la poison in a
conserve which she pressed her to take, under the pretence that it was
good for the sinking and oppression of the heart which she complained
of. A short while after Isabella had swallowed it her throat and tongue
began to swell, her lips turned black, her voice became hoarse, her eyes
fixed and glassy, and her breathing laboured and stertorous: in short,
she exhibited all the symptoms of having been poisoned. The queen's
ladies hastened to inform her majesty, assuring her that the lady keeper
had been the author of the nefarious deed.

The queen had no great difficulty in coming to the same conclusion, and
went at once to see Isabella, who seemed to be almost at the last gasp.
Sending with all speed for her physicians, she, meanwhile, ordered that
the sufferer should be given a quantity of powdered unicorn's horn and
several other antidotes, with which great princes are usually provided
against such casualties. The physicians arrived and begged the queen to
make the lady keeper declare what kind of poison she had used (for no
one doubted that she was the poisoner). This information having been
obtained from the criminal, the physician applied the proper remedies
with such good effect that, with God's help, Isabella's life was saved,
or at least there was a hope that it would be so.

The queen ordered that the lady keeper should be arrested and confined
in a chamber of the palace, intending to punish her as her crime
deserved; whilst the guilty woman thought to excuse herself by saying
that in killing Isabella she offered an acceptable sacrifice to heaven
by ridding the world of a Catholic, and removing with her the cause of
affliction to her son. Finally, Isabella did not die; but she escaped
only with the loss of her hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes, her face
swollen, her bloom gone, her skin blotched and blistered, and her eyes
red and humid. In a word, she was now become an object as loathsome to
look at as she had before been surpassingly beautiful. The change was so
frightful that those who knew her thought it would have been better had
the poison killed her. But notwithstanding all this, Richard supplicated
the queen to let him take her home with him, for the great love he bore
her comprehended not only her body but her soul, and if Isabella had
lost her beauty, she could not have lost her infinite virtues. "Be it
so," said the queen. "Take her, Richard, and reckon that you take in her
a most precious