That the skeleton was her mother is clear: for the cloud occurred just
twenty-one years since, and the dead woman was, of course, at that
moment in the prison, which must have been air-tight, and with her the
girl: but since the girl is quite certainly not much more than
twenty--she looks younger--she must at that time have been either unborn
or a young babe: but a babe would hardly be imprisoned with another than
its own mother. I am rather inclined to think that the girl was unborn
at the moment of the cloud, and was born in the cellar.
That the mother was the Sultana is clear from her fragments of dress,
and the symbolic character of her every ornament, crescent earrings,
heron-feather, and the blue campaca enamelled in a bracelet. This poor
woman, I have thought, may have been the victim of some unbounded fit of
imperial passion, incurred by some domestic crime, real or imagined,
which may have been pardoned in a day had not death overtaken her master
and the world.
There are four steep stone steps at about the centre of the cellar,
leading up to a locked iron trap-door, apparently the only opening into
this great hole: and this trap-door must have been so nearly air-tight
as to bar the intrusion of the poison in anything like deadly quantity.
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