwine with the sound of the wind, or whisper with the soft rain, and then she laughs and it is like no other sound in the world. After all those years, after all that darkness, I can still hear them, and know them for what they really were: two people who perfectly understood each other.

Description
And so you ask me about the two of them, my sweet one, and I must say I am not surprised. Their legend has flourished in these last few years and I am faced with more questions than I care to answer. Everyone wants to know absolutely everything, and when they do not get it from me – the tight-lipped old owl, the mean guardian of secrets – they simply invent it. Everybody, from the dirtiest little kitchen maid to the most revered historian, has their own version, and they seem to be shouting it from the rooftops these days.

I can see you frowning now, my dear, and I know what goes through your head. “Why don’t you stop it?” you want to ask me. “Why don’t you tell them the truth?”

Ah, the truth. The most abused term in history. The precious line of light over the gorge of lies. That truth?

They do not deserve it, sweetheart, and they would not like it. They have already turned the two of them into story material, cut them out of colourful paper, stuck them together with sugar and honey, and hung them out to dry until they fade. She was so pretty, I hear the ladies gush in the garden. He was so brave, I hear the squires bluster. And their love, their love was…

Oh dear, I am cynical, and I should not be, not with you. You deserve to know them as they were. Not perfect – or perfectly dull, as I see them represented now – but extraordinary, brilliant in their own ways. I remember them so clearly, still: this girl who was far too beautiful for her own good, and this man who had too many enemies to live long.

You would have loved her, as I did, as everybody did. The quicksilver child, the nightingale, the darling of the court, my only faithful friend and companion. Reckless, true and braver than most men I have seen, she would have chuckled if she heard my ladies comparing themselves with her, she would have laughed at their faces, she would have howled. “I do not care,” she was always saying to the whole world. And it was true, most of the time. But the one thing she did care for, she lost.

It was him, of course; and him I did not know half as well as her. I do not think anybody did. He was too high up, too exposed, too endangered to reveal himself like that. He once told me that he existed as two people. “One is my private self,” he said, “and the actions of this person are the result of the impulse that comes from within. What I do is determined by who I am. The other is my public self. And with this person, the process is opposite. The actions, the visible part, determine the person hidden behind them.” I had no idea what he was talking about at the time. Now I understand him too well, and remember the little bits I saw when he took off his mask: his kindness, his fairness and, most of all, his energy – that light that shone so brightly inside him.

“And love?” I hear you asking impatiently. “What about love?”

Well, it was there, I can tell you that for sure. As for the rest, I will leave it to poets and scribblers of all sorts – let them shuffle their words and coin their rhymes and try to describe what cannot be described. But I will tell you this: sometimes, as I lie in my bed, wide awake before dawn, tortured by insomnia and worries of a silly old woman, I can still hear them talk under the window. Their voices entwine with the sound of the wind, or whisper with the soft rain, and then she laughs and it is like no other sound in the world. After all those years, after all that darkness, I can still hear them, and know them for what they really were: two people who perfectly understood each other.