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The Fifth Queen Crowned

by Ford Madox Ford · English · Gutenberg #27432 · 342,495 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Fifth Queen Crowned

Author: Ford Madox Ford


        
Release date: December 7, 2008 [eBook #27432]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27432

Credits: E-text prepared by Verity White, Suzanne Shell, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FIFTH QUEEN CROWNED ***


E-text prepared by Verity White, Suzanne Shell, and the Project Gutenberg
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   +-----------------------------------------------------------+
   | Transcriber's note:                                       |
   |                                                           |
   | This edition of _The Fifth Queen Crowned_ was extracted   |
   | from an omnibus edition of the trilogy. The two previous  |
   | books of the trilogy are _The Fifth Queen_ and _Privy     |
   | Seal: His Last Venture_.                                  |
   |                                                           |
   | Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has     |
   | been preserved.                                           |
   +-----------------------------------------------------------+





THE FIFTH QUEEN CROWNED

A Romance

_"Da habt Ihr schon das End vom Lied"_







To
Arthur Marwood




CONTENTS

   PART ONE
   The Major Cord

   PART TWO
   The Threatened Rift

   PART THREE
   The Dwindling Melody

   PART FOUR
   The End of the Song




PART ONE

THE MAJOR CHORD


I

'The Bishop of Rome----'

Thomas Cranmer began a hesitating speech. In the pause after the words
the King himself hesitated, as if he poised between a heavy rage and a
sardonic humour. He deemed, however, that the humour could the more
terrify the Archbishop--and, indeed, he was so much upon the joyous side
in those summer days that he had forgotten how to browbeat.

'Our holy father,' he corrected the Archbishop. 'Or I will say my holy
father, since thou art a heretic----'

Cranmer's eyes had always the expression of a man's who looked at
approaching calamity, but at the King's words his whole face, his closed
lips, his brows, the lines from his round nose, all drooped suddenly
downwards.

'Your Grace will have me write a letter to the--to his--to him----'

The downward lines fixed themselves, and from amongst them the
panic-stricken eyes made a dumb appeal to the griffins and crowns of his
dark green hangings, for they were afraid to turn to the King. Henry
retained his heavy look of jocularity: he jumped at a weighty gibe--

'My Grace will have thy Grace write a letter to his Holiness.'

He dropped into a heavy impassivity, rolled his eyes, fluttered his
swollen fingers on the red and gilded table, and then said clearly, 'My.
Thy. His.'

When he was in that mood he spoke with a singular distinctness that came
up from his husky and ordinary joviality like something dire and
terrible--like that something that upon a clear smooth day will suggest
to you suddenly the cruelty that lies always hidden in the limpid sea.

'To Caesar--egomet, I mineself--that which is Caesar's: to him--that is to
say to his Holiness, our lord of Rome--the things which are of God! But
to thee, Archbishop, I know not what belongs.'

He paused and then struck his hand upon the table: 'Cold porridge is thy
portion! Cold porridge!' he laughed; 'for they say: Cold porridge to the
devil! And, since thou art neither God's nor the King's, what may I call
thee but the devil's self's man?'

A heavy and minatory silence seemed to descend upon him; the
Archbishop's thin hands opened suddenly as if he were letting something
fall to the ground. The King scowled heavily, but rather as if he were
remembering past heavinesses than for any present griefs.

'Why,' he said, 'I am growing an old man. It is time I redded up my
house.'

It was as if he thought he could take his time, for his heavily pursed
eyes looked down at the square tips of his fingers where they drummed on
the table. He was such a weighty man that the old chair in which he sat
creaked at the movement of his limbs. It was his affectation of courtesy
that he would not sit in the Archbishop's own new gilded and great chair
that had been brought from Lambeth on a mule's back along with the
hangings. But the other furnishings of that Castle of Pontefract were as
old as the days of Edward IV--even the scarlet wood of the table had
upon it the arms of Edward IV's Queen Elizabeth, side by side with that
King's. Henry noted it and said--

'It is time these arms were changed. See that you have here fairly
painted the arms of my Queen and me--Howard and Tudor--in token that we
have passed this way and sojourned in this Castle of Pontefract.'

He was dallying with time as if it were a luxury to dally: he looked
curiously round the room.

'Why, they have not housed you very well,' he said, and, as the
Archbishop shivered suddenly, he added, 'there should be glass in the
windows. This is a foul old kennel.'

'I have made a complaint to the Earl Marshal,' Cranmer said dismally,
'but 'a said there was overmuch room needed above ground.'

This room was indeed below ground and very old, strong, and damp. The
Archbishop's own hangings covered the walls, but the windows shot
upwards through the stones to the light; there was upon the ground of
stone not a carpet but only rushes; being early in the year, no
provision was made for firing, and the soot of the chimney back was
damp, and sparkled with the track of a snail that had lived there
undisturbed for many years, and neither increasing, because it had no
mate, nor dying, because it was well fed by the ferns that, behind the
present hangings, grew in the joints of the stones. In that low-ceiled
and dark place the Archbishop was aware that above his head were fair
and sunlit rooms, newly painted and hung, with the bosses on the
ceilings fresh silvered or gilt, all these fair places having been given
over to kinsmen of the yellow Earl Marshal from the Norfolk Queen
downwards. And the temporal and material neglect angered him and filled
him with a querulous bitterness that gnawed up even through his dread of
a future--still shadowy--fall and ruin.

The King looked sardonically at the line of the ceiling. He had known
that Norfolk, who was the Earl Marshal, had the mean mind to make him
set these indignities upon the Archbishop, and loftily he considered
this result as if the Archbishop were a cat mauled by his own dog whose
nature it was to maul cats.

The Archbishop had been standing with one hand on the arm of his heavy
chair, about to haul it back from the table to sit himself down. He had
been standing thus when the King had entered with the brusque words--

'Make you ready to write a letter to Rome.'

And he still stood there, the cold feet among the damp rushes, the cold
hand still upon the arm of the chair, the cap pulled forward over his
eyes, the long black gown hanging motionless to the boot tops that were
furred around the ankles.

'I have made a plaint to the Earl Marshal,' he said; 'it is not fitting
that a lord of the Church should be so housed.'

Henry eyed him sardonically.

'Sir,' he said, 'I am being brought round to think that ye are only a
false lord of the Church. And I am minded to think that ye are being
brought round to trow even the like to mine own self.'

His eyes rested, little and twinkling like a pig's, upon the opening of
the Archbishop's cloak above his breastbone, and the Archbishop's right
hand nervously sought that spot.

'I was always of the thought,' he said, 'that the prohibition of the
wearing of crucifixes was against your Highness' will and the teachings
of the Church.'

A great crucifix of silver, the Man of Sorrows depending dolorously from
its arms and backed up by a plaque of silver so that it resembled a
porter's badge, depended over the black buttons of his undercoat. He had
put it on upon the day when secretly he had married Henry to the papist
Lady Katharine Howard. On the same day he had put on a hair shirt, and
he had never since removed either the one or the other. He had known
very well that this news would reach the Queen's ears, as also that he
had fasted thrice weekly and had taken a Benedictine sub-prior out of
chains in the tower to be his second chaplain.

'Holy Church! Holy Church!' the King muttered amusedly into the stiff
hair of his chin and lips. The Archbishop was driven into one of his
fits of panic-stricken boldness.

'Your Grace,' he said, 'if ye write a letter to Rome you will--for I see
not how ye may avoid it--reverse all your acts of this last twenty
years.'

'Your Grace,' the King mocked him, 'by your setting on of chains,
crucifixes, phylacteries, and by your aping of monkish ways, ye have
reversed--well ye know it--all my and thy acts of a long time gone.'

He cast himself back from the table into the leathern shoulder-straps of
the chair.

'And if,' he continued with sardonic good-humour, 'my fellow and servant
may reverse my acts--videlicet, the King's--wherefore shall not
I--videlicet, the King--reverse what acts I will? It is to set me below
my servants!'

'I am minded to redd up my house!' he repeated after a moment.

'Please it, your Grace----' the Archbishop muttered. His eyes were upon
the door.

The King said, 'Anan?' He could not turn his bulky head, he would not
move his bulky body.

'My gentleman!' the Archbishop whispered.

The King looked at the opposite wall and cried out--

'Come in, Lascelles. I am about cleaning out some stables of mine.'

The door moved noiselessly and heavily back, taking the hangings with
it; as if with the furtive eyes and feathery grace of a blonde fox
Cranmer's spy came round the great boards.

'Ay! I am doing some cleansing,' the King said again. 'Come hither and
mend thy pen to write.'

Against the King's huge bulk--Henry was wearing purple and black upon
that day--and against the Archbishop's black and pillar-like form,
Lascelles, in his scarlet, with his blonde and tender beard had an air
of being quill-like. The bones of his knees through his tight and thin
silken stockings showed almost as those of a skeleton; where the King
had great chains of gilt and green jewels round his neck, and where the
Archbishop had a heavy chain of silver, he had a thin chain of fine gold
and a tiny badge of silver-gilt. He dragged one of his legs a little
when he walked. That was the fashion of that day, because the King
himself dragged his right leg, though the ulcer in it had been cured.

Sitting askew in his chair at the table, the King did not look at this
gentleman, but moved the fingers of his outstretched hand in token that
his crook of the leg was kneeling enough for him.

'Take your tablets and write,' Henry said; 'nay, take a great sheet of
parchment and write----'

'Your Grace,' he added to the Archbishop, 'ye are the greatest penner of
solemn sentences that I have in my realm. What I shall say roughly to
Lascelles you shall ponder upon and set down nobly, at first in the
vulgar tongue and then in fine Latin.' He paused and added--

'Nay; ye shall write it in the vulgar tongue, and the Magister Udal
shall set it into Latin. He is the best Latinist we have--better than
myself, for I have no time----'

Lascelles was going between a great cabinet with iron hinges and the
table. He fetched an inkhorn set into a tripod, a sandarach, and a roll
of clean parchment that was tied around with a green ribbon.

Upon the gold and red of the table he stretched out the parchment as if
it had been a map. He mended his pen with a little knife and kneeled
down upon the rushes beside the table, his chin level with the edge. His
whole mind appeared to be upon keeping the yellowish sheet straight and
true upon the red and gold, and he raised his eyes neither to the
Archbishop's white face nor yet to the King's red one.

Henry stroked the short hairs of his neck below the square grey beard.
He was reflecting that very soon all the people in that castle, and very
soon after, most of the people in that land would know what he was about
to say.

'Write now,' he said. '"Henry--by the grace of God--Defender of the
Faith--King, Lord Paramount."' He stirred in his chair.

'Set down all my styles and titles: "Duke
Palatine--Earl--Baron--Knight"--leave out nothing, for I will show how
mighty I am.' He hummed, considered, set his head on one side and then
began to speak swiftly--

'Set it down thus: "We, Henry, and the rest, being a very mighty King,
such as few have been, are become a very humble man. A man broken by
years, having suffered much. A man humbled to the dust, crawling to kiss
the wounds of his Redeemer. A Lord of many miles both of sea and land."
Why, say--

'"Guide and Leader of many legions, yet comes he to thee for guidance."
Say, too, "He who was proud cometh to thee to regain his pride. He who
was proud in things temporal cometh to thee that he may once more have
the pride of a champion in Christendom----"'

He had been speaking as if with a malicious glee, for his words seemed
to strike, each one, into the face of the pallid figure, darkly standing
before him. And he was aware that each word increased the stiff and
watchful constraint of the figure that knelt beside the table to write.
But suddenly his glee left him; he scowled at the Archbishop as if
Cranmer had caused him to sin. He pulled at the collar around his
throat.

'No,' he cried out, 'write down in simple words that I am a very sinful
man. Set it down that I grow old! That I am filled with fears for my
poor soul! That I have sinned much! That I recall all that I have done!
An old man, I come to my Saviour's Regent upon earth. A man aware of
error, I will make restitution tenfold! Say I am broken and aged and
afraid! I kneel down on the ground----'

He cast his inert mass suddenly a little forward as if indeed he were
about to come on to his knees in the rushes.

'Say----' he muttered--'say----'

But his face and his eyes became suffused with blood.

'It is a very difficult thing,' he uttered huskily, 'to meddle in these
sacred matters.'

He fell heavily back into his chair-straps once more.

'I do not know what I will have you to say,' he said.

He looked broodingly at the floor.

'I do not know,' he muttered.

He rolled his eyes, first to the face of the Archbishop, then to
Lascelles--

'Body of God--what carved turnips!' he said, for in the one face there
was only panic, and in the other nothing at all. He rolled on to his
feet, catching at the table to steady himself.

'Write what you will,' he called, 'to these intents and purposes. Or
stay to write--I will send you a letter much more good from the upper
rooms.'

Cranmer suddenly stretched out, with a timid pitifulness, his white
hands. But, rolling his huge shoulders, like a hastening bear, the King
went over the rushes. He pulled the heavy door to with such a vast force
that the latch came again out of the hasp, and the door, falling slowly
back and quivering as if with passion, showed them his huge legs
mounting the little staircase.

       *       *       *       *       *

A long silence fell in that dim room. The Archbishop's lips moved
silently, the spy's glance went, level, along his parchment. Suddenly he
grinned mirthlessly and as if at a shameless thought.

'The Queen will write the letter his Grace shall send us,' he said.

Then their eyes met. The one glance, panic-stricken, seeing no issue,
hopeless and without resource, met the other--crafty, alert, fox-like,
with a dance in it. The glances transfused and mingled. Lascelles
remained upon his knees as if, stretching out his right knee behind him,
he were taking a long rest.


II

It was almost within earshot of these two men in their dim cell that the
Queen walked from the sunlight into shadow and out again. This great
terrace looked to the north and west, and, from the little hillock,
dominating miles of gently rising ground, she had a great view over
rolling and very green country. The original builders of the Castle of
Pontefract had meant this terrace to be flagged with stone: but the
work had never been carried so far forward. There was only a path of
stone along the bowshot and a half of stone balustrade; the rest had
once been gravel, but the grass had grown over it; that had been
scythed, and nearly the whole space was covered with many carpets of
blue and red and other very bright colours. In the left corner when you
faced inwards there was a great pavilion of black cloth, embroidered
very closely with gold and held up by ropes of red and white. Though
forty people could sit in it round the table, it appeared very small,
the walls of the castle towered up so high. They towered up so high, so
square, and so straight that from the terrace below you could hardly
hear the flutter of the huge banner of St George, all red and white
against the blue sky, though sometimes in a gust it cracked like a huge
whip, and its shadow, where it fell upon the terrace, was sufficient to
cover four men.

To take away from the grimness of the flat walls many little banners had
been suspended from loopholes and beneath windows. Swallow-tailed, long,
or square, they hung motionless in the shelter, or, since the dying away
of the great gale three days before, had looped themselves over their
staffs. These were all painted green, because that was the Queen's
favourite colour, being the emblem of Hope.

A little pavilion, all of green silk, at the very edge of the platform,
had all its green curtains looped up, so that only the green roof
showed; and, within, two chairs, a great leathern one for the King, a
little one of red and white wood for the Queen, stood side by side as if
they conversed with each other. At the top of it was a golden image of a
lion, and above the peak of the entrance another, golden too, of the
Goddess Flora, carrying a cornucopia of flowers, to symbolise that this
tent was a summer abode for pleasantness.

Here the King and Queen, for the four days that they had been in the
castle, had delighted much to sit, resting after their long ride up from
the south country. For it pleased Henry to let his eyes rest upon a
great view of this realm that was his, and to think nothing; and it
pleased Katharine Howard to think that now she swayed this land, and
that soon she would alter its face.

They looked out, over the tops of the elm trees that grew right up
against the terrace wall; but the land itself was too green, the fields
too empty of dwellings. There was no one but sheep between all the
hedgerows: there was, in all the wide view, but one church tower, and
where, in place and place, there stood clusters of trees as if to
shelter homesteads--nearly always the homesteads had fallen to ruin
beneath the boughs. Upon one ridge one could see the long walls of an
unroofed abbey. But, to the keenest eye no men were visible, save now
and then a shepherd leaning on his crook. There was no ploughland at
all. Now and then companies of men in helmets and armour rode up to or
away from the castle. Once she had seen the courtyard within the keep
filled with cattle that lowed uneasily. But these, she had learned, had
been taken from cattle thieves by the men of the Council of the Northern
Borders. They were destined for the provisioning of that castle during
her stay there, they being forfeit, whether Scotch or English.

'Ah,' she said, 'whilst his Grace rides north to meet the King's Scots I
will ride east and west and south each day.'

       *       *       *       *       *

At that moment, whilst the King had left Cranmer and his spy and, to
regain his composure, was walking up and down in her chamber, she was
standing beside the Duke of Norfolk about midway between the end of the
terrace and the little green pavilion.

She was all in a dark purple dress, to please the King whose mood that
colour suited; and the Duke's yellow face looked out above a suit all of
black. He wore that to please the King too, for the King was of opinion
that no gathering looked gay in its colours that had not many men in
black amongst the number.

He said--

'You do not ride north with his Grace?'

He leaned upon his two staves, one long and of silver, the other shorter
and gilt; his gown fell down to his ankles, his dark and half-closed
eyes looked out at a tree that, struck lately by lightning, stretched up
half its boughs all naked from a little hillock beside a pond a mile
away.

'So it is settled between his Grace and me,' she said. She did not much
like her uncle, for she had little cause. But, the King being away, she
walked with him rather than with another man.

'I ask, perforce,' he said, 'for I have much work in the ordering of
your progresses.'

'We meant that you should have that news this day,' she said.

He shot one glance at her face, then turned his eyes again upon the
stricken tree. Her face was absolutely calm and without expression, as
it had been always when she had directed him what she would have done.
He could trace no dejection in it: on the other hand, he gave her credit
for a great command over her features. That he had himself. And, in the
niece's eyes, as they moved from the backs of a flock of sheep to the
dismantled abbey on the ridge, there was something of the enigmatic
self-containment that was in the uncle's steady glance. He could observe
no dejection, and at that he humbled himself a little more.

'Ay,' he said, 'the ordering of your progresses is a heavy burden. I
would have you commend what I have done here.'

She looked at him, at that, as if with a swift jealousy. His eyes were
roving upon the gay carpets, the pavilions, and the flags against the
grim walls, depending in motionless streaks of colour.

'The King's Grace's self,' she said, 'did tell me that all these things
he ordered and thought out for my pleasuring.'

Norfolk dropped his eyes to the ground.

'Aye,' he said, 'his Grace ordered them and their placing. There is no
man to equal his Grace for such things; but I had the work of setting
them where they are. I would have your favour for that.'

She appeared appeased and gave him her hand to kiss. There was a little
dark mole upon the third finger.

'The last niece that I had for Queen,' he said, 'would not suffer me to
kiss her hand.'

She looked at him a little absently, for, because since she had been
Queen--and before--she had been a lonely woman, she was given to
thinking her own thoughts whilst others talked.

She was troubled by the condition of her chief maid Margot Poins. Margot
Poins was usually tranquil, modest, submissive in a cheerful manner and
ready to converse. But of late she had been moody, and sunk in a dull
silence. And that morning she had suddenly burst out into a smouldering,
heavy passion, and had torn Katharine's hair whilst she dressed it.

'Ay,' Margot had said, 'you are Queen: you can do what you will. It is
well to be Queen. But we who are dirt underfoot, we cannot do one single
thing.'

And, because she was lonely, with only Lady Rochford, who was foolish,
and this girl to talk to, it had grieved the Queen to find this girl
growing so lumpish and dull. At that time, whilst her hair was being
dressed, she had answered only--

'Yea; it is good to be a Queen. But you will find it in Seneca----' and
she had translated for Margot the passage which says that eagles are as
much tied by weighty ropes as are finches caught in tiny fillets.

'Oh, your Latin,' Margot had said. 'I would I had never heard the sound
of it, but had stuck to clean English.'

Katharine imagined then that it was some new flame of the Magister
Udal's that was troubling the girl, and this troubled her too, for she
did not like that her maids should be played with by men, and she loved
Margot for her past loyalties, readiness, and companionship.

       *       *       *       *       *

She came out of her thoughts to say to her uncle, remembering his speech
about her hands--

'Aye; I have heard that Anne Boleyn had six fingers upon her right
hand.'

'She had six upon each, but she concealed it,' he answered. 'It was her
greatest grief.'

Katharine realised that his sardonic tone, his bitter yellow face, the
croak in his voice, and his stiff gait--all these things were signs of
his hostility to her. And his mention of Anne Boleyn, who had been
Queen, much as she was, and of her bitter fate, this mention, if it
could not be a threat, was, at least, a reminder meant to give her fears
and misgiving. When she had been a child--and afterwards, until the very
day when she had been shown for Queen--her uncle had always treated her
with a black disdain, as he treated all the rest of the world. When he
had--and it was rarely enough--come to visit her grandmother, the old
Duchess of Norfolk, he had always been like that. Through the old
woman's huge, lonely, and ugly halls he had always stridden, halting a
little over the rushes, and all creatures must keep out of his way. Once
he had kicked her little dog, once he had pushed her aside; but
probably, then, when she had been no more than a child, he had not known
who she was, for she had lived with the servants and played with the
servants' children, much like one of them, and her grandmother had known
little of the household or its ways.

She answered him sharply--

'I have heard that you were no good friend to your niece, Anne Boleyn,
when she was in her troubles.'

He swallowed in his throat and gazed impassively at the distant oak
tree, nevertheless his knee trembled with fury. And Katharine knew very
well that if, more than another, he took pleasure in giving pain with
his words, he bore the pain of other's words less well than most men.

'The Queen Anne,' he said, 'was a heretic. No better was she than a
Protestant. She battened upon the goods of our Church. Why should I
defend her?'

'Uncle,' she said, 'where got you the jewel in your bonnet?'

He started a little back at that, and the small veins in his yellow
eye-whites grew inflamed with blood.

'Queen----' he brought out between rage and astonishment that she
should dare the taunt.

'I think it came from the great chalice of the Abbey of Rising,' she
said. 'We are valiant defenders of the Church, who wear its spoils upon
our very brows.'

It was as if she had thrown down a glove to him and to a great many that
were behind him.

She knew very well where she stood, and she knew very well what her
uncle and his friends awaited for her, for Margot, her maid, brought her
alike the gossip of the Court and the loudly voiced threats and
aspirations of the city. For the Protestants--she knew them and cared
little for them. She did not believe there were very many in the King's
and her realm, and mostly they were foreign merchants and poor men who
cared little as long as their stomachs were filled. If these had their
farms again they would surely return to the old faith, and she was
minded to do away with the sheep. For it was the sheep that had brought
discontent to England. To make way for these fleeces the ploughmen had
been dispossessed.

It was natural that Protestants should hate her; but with Norfolk and
his like it was different. She knew very well that Norfolk came there
that day and waited every day, watching anxiously for the first sign
that the King's love for her should cool. She knew very well that they
said in the Court that with the King it was only possession and then
satiety. And she knew very well that when Norfolk's eyes searched her
face it was for signs of dismay and of discouragement. And when Norfolk
had said that he himself had placed the banners, the tents, the
pavilions and carpets that made gay all that grim terrace of the air, he
was essaying to make her think that the King was abandoning the task of
doing her honour. This had made her angry, for it was such folly. Her
uncle should have known that the King had discussed all these things
with her, asking her what she liked, and that all these bright colours
and these plaisaunces were what her man had gallantly thought out for
her. She carried her challenge still further.

'It ill becomes us Howards and all like us,' she said, 'to talk of how
we will defend the Church of God----'

'I am a swordsman only,' he said. 'Give me that----'

She was not minded to listen to him.

'It becomes us ill,' she said; 'and I take shame in it. For, a very few
years agone we Howards were very poor. Now we are very rich--though it
is true that my father is still a very poor man, and your stepmother, my
grandmother, has known hard shifts. But we Howards, through you who are
our head, became amongst the richest in the land. And how?'

'I have done services----' the Duke began.

'Why, there has been no new wealth made in this realm,' she said; 'it
came from the Church. Consider what you have had of this Abbey of
Risings that I speak of, because I knew it well as a child, and saw many
times then, sparkling in that which held the blood of my Saviour, the
jewel that is now in your cap.'

The Abbey of Risings, after the visitors had been to it and the monks
had been driven out, had fallen to the Duke of Norfolk. And his men had
stripped the lead from the roofs, the glass from the windows, the very
tiles from the floor. And this little abbey was only one of many, large
and small, that had fallen to the Duke, so that it was true enough that,
through him, the Howards had become a very rich family.

Norfolk burst into a sudden speech--

'I hold these things only as a trust,' he said. 'I am ready to restore.'

'Why, that is very well,' Katharine said; 'and I have hopes that soon
you will be called to make that restoration to your God.'

Norfolk looked at the square toes of his shoes for a long time.

'Will you have _all_ things to be given back?' he said at last after he
had thought much.

'The King will have all things be as they were before the Queen
Katharine, my namesake of Aragon, was undone,' Katharine answered. 'And
me he will have to take her place so that all things shall be as before
they were.'

The Duke, leaning on his silver and gold staves, shrugged his shoulders
very slowly.

'This will make a very great confusion,' he said.

'Ay,' Katharine answered, 'there will a very many be confounded, and a
great number of hundreds be much annoyed.'

She broke in again upon his slow meditations--

'Sir,' she said, 'this is a very pitiful thing! Privy Seal that is dead
and done with worked with a very great cunning. Well he knew that for
most men the heart resideth in the pocket. Therefore, though ye said all
that he rode this land with a bridle of iron, he was very careful to
stop all your mouths alike with pieces of gold. It was not only to his
friends that he gave what had been taken from God, but he was very
careful that much also should fall into the greedy mouths of those that
cried out. If he had not done this, do you think that he would have
remained so long above the earth that he made weary? No. But since he
made all rich alike with this plunder, so there was no man, either
Catholic or Lutheran, very anxious to have him away. And, now that he is
dead he worketh still. For who among you lords that do call yourselves
sons of the Church, but holdeth of the Church's goods? Oh, bethink you!
bethink you! The moment is at hand when ye may work restoration. See
that ye do it willingly and with good hearts, smoothing and making plain
the way by which the bruised feet of our Saviour shall come across this,
His land.'

Norfolk kept his eyes upon the ground.

'Why, for me,' he said, 'I am very willing. This day I will send to set
clerks at work discovering that which is mine and that which came from
the Church; but I think you will find some that will not do it so
eagerly.'

She believed him very little; and she said--

'Why, if you will do this thing I think there will not many be
behindhand.'

He did what he could to conceal his wincing, and her voice changed its
tone.

'Sir,' she said, and she was eager and pleading, 'you have many men that
take counsel with you, for I trow that you and my Lord of Winchester do
lead such lords as be Catholic in this realm. I know very well that you
and my Lord Bishop of Winchester and such Catholic lords would have me
to be your puppet and so work as you would have me, giving back to the
Church such things as have fallen to Protestants or to men that ye
mislike. But that may not be, for, since I owe mine advancement not to
you, nor to mine own efforts, but to God alone, so to God alone do I owe
fealty.'

She stretched out towards him the hand that he had kissed. The tail of
her coif fell almost to her feet; her body in the fresh sunlight was all
cased in purple velvet, only the lawn of her undershirt showed, white
and tremulous at her wrists and her neck; and, fair and contrasted with
the gold of her hair, her face came out of its abstraction, to take on a
pitiful and mournful earnestness.

'Sir,' she said, 'if you shall speak for God in the councils that you
will hold, believe that your rewards shall be very great. I think that
you have been a man of a very troubled mind, for you have thought only
or mostly of the affairs of this world. But do now this one good stroke
for God His piteous sake, and such a peace shall descend upon you as you
have never yet known. You shall have no more griefs; you shall have no
more fears. And that is better than the jewels of chalices, and than
much lead from the roofs of abbeys. Speak you thus in these councils
that you shall hold, give you such advice to them that come to you
seeking it, and this I promise you--for it is too little a thing to
promise you the love of a Queen and a King's favour, though that too ye
shall not lack--but this I promise you, that there shall descend upon
your heart that most blessed miracle and precious wealth, the peace of
God.'


III

When Henry was calmed by his pacing in her chamber he came out to her in
the sunlight, rolling and bear-like, and so huge that the terrace seemed
to grow smaller.

'Chuck,' he said to her, 'I ha' done a thing to pleasure thee.' He moved
two fingers upwards to save the Duke of Norfolk from falling to his
knees, caught Katharine by the elbow, and, turning upon himself as on a
huge pivot, swung her round him so that they faced the pavilion. 'Sha't
not talk with a citron-faced uncle,' he said; 'sha't save sweet words
for me. I will tell thee what I ha' done to pleasure thee.'

'Save it a while and do another ere ye tell me,' she said.

'Now, what is your reasoning about that, wise one?' he asked.

She laughed at him, for she took pleasure in his society and, except
when she was earnest to beg things of him, she was mostly gay at his
side.

'It takes a woman to teach kings,' she said.

He answered that it took a Queen to teach him.

'Why,' she said, 'listen! I know that each day ye do things to pleasure
me, things prodigal or such little things as giving me pouncet boxes.
But you will find--and a woman, quean or queen, knows it well--that to
take the full pleasure of her lover's surprises well, she must have an
easy mind. And to have an easy mind she must have granted her the
little, little boons she asketh.'

He reflected ponderously upon this point and at last, with a sort of
peasant's gravity, nodded his head.

'For,' she said, 'if a woman is to take pleasure she must guess at what
you men have done for her. And if she be to guess pleasurably, she must
have a clear mind. And if I am to have a clear mind I must have a maiden
consoled with a husband.'

Henry seated himself carefully in the great chair of the small pavilion.
He spread out his knees, blinked at the view and when, having cast a
look round to see that Norfolk was gone--for it did not suit her that he
should see on what terms she was with the King--she seated herself on a
little foot-pillow at his feet, he set a great hand upon her head. She
leaned her arms across over his knees, and looked up at him appealingly.

'I do take it,' he said, 'that I must make some man rich to wed some
poor maid.'

'Oh, Solomon!' she said.

'And I do take it,' he continued with gravity, 'that this maid is thy
maid Margot.'

'How know you that?' she said.

'I have observed her,' he maintained gravely.

'Why, you could not well miss her,' she answered. 'She is as big as a
plough-ox.'

'I have observed,' he said--and he blinked his little eyes as if,
pleasurably, she were, with her words, whispering around his head. 'I
have observed that ye affected her.'

'Why, she likes me well. She is a good wench--and to-day she tore my
hair.'

'Then that is along of a man?' he asked. 'Didst not stick thy needle in
her arm? Or wilto be quit of her?'

She rubbed her chin.

'Why, if she wed, I mun be quit of her,' she said, as if she had never
thought of that thing.

He answered--

'Assuredly; for ye may not part man and lawful wife were you seven times
Queen.'

'Why,' she said, 'I have little pleasure in Margot as she is.'

'Then let her go,' he answered.

'But I am a very lonely Queen,' she said, 'for you are much absent.'

He reflected pleasurably.

'Thee wouldst have about thee a little company of well-wishers?'

'So that they be those thou lovest well,' she said.

'Why, thy maid contents me,' he answered. He reflected slowly. 'We must
give her man a post about thee,' he uttered triumphantly.

'Why, trust thee to pleasure me,' she said. 'You will find out a way
always.'

He scrubbed her nose gently with his heavy finger.

'Who is the man?' he said. 'What ruffler?'

'I think it is the Magister Udal,' she answered.

Henry said--

'Oh ho! oh ho!' And after a moment he slapped his thigh and laughed like
a child. She laughed with him, silverly upon a little sound between 'ah'
and 'e.' He stopped his laugh to listen to hers, and then he said
gravely--

'I think your laugh is the prettiest sound I ever heard. I would give
thy maid Margot a score of husbands to make thee laugh.'

'One is enough to make her weep,' she said; 'and I may laugh at thee.'

He said--

'Let us finish this business within the hour. Sit you upon your chair
that I may call one to send this ruffler here.'

She rose, with one sinuous motion that pleased him well, half to her
feet and, feeling behind her with one hand for the chair, aided herself
with the other upon his shoulder because she knew that it gave him joy
to be her prop.

'Call the maid, too,' she said, 'for I would come to the secret soon.'

That pleased him too, and, having shouted for a knave he once more shook
with laughter.

'Oh ho,' he said, 'you will net this old fox, will you?'

And, having sent his messenger off to summon the Magister from the Lady
Mary's room, and the maid from the Queen's, he continued for a while to
soliloquise as to Udal's predicament. For he had heard the Magister rail
against matrimony in Latin hexameters and doggerel Greek. He knew that
the Magister was an incorrigible fumbler after petticoats. And now, he
said, this old fox was to be bagged and tied up.

He said--

'Well, well, well; well, well!'

For, if a Queen commanded a marriage, a marriage there must be; there
was no more hope for the Magister than for any slave of Cato's. He was
cabined, ginned, trapped, shut in from the herd of bachelors. It pleased
the King very well.

The King grasped the gilded arms of his great chair, Katharine sat
beside him, her hands laid one within another upon her lap. She did not
say one single word during the King's interview with Magister Udal.

The Magister fell upon his knees before them and, seeing the laughing
wrinkles round the King's little eyes, made sure that he was sent
for--as had often been the case--to turn into Latin some jest the King
had made. His gown fell about his kneeling shins, his cap was at his
side, his lean, brown, and sly face, with the long nose and crafty eyes,
was like a woodpecker's.

'Goodman Magister,' Henry said. 'Stand up. We have sent for thee to
advance thee.' Without moving his head he rolled his eyes to one side.
He loved his dramatic effects and wished to await the coming of the
Queen's maid, Margot, before he gave the weight of his message.

Udal picked up his cap and came up to his feet before them; he had
beneath his gown a little book, and one long finger between its leaves
to keep his place where he had been reading. For he had forgotten a
saying of Thales, and was reading through Caesar's Commentaries to find
it.

'As Seneca said,' he uttered in his throat, 'advancement is doubly sweet
to them that deserve it not.'

'Why,' the King said, 'we advance thee on the deserts of one that finds
thee sweet, and is sweet to one doubly sweet to us, Henry of Windsor
that speak sweet words to thee.'

The lines on Udal's face drooped all a little downwards.

'Y'are reader in Latin to the Lady Mary,' the King said.

'I have little deserved in that office,' Udal answered; 'the lady reads
Latin better than even I.'

'Why, you lie in that,' Henry said, ''a readeth well for she's my
daughter; but not so well as thee.'

Udal ducked his head; he was not minded to carry modesty further than in
reason.

'The Lady Mary--the Lady Mary of England----' the King said
weightily--and these last two words of his had a weight all their own,
so that he added, 'of England' again, and then, 'will have little longer
need of thee. She shall wed with a puissant Prince.'

'I hail, I felicitate, I bless the day I hear those words,' the Magister
said.

'Therefore,' the King said--and his ears had caught the rustle of
Margot's grey gown--'we will let thee no more be reader to that my
daughter.'

Margot came round the green silk curtains that were looped on the corner
posts of the pavilion. When she saw the Magister her great, fair face
became slowly of a fiery red; slowly and silently she fell, with motions
as if bovine, to her knees at the Queen's side. Her gown was all grey,
but it had roses of red and white silk round the upper edges of the
square neck-place, and white lawn showed beneath her grey cap.

'We advance thee,' Henry said, 'to be Chancellier de la Royne, with an
hundred pounds by the year from my purse. Do homage for thine office.'

Udal fell upon one knee before Katharine, and dropping both cap and
book, took her hand to raise to his lips. But Margot caught her hand
when he had done with it and set upon it a huge pressure.

'But, Sir Chancellor,' the King said, 'it is evident that so grave an
office must have a grave fulfiller. And, to ballast thee the better, the
Queen of her graciousness hath found thee a weighty helpmeet. So that,
before you shall touch the duties and emoluments of this charge you
shall, and that even to-night, wed this Madam Margot that here kneels.'

Udal's face had been of a coppery green pallor ever since he had heard
the title of Chancellor.

'Eheu!' he said, 'this is the torture of Tantalus that might never
drink.'

In its turn the face of Margot Poins grew pale, pushed forward towards
him; but her eyes appeared to blaze, for all they were a mild blue, and
the Queen felt the pressure upon her hand grow so hard that it pained
her.

The King uttered the one word, 'Magister!'

Udal's fingers picked at the fur of his moth-eaten gown.

'God be favourable to me,' he said. 'If it were anything but
Chancellor!'

The King grew more rigid.

'Body of God,' he said, 'will you wed with this maid?'

'Ahi!' the Magister wailed; and his perturbation had in it something
comic and scarecrowlike, as if a wind shook him from within. 'If you
will make me anything but a Chancellor, I will. But a Chancellor, I dare
not.'

The King cast himself back in his chair. The suggested gibe rose
furiously to his lips; the Magister quailed and bent before him,
throwing out his hands.

'Sire,' he said, 'if--which God forbid--this were a Protestant realm I
might do it. But oh, pardon and give ear. Pardon and give ear----'

He waved one hand furiously at the silken canopy above them.

'It is agreed with one of mine in Paris that she shall come hither--God
forgive me, I must make avowal, though God knows I would not--she shall
come hither to me if she do hear that I have risen to be a Chancellor.'

The King said, 'Body of God!' as if it were an earthquake.

'If it were anything else but Chancellor she might not come, and I would
wed Margot Poins more willingly than any other. But--God knows I do not
willingly make this avowal, but am in a corner, _sicut vulpis in
lucubris_, like a fox in the coils--this Paris woman is my wife.'

Henry gave a great shout of laughter, but slowly Margot Poins fell
across the Queen's knees. She uttered no sound, but lay there
motionless. The sight affected Udal to an epileptic fury.

'Jove be propitious to me!' he stuttered out. 'I know not what I can
do.' He began to tear the fur of his cloak and toss it over the
battlements. 'The woman is my wife--wed by a friar. If this were a
Protestant realm now--or if I pleaded pre-contract--and God knows I ha'
promised marriage to twenty women before I, in an evil day, married
one--eheu!--to this one----'

He began to sob and to wring his thin hands.

'_Quod faciam? Me miser! Utinam. Utinam----_'

He recovered a little coherence.

'If this were a Protestant land ye might say this wedding was no
wedding, for that a friar did it; but I know ye will not suffer that----'
His eyes appealed piteously to the Queen.

'Why, then,' he said, 'it is not upon my head that I do not wed this
wench. You be my witness that I would wed; it gores my heart to see her
look so pale. It tears my vitals to see any woman look pale. As
Lucretius says, "Better the sunshine of smiles----"'

A little outputting of impatient breath from Katharine made him stop.

'It is you, your Grace,' he said, 'that make me thus tied. If you would
let us be Protestant, or, again, if I could plead pre-contract to void
this Paris marriage it would let me wed with this wench--eheu--eheu. Her
brother will break my bones----'

He began to cry out so lamentably, invoking Pluto to bear him to the
underworld, that the King roared out upon him--

'Why, get you gone, fool.'

The Magister threw himself suddenly upon his knees, his hands clasped,
his gown drooping over them down to his wrists. He turned his face to
the Queen.

'Before God,' he said, 'before high and omnipotent Jove, I swear that
when I made this marriage I thought it was no marriage!' He reflected
for a breath and added, at the recollection of the cook's spits that had
been turned against him when he had by woman's guile been forced into
marriage with the widow in Paris, 'I was driven into it by force, with
sharp points at my throat. Is that not enow to void a marriage? Is that
not enow? Is that not enow?'

Katharine looked out over the great levels of the view. Her face was
rigid, and she swallowed in her throat, her eye being glazed and hard.
The King took his cue from a glance at her face.

'Get you gone, Goodman Rogue Magister,' he said, and he adopted a
canonical tone that went heavily with his rustic pose. 'A marriage made
and consummated and properly blessed by holy friar there is no undoing.
You are learned enough to know that. Rogue that you be, I am very glad
that you are trapped by this marriage. Well I know that you have dangled
too much with petticoats, to the great scandal of this my Court. Now you
have lost your preferment, and I am glad of it. Another and a better
than thou shall be the Queen's Chancellor, for another and a better than
thou shall wed this wench. We will get her such a goodly husband----'

A low, melancholy wail from Margot Poins' agonised face--a sound such as
might have been made by an ox in pain--brought him to a stop. It wrung
the Magister, who could not bear to see a woman pained, up to a pitch of
ecstatic courage.

'_Quid fecit Caesar_,' he stuttered; 'what Caesar hath done, Caesar can do
again. It was not till very lately since this canon of wedding and
consummating and blessing by a holy friar hath been derided and
contemned in this realm. And so it might be again----'

Katharine Howard cried out, 'Ah!' Her features grew rigid and as ashen
as cold steel. And, at her cry, the King--who could less bear than Udal
to hear a woman in pain--the King sprang up from his chair. It was as
amazing to all them as to hunters it is to see a great wild bull charge
with a monstrous velocity. Udal was rigid with fear, and the King had
him by the throat. He shook him backwards and forwards so that his book
fell upon the Queen's feet, bursting out of his ragged gown, and his
cap, flying from his opened hand, fell down over the battlement into an
elm top. The King guttered out unintelligible sounds of fury from his
vast chest and, planted on his huge feet, he swung the Magister round
him till, backwards and staggering, the eyes growing fixed in his brown
and rigid face, he was pushed, jerking at each step of the King, out of
sight behind the green silk curtains.

The Queen sat motionless in her purple velvet. She twisted one hand into
the chain of the medallion about her throat, and one hand lay open and
pale by her side. Margot Poins knelt at her side, her face hidden in the
Queen's lap, her two arms stretched out beyond her grey coifed head. For
a minute she was silent. Then great sobs shook her so that Katharine
swayed upon her seat. From her hidden face there came muffled and
indistinguishable words, and at last Katharine said dully--

'What, child? What, child?'

Margot moved her face sideways so that her mouth was towards Katharine.

'You can unmake it! You can unmake the marriage,' she brought out in
huge sobs.

Katharine said--

'No! No!'

'You unmade a King's marriage,' Margot wailed.

Katharine said--

'No! No!' She started and uttered the words loudly; she added pitifully,
'You do not understand! You do not understand!'

It was the more pitiful in that Margot understood very well. She hid her
face again and only sobbed heavily and at long intervals, and then with
many sobs at once. The Queen laid her white hand upon the girl's head.
Her other still played with the chain.

'Christ be piteous to me,' she said. 'I think it had been better if I
had never married the King.'

Margot uttered an indistinguishable sound.

'I think it had been better,' the Queen said; 'though I had jeoparded my
immortal part.'

Margot moved her head up to cry out in her turn--

'No! No! You may not say it!'

Then she dropped her face again. When she heard the King coming back and
breathing heavily, she stood up, and with huge tears on her red and
crumpled face she looked out upon the fields as if she had never seen
them before. An immense sob shook her. The King stamped his foot with
rage, and then, because he was soft-hearted to them that he saw in
sorrow, he put his hand upon her shoulder.

'Sha't have a better mate,' he uttered. 'Sha't be a knight's dame!
There! there!' and he fondled her great back with his hand. Her eyes
screwed tightly up, she opened her mouth wide, but no words came out,
and suddenly she shook her head as if she had been an enraged child. Her
loud cries, shaken out of her with her tears, died away as she went
across the terrace, a loud one and then a little echo, a loud one and
then two more.

'Before God!' the King said, 'that knave shall eat ten years of prison
bread.'

His wife looked still over the wooded enclosures, the little stone
walls, and the copses. A small cloud had come before the sun, and its
shadow was moving leisurely across the ridge where stood the roofless
abbey.

'The maid shall have the best man I can give her,' the King said.

'Why, no good man would wed her!' Katharine answered dully.

Henry said--

'Anan?' Then he fingered the dagger on the chain before his chest.

'Why,' he added slowly, 'then the Magister shall die by the rope. It is
an offence that can be quitted with death. It is time such a thing were
done.'

Katharine's dull silence spurred him; he shrugged his shoulders and
heaved a deep breath out.

'Why,' he said, 'a man can be found to wed the wench.'

She moved one hand and uttered--

'I would not wed her to such a man!' as if it were a matter that was not
much in her thoughts.

'Then she may go into a nunnery,' the King said; 'for before three
months are out we will have many nunneries in this realm.'

She looked upon him a little absently, but she smiled at him to give him
pleasure. She was thinking that she wished she had not wedded him; but
she smiled because, things being as they were, she thought that she had
all the authorities of the noble Greeks and Romans to bid her do what a
good wife should.

He laughed at her griefs, thinking that they were all about Margot
Poins. He uttered jolly grossnesses; he said that she little knew the
way of courts if she thought that a man, and a very good man, might not
be found to wed the wench.

She was troubled that he could not better read what was upon her mind,
for she was thinking that her having consented to his making null his
marriage with the Princess of Cleves that he might wed her would render
her work always the more difficult. It would render her more the target
for evil tongues, it would set a sterner and a more stubborn opposition
against her task of restoring the Kingdom of God within that realm.

Henry said--

'Ye hannot guessed what my secret was? What have I done for thee this
day?'

She still looked away over the lands. She made her face smile--

'Nay, I know not. Ha' ye brought me the musk I love well?'

He shook his head.

'It is more than that!' he said.

She still smiled--

'Ha' ye--ha' ye--made make for me a new crown?'

She feared a little that that was what he had done. For he had been
urgent with her, many months, to be crowned. It was his way to love
these things. And her heart was a little gladder when he shook his head
once again and uttered--

'It is more than that!'

She dreaded his having made ready in secret a great pageant in her
honour, for she was afraid of all aggrandisements, and thought still it
had been better that she had remained his sweet friend ever and not the
Queen. For in that way she would have had as much empire over him, and
there would have been much less clamour against her--much less clamour
against the Church of her Saviour.

She forced her mind to run upon all the things that she could wish for.
When she said it must be that he had ordered for her enough French
taffetas to make twelve gowns, he laughed and said that he had said that
it was more than a crown. When she guessed that he had made ready such a
huge cavalcade that she might with great comfort and safety ride with
him into Scotland, he laughed, contented that she should think of going
with him upon that long journey. He stood looking at her, his little
eyes blinking, his face full of pride and joy, and suddenly he uttered--

'The Church of God is come back again.' He touched his cap at the sacred
name. 'I ha' made submission to the Pope.'

He looked her full in the face to get all the delight he might from her
looks and her movements.

Her blue eyes grew large; she leaned forward in her chair; her mouth
opened a little; her sleeves fell down to the ground. 'Now am I indeed
crowned!' she said, and closed her eyes. '_Benedicta sit mater dei!_'
she uttered, and her hand went over her heart place; '_deo clamavi nocte
atque die._'

She was silent again, and she leaned more forward.

'_Sit benedicta dies haec; sit benedicta hora haec benedictaque,
saeculum saeculum, castra haec._'

She looked out upon the great view: she aspired the air.

'_Ad colles_,' she breathed, '_levavi oculos meos; unde venit salvatio
nostra!_'

'Body of God,' Henry said, 'all things grow plain. All things grow
plain. This is the best day that ever I knew.'


IV

The Lady Mary of England sat alone in a fair room with little arched
windows that gave high up on to the terrace. It was the best room that
ever she had had since her mother, the Queen Katharine of Aragon, had
been divorced.

Dressed in black she sat writing at a large table before one window. Her
paper was fitted on to a wooden pulpit that rose before her; one book
stood open upon it, three others lay open too upon the red and blue and
green pattern of the Saracen rug that covered her table. At her right
hand was a three-tiered inkstand of pewter, set about with the white
feathers of pens; and the snakelike pattern of the table-rug serpentined
in and out beneath seals of parcel gilt, a platter of bread, a sandarach
of pewter, books bound in wooden covers and locked with chains, books in
red velvet covers, sewn with silver wire and tied with ribbons. It ran
beneath a huge globe of the world, blue and pink, that had a golden pin
in it to mark the city of Rome. There were little wooden racks stuck
full with written papers and parchments along the wainscoting between
the arched windows, but all the hangings of the other walls were of
tinted and dyed silks, not any with dark colours, because Katharine
Howard had deemed that that room with its deep windows in the thick
walls would be otherwise dark. The room was ten paces deep by twenty
long, and the wood of the floor was polished. Against the wall, behind
the Lady Mary's back, there stood a high chair upon a platform. Upon the
platform a carpet began that ran up the wall and, overhead, depended
from the gilded rafters of the ceiling so that it formed a dais and a
canopy.

The Lady Mary sat grimly amongst all these things as if none of them
belonged to her. She looked in her book, she made a note upon her
paper, she stretched out her hand and took a piece of bread, putting it
in her mouth, swallowing it quickly, writing again, and then once more
eating, for the great and ceaseless hunger that afflicted her gnawed
always at her vitals.

A little boy with a fair poll was reaching on tiptoe to smell at a pink
that depended from a vase of very thin glass standing in the deep
window. The shield of the coloured pane cast a little patch of red and
purple on to his callow head. He was dressed all in purple, very square,
and with little chains and medallions, and a little dagger with a golden
sheath was about his neck. In one hand he had a piece of paper, in the
other a pencil. The Lady Mary wrote; the child moved on tiptoe, with a
sedulous expression of silence about his lips, near to her elbow. He
watched her writing for a long time with attentive eyes.

Once he said, 'Sister, I----' but she paid him no heed.

After a time she looked coldly at his face and then he moved along the
table, fingered the globe very gently, touched the books and returned to
her side. He stood with his little legs wide apart. Then he sighed, then
he said--

'Sister, the Queen did bid me ask you a question.'

She looked round upon him.

'This was the Queen's question,' he said bravely:
'"_Cur_--why--_nunquam_--never--_rides_--dost thou
smile--_cum_--when--_ego, frater tuus_--I, thy little
brother--_ludo_--play--_in camera tua_--in thy chamber?"'

'Little Prince,' she said, 'art not afeared of me?'

'Aye, am I,' he answered.

'Say then to the Queen,' she said, '"_Domina Maria_--the Lady
Mary--_ridet nunquam_--smileth never--_quod_--because--_timoris
ratio_--the reason of my fear--_bona et satis_--is good and
sufficient."'

He held his little head upon one side.

'The Queen did bid me say,' he uttered with his brave little voice,
'"Holy Writ hath it: _Ecce quam bonum et dignum est fratres--fratres----_"'
He faltered without embarrassment and added, 'I ha' forgot the words.'

'Aye!' she said, 'they ha' been long forgotten in these places; I deem
it is overlate to call them to mind.'

She looked upon him coldly for a long time. Then she stretched out her
hand for his paper.

'Your Highness, I will set you a copy.'

She took his paper and wrote--

'_Malo malo mala._'

He held it in his chubby fist, his head on one side.

'I cannot conster it,' he said.

'Why, think upon it,' she answered. 'When I was thy age I knew it
already two years. But I was better beaten than thou.'

He rubbed his little arm.

'I am beaten enow,' he said.

'Knowest not what a swingeing is,' she answered.

'Then thou hadst a bitter childhood,' he brought out.

'I had a good mother,' she cut him short.

She turned her face to her writing again; it was bitter and set. The
little prince climbed slowly into the chair on the dais. He moved
sturdily and curled himself up on the cushion, studying the words on the
paper all the while with a little frown upon his brows. Then, shrugging
his shoulders, he set the paper upon his knee and began to write.

At that date the Lady Mary was still called a bastard, though most men
thought that that hardship would soon be reversed. It was said that
great honours had been shown her, and that was apparent in the
furnishing of her rooms, the fineness of her gear, the increase in the
number of the women that waited on her, and the store of sweet things
that was provided for her to eat. A great many men noted the chair with
a dais that was set up always where she might be, in her principal room,
and though her ladies said that she never sat in it, most men believed
that she had made a pact with the King to do him honour and so to be
reinstated in the estate in which she held her own. It was considered,
too, that she no longer plotted with the King's enemies inside or out of
the realm; it was at least certain that she no longer had men set to
spy upon her, though it was noted that the Archbishop's gentleman,
Lascelles, nosed about her quarters and her maids. But he was always
spying somewhere and, as the Archbishop's days were thought to be
numbered, he was accounted of little weight. Indeed, since the fall of
Thomas Cromwell there seemed to be few spies about the Court, or almost
none at all. It was known that gentlemen wrote accounts of what passed
to Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester. But Gardiner was gone back into
his see and appeared to have little favour, though it was claimed for
him that he had done much to advance the new Queen. So that, upon the
whole, men breathed much more freely--and women too--than in the days
before the fall of Privy Seal. The Queen had made little change, and
seemed to have it in mind to make little more. Her relatives had, nearly
none of them, been advanced. There were few Protestants oppressed,
though many Catholics had been loosed from the gaols, most notably him
whom the Archbishop Cranmer had taken to be his chaplain and confessor,
and others that other lords had taken out of prison to be about them.

All in all the months that had passed since Cromwell's fall had gone
quietly. The King and Queen had gone very often to mass since Katharine
had been shown for Queen in the gardens at Hampton Court, and saints'
days and the feasts of the life of our Lady had been very carefully
observed, along with fasts such as had used to be observed. The King,
however, was mightily fond with his new Queen, and those that knew her
well, or knew her servants well, expected great changes. Some were much
encouraged, some feared very much, but nearly all were heartily glad of
that summer of breathing space; and the weather was mostly good, so that
the corn ripened well and there was little plague or ague abroad.

Thus most men had been heartily glad to see the new Queen upon her
journey there to the north parts. She had ridden upon a white horse with
the King at her side; she had asked the names of several that had come
to see her; she had been fair to look at; and the King had pardoned
many felons, so that men's wives and mothers had been made glad; and
most old men said that the good times were come again, with the price of
malt fallen and twenty-six to the score of herrings. It was reported,
too, that a cider press in Herefordshire had let down a dozen firkins of
cider without any apples being set in it, and this was accounted an omen
of great plenty, whilst many sheep had died, so that men who had set
their fields down in grass talked of giving them to the plough again,
and upon St Swithin's Day no rain had fallen. All these things gave a
great contentment, and many that in the hard days had thought to become
Lutheran in search of betterment, now looked in byres and hidden valleys
to find priests of the old faith. For if a man could plough he might
eat, and if he might eat he could praise God after his father's manner
as well as in a new way.

Thus, around the Lady Mary, whilst she wrote, the people of the land
breathed more peace. And even she could not but be conscious of a new
softness, if it was only in the warmth that came from having her
window-leads properly mended. She had hardly ever before known what it
was to have warm hands when she wrote, and in most days of the year she
had worn fur next her skin, indoors as well as out. But now the sun beat
on her new windows, and in that warmth she could wear fine lawn, so
that, in spite of herself, she took pleasure and was softened, though,
since she spoke to no man save the Magister Udal, and to him only about
the works of Plautus or the game of cards that they played together, few
knew of any change in her.

Nevertheless, on that day she had one of her more ill moods and,
presently, having written a little more, she rang a small silver bell
that was shaped like a Dutch woman with wide skirts.

'The Prince annoys me,' she said to her woman; 'send for his lady
governess.'

The woman, dressed all in black, like her mistress, and with a little
frill of white cambric over her temples as if she were a nun, stood in
the open doorway that was just level with the Lady Mary's chair, so that
the stone wall of the passage caught the light from the window. She
folded her hands before her.

'Alack, Madam,' she said, 'your Madamship knows that at this hour his
Highness' lady governess taketh ever the air.'

The little boy in the chair looked over his paper at his sister.

'Send for his physician then,' Mary said.

'Alack, sister,' the little Prince said before the woman could move, 'my
physician is ill. _Jacet_--He lieth--_in cubiculo_--in his bed.'

The Lady Mary would not look round on him.

'Get thee, then,' she uttered coldly, 'to thine own apartments, Prince.'

'Alack, sister,' he answered,'thou knowest that I may not walk along the
corridors alone for fear some slay me. Nor yet may I be anywhere save
with the Queen, or thee, or with my uncles, or my lady governess, or my
physicians, for fear some poison me.'

He spoke with a clear and shrill voice, and the woman cast down her
eyes, trembling a little, partly to hear such a small, weary child speak
such a long speech as if by wizardry--for it was reported among the
serving maids that he had been overlooked--and partly for fear of the
black humour that she perceived to be upon her mistress.

'Send me then my Magister to lay out cards with me,' the Lady Mary said.
'I cannot make my studies with this Prince in my rooms.'

'Alack, Madam,' the girl said. She was high coloured and with dark eyes,
but when she faltered then the colour died from her cheeks. The Lady
Mary surveyed her coldly, for she was in the mood to give pain. She
uttered no words.

'Alack, alack----' the maid whimpered. She was full of fear lest the
Lady Mary should order her to receive short rations or many stripes; she
was filled with consternation and grief since her sweetheart, a server,
had told her that he must leave her. For it was rumoured that the
Magister had been cast into gaol for sweethearting, and that the King
had said that all sweethearts should be gaoled from thenceforth. 'The
Magister is gaoled,' she said.

'Wherefore?' the Lady uttered the one expressionless word.

'I do not know,' the maid wailed; 'I do not know.'

The form of the Archbishop's gentleman glided noiselessly behind her
back. His eyes shot one sharp, sideways glance in at the door, and, like
a russet fox, he was gone. He was so like a fox that the Lady Mary, when
she spoke, used the words--

'Catch me that gentleman.'

He was brought to the doorsill by the panting maid, for he had walked
away very fast. He stood there, blinking his eyes and stroking his
fox-coloured beard. When the Lady Mary beckoned him into the room he
pulled off his cap and fell to his thin knees. He expected her to bid
him rise, but she left him there.

'Wherefore is my secretary gaoled?' she asked cruelly.

He ran his finger round the rim of his cap where it lay on the floor
beside him.

'That he is gaoled, I know,' he said; 'but the wherefore of it, not.'

He looked down at the floor and she down at his drooped eyelids.

'God help you,' she uttered scornfully. 'You are a spy and yet know no
more than a Queen's daughter.'

'God help me,' he repeated gravely and touched his eyelid with one
finger. 'What passed, passed between the King and him. I know no more
than common report.'

'Common report?' she said. 'I warrant thee thou wast slinking around the
terrace. I warrant thee thou heardst words of the King's mouth. I
warrant thee thou followedst here to hear at my doorhole how I might
take this adventure.'

One of his eyelids moved delicately, but he said no word. The Lady Mary
turned her back on him and he expected her order to be gone. But she
turned again--

'Common report?' she uttered once more. 'I do bid you give me the common
report upon this, that the Queen sends to me every day this little
Prince to be alone with me two hours.'

He winced with his eyebrows again.

'Out with the common report,' she said.

'Madam,' he uttered, 'it is usually commended that the Queen should seek
to bring sister and Prince-brother together.'

She shrugged her stiff shoulders up to her ears.

'What a poor liar for a spy,' she said. 'It is more usually
reported'--and she turned upon the little Prince--'that the Queen sends
thee here that I may work thee a mischief so that thou die and her child
reign after the King thy father.'

The little Prince looked at her with pensive eyes. At that moment
Katharine Howard came to the room door and looked in.

'Body of God,' the Lady Mary said; 'here you spy out a spy committing
treason. For it is still treason to kneel to me. I am of illegal birth
and not of the blood royal.'

Katharine essayed her smile upon the black-avised girl.

'Give me leave,' she said.

'Your Grace's poor room,' Mary said, 'is open ever to your Grace's
entry. _Ubi venis ibi tibi._'

The Queen bade her waiting women go. She entered the room and looked at
Lascelles.

'I think I know thy face,' she said.

'I am the Archbishop's poor gentleman,' he answered. 'I think you have
seen me.'

'No. It is not that,' she said. 'It was long ago.'

She crossed the room to smell at the pinks in the window.

'How late the flowers grow,' she said. 'It is August, yet here are still
vernal perfumes.'

She was unwilling to bid the gentleman rise and go, because this was the
Lady Mary's room.

'Where your Grace is, there the spring abideth,' Mary said sardonically.
'_Ecce miraculum sicut erat, Joshua rege._'

The little Prince came timidly down to beg a flower from the Queen and
they all had their backs upon the spy. He ran his hands down his beard
and considered the Queen's words. Then swiftly he was on his feet and
through the door. He was more ready to brave the Lady Mary's after-wrath
than let the Queen see him upon his knees. For actually it was a treason
to kneel to the Lady Mary. It had been proclaimed so in the old days
when the King's daughter was always subject to new debasements. And who
knew whether now the penalty of treason might not still be enacted? It
was certain that the Queen had no liking for the Archbishop. Then, what
use might she not make of the fact that the Archbishop's man knelt,
seeming to curry favour, though in these days all men knelt to her, even
when the King was by? He cursed himself as he hastened away.

The Queen looked over her shoulder and caught the glint of his red heel
as it went past the doorpost.

'In our north parts,' she said, and she was glad that Lascelles had
fled, 'the seasons come ever tardily.'

'Well, your Grace has not delayed to blossom,' Mary said.

It was part of her humour when she was in a taunting mood to call the
Queen always 'your Grace' or 'your Majesty' at every turn of the phrase.

Katharine looked at the pink intently. Her face had no expression, she
was determined at once to have a cheerful patience and not to show it in
her face.

The little Prince stole his hand into hers.

'Wherefore did my father--_rex pater meus_--pummel the man in the long
cloak?' he asked.

'You knew it then?' Katharine asked of her stepdaughter.

'I knew it not,' the Lady Mary answered.

'I saw it from this window, but my sister would not look,' the Prince
said.

The Queen was going to shut, with her own hand, the door, the little boy
trotting behind her, but, purple-clothed and huge, the King was there.

'Well, I will not be shut out in mine own castle,' he said pleasantly.

In those, the quiet days of his realm when most things were going well,
his face beneath his beard had taken a rounder and a smoother outline.
He moved with motions less hasty than those he had had two years before,
and when he had cast a task off it was done with and went out of his
mind, so that he appeared a very busy man with, between whiles, the
leisure to saunter.

'In a half hour,' he said, 'I go north to meet the King o' Scots. I
would I had not the long journey to make but could stay with ye. It is
pleasant here; the air is livening.' He caught his little son by the
armpits and hoisted him on to his purple shoulders. 'Hey, princekin,' he
said, 'what news ha' you o' the day?'

The little Edward pulled his father's bonnet off that he might the
better see the huge brows and the little eyes.

'I told my sister that you did pummel a man in a long gown. What is even
"long gown" in the learned tongue?' He played daintily and languidly
with the hair of the King's temples, and when the King had said that he
might call it '_doctorum toga_,' he added, 'But my sister would not come
to look.'

'Well, thy sister is a monstrous learned wench,' the King said with a
heavy benignity. 'She could not leave her book.'

The Lady Mary stood rigid, with a mock humility. She had her hands
clasped before her, the folds of her black skirt fell stiffly just to
the ground. She pursed her lips and strove with herself to speak, for
she was minded to exhibit disdain, but her black mood was too strong for
her.

'I did not read in my book, because I could not,' she said numbly. 'Your
son disturbed my reading. But I did not come to look, because I would
not.'

With one arm round the boy's little waist as he sat on high, and one
hand on the little feet, the King looked at his daughter in a sudden hot
rage; for to speak contemptuously of his son was a thing that filled him
with anger and surprise. He opened his mouth to shout. Katharine Howard
was gently turning a brass sphere with the constellations upon it that
stood upon the table. She moved her fair face round towards the King and
set her finger upon her lips. He shrugged his shoulders, prince and all
moving up together, and his face took on the expression, half abashed
and half resigned, of a man who is reminded by his womankind that he is
near to a passionate folly.

Katharine by that time had schooled him how to act when Mary was in that
humour, and he let out no word.

'I do not like that this Prince should play in my room,' the Lady Mary
pursued him relentlessly, and he was so well lessoned that he answered
only--

'Ye must fight that cock with Kat. It is Kat that sends him, not I.'

Nevertheless he was too masterful a man to keep his silence altogether;
he was, besides, so content upon the whole that he was sure he could
hold his temper in check, and the better to take breath for a long
speech, he took the little boy from his shoulder and planted his feet
abroad on the carpet.

'See now, Moll,' he said, 'make friends!' and he stretched out a large
hand. She shrugged her shoulders half invisibly.

'I will kneel down to the King of this country and to the Supreme Head
of the Church as it is here set up by law. What more would you have of
me?'

'See now, Moll!' he said.

He fingered the medal upon his chest and cast about for words.

'Let us have peace in this realm,' he said. 'We are very near it.'

She raised her eyelids with a tiny contempt.

'It hangs much around you,' he went on. 'Listen! I will tell ye the
whole matter.'

Slowly and sagaciously he disentangled all his coil of policies. His
letter to the Holy Father was all drafted and ready to be put into fine
words. But, before he sent it, he must be sure of peace abroad. It was
like this--

'Ye know,' he said, 'though great wrangles have been in the past betwixt
him and thee and mine own self, how my heart has ever been well inclined
to my nephew, thy cousin the Emperor. There are in Christendom now only
he and France that are anyways strong to stand against me or to invade
me. But France I ha' never loved, and him much.'

'Ye are grown gentle then,' Mary said, 'and forgiving in your old age,
for ye know I ha' plotted against you with my cousin and my cousin with
me.'

'It is a very ancient tale,' the King said. 'Forget it, as do I and he.'

'Why, you live in the sun where the dial face moves. I in the shadow
where Time stays still. To me it is every day a new tale,' the Lady Mary
answered.

His face took on an expression of patience and resignation that angered
her, for she knew that when her father looked so it was always very
difficult to move him.

'Why, all the world forgets,' he said.

'Save only I,' she answered. 'I had only one parent--a mother. She is
dead: she was done to death.'

'I have pardoned your cousin that he plotted against me,' he stuck to
his tale, 'and he me what I did against your mother.'

'Well, he was ever a popinjay,' the Lady Mary said.

'Lately,' Henry continued, 'as ye wiz he had grown very thick with
Francis of France. He went across the French country into the
Netherlands, so strict was their alliance. It is more than I would do to
trust myself to France's word. All Holland marvelled.'

'What is this to me?' the Lady Mary said. 'Will you send me across
France to the Netherlands?'

He left her gibe alone.

'But in these latter months,' he said, 'Kat and I ha' weakened with true
messages and loyal conceits this unholy alliance.'

'Why, I ha' heard,' Mary said, 'ye did send the Duke of Norfolk to tell
the King o' France that my cousin had said in private that he was the
greater King of the twain. These be princely princes!'

'An unholy alliance it was,' Henry went on his way, 'for the Emperor is
a very good Christian and a loyal son of the Church. But Francis
worships the devil--I have heard it said and I believe it--or, at least,
he believes not in God and our Saviour; and he pays allegiance to the
Church only when it serves his turn, now holding on, now letting go. I
am glad this alliance is dissolving.'

'Why, I am glad to hear you speak like this,' Mary said bitterly. 'You
are a goodly son to Mother Church.'

The King took her scorn with a shrug of the shoulders.

'I am glad this alliance is dissolved or dissolving,' he said, 'for when
it is fully dissolved I will make my peace with Rome. And I long for
that day, for I am weary of errors.'

'Well, this is a very goodly tale,' Mary said. 'I am glad you are minded
to escape hell-flame. What is it all to me?'

'The burden of it rests with thee,' he answered, 'for thou alone canst
make thy cousin believe in my true mind.'

'God help me,' Mary said.

'See you, Moll,' the King broke in on her eagerly, 'if you will marry
the Infant of Spain----'

'God's sakes,' she said lightly, 'my cousin's son will wed no bastard as
I be.'

He brushed her jest aside with one hand.

'See you,' he said, 'now I ride to the north to meet the King o' Scots.
That nephew of mine has always been too thick with Francis. But I will
be so friendly with him. And see you, with the Scots cut away and the
Emperor unloyal, the teeth of Francis are drawn. I might not send my
letter to the Pope with all Christendom arrayed together against me. But
when they are set by the ears I am strong enow.'

'Oh, good!' the Lady Mary said. 'Strong enow to be humble!'

Her eyes sparkled so much and her bosom so heaved, that Katharine moved
solicitously and swiftly to come between them.

'See you, Moll,' the King said, 'forgive the ill I wrought thee, and so
shall golden days come again. Once more there shall be a deep peace with
contented husbandmen and the spreading of the vines abroad upon the
stakes. And once more _venite creator spiritus_ shall be sung in this
land. And once more you shall be much honoured; nay, you shall be as one
that saved this realm----'

She screamed out--

'Stay your tongue!' with such a shrill voice that the King's words were
drowned. Katharine Howard ran in between them, but she pushed her aside,
speaking over her shoulder.

'Before God,' she said, 'you gar me forget that you are the King that
begot me illegally.'

Katharine turned upon the King and sought to move him from the room. But
he was still of opinion that he could convince his daughter and stood
his ground, looking over her shoulder as Mary had done.

'Body of God!' Mary said. 'Body of God! That a man could deem me so
base!' She looked, convulsed, into Henry's eyes. 'Can you bring my
mother alive by the truckling and cajoling and setting lying prince
against lying prince? You slew my mother by lies, or your man slew her
by poison. It is all one. And will you come to me that you have decreed
misbegotten, to help you save your soul!'

There was such a violent hatred in her tone that the King could bring no
word out, and she swept on--

'Could even a man be such a dull villain? To creep into heaven by
bribing his daughter! To creep into heaven by strengthening himself with
lies about one prince to another till he be strong enow to be humble!
This is a king! This is even a man! I would be ashamed of such manhood!'

She took a deep breath.

'What can you bribe me with? A marriage with my cousin's son? Why, he
has deserted my mother's cause. I had rather wed a falconer than that
prince. You will have me no longer called bastard? Why, I had rather be
called bastard than the acknowledged child of such a royal King. You
will cover me with brocades and set me on high? By God, the sun in the
heaven has looked upon such basenesses that I seek only a patch of
shade. God help me; you will recall the decree that said my mother was
not a Queen! God help us! God help us all! You will ennoble my mother's
memory. With a decree! Can all the decrees you can make render my mother
more sacred? When you decreed her not a Queen, did a soul believe it? If
now you decree that a Queen she was, who will believe you? I think I had
rather you left it alone, it is such a foul thing to have been thy
wife!'

The saying of these things had pleased her so much that she gained
control of her tongue.

'You cannot bribe me,' she said calmly. 'You have naught to give that I
have need of.'

But the King was so used to his daughter's speeches that, though he had
seldom seen her so mutinous, he could still ignore them.

'Well,' he said, 'I think you are angered with me for having set the
Magister in gaol----'

'And in addition,' the Lady Mary pursued her own speech, for she deemed
that she had thought of a thing to pain both him and the Queen, 'how
might I with a good conscience tell my cousin that you have a true
inclination to him? I do believe you have; it is this lady that has
given it you. But how much longer will this lady sway you? No doubt the
King o' Scots hath a new lady for you--and she will be on the French
side, for the King o' Scots is the French King's man.'

The King opened his mouth convulsively, but Katharine Howard laid her
hand right across it.

'You must be riding soon,' she said. 'I have had a collation set in my
chamber.' She was so used by now to the violent humours of these
Tudors. 'You have still to direct me,' she added, 'what is to be done
with these rived cattle.'

As they went through the door, the little Prince holding his father's
hand and she moving him gently by the shoulder, the child said--

'I thought ye wad ha' little profit speaking to my sister in her then
mood.'

The King, in the gallery, looked with a gentle apprehension at his wife.

'I trow ye think I ha' done wrong,' he said.

She answered--

'Oh nay; she must come to know one day what your Grace had to tell her.
Now it is over. But I would not have had you heated. For it is ill to
start riding in a sweat. You shall not go for an hour yet.'

That pleased him, for it made him think she was unwilling he should go.

In her own room the Lady Mary sat back in her chair and smiled grimly at
the ceiling.

'Body of God,' she said, 'I wish he had married this wench or ever he
saw my mother.' Nevertheless, upon reflection, she got pleasure from the
thought that her mother, with her Aragonia pride, had given the King
some ill hours before he had put her away to her death. Katharine of
Aragon had been no Katharine Howard to study her lord's ways and twist
him about her finger; and Mary took her rosary from a nail beside her
and told her beads for a quarter hour to calm herself.


V

There fell upon the castle a deep peace when the King and most of the
men were gone. The Queen had the ordering of all things in the castle
and of most in the realm. Beneath her she had the Archbishop and some
few of the lords of the council who met most days round a long table in
the largest hall, and afterwards brought her many papers to sign or to
approve. But they were mostly papers of accounts for the castles that
were then building, and some few letters from the King's envoys in
foreign courts. Upon the whole, there was little stirring, though the
Emperor Charles V was then about harrying the Protestant Princes of
Almain and Germany. That was good enough news, and though the great
castle had well-nigh seven hundred souls, for the most part women, in
it, yet it appeared to be empty. High up upon the upper battlements the
guards kept a lazy watch. Sometimes the Queen rode a-hawking with her
ladies and several lords; when it rained she held readings from the
learned writers amongst her ladies, to teach them Latin better. For she
had set a fashion of good learning among women that did not for many
years die out of the land. In that pursuit she missed the Magister Udal,
for the ladies listened to him more willingly than to another. They were
reading the _True History of Lucian_, which had been translated into
Latin from the Greek about that time.

What occupied her most was the writing of the King's letter to the Pope.
Down in their cellar the Archbishop and Lascelles wrought many days at
this very long piece of writing. But they made it too humble to suit
her, for she would not have her lord to crawl, as if in the dust upon
his belly, so she told the Archbishop. Henry was to show contrition and
repentance, desire for pardon and the promise of amendment. But he was a
very great King and had wrought greatly. And, having got the draft of it
in the vulgar tongue, she set about herself to turn it into Latin, for
she esteemed herself the best Latinist that they had there.

But in that again she missed the Magister at last, and in the end she
sent for him up from his prison to her ante-chamber where it pleased her
to sit. It was a tall, narrow room, with much such a chair and dais as
were in the room of the Lady Mary. It gave on to her bedchamber that was
larger, and it had little, bright, deep windows in the thick walls. From
them there could be seen nothing but the blue sky, it was so high up.
Here she sat, most often with the Lady Rochford, upon a little stool
writing, with the parchments upon her knee or setting a maid to sew. The
King had lately made her a gift of twenty-four satin quilts. Most of her
maids sat in her painted gallery, carding and spinning wool, but usually
she did not sit with them, since she was of opinion that they spoke more
freely and took more pleasure when she was not there. She had brought
many maids with her into Yorkshire for this spinning, for she believed
that this northern wool was the best that could be had. Margot Poins sat
always with these maids to keep them to their tasks, and her brother had
been advanced to keep the Queen's door when she was in her private
rooms, being always without the chamber in which she sat.

When the Magister came to her, she had with her in the little room the
Lady Rochford and the Lady Cicely Rochford that had married the old
knight when she was Cicely Elliott. Udal had light chains on his wrists
and on his ankles, and the Queen sent her guards to await him at her
outer door. The Lady Cicely set back her head and laughed at the
ceiling.

'Why, here are the bonds of holy matrimony!' she said to his chains. 'I
ha' never seen them so plain before.'

The Magister had straws on his cloak, and he limped a little, being
stiff with the damp of his cell.

'_Ave, Regina!_' he said. '_Moriturus te saluto!_' He sought to kneel,
but he could not bend his joints; he smiled with a humorous and rueful
countenance at his own plight.

The Queen said she had brought him there to read the Latin of her
letter. He ducked his brown, lean head.

'_Ha_,' he said, '_sine cane pastor_--without his dog, as Lucretius
hath it, the shepherd watches in vain. Wolves--videlicet, errors--shall
creep into your marshalled words.'

Katharine kept to him a cold face and, a little abashed, he muttered
under his breath--

'I ha' played with many maids, but this is the worst pickle that ever I
was in.'

He took her parchment and read, but, because she was the Queen, he
would not say aloud that he found solecisms in her words.

'Give me,' he said, 'your best pen, and let me sit upon a stool!'

He sat down upon the stool, set the writing on his knee, and groaned
with his stiffness. He took up his task, but when those ladies began to
talk--the Lady Cicely principally about a hawk that her old knight had
training for the Queen, a white sea hawk from Norway--he winced and
hissed a little because they disturbed him.

'Misery!' he said; 'I remember the days when no mouse dared creak if I
sat to my task in the learned tongues.'

The Queen then remembered very well how she had been a little girl with
the Magister for tutor in her father's great and bare house. It was
after Udal had been turned out of his mastership at Eton. He had been in
vile humour in most of those days, and had beaten her very often and
fiercely with his bundle of twigs. It was only afterwards that he had
called her his best pupil.

Remembering these things, she dropped her voice and sat still, thinking.
Cicely Elliott, who could not keep still, blew a feather into the air
and caught it again and again. The old Lady Rochford, her joints swollen
with rheumatism, played with her beads in her lap. From time to time she
sighed heavily and, whilst the Magister wrote, he sighed after her.
Katharine would not send her ladies away, because she would not be alone
with him to have him plague her with entreaties. She would not go
herself, because it would have been to show him too much honour then,
though a few days before she would have gone willingly because his
vocation and his knowledge of the learned tongues made him a man that it
was right to respect.

But when she read what he had written for her, his lean, brown face
turning eagerly and with a ferreting motion from place to place on the
parchment, she was filled with pity and with admiration for the man's
talent. It was as if Seneca were writing to his master, or Pliny to the
Emperor Trajan. And, being a very tender woman at bottom--

'Magister,' she said, 'though you have wrought me the greatest grief I
think ye could, by so injuring one I like well, yet this is to me so
great a service that I will entreat the King to remit some of your
pains.'

He stumbled up from his stool and this time managed to kneel.

'Oh, Queen,' he said, '_Doctissima fuisti_; you were the best pupil that
ever I had----' She tried to silence him with a motion of her hand. But
he twined his lean hands together with the little chains hanging from
them. 'I call this to your pitiful mind,' he brought out, 'not because I
would have you grateful, but to make you mindful of what I suffer--_non
quia grata sed ut clemens sis_. For, for advancement I have no stomach,
since by advancing me you will advance my wife from Paris, and for
liberty I have no use since you may never make me free of her. Leave me
to rot in my cell, but, if it be but the tractate of Diodorus Siculus, a
very dull piece, let me be given some book in a learned tongue. I faint,
I starve, I die for lack of good letters. I that no day in my life have
passed--_nulla die sine_--no day without reading five hours in goodly
books since I was six and breeched. Bethink you, you that love
learning----'

'Now tell me,' Cicely Elliott cried out, 'which would you rather in your
cell--the Letters of Cicero or a kitchen wench?'

The Queen bade her hold her peace, and to the Magister she uttered--

'Books I will have sent you, for I think it well that you should be so
well employed. And, for your future, I will have you set down in a
monastery where there shall be for you much learning and none of my sex.
You have done harm enow! Now, get you gone!'

He sighed that she had grown so stern, and she was glad to be rid of
him. But he had not been gone a minute into the other room when there
arose such a clamour of harsh voices and shrieks and laughter that she
threw her door open, coming to it herself before the other ladies could
close their mouths, which had opened in amazement.

The young Poins was beating the Magister, so that the fur gown made a
greyish whirl about his scarlet suit in the midst of a tangle of spun
wool; spinning wheels were overset, Margot Poins crashed around upon
them, wailing; the girls with their distaffs were crouching against the
window-places and in corners, crying out each one of them.

The Queen had a single little gesture of the hand with which she
dismissed all her waiting-women. She stood alone in the inner doorway
with the Lady Cicely and the Lady Rochford behind her. The Lady Rochford
wrung her gouty hands; the Lady Cicely set back her head and laughed.

The Queen spoke no word, but in the new silence it was as if the
Magister fell out of the boy's hands. He staggered amidst the trails of
wool, nearly fell, and then made stiff zigzags towards the open outer
door, where his prison guards awaited him, since they had no warrant to
enter the antechamber. He dragged after him a little trail of fragments
of spinning wheels and spindles.

'Well, there's a fine roister-doister!' the Lady Cicely laughed behind
the Queen's back. The Queen stood very still and frowned. To her the
disturbance was monstrous and distasteful, for she was minded to have
things very orderly and quiet. The boy, in his scarlet, pulled off his
bonnet and panted, but he was not still more than a second, and suddenly
he called out to the Queen--

'Make that pynot to marry my sister!'

Margot Poins hung round him and cried out--

'Oh no! Oh no!'

He shook her roughly loose.

'An' you do not wed with him how shall I get advancement?' he said. ''A
promised me that when 'a should come to be Chancellor 'a would advance
me.'

He pushed her from him again with his elbow when she came near.

'Y've grown over familiar,' the Queen said, 'with being too much near
me. Y'are grown over familiar. For seven days you shall no longer keep
my door.'

Margot Poins raised her arms over her head, then she leant against a
window-pane and sobbed into the crook of her elbow. The boy's slender
face was convulsed with rage; his blue eyes started from his head; his
callow hair was crushed up.

'Shall a man----' he began to protest.

'I say nothing against that you did beat this Magister,' the Queen said.
'Such passions cannot be controlled, and I pass it by.'

'But will ye not make this man to wed with my sister?' the boy said
harshly.

'I cannot. He hath a wedded wife!'

He dropped his hands to his side.

'Alack; then my father's house is down,' he cried out.

'Gentleman Guard,' Katharine said, 'get you for seven days away from my
door. I will have another sentry whilst you bethink you of a worthier
way to advancement.'

He gazed at her stupidly.

'You will not make this wedding?' he asked.

'Gentleman Guard,' Katharine said, 'you have your answer. Get you gone.'

A sudden rage came into his eyes; he swallowed in his throat and made a
gesture of despair with his hand. The Queen turned back into her room
and busied herself with her task, which was the writing into a little
vellum book of seven prayers to the Virgin that the Lady Elizabeth,
Queen Anne Boleyn's daughter, a child then in London, was to turn each
one into seven languages, written fair in the volume as a gift, against
Christmas, for the King.

'I would not have that boy to guard my door,' the Lady Cicely said to
the Queen.

'Why, 'tis a good boy,' Katharine answered; 'and his sister loves me
very well.'

'Get your Highness another,' the Lady Cicely persisted. 'I do not like
his looks.'

The Queen gazed up from her writing to where the dark girl, her figure
raked very much back in her stiff bodice, played daintily with the
tassels of the curtain next the window.

'My Lady,' Katharine said, 'my Highness must get me a new maid in place
of Margot Poins, that shall away into a nunnery. Is not that grief
enough for poor Margot? Shall she think in truth that she has undone her
father's house?'

'Then advance the springald to some post away from you,' the Lady Cicely
said.

'Nay,' the Queen answered; 'he hath done nothing to merit advancement.'

She continued, with her head bent down over the writing on her knee, her
lips moving a little as, sedulously, she drew large and plain letters
with her pen.

'By Heaven,' the Lady Cicely said, 'you have too tickle a conscience to
be a Queen of this world and day. In the time of Caesar you might have
lived more easily.'

The Queen looked up at her from her writing; her clear eyes were
untroubled.

'Aye,' she said. '_Lucio Domitio, Appio Claudio consulibus_----'

Cicely Rochford set back her head and laughed at the ceiling.

'Aye, your Highness is a Roman,' she tittered like a magpie.

'In the day of Caesar it was simple to do well,' the Queen said.

'Why, I do not believe it,' Cicely answered her.

'Cousin! Cousin!' The old Lady Rochford warned her that this was the
Queen, not her old playmate.

'But now,' the Queen said, 'with such a coming together and a concourse
of peoples about us; with such holes and corners in a great Court----'
She paused and sighed.

'Well, if I may not speak my mind,' Cicely Rochford said to the old
lady, 'what good am I?'

'I did even what I might to keep this lamb Margot from the teeth of that
wolf Magister,' the Queen said. 'I take shame to myself that I did no
more. I will do a penance for it. But still I think that these be
degenerate days.'

'Oh, Queen of dreams and fancies,' Cicely Rochford said. 'I am very
certain that in the days of your noble Romans it was as it is now. Tell
me, if you can, that in all your readings of hic and hoc you lit not
upon such basenesses? You will not lay your hand upon your heart and say
that never a man of Rome bartered his sister for the hope of
advancement, or that never a learned doctor was a corrupter of youth? I
have seen the like in the plays of Plautus that here have been played at
Court.'

'Why,' the Queen said, 'the days of Plautus were days degenerated and
fallen already from the ancient nobleness.'

'You should have Queened it before Goodman Adam fell,' Cicely Rochford
mocked her. 'If you go back before Plautus, go back all the way.'

She shrugged her shoulders up to her ears and uttered a little sound
like '_Pfui!_' Then she said quickly--

'Give me leave to be gone, your Highness, that I may not grow over
familiar like the boy with the pikestaff, for if it do not gall you it
shall wring the withers of this my old husband's cousin!'

The old Lady Rochford, who was always thinking of what had been said two
speeches ago, because she was so slow-witted, raised her gouty hands in
the air and opened her mouth. But the Queen smiled faintly at Cicely.

'When I ask you to mince matters in my little room you shall do it. It
was Lucius the Praetor that went always accompanied by a carping Stoic
to keep him from being puffed up, and it was a good custom.'

'Before Heaven,' Cicely Rochford said in the midst of her curtsey at the
door, 'shall I have the office of such a one as Diogenes who derided
Alexander the Emperor? Then must my old husband live with me in a tub!'

'Pray you,' the Queen said after her through the door, 'look you around
and spy me out a maid to be my tiring-woman and ward my spinsters. For
nowadays I see few maids to choose from.'

When she was gone the old Lady Rochford timorously berated the Queen.
She would have her be more distant with knights' wives and the like. For
it was fitting for a Queen to be feared and deemed awful.

'I had rather be loved and deemed pitiful,' Katharine answered. 'For I
was once such a one--no more--than she or thou, or very little more.
Before the people I bear myself proudly for my lord his high honour. But
I do lead a very cloistered life, and have leisure to reflect upon for
what a little space authority endureth, and how that friendship and true
love between friends are things that bear the weather better.' She did
not say her Latin text, for the old lady had no Latin.


VI

In the underground cell, above the red and gold table that afternoon,
Lascelles wrought at a fair copy of the King's letter to the Pope,
amended as it had been by Udal's hand. The Archbishop had come into the
room reading a book as he came from his prayers, and sate him down in
his chair at the tablehead without glancing at his gentleman.

'Prithee, your Grace,' Lascelles said, 'suffer me to carry this letter
mine own self to the Queen.'

The Archbishop looked up at him; his mournful eyes started wide; he
leaned forward.

'Art thou Lascelles?' he asked.

'Aye, Lascelles I am,' the gentleman answered; 'but I have cut off my
beard.'

The Archbishop was very weak and startled; he fell into an anger.

'Is this a time for vanities?' he said. 'Will you be after the wenches?
You look a foolish boy! I do not like this prank.'

Lascelles put up his hand to stroke his vanished beard. His risible lips
writhed in a foxy smile; his chin was fuller than you would have
expected, round and sensuous with a dimple in the peak of it.

'Please it, your Grace,' he said, 'this is no vanity, but a scheme that
I will try.'

'What scheme? What scheme?' the Archbishop said. 'Here have been too
many schemes.' He was very shaken and afraid, because this world was
beyond his control.

'Please it, your Grace,' Lascelles answered, 'ask me not what this
scheme is.'

The Archbishop shook his head and pursed his lips feebly.

'Please it, your Grace,' Lascelles urged, 'if this scheme miscarry, your
Grace shall hear no more of it. If this scheme succeed I trow it shall
help some things forward that your Grace would much have forwarded.
Please it, your Grace, to ask me no more, and to send me with this
letter to the Queen's Highness.'

The Archbishop opened his nerveless hands before him; they were pale and
wrinkled as if they had been much soddened in water. Since the King had
bidden him compose that letter to the Pope of Rome, his hands had grown
so. Lascelles wrote on at the new draft of the letter, his lips
following the motions of his pen. Still writing, and with his eyes down,
he said--

'The Queen's Highness will put from her her tirewoman in a week from
now.'

The Archbishop moved his fingers as who should say--

'What is that to me!' His eyes gazed into the space above his book that
lay before him on the table.

'This Margot Poins is a niece of the master-printer Badge, a Lutheran,
of the Austin Friars.' Lascelles pursued his writing for a line further.
Then he added--

'This putting away and the occasion of it shall make a great noise in
the town of London. It will be said amongst the Lutherans that the Queen
is answerable therefor. It will be said that the Queen hath a very lewd
Court and companionship.'

The Archbishop muttered wearily--

'It hath been said already.'

'But not,' Lascelles said, 'since she came to be Queen.'

The Archbishop directed upon him his hang-dog eyes, and his voice was
the voice of a man that would not be disturbed from woeful musings.

'What use?' he said bitterly; and then again, 'What use?'

Lascelles wrote on sedulously. He used his sandarach to the end of the
page, blew off the sand, eyed the sheet sideways, laid it down, and set
another on his writing-board.

'Why,' he brought out quietly, 'it may be brought to the King's
Highness' ears.'

'What way?' the Archbishop said heavily, as if the thing were
impossible. His gentleman answered--

'This way and that!' The King's Highness had a trick of wandering about
among his faithful lieges unbeknown; foreign ambassadors wrote abroad
such rumours which might be re-reported from the foreign by the King's
servants.

'Such a report,' Lascelles said, 'hath gone up already to London town by
a swift carrier.'

The Archbishop brought out wearily and distastefully--

'How know you? Was it you that wrote it?'

'Please it, your Grace,' his gentleman answered him, 'it was in this
wise. As I was passing by the Queen's chamber wall I heard a great
outcry----'

He laid down his pen beside his writing-board the more leisurely to
speak.

He had seen Udal, beaten and shaking, stagger out from the Queen's door
to where his guards waited to set him back in prison. From Udal he had
learned of this new draft of the letter; of Udal's trouble he knew
before. Udal gone, he had waited a little, hearing the Queen's voice and
what she said very plainly, for the castle was very great and quiet.
Then out had come the young Poins, breathing like a volcano through his
nostrils, and like to be stricken with palsy, boy though he was. Him
Lascelles had followed at a convenient distance, where he staggered and
snorted. And, coming upon the boy in an empty guard-room near the great
gate, he had found him aflame with passion against the Queen's
Highness.

'I,' the boy had cried out, 'I that by my carrying of letters set this
Howard where she sits! I!--and this is my advancement. My sister cast
down, and I cast out, and another maid to take my sister's place.'

And Lascelles, in the guard-chamber, had shown him sympathy and reminded
him that there was gospel for saying that princes had short memories.

'But I did not calm him!' Lascelles said.

On the contrary, upon Lascelles' suggestion that the boy had but to hold
his tongue and pocket his wrongs, the young Poins had burst out that he
would shout it all abroad at every street corner. And suddenly it had
come into his head to write such a letter to his Uncle Badge the printer
as, printed in a broadside, would make the Queen's name to stink, until
the last generation was of men, in men's nostrils.

Lascelles rubbed his hands gently and sinuously together. He cast one
sly glance at the Archbishop.

'Well, the letter was written,' he said. 'Be sure the broadside shall be
printed.'

Cranmer's head was sunk over his book.

'This lad,' Lascelles said softly, 'who in seven days' time again shall
keep the Queen's door (for it is not true that the Queen's Highness is
an ingrate, well sure am I), this lad shall be a very useful confidant;
a very serviceable guide to help us to a knowledge of who goes in to the
Queen and who cometh out.'

The Archbishop did not appear to be listening to his gentleman's soft
voice and, resuming his pen, Lascelles finished his tale with--

'For I have made this lad my friend. It shall cost me some money, but I
do not doubt that your Grace shall repay.'

The Archbishop raised his head.

'No, before God in heaven on His throne!' he said. His voice was shrill
and high; he agitated his hands in their fine, tied sleeves. 'I will
have no part in these Cromwell tricks. All is lost; let it be lost. I
must say my prayers.'

'Has it been by saying of your Grace's prayers that your Grace has lived
through these months?' Lascelles asked softly.

'Aye,' the Archbishop wrung his hands; 'you girded me and moved me when
Cromwell lay at death, to write a letter to the King's Highness. To
write such a letter as should appear brave and faithful and true to
Privy Seal's cause.'

'Such a letter your Grace wrote,' Lascelles said; 'and it was the best
writing that ever your Grace made.'

The Archbishop gazed at the table.

'How do I know that?' he said in a whisper. 'You say so, who bade me
write it.'

'For that your Grace lives yet,' Lascelles said softly; 'though in those
days a warrant was written for your capture. For, sure it is, and your
Grace has heard it from the King's lips, that your letter sounded so
faithful and piteous and true to him your late leader, that the King
could not but believe that you, so loyal in such a time to a man
disgraced and cast down beyond hope, could not but be faithful and loyal
in the future to him, the King, with so many bounties to bestow.'

'Aye,' the Archbishop said, 'but how do I know what of a truth was in
the King's mind who casteth down to-day one, to-morrow another, till
none are left?'

And again Cranmer dropped his anguished eyes to the table.

       *       *       *       *       *

In those days still--and he slept still worse since the King had bidden
him write this letter to Rome--the Archbishop could not sleep on any
night without startings and sweats and cryings out in his sleep. And he
gave orders that, when he so cried out, the page at his bedside should
wake him.

For then he was seeing the dreadful face of his great master, Privy
Seal, when the day of his ruin had come. Cromwell had been standing in a
window of the council chamber at Westminster looking out upon a
courtyard. In behind him had come the other lords of the council,
Norfolk with his yellow face, the High Admiral, and many others; and
each, seating himself at the table, had kept his bonnet on his head. So
Cromwell, turning, had seen them and had asked with his hard insolence
and embittered eyes of hatred, how they dared be covered before he who
was their president sat down. Then, up against him in the window-place
there had sprung Norfolk at the chain of the George round his neck, and
Suffolk at the Garter on his knee; and Norfolk had cried out that Thomas
Cromwell was no longer Privy Seal of that kingdom, nor president of that
council, but a traitor that must die. Then such rage and despair had
come into Thomas Cromwell's terrible face that Cranmer's senses had
reeled. He had seen Norfolk and the Admiral fall back before this
passion; he had seen Thomas Cromwell tear off his cap and cast it on the
floor; he had heard him bark and snarl out certain words into the face
of the yellow dog of Norfolk.

'_Upon your life you dare not call me traitor!_' and Norfolk had fallen
back abashed.

Then the chamber had seemed to fill with an awful gloom and darkness;
men showed only like shadows against the window lights; the constable of
the Tower had come in with the warrants, and in that gloom the earth had
appeared to tremble and quake beneath the Archbishop's feet.

       *       *       *       *       *

He crossed himself at the recollection, and, coming out of his stupor,
saw that Lascelles was finishing his writings. And he was glad that he
was here now and not there then.

'Prithee, your Grace,' the gentleman's soft voice said, 'let me bear,
myself, this letter to the Queen.'

The Archbishop shivered frostily in his robes.

'I will have no more Cromwell tricks,' he said. 'I have said it'; and he
affected an obdurate tone.

'Then, indeed, all is lost,' Lascelles answered; 'for this Queen is very
resolved.'

The Archbishop cast his eyes up to the cold stone ceiling above him. He
crossed himself.

'You are a very devil,' he said, and panic came into his eyes, so that
he turned them all round him as if he sought an issue at which to run
out.

'The Papist lords in this castle met on Saturday night,' Lascelles said;
'their meeting was very secret, and Norfolk was their head. But I have
heard it said that not one of them was for the Queen.'

The Archbishop shrank within himself.

'I am not minded to hear this,' he said.

'Not one of them was for the Queen altogether; for she will render all
lands and goods back to the Church, and there is no one of them but is
rich with the lands and goods of the Church. That they that followed
Cromwell are not for the Queen well your Grace knoweth,' his gentleman
continued.

'I will not hear this; this is treason,' the Archbishop muttered.

'So that who standeth for the Queen?' Lascelles whispered. 'Only a few
of the baser sort that have no lands to lose.'

'The King,' the Archbishop cried out in a terrible voice; 'the King
standeth for her!'

He sprang up in his chair and then sank down again, covering his mouth
with his hands, as if he would have intercepted the uttered words. For
who knew who listened at what doors in these days. He whispered
horribly--

'What a folly is this. Who shall move the King? Will reports of his
ambassadors that Cleves, or Charles, or Francis miscall the Queen? You
know they will not, for the King is aware of how these princes batten on
carrion. Will broad sheets of the Lutheran? You know they will not, for
the King is aware of how those coggers come by their tales. Will the
King go abroad among the people any more to hear what they say? You know
he will not. For he is grown too old, and his fireside is made too
sweet----'

He wavered, and he could not work himself up with a longer show of
anger.

'Prithee,' Lascelles said, 'let me bear this letter myself to the
Queen.' His voice was patient and calm.

The Archbishop lay back, impotent, in his chair. His arms were along the
arms of it: he had dropped his book upon the table. His long gown was
draped all over him down to his feet; his head remained motionless; his
eyes did not wink, and gazed at despair; his hands drooped, open and
impotent.

Suddenly he moved one of them a very little.


VII

It was the Queen's habit to go every night, when the business of the day
was done, to pray, along with the Lady Mary, in the small chapel that
was in the roof of the castle. To vespers she went with all the Court to
the big chapel in the courtyard that the King had builded especially for
her. But to this little chapel, that was of Edward IV's time, small and
round-arched, all stone and dark and bare, she went with the Lady Mary
alone. Her ladies and her doorguards they left at the stair foot, on a
level with the sleeping rooms of the poorer sort, but up the little
stairway they climbed by themselves, in darkness, to pray privately for
the conversion of England. For this little place was so small and so
forgotten that it had never been desecrated by Privy Seal's men. It had
had no vessels worth the taking, and only very old vestments and a few
ill-painted pictures on the stone walls that were half hidden in the
dust.

Katharine had found this little place when, on her first day at
Pontefract, she had gone a-wandering over the castle with the King. For
she was curious to know how men had lived in the old times; to see their
rooms and to mark what old things were there still in use. And she had
climbed thus high because she was minded to gaze upon the huge expanse
of country and of moors that from the upper leads of the castle was to
be seen. But this little chapel had seemed to her to be all the more
sacred because it had been undesecrated and forgotten. She thought that
you could not find such another in the King's realm at that time; she
was very assured that not one was to be found in any house of the King's
and hers.

And, making inquiries, she had found that there was also an old priest
there served the chapel, doing it rather secretly for the well-disposed
of the castle's own guards. This old man had fled, at the approach of
the King's many, into the hidden valleys of that countryside, where
still the faith lingered and lingers now. For, so barbarous and remote
those north parts were, that a great many people had never heard that
the King was married again, and fewer still, or none, knew that he and
his wife were well inclined again towards Rome.

This old priest she had had brought to her. And he was so well loved
that along with him came a cluster of weather-battered moorsmen, right
with him into her presence. They kneeled down, being clothed with skins,
and several of them having bows of a great size, to beg her not to harm
this old man, for he was reputed a saint. The Queen could not understand
their jargon but, when their suit was interpreted to her by the Lord
Dacre of the North, and when she had had a little converse with the old
priest, she answered that, so touched was her heart by his simplicity
and gentleness, that she would pray the good King, her lord and master,
to let this priest be made her confessor whilst there they stayed. And
afterwards, if it were convenient, in reward for his faithfulness, he
should be made a prior or a bishop in those parts. So the moorsmen,
blessing her uncouthly for her fairness and kind words, went back with
their furs and bows into their fastnesses. One of them was a great lord
of that countryside, and each day he sent into the castle bucks and moor
fowl, and once or twice a wolf. His name was Sir John Peel, and Sir John
Peel, too, the priest was called.

So the priest served that little altar, and of a night, when the Queen
was minded next day to partake of the host, he heard her confession. On
other nights he left them there alone to say their prayers. It was
always very dark with the little red light burning before the altar and
two tapers that they lit beneath a statue of the Virgin, old and black
and ill-carved by antique hands centuries before. And, in that
blackness, they knelt, invisible almost, and still in the black gowns
that they put on for prayers, beside a low pillar that gloomed out at
their sides and vanished up into the darkness of the roof.

Having done their prayers, sometimes they stayed to converse and to
meditate, for there they could be very private. On the night when the
letter to Rome was redrafted, the Queen prayed much longer than the Lady
Mary, who sat back upon a stool, silently, to await her finishing--for
it seemed that the Queen was more zealous for the converting of those
realms again to the old faith than was ever the Lady Mary. The tapers
burned with a steady, invisible glow in the little side chapel behind
the pillar; the altar gleamed duskily before them, and it was so still
that through the unglassed windows they could hear, from far below in
the black countryside, a tenuous bleating of late-dropped lambs.
Katharine Howard's beads clicked and her dress rustled as she came up
from her knees.

'It rests more with thee than with any other in this land,' her voice
reverberated amongst the distant shadows. A bat that had been drawn in
by the light flittered invisibly near them.

'Even what?' the Lady Mary asked.

'Well you know,' the Queen answered; 'and may the God to whom you have
prayed, that softened the heart of Paul, soften thine in this hour!'

The Lady Mary maintained a long silence. The bat flittered, with a
leathern rustle, invisible, between their very faces. At last Mary
uttered, and her voice was taunting and malicious--

'If you will soften my heart much you must beseech me.'

'Why, I will kneel to you,' the Queen said.

'Aye, you shall,' Mary answered. 'Tell me what you would have of me.'

'Well you know!' Katharine said again.

In the darkness the lady's voice maintained its bitter mirth, as it were
the broken laughter of a soul in anguish.

'I will have you tell me, for it is a shameful tale that will shame you
in the telling.'

The Queen paused to consider of her words.

'First, you shall be reconciled with, and speak pleasantly with, the
King your father and my lord.'

'And is it not a shameful thing you bid me do, to bid me speak pleasant
words to him that slew my mother and called me bastard?'

The Queen answered that she asked it in the name of Christ, His pitiful
sake, and for the good of this suffering land.

'None the less, Queen, thou askest it in the darkness that thy face may
not be seen. And what more askest thou?'

'That when the Duke of Orleans his ambassadors come asking your hand in
marriage, you do show them a pleasant and acquiescent countenance.'

The sacredness of that dark place kept Mary from laughing aloud.

'That, too, you dare not ask in the light of day, Queen,' she said. 'Ask
on!'

'That when the Emperor's ambassadors shall ask for your hand you shall
profess yourself glad indeed.'

'Well, here is more shame, that I should be prayed to feign this
gladness. I think the angels do laugh that hear you. Ask even more.'

Katharine said patiently--

'That, having in reward of these favours, been set again on high, having
honours shown you and a Court appointed round you, you shall gladly play
the part of a princess royal to these realms, never gibing, nor sneering
upon this King your father, nor calling upon the memory of the wronged
Queen your mother.'

'Queen,' the Lady Mary said, 'I had thought that even in the darkness
you had not dared to ask me this.'

'I will ask it you again,' the Queen said, 'in your room where the light
of the candles shines upon my face.'

'Why, you shall,' the Lady Mary said. 'Let us presently go there.'

       *       *       *       *       *

They went down the dark and winding stair. At the foot the procession of
the _coucher de la royne_ awaited them, first being two trumpeters in
black and gold, then four pikemen with lanthorns, then the marshal of
the Queen's household and five or seven lords, then the Queen's ladies,
the Lady Rochford that slept with her, the Lady Cicely Rochford; the
Queen's tiring-women, leaving a space between them for the Queen and the
Lady Mary to walk in, then four young pages in scarlet and with the
Queen's favours in their caps, and then the guard of the Queen's door,
and four pikemen with torches whose light, falling from behind,
illumined the path for the Queen's steps. The trumpeters blew four
shrill blasts and then four with their fists in the trumpet mouths to
muffle them. The brazen cries wound down the dark corridors, fathoms and
fathoms down, to let men know that the Queen had done her prayers and
was going to her bed. This great state was especially devised by the
King to do honour to the new Queen that he loved better than any he had
had. The purpose of it was to let all men know what she did that she
might be the more imitated.

But the Queen bade them guide her to the Lady Mary's door, and in the
doorway she dismissed them all, save only her women and her door guard
and pikemen who awaited her without, some on stools and some against the
wall, ladies and men alike.

The Lady Mary looked into the Queen's face very close and laughed at her
when they were in the fair room and the light of the candles.

'Now you shall say your litany over again,' she sneered; 'I will sit me
down and listen.' And in her chair at the table, with her face averted,
she dug with little stabs into the covering rug the stiletto with which
she was wont to mend her pens.

Standing by her, her face fully lit by the many candles that were upon
the mantel, the Queen, dressed all in black and with the tail of her
hood falling down behind to her feet, went patiently through the list of
her prayers--that the Lady Mary should be reconciled with her father,
that she should show at first favour to the ambassadors that sued for
her hand for the Duke of Orleans, and afterwards give a glad consent to
her marriage with the Prince Philip, the Emperor's son; and then, having
been reinstated as a princess of the royal house of England, she should
bear herself as such, and no more cry out upon the memory of Katharine
of Aragon that had been put away from the King's side.

The Queen spoke these words with a serious patience and a level voice;
but when she came to the end of them she stretched out her hand and her
voice grew full.

'And oh,' she said, her face being set and earnest in entreaty towards
the girl's back, 'if you have any love for the green and fertile land
that gave birth both to you and to me----'

'But to me a bastard,' the Lady Mary said.

'If you would have the dishoused saints to return home to their loved
pastures; if you would have the Mother of God and of us all to rejoice
again in her dowry; if you would see a great multitude of souls, gentle
and simple reconducted again towards Heaven----'

'Well, well!' the Lady Mary said; 'grovel! grovel! I had thought you
would have been shamed thus to crawl upon your belly before me.'

'I would crawl in the dust,' Katharine said. 'I would kiss the mire from
the shoon of the vilest man there is if in that way I might win for the
Church of God----'

'Well, well!' the Lady Mary said.

'You will not let me finish my speech about our Saviour and His mother,'
the Queen said. 'You are afraid I should move you.'

The Lady Mary turned suddenly round upon her in her chair. Her face was
pallid, the skin upon her hollowed temples trembled--

'Queen,' she called out, 'ye blaspheme when ye say that a few paltry
speeches of yours about God and souls will make me fail my mother's
memory and the remembrances of the shames I have had.'

She closed her eyes; she swallowed in her throat and then, starting up,
she overset her chair.

'To save souls!' she said. 'To save a few craven English souls! What are
they to me? Let them burn in the eternal fires! Who among them raised a
hand or struck a blow for my mother or me? Let them go shivering to
hell.'

'Lady,' the Queen said, 'ye know well how many have gone to the stake
over conspiracies for you in this realm.'

'Then they are dead and wear the martyr's crown,' the Lady Mary said.
'Let the rest that never aided me, nor struck blow for my mother, go rot
in their heresies.'

'But the Church of God!' the Queen said. 'The King's Highness has
promised me that upon the hour when you shall swear to do these things
he will send the letter that ye wot of to our Father in Rome.'

The Lady Mary laughed aloud--

'Here is a fine woman,' she said. 'This is ever the woman's part to
gloss over crimes of their men folk. What say you to the death of Lady
Salisbury that died by the block a little since?'

She bent her body and poked her head forward into the Queen's very face.
Katharine stood still before her.

'God knows,' she said. 'I might not stay it. There was much false
witness--or some of it true--against her. I pray that the King my Lord
may atone for it in the peace that shall come.'

'The peace that shall come!' the Lady Mary laughed. 'Oh, God, what
things we women are when a man rules us. The peace that shall come? By
what means shall it have been brought on?'

'I will tell you,' she pursued after a moment. 'All this is cogging and
lying and feigning and chicaning. And you who are so upright will crawl
before me to bring it about. Listen!'

And she closed her eyes the better to calm herself and to collect her
thoughts, for she hated to appear moved.

'I am to feign a friendship to my father. That is a lie that you ask me
to do, for I hate him as he were the devil. And why must I do this? To
feign a smooth face to the world that his pride may not be humbled. I am
to feign to receive the ambassadors of the Duke of Orleans. That is
cogging that you ask of me. For it is not intended that ever I shall wed
with a prince of the French house. But I must lead them on and on till
the Emperor be affrighted lest your King make alliance with the French.
What a foul tale! And you lend it your countenance!'

'I would well----' Katharine began.

'Oh, I know, I know,' Mary snickered. 'Ye would well be chaste but that
it must needs be other with you. It was the thief's wife said that.

'Listen again,' she pursued, 'anon there shall come the Emperor's men,
and there shall be more cogging and chicaning, and honours shall be
given me that I may be bought dear, and petitioning that I should be set
in the succession to make them eager. And then, perhaps, it shall all be
cried off and a Schmalkaldner prince shall send ambassadors----'

'No, before God,' Katharine said.

'Oh, I know my father,' Mary laughed at her. 'You will keep him tied to
Rome if you can. But you could not save the venerable Lady of Salisbury,
nor you shall not save him from trafficking with Schmalkaldners and
Lutherans if it shall serve his monstrous passions and his vanities. And
if he do not this yet he will do other villainies. And you will cosset
him in them--to save his hoggish dignity and buttress up his heavy
pride. All this you stand there and ask.'

'In the name of God I ask it,' Katharine said. 'There is no other way.'

'Well then,' the Lady Mary said, 'you shall ask it many times. I will
have you shamed.'

'Day and night I will ask it,' Katharine said.

The Lady Mary sniffed.

'It is very well,' she said. 'You are a proud and virtuous piece. I will
humble you. It were nothing to my father to crawl on his belly and
humble himself and slaver. He would do it with joy, weeping with a
feigned penitence, making huge promises, foaming at the mouth with oaths
that he repented, calling me his ever loved child----'

She stayed and then added--

'That would cost him nothing. But that you that are his pride, that you
should do it who are in yourself proud--that is somewhat to pay oneself
with for shamed nights and days despised. If you will have this thing
you shall do some praying for it.'

'Even as Jacob served so will I,' Katharine said.

'Seven years!' the Lady Mary mocked at her. 'God forbid that I should
suffer you for so long. I will get me gone with an Orleans, a Kaiserlik,
or a Schmalkaldner leaguer before that. So much comfort I will give
you.' She stopped, lifted her head and said, 'One knocks!'

They said from the door that a gentleman was come from the Archbishop
with a letter to the Queen's Grace.


VIII

There came in the shaven Lascelles and fell upon his knees, holding up
the sheets of the letter he had copied.

The Queen took them from him and laid them upon the great table, being
minded later to read them to the Lady Mary, in proof that the King very
truly would make his submission to Rome, supposing only that his
daughter would make submission to her.

When she turned, Lascelles was still kneeling before the doorway, his
eyes upon the ground.

'Why, I thank you,' she said. 'Gentleman, you may get you gone back to
the Archbishop.'

She was thinking of returning to her duel of patience with the Lady
Mary. But looking upon his blond and agreeable features she stayed for a
minute.

'I know your face,' she said. 'Where have I seen you?'

He looked up at her; his eyes were blue and noticeable, because at times
of emotion he was so wide-lidded that the whites showed round the pupils
of them.

'Certainly I have seen you,' the Queen said.

'It is a royal gift,' he said, 'the memory of faces. I am the
Archbishop's poor gentleman, Lascelles.'

The Queen said--

'Lascelles? Lascelles?' and searched her memory.

'I have a sister, the spit and twin of me,' he answered; 'and her name
is Mary.'

The Queen said--

'Ah! ah!' and then, 'Your sister was my bed-fellow in the maid's room at
my grandmother's.'

He answered gravely--

'Even so!'

And she--

'Stand up and tell me how your sister fares. I had some kindnesses of
her when I was a child. I remember when I had cold feet she would heat a
brick in the fire to lay to them, and such tricks. How fares she? Will
you not stand up?'

'Because she fares very ill I will not stand upon my feet,' he answered.

'Well, you will beg a boon of me,' she said. 'If it is for your sister I
will do what I may with a good conscience.'

He answered, remaining kneeling, that he would fain see his sister. But
she was very poor, having married an esquire called Hall of these parts,
and he was dead, leaving her but one little farm where, too, his old
father and mother dwelt.

'I will pay for her visit here,' she said; 'and she shall have lodging.'

'Safe-conduct she must have too,' he answered; 'for none cometh within
seven miles of this court without your permit and approval.'

'Well, I will send horses of my own, and men to safeguard her,' the
Queen said. 'For, sure, I am beholden to her in many little things. I
think she sewed the first round gown that ever I had.'

He remained kneeling, his eyes still upon the floor.

'We are your very good servants, my sister and I,' he said. 'For she did
marry one--that Esquire Hall--that was done to death upon the gallows
for the old faith's sake. And it was I that wrote the English of most of
this letter to his Holiness, the Archbishop being ill and keeping his
bed.'

'Well, you have served me very well, it is true,' the Queen answered.
'What would you have of me?'

'Your Highness,' he answered, 'I do well love my sister and she me. I
would have her given a place here at the Court. I do not ask a great
one; not one so high as about your person. For I am sure that you are
well attended, and places few there are to spare about you.'

And then, even as he willed it, she bethought her that Margot Poins was
to go to a nunnery. That afternoon she had decided that Mary Trelyon,
who was her second maid, should become her first, and others be moved up
in a rote.

'Why,' she said, 'it may be that I shall find her an occupation. I will
not have it said--nor yet do it--that I have ever recompensed them that
did me favours in the old times, for there are a many that have served
well in the Court that then I was outside of, and those it is fitting
first to reward. Yet, since, as you say you have writ the English of
this letter, that is a very great service to the Republic, and if by
rewarding her I may recompense thee, I will think how I may come to do
it.'

He stood up upon his feet.

'It may be,' he said, 'that my sister is rustic and unsuited. I have not
seen her in many years. Therefore, I will not pray too high a place for
her, but only that she and I may be near, the one to the other, upon
occasions, and that she be housed and fed and clothed.'

'Why, that is very well said,' the Queen answered him. 'I will bid my
men to make inquiries into her demeanour and behaviour in the place
where she bides, and if she is well fitted and modest, she shall have a
place about me. If she be too rustic she shall have another place. Get
you gone, gentleman, and a good-night to ye.'

He bent himself half double, in the then newest courtly way, and still
bent, pivoted through the door. The Queen stayed a little while musing.

'Why,' she said, 'when I was a little child I fared very ill, if now I
think of it; but then it seemed a little thing.'

'Y'had best forget it,' the Lady Mary answered.

'Nay,' the Queen said. 'I have known too well what it was to go
supperless to my bed to forget it. A great shadowy place--all shadows,
where the night airs crept in under the rafters.'

She was thinking of the maids' dormitory at her grandmother's, the old
Duchess.

'I am climbed very high,' she said; 'but to think----'

She was such a poor man's child and held of only the littlest account,
herding with the maids and the servingmen's children. At eight by the
clock her grandmother locked her and all the maids--at times there were
but ten, at times as many as a score--into that great dormitory that
was, in fact, nothing but one long attic or grange beneath the bare
roof. And sometimes the maids told tales or slept soon, and sometimes
their gallants, grooms and others, came climbing through the windows
with rope ladders. They would bring pasties and wines and lights, and
coarsely they would revel.

'Why,' she said, 'I had a gallant myself. He was a musician, but I have
forgot his name. Aye, and then there was another, Dearham, I think; but
I have heard he is since dead. He may have been my cousin; we were so
many in family, I have a little forgot.'

She stood still, searching her memory, with her eyes distant. The Lady
Mary surveyed her face with a curious irony.

'Why, what a simple Queen you are!' she said. 'This is something
rustic.'

The Queen joined her hands together before her, as if she caught at a
clue.

'I do remember me,' she said. 'It was a make of a comedy. This Dearham,
calling himself my cousin, beat this music musician for calling himself
my gallant. Then goes the musicker to my grandam, bidding the old
Duchess rise up again one hour after she had sought her bed. So comes my
grandam and turns the key in the padlock and looketh in over all the
gallimaufrey of lights and pasties and revels.

'Why,' she continued. 'I think I was beaten upon that occasion, but I
could not well tell why. And I was put to sleep in another room. And
later came my father home from some war. And he was angry that I had
consorted so with false minions, and had me away to his own poor house.
And there I had Udal for my Magister and evil fare and many beatings.
But this Mary Lascelles was my bed-fellow.'

'Why, forget it,' the Lady Mary said again.

'Other teachers would bid me remember it that I might remain humble,'
Katharine answered.

'Y'are humble enow and to spare,' the Lady Mary said. 'And these are not
good memories for such a place as this. Y'had best keep this Mary
Lascelles at a great distance.'

Katharine said--

'No; for I have passed my word.'

'Then reward her very fully,' the Lady Mary commended, and the Queen
answered--

'No, for that is against my conscience. What have I to fear now that I
be Queen?'

Mary shrugged her squared shoulders.

'Where is your Latin,' she said, 'with its _nulla dies felix_--call no
day fortunate till it be ended.'

'I will set another text against that,' she said, 'and that from holy
sayings--that _justus ab aestimatione non timebit_.'

'Well,' Mary answered, 'you will make your bed how you will. But I think
you would better have learned of these maids how to steer a course than
of your Magister and the Signor Plutarchus.'

The Queen did not answer her, save by begging her to read the King's
letter to his Holiness.

'And surely,' she said, 'if I had never read in the noble Romans I had
never had the trick of tongue to gar the King do so much of what I
will.'

'Why, God help you,' her step-daughter said. 'Pray you may never come to
repent it.'




PART TWO

THE THREATENED RIFT


I

In these summer days there was much faring abroad in the broad lands to
north and to south of the Pontefract Castle. The sunlight lay across
moors and uplands. The King was come with all his many to Newcastle; but
no Scots King was there to meet him. So he went farther to northwards.
His butchers drove before him herds of cattle that they slew some of
each night: their hooves made a broad and beaten way before the King's
horses. Behind came an army of tent men: cooks, servers, and sutlers.
For, since they went where new castles were few, at times they must
sleep on moorsides, and they had tents all of gold cloth and black, with
gilded tent-poles and cords of silk and silver wire. The lords and
principal men of those parts came out to meet him with green boughs, and
music, and slain deer, and fair wooden kegs filled with milk. But when
he was come near to Berwick there was still no Scots King to meet him,
and it became manifest that the King's nephew would fail that tryst.
Henry, riding among his people, swore a mighty oath that he would take
way even into Edinburgh town and there act as he listed, for he had with
him nigh on seven thousand men of all arms and some cannon which he had
been minded to display for the instruction of his nephew. But he had, in
real truth, little stomach for this feat. For, if he would go into
Scotland armed, he must wait till he got together all the men that the
Council of the North had under arms. These were scattered over the whole
of the Border country, and it must be many days before he had them all
there together. And already the summer was well advanced, and if he
delayed much longer his return, the after progress from Pontefract to
London must draw them to late in the winter. And he was little minded
that either Katharine or his son should bear the winter travel. Indeed,
he sent a messenger back to Pontefract with orders that the Prince
should be sent forthwith with a great guard to Hampton Court, so that he
should reach that place before the nights grew cold.

And, having stayed in camp four days near the Scots border--for he loved
well to live in a tent, since it re-awoke in him the ardour of his youth
and made him think himself not so old a man--he delivered over to the
Earl Marshal forty Scots borderers and cattle thieves that had been
taken that summer. These men he had meant to have handed, pardoned, to
the Scots King when he met him. But the Earl Marshal set up, along the
road into Scotland, from where the stone marks the border, a row of
forty gallows, all high, but some higher than others; for some of the
prisoners were men of condition. And, within sight of a waiting crowd of
Scots that had come down to the boundaries of their land to view the
King of England, Norfolk hanged on these trees the forty men.

And, laughing over their shoulders at this fine harvest of fruit,
gibbering and dangling against the heavens on high, the King and his
host rode back into the Border country. It was pleasant to ride in the
summer weather, and they hunted and rendered justice by the way, and
heard tales of battle that there had been before in the north country.

But there was one man, Thomas Culpepper, in the town of Edinburgh to
whom this return was grievous. He had been in these outlandish parts now
for more than nineteen months. The Scots were odious to him, the town
was odious; he had no stomach for his food, and such clothes as he had
were ragged, for he would wear nothing that had there been woven. He was
even a sort of prisoner. For he had been appointed to wait on the King's
Ambassador to the King of Scots, and the last thing that Throckmorton,
the notable spy, had done before he had left the Court had been to write
to Edinburgh that T. Culpepper, the Queen's cousin, who was a dangerous
man, was to be kept very close and given no leave of absence.

And one thing very much had aided this: for, upon receiving news, or the
rumour of news, that his cousin Katharine Howard--he was her mother's
brother's son--had wedded the King, or had been shown for Queen at
Hampton Court, he had suddenly become seized with such a rage that,
incontinently, he had run his sword through an old fishwife in the
fishmarket where he was who had given him the news, newly come by sea,
thinking that because he was an Englishman this marriage of his King
might gladden him. The fishwife died among her fish, and Culpepper with
his sword fell upon all that were near him in the market, till, his heel
slipping upon a haddock, he fell, and was fallen upon by a great many
men.

He must stay in jail for this till he had compounded with the old
woman's heirs and had paid for a great many cuts and bruises. And Sir
Nicholas Hoby, happening to be in Edinburgh at that time, understood
well what ailed Thomas Culpepper, and that he was mad for love of the
Queen his cousin--for was it not this Culpepper that had brought her to
the court, and, as it was said, had aforetime sold farms to buy her food
and gowns when, her father being a poor man, she was well-nigh starving?
Therefore Sir Nicholas begged alike the Ambassador and the King of Scots
that they would keep this madman clapped up till they were very certain
that the fit was off him. And, what with the charges of blood ransom and
jailing for nine months, Culpepper had no money at all when at last he
was enlarged, but must eat his meals at the Ambassador's table, so that
he could not in any way come away into England till he had written for
more money and had earned a further salary. And that again was a matter
of many months, and later he spent more in drinking and with Scots women
till he persuaded himself that he had forgotten his cousin that was now
a Queen. Moreover, it was made clear to him by those about him that it
was death to leave his post unpermitted.

But, with the coming of the Court up into the north parts, his
impatience grew again, so that he could no longer eat but only drink and
fight. It was rumoured that the Queen was riding with the King, and he
swore a mighty oath that he would beg of her or of the King leave at
last to be gone from that hateful city; and the nearer came the King the
more his ardour grew. So that, when the news came that the King was
turned back, Culpepper could no longer compound it with himself. He had
then a plenty of money, having kept his room for seven days, and the
night before that he had won half a barony at dice from a Scots archer.
But he had no passport into England; therefore, because he was afraid to
ask for one, being certain of a refusal, he blacked his face and hands
with coal and then took refuge on a coble, leaving the port of Leith for
Durham. He had well bribed the master of this ship to take him as one of
his crew. In Durham he stayed neither to wash nor to eat, but, having
bought himself a horse, he rode after the King's progress that was then
two days' journey to the south, and came up with them. He had no wits
left more than to ask of the sutlers at the tail of the host where the
Queen was. They laughed at this apparition upon a haggard horse, and one
of them that was a notable cutpurse took all the gold that he had, only
giving him in exchange the news that the Queen was at Pontefract, from
which place she had never stirred. With a little silver that he had in
another bag he bought himself a provision of food, a store of drink, and
a poor Kern to guide him, running at his saddle-bow.

He saw neither hills nor valleys, neither heather nor ling: he had no
thoughts but only that of finding the Queen his cousin. At times the
tears ran down his begrimed face, at times he waved his sword in the air
and, spurring his horse, he swore great oaths. How he fared, where he
rested, by what roads he went over the hills, that he never knew.
Without a doubt the Kern guided him faithfully.

For the Queen, having news that the King was nearly come within a day's
journey, rode out towards the north to meet him. And as she went along
the road, she saw, upon a hillside not very far away, a man that sat
upon a dead horse, beating it and tugging at its bridle. Beside him
stood a countryman, in a garment of furs and pelts, with rawhide boots.
She had a great many men and ladies riding behind her, and she had come
as far as she was minded to go. So she reined in her horse and sent two
prickers to ask who these men were.

And when she heard that this was a traveller, robbed of all his money
and insensate, and his poor guide who knew nothing of who he might be,
she turned her cavalcade back and commanded that the traveller should be
borne to the castle on a litter of boughs and there attended to and
comforted until again he could take the road. And she made occasion upon
this to comment how ill it was for travellers that the old monasteries
were done away with. For in the old time there were seven monasteries
between there and Durham, wherein poor travellers might lodge. Then, if
a merchant were robbed upon the highways, he could be housed at
convenient stages on his road home, and might afterwards send recompense
to the good fathers or not as he pleased or was able. Now, there was no
harbourage left on all that long road, and, but for the grace of God,
that pitiful traveller might have lain there till the ravens picked out
his eyes.

And some commended the Queen's words and actions, and some few, behind
their hands, laughed at her for her soft heart. And the more Lutheran
sort said that it was God's mercy that the old monasteries were gone;
for they had, they said, been the nests for lowsels, idle wayfarers,
palmers, pilgrims, and the like. And, praise God, since that clearance
fourteen thousand of these had been hanged by the waysides for sturdy
rogues, to the great purging of the land.


II

In the part of Lincolnshire that is a little to the northeastward of
Stamford was a tract of country that had been granted to the monks of St
Radigund's at Dover by William the Conqueror. These monks had drained
this land many centuries before, leaving the superintendence of the work
at first to priors by them appointed, and afterwards, when the dykes,
ditches, and flood walls were all made, to knights and poor gentlemen,
their tenants, who farmed the land and kept up the defences against
inundations, paying scot and lot to a bailiff and water-wardens and
jurats, just as was done on the Romney marshes by the bailiff and jurats
of that level.

And one of these tenants, holding two hundred acres in a simple fee from
St Radigund's for a hundred and fifty years back, had been always a man
of the name of Hall. It was an Edward Hall that Mary Lascelles had
married when she was a maid at the Duchess of Norfolk's. This Edward
Hall was then a squire, a little above the condition of a groom, in the
Duchess's service. His parents dwelled still on the farm which was
called Neot's End, because it was in the angle of the great dyke called
St Neot's and the little sewer where St Radigund's land had its boundary
stone.

But in the troublesome days of the late Privy Seal, Edward Hall had
informed Throckmorton the spy of a conspiracy and rising that was
hatching amongst the Radigund's men a little before the Pilgrimage of
Grace, when all the north parts rose. For the Radigund's men cried out
and murmured amongst themselves that if the Priory was done away with
there would be an end of their easy and comfortable tenancy. Their rents
had been estimated and appointed a great number of years before, when
all goods and the produce of the earth were very low priced. And the
tenants said that if now the King took their lands to himself or gave
them to some great lord, very heavy burdens would be laid upon them and
exacted; whereas in some years under easy priors the monks forgot their
distant territory, and in bad seasons they took no rents at all. And
even under hard and exacting priors the monks could take no more than
their rentals, which were so small. They said, too, that the King and
Thomas Cromwell would make them into heathen Greeks and turn their
children to be Saracens. So these Radigund's men meditated a rising and
conspiracy.

But, because Edward Hall informed Throckmorton of what was agate, a
posse was sent into that country, and most of the men were hanged and
their lands all taken from them. Those that survived from the jailing
betook themselves to the road, and became sturdy beggars, so that many
of them too came to the gallows tree.

Most of the land was granted to the Sieur Throckmorton with the abbey's
buildings and tithe barns. But the Halls' farm and another of near three
hundred acres were granted to Edward Hall. Then it was that Edward Hall
could marry and take his wife, Mary Lascelles, down into Lincolnshire to
Neot's End. But when the Pilgrimage of Grace came, and the great risings
all over Lincolnshire, very early the rioters came to Neot's End, and
they burned the farm and the byres, they killed all the beasts or drove
them off, they trampled down the corn and laid waste the flax fields.
And, between two willow trees along the great dyke, they set a pole, and
from it they hanged Edward Hall over the waters, so that he dried and
was cured like a ham in the smoke from his own stacks.

Then Mary Lascelles' case was a very miserable one; for she had to fend
for the aged father and bedridden mother of Edward Hall, and there were
no beasts left but only a few geese and ducks that the rebels could not
lay their hands on. And the only home that they had was the farmhouse
that was upon Edward Hall's other farm, and that they had let fall
nearly into ruin. And for a long time no men would work for her.

But at last, after the rebellion was pitifully ended, a few hinds came
to her, and she made a shift. And it was better still after Privy Seal
fell, for then came Throckmorton the spy into his lands, and he brought
with him carpenters and masons and joiners to make his house fair, and
some of these men he lent to Mary Hall. But it had been prophesied by a
wise woman in those parts that no land that had been taken from the
monks would prosper. And, because all the jurats, bailiffs, and
water-wardens had been hanged either on the one part or the other and no
more had been appointed, at about that time the sewers began to clog up,
the lands to swamp, murrain and fluke to strike the beasts and the
sheep, and night mists to blight the grain and the fruit blossoms. So
that even Throckmorton had little good of his wealth and lands.

Thus one morning to Mary Hall, who stood before her door feeding her
geese and ducks, there came a little boy running to say that men-at-arms
stood on the other side of the dyke that was very swollen and grey and
broad. And they shouted that they came from the Queen's Highness, and
would have a boat sent to ferry them over.

The colour came into Mary Hall's pale face, for even there she had heard
that her former bedfellow was come to be Queen. And at times even she
had thought to write to the Queen to help her in her misery. But always
she had been afraid, because she thought that the Queen might remember
her only as one that had wronged her childish innocence. For she
remembered that the maids' dormitory at the old Duchess's had been no
cloister of pure nuns. So that, at best, she was afraid, and she sent
her yard-worker and a shepherd a great way round to fetch the larger
boat of two to ferry over the Queen's men. Then she went indoors to redd
up the houseplace and to attire herself.

To the old farmstead, that was made of wood hung over here and there
with tilework with a base of bricks, she had added a houseplace for the
old folk to sit all day. It was built of wattles that had had clay cast
over them, and was whitened on the outside and thatched nearly down to
the ground like any squatter's hut; it had cupboards of wood nearly all
round it, and beneath the cupboards were lockers worn smooth with men
sitting upon them, after the Dutch fashion--for there in Lincolnshire
they had much traffic with the Dutch. There was a great table made of
one slab of a huge oak from near Boston. Here they all ate. And above
the ingle was another slab of oak from the same tree. Her little old
step-mother sat in a stuff chair covered with a sheep-skin; she sat
there night and day, shivering with the shaking palsy. At times she let
out of her an eldritch shriek, very like the call of a hedgehog; but she
never spoke, and she was fed with a spoon by a little misbegotten son of
Edward Hall's. The old step-father sat always opposite her; he had no
use of his legs, and his head was always stiffly screwed round towards
the door as if he were peering, but that was the rheumatism. To atone
for his wife's dumbness, he chattered incessantly whenever anyone was on
that floor; but because he spoke always in Lincolnshire, Mary Hall could
scarce understand him, and indeed she had long ceased to listen. He
spoke of forgotten floods and ploughings, ancient fairs, the boundaries
of fields long since flooded over, of a visit to Boston that King Edward
IV had made, and of how he, for his fair speech and old lineage, had
been chosen of all the Radigund's men to present into the King's hands
three silver horseshoes. Behind his back was a great dresser with railed
shelves, having upon them a little pewter ware and many wooden bowls for
the hinds' feeding. A door on the right side, painted black, went down
into the cellar beneath the old house. Another door, of bars of iron
with huge locks from the old monastery, went into the old house where
slept the maids and the hinds. This was always open by day but locked in
the dark hours. For the hinds were accounted brutish lumps that went
savage at night, like wild beasts, so that, if they spared the master's
throat, which was unlikely, it was certain that they would little spare
the salted meat, the dried fish, the mead, metheglin, and cyder that
their poor cellar afforded. The floor was of stamped clay, wet and
sweating but covered with rushes, so that the place had a mouldering
smell. Behind the heavy door there were huge bolts and crossbars against
robbers: the raftered ceiling was so low that it touched her hair when
she walked across the floor. The windows had no glass but were filled
with a thin reddish sheep-skin like parchment. Before the stairway was a
wicket gate to keep the dogs--of whom there were many, large and fierce,
to protect them alike from robbers and the hinds--to keep the dogs from
going into the upper room.

Each time that Mary Hall came into this home of hers her heart sank
lower; for each day the corner posts gave sideways a little more, the
cupboard bulged, the doors were loth to close or open. And more and more
the fields outside were inundated, the lands grew sour, the sheep would
not eat or died of the fluke.

'And surely,' she would cry out at times, 'God created me for other
guesswork than this!'

At nights she was afraid, and shivered at the thought of the fens and
the black and trackless worlds all round her; and the ravens croaked,
night-hawks screamed, the dog-foxes cried out, and the flames danced
over the swampy grounds. Her mirror was broken on the night that they
hanged her husband: she had never had another but the water in her
buckets, so that she could not tell whether she had much aged or whether
she were still brown-haired and pink-cheeked, and she had forgotten how
to laugh, and was sure that there were crow's-feet about her eyelids.

Her best gown was all damp and mouldy in the attic that was her bower.
She made it meet as best she could, and indeed she had had so little fat
living, sitting at the head of her table with a whip for unruly hinds
and louts before her--so little fat living that she could well get into
her wedding-gown of yellow cramosyn. She smoothed her hair back into her
cord hood that for so long had not come out of its press. She washed her
face in a bucket of water: that and the press and her bed with grey
woollen curtains were all the furnishing her room had. The straw of the
roof caught in her hood when she moved, and she heard her old
father-in-law cackling to the serving-maids through the cracks of the
floor.

When she came down there were approaching, across the field before the
door, six men in scarlet and one in black, having all the six halberds
and swords, and one a little banner, but the man in black had a sword
only. Their horses were tethered in a clump on the farther side of the
dyke. Within the room the serving-maids were throwing knives and pewter
dishes with a great din on to the table slab. They dropped
drinking-horns and the salt-cellar itself all of a heap into the rushes.
The grandfather was cackling from his chair; a hen and its chickens ran
screaming between the maids' feet. Then Lascelles came in at the
doorway.


III

The Sieur Lascelles looked round him in that dim cave.

'Ho!' he said, 'this place stinks,' and he pulled from his pocket a
dried and shrivelled orange-peel purse stuffed with cloves and ginger.
'Ho!' he said to the cornet that was come behind him with the Queen's
horsemen. 'Come not in here. This will breed a plague amongst your men!'
and he added--

'Did I not tell you my sister was ill-housed?'

'Well, I was not prepared against this,' the cornet said. He was a man
with a grizzling beard that had little patience away from the Court,
where he had a bottle that he loved and a crony or two that he played
all day at chequers with, except when the Queen rode out; then he was of
her train. He did not come over the sill, but spoke sharply to his men.

'Ungird not here,' he said. 'We will go farther.' For some of them were
for setting their pikes against the mud wall and casting their swords
and heavy bottle-belts on to the table before the door. The old man in
the armchair began suddenly to prattle to them all--of a horse-thief
that had been dismembered and then hanged in pieces thirty years
before. The cornet looked at him for a moment and said--

'Sir, you are this woman's father-in-law, I do think. Have you aught to
report against her?' He bent in at the door, holding his nose. The old
man babbled of one Pease-Cod Noll that had no history to speak of but a
swivel eye.

'Well,' the grizzled cornet said, 'I shall get little sense here.' He
turned upon Mary Hall.

'Mistress,' he said, 'I have a letter here from the Queen's High Grace,'
and, whilst he fumbled in his belt to find a little wallet that held the
letter, he spoke on: 'But I misdoubt you cannot read. Therefore I shall
tell you the Queen's High Grace commandeth you to come into her
service--or not, as the report of your character shall be. But at any
rate you shall come to the castle.'

Mary Hall could find no words for men of condition, so long she had been
out of the places where such are found. She swallowed in her throat and
held her breast over her heart.

'Where is the village here?' the cornet said, 'or what justice is there
that can write you a character under his seal?'

She made out to say that there was no village, all the neighbourhood
having been hanged. A half-mile from there there was the house of Sir
Nicholas Throckmorton, a justice. From the house-end he might see it, or
he might have a hind to guide him. But he would have no guide; he would
have no man nor maid nor child to go from there to the justice's house.
He set one soldier to guard the back door and one the front, that none
came out nor went beyond the dyke-end.

'Neither shall you go, Sir Lascelles,' he said.

'Well, give me leave with my sister to walk this knoll,' Lascelles said
good-humouredly. 'We shall not corrupt the grass blades to bear false
witness of my sister's chastity.'

'Ay, you may walk upon this mound,' the cornet answered. Having got out
the packet of the Queen's letter, he girded up his belt again.

'You will get you ready to ride with me,' he said to Mary Hall. 'For I
will not be in these marshes after nightfall, but will sleep at
Shrimpton Inn.'

He looked around him and added--

'I will have three of your geese to take with us,' he said. 'Kill me
them presently.'

Lascelles looked after him as he strode away round the house with the
long paces of a stiff horseman.

'Before God,' he laughed, 'that is one way to have information about a
quean. Now are we prisoners whilst he inquires after your character.'

'Oh, alack!' Mary Hall said, and she cast up her hands.

'Well, we are prisoners till he come again,' her brother said
good-humouredly. 'But this is a foul hole. Come out into the sunlight.'

She said--

'If you are with them, they cannot come to take me prisoner.'

He looked her full in the eyes with his own that twinkled inscrutably.
He said very slowly--

'Were your mar-locks and prinking-prankings so very evil at the old
Duchess's?'

She grew white: she shrank away as if he had threatened her with his
fist.

'The Queen's Highness was such a child,' she said. 'She cannot remember.
I have lived very godly since.'

'I will do what I can to save you,' he said. 'Let me hear about it, as,
being prisoners, we may never come off.'

'You!' she cried out. 'You who stole my wedding portion!'

He laughed deviously.

'Why, I have laid it up so well for you that you may wed a knight now if
you do my bidding. I was ever against your wedding Hall.'

'You lie!' she said. 'You gar'd me do it.'

The maids were peeping out of the cellar, whither they had fled.

'Come upon the grass,' he said. 'I will not be heard to say more than
this: that you and I stand and fall together like good sister and goodly
brother.'

Their faces differed only in that hers was afraid and his smiling as he
thought of new lies to tell her. Her face in her hood, pale beneath its
weathering, approached the colour of his that shewed the pink and white
of indoors. She came very slowly near him, for she was dazed. But when
she was almost at the sill he caught her hand and drew it beneath his
elbow.

'Tell me truly,' she said, 'shall I see the Court or a prison?... But
you cannot speak truth, nor ever could when we were tiny twins. God help
me: last Sunday I had the mind to wed my yard-man. I would become such a
liar as thou to come away from here.'

'Sister,' he said, 'this I tell you most truly: that this shall fall out
according as you obey me and inform me'; and, because he was a little
the taller, he leaned over her as they walked away together.

       *       *       *       *       *

On the fourth day from then they were come to the great wood that is to
south and east of the castle of Pontefract. Here Lascelles, who had
ridden much with his sister, forsook her and went ahead of the slow and
heavy horses of that troop of men. The road was broadened out to forty
yards of green turf between the trees, for this was a precaution against
ambushes of robbers. Across the road, after he had ridden alone for an
hour and a half, there was a guard of four men placed. And here, whilst
he searched for his pass to come within the limits of the Court, he
asked what news, and where the King was.

It was told him that the King lay still at the Fivefold Vents, two days'
progress from the castle, and as it chanced that a verderer's pricker
came out of the wood where he had been to mark where the deer lay for
to-morrow's killing, Lascelles bade this man come along with him for a
guide.

'Sir, ye cannot miss the way,' the pricker said surlily. 'I have my deer
to watch.'

'I will have you to guide me,' Lascelles said, 'for I little know these
parts.'

'Well,' the pricker answered him, 'it is true that I have not often seen
you ride a-hawking.'

Whilst they went along the straight road, Lascelles, who unloosened the
woodman's tongue with a great drink of sherry-sack, learned that it was
said that only very unwillingly did the King lie so long at the Fivefold
Vents. For on the morrow there was to be driven by, up there, a great
herd of moor stags and maybe a wolf or two. The King would be home with
his wife, it was reported, but the younger lords had been so importunate
with him to stay and abide this gallant chase and great slaughter that,
they having ridden loyally with him, he had yielded to their prayers and
stayed there--twenty-four hours, it was said.

'Why, you know a great deal,' Lascelles answered.

'We who stand and wait had needs have knowledge,' the woodman said, 'for
we have little else.'

'Aye, 'tis a hard service,' Lascelles said. 'Did you see the Queen's
Highness o' Thursday week borrow a handkerchief of Sir Roger Pelham to
lure her falcon back?'

'That did not I,' the woodman answered, 'for o' Thursday week it was a
frost and the Queen rode not out.'

'Well, it was o' Saturday,' Lascelles said.

'Nor was it yet o' Saturday,' the woodman cried; 'I will swear it. For
o' Saturday the Queen's Highness shot with the bow, and Sir Roger
Pelham, as all men know, fell with his horse on Friday, and lies up
still.'

'Then it was Sir Nicholas Rochford,' Lascelles persisted.

'Sir,' the woodman said, 'you have a very wrong tale, and patent it is
that little you ride a-hunting.'

'Well, I mind my book,' Lascelles said. 'But wherefore?'

'Sir,' the woodman answered, 'it is thus: The Queen when she rides
a-hawking has always behind her her page Toussaint, a little boy. And
this little boy holdeth ever the separate lures for each hawk that the
Queen setteth up. And the falcon or hawk or genette or tiercel having
stooped, the Queen will call upon that eyass for the lure appropriated
to each bird as it chances. And very carefully the Queen's Highness
observeth the laws of the chase, of venery and hawking. For the which I
honour her.'

Lascelles said, 'Well, well!'

'As for the borrowing of a handkerchief,' the woodman pursued, 'that is
a very idle tale. For, let me tell you, a lady might borrow a jewelled
feather or a scarlet pouch or what not that is bright and shall take a
bird's eye--a little mirror upon a cord were a good thing. But a
handkerchief! Why, Sir Bookman, that a lady can only do if she will
signify to all the world: "This knight is my servant and I his
mistress." Those very words it signifieth--and that the better for it
showeth that that lady is minded to let her hawk go, luring the
gentleman to her with that favour of his.'

'Well, well,' Lascelles said, 'I am not so ignorant that I did not know
that. Therefore I asked you, for it seemed a very strange thing.'

'It is a very foolish tale and very evil,' the man answered. 'For this I
will swear: that the Queen's Highness--and I and her honour for
it--observeth very jealously the laws of wood and moorland and chase.'

'So I have heard,' Lascelles said. 'But I see the castle. I will not
take you farther, but will let you go back to the goodly deer.'

'Pray God they be not wandered fore,' the woodman said. 'You could have
found this way without me.'

       *       *       *       *       *

There was but one road into the castle, and that from the south, up a
steep green bank. Up the roadway Lascelles must ride his horse past four
men that bore a litter made of two pikes wattled with green boughs and
covered with a horse-cloth. As Lascelles passed by the very head of it,
the man that lay there sprang off it to his feet, and cried out--

'I be the Queen's cousin and servant. I brought her to the Court.'
Lascelles' horse sprang sideways, a great bound up the bank. He galloped
ten paces ahead before the rider could stay him and turn round. The man,
all rags and with a black face, had fallen into the dust of the road,
and still cried out outrageously. The bearers set down the litter, wiped
their brows, and then, falling all four upon Culpepper, made to carry
him by his legs and arms, for they were weary of laying him upon the
litter from which incessantly he sprang.

But before them upon his horse was Lascelles and impeded their way.
Culpepper drew in and pushed out his legs and arms, so that they all
four staggered, and--

'For God's sake, master,' one of them grunted out, 'stand aside that we
may pass. We have toil enow in bearing him.'

'Why, set the poor gentleman down upon the litter,' Lascelles said, 'and
let us talk a little.'

The men set Culpepper on the horse-cloth, and one of them knelt down to
hold him there.

'If you will lend us your horse to lay him across, we may come more
easily up,' one said. In these days the position and trade of a spy was
so little esteemed--it had been far other with the great informers of
Privy Seal's day--that these men, being of the Queen's guard, would talk
roughly to Lascelles, who was a mere poor gentleman of the Archbishop's
if his other vocation could be neglected. Lascelles sat, his hand upon
his chin.

'You use him very roughly if this be the Queen's cousin,' he said.

The bearer set back his beard and laughed at the sky.

'This is a coif--a poor rag of a merchant,' he cried out. 'If this were
the Queen's cousin should we bear him thus on a clout?'

'I am the Queen's cousin, T. Culpepper,' Culpepper shouted at the sky.
'Who be you that stay me from her?'

'Why, you may hear plainly,' the bearer said. 'He is mazed, doited,
starved, thirsted, and a seer of visions.'

Lascelles pondered, his elbow upon his saddle-peak, his chin caught in
his hand.

'How came ye by him?' he asked.

One with another they told him the tale, how, the Queen being ridden
towards the north parts, at the extreme end of her ride had seen the
man, at a distance, among the heather, flogging a dead horse with a
moorland kern beside him. He was a robbed, parched, fevered, and amazed
traveller. The Queen's Highness, compassionating, had bidden bear him to
the castle and comfort and cure him, not having looked upon his face or
heard his tongue. For, for sure then, she had let him die where he was;
since, no sooner were these four, his new bearers, nearly come up among
the knee-deep heather, than this man had started up, his eyes upon the
Queen's cavalcade and many at a distance. And, with his sword drawn and
screaming, he had cried out that, if that was the Queen, he was the
Queen's cousin. They had tripped up his heels in a bed of ling and
quieted him with a clout on the poll from an axe end.

'But now we have him here,' the eldest said; 'where we shall bestow him
we know not.'

Lascelles had his eyes upon the sick man's face as if it fascinated him,
and, slowly, he got down from his horse. Culpepper then lay very still
with his eyes closed, but his breast heaved as though against tight and
strong ropes that bound him.

'I think I do know this gentleman for one John Robb,' he said. 'Are you
very certain the Queen's Highness did not know his face?'

'Why, she came not ever within a quarter mile of him,' the bearer said.

'Then it is a great charity of the Queen to show mercy to a man she hath
never seen,' Lascelles answered absently. He was closely casting his
eyes over Culpepper. Culpepper lay very still, his begrimed face to the
sky, his hands abroad above his head. But when Lascelles bent over him
it was as if he shuddered, and then he wept.

Lascelles bent down, his hands upon his knees. He was afraid--he was
very afraid. Thomas Culpepper, the Queen's cousin, he had never seen in
his life. But he had heard it reported that he had red hair and beard,
and went always dressed in green with stockings of red. And this man's
hair was red, and his beard, beneath coal grime, was a curly red, and
his coat, beneath a crust of black filth, was Lincoln green and of a
good cloth. And, beneath the black, his stockings were of red silk. He
reflected slowly, whilst the bearers laughed amongst themselves at this
Queen's kinsman in rags and filth.

Lascelles gave them his bottle of sack to drink empty among them, that
he might have the longer time to think.

If this were indeed the Queen's cousin, come unknown to the Queen and
mazed and muddled in himself to Pontefract, what might not Lascelles
make of him? For all the world knew that he loved her with a mad
love--he had sold farms to buy her gowns. It was he that had brought her
to Court, upon an ass, at Greenwich, when her mule--as all men knew--had
stumbled upon the threshold. Once before, it was said, Culpepper had
burst in with his sword drawn upon the King and Kate Howard when they
sat together. And Lascelles trembled with eagerness at the thought of
what use he might not make of this mad and insolent lover of the
Queen's!

But did he dare?

Culpepper had been sent into Scotland to secure him up, away at the
farthest limits of the realm. Then, if he was come back? This grime was
the grime of a sea-coal ship! He knew that men without passports,
outlaws and the like, escaped from Scotland on the Durham ships that
went to Leith with coal. And this man came on the Durham road. Then....

If it were Culpepper he had come unpermitted. He was an outlaw. Dare
Lascelles have trade with--dare he harbour--an outlaw? It would be
unbeknown to the Queen's Highness! He kicked his heels with impatience
to come to a resolution.

He reflected swiftly:

What hitherto he had were: some tales spread abroad about the Queen's
lewd Court--tales in London Town. He had, too, the keeper of the Queen's
door bribed and talked into his service and interest. And he had his
sister....

His sister would, with threatening, tell tales of the Queen before
marriage. And she would find him other maids and grooms, some no doubt
more willing still than Mary Hall. But the keeper of the Queen's door!
And, in addition, the Queen's cousin mad of love for her! What might he
not do with these two?

The prickly sweat came to his forehead. Four horsemen were issuing from
the gate of the castle above. He must come to a decision. His fingers
trembled as if they were a pickpocket's near a purse of gold.

He straightened his back and stood erect.

'Yes,' he said very calmly, 'this is my friend John Robb.'

He added that this man had been in Edinburgh where the Queen's cousin
was. He had had letters from him that told how they were sib and rib.
Thus this fancy had doubtless come into his brain at sight of the Queen
in his madness.

He breathed calmly, having got out these words, for now the doubt was
ended. He would have both the Queen's door-keeper and the Queen's mad
lover.

He bade the bearers set Culpepper upon his horse and, supporting him,
lead him to a room that he would hire of the Archbishop's chamberlain,
near his own in the dark entrails of the castle. And there John Robb
should live at his expenses.

And when the men protested that, though this was very Christian of
Lascelles, yet they would have recompense of the Queen for their toils,
he said that he himself would give them a crown apiece, and they might
get in addition what recompense from the Queen's steward that they
could. He asked them each their names and wrote them down, pretending
that it was that he might send each man his crown piece.

So, when the four horsemen were ridden past, the men hoisted Culpepper
into Lascelles' horse and went all together up into the castle.

But, that night, when Culpepper lay in a stupor, Lascelles went to the
Archbishop's chamberlain and begged that four men, whose names he had
written down, might be chosen to go in the Archbishop's paritor's guard
that went next dawn to Ireland over the sea to bring back tithes from
Dublin. And, next day, he had Culpepper moved to another room; and, in
three days' time, he set it about in the castle that the Queen's cousin
was come from Scotland. By that time most of the liquor had come down
out of Culpepper's brain, but he was still muddled and raved at times.


IV

On that third night the Queen was with the Lady Mary, once more in her
chamber, having come down as before, from the chapel in the roof, to
pray her submit to her father's will. Mary had withstood her with a more
good-humoured irony; and, whilst she was in the midst of her pleadings,
a letter marked most pressing was brought to her. The Queen opened it,
and raised her eyebrows; she looked down at the subscription and
frowned. Then she cast it upon the table.

'Shall there never be an end of old things?' she said.

'Even what old things?' the Lady Mary asked.

The Queen shrugged her shoulders.

'It was not they I came to talk of,' she said. 'I would sleep early, for
the King comes to-morrow and I have much to plead with you.'

'I am weary of your pleadings,' the Lady Mary said. 'You have pleaded
enow. If you would be fresh for the King, be first fresh for me. Start a
new hare.'

The Queen would have gainsaid her.

'I have said you have pleaded enow,' the Lady Mary said. 'And you have
pleaded enow. This no more amuses me. I will wager I guess from whom
your letter was.'

Reluctantly the Queen held her peace; that day she had read in many
ancient books, as well profane as of the Fathers of the Church, and she
had many things to say, and they were near her lips and warm in her
heart. She was much minded to have good news to give the King against
his coming on the morrow; the great good news that should set up in that
realm once more abbeys and chapters and the love of God. But she could
not press these sayings upon the girl, though she pleaded still with her
blue eyes.

'Your letter is from Sir Nicholas Throckmorton,' the Lady Mary said.
'Even let me read it.'

'You did know that that knight was come to Court again?' the Queen said.

'Aye; and that you would not see him, but like a fool did bid him depart
again.'

'You will ever be calling me a fool,' Katharine retorted, 'for giving
ear to my conscience and hating spies and the suborners of false
evidence.'

'Why,' the Lady Mary answered, 'I do call it a folly to refuse to give
ear to the tale of a man who has ridden far and fast, and at the risk of
a penalty to tell it you.'

'Why,' Katharine said, 'if I did forbid his coming to the Court under a
penalty, it was because I would not have him here.'

'Yet he much loved you, and did you some service.'

'He did me a service of lies,' the Queen said, and she was angry. 'I
would not have had him serve me. By his false witness Cromwell was cast
down to make way for me. But I had rather have cast down Cromwell by the
truth which is from God. Or I had rather he had never been cast down.
And that I swear.'

'Well, you are a fool,' the Lady Mary said. 'Let me look upon this
knight's letter.'

'I have not read it,' Katharine said.

'Then will I,' the Lady Mary answered. She made across the room to where
the paper lay upon the table beside the great globe of the earth. She
came back; she turned her round to the Queen; she made her a deep
reverence, so that her black gown spread out stiffly around her, and,
keeping her eyes ironically on Katharine's face, she mounted backward up
to the chair that was beneath the dais.

Katharine put her hand over her heart.

'What mean you?' she said. 'You have never sat there before.'

'That is not true,' the Lady Mary said harshly. 'For this last three
days I have practised how, thus backward, I might climb to this chair
and, thus seemly, sit in it.'

'Even then?' Katharine asked.

'Even then I will be asked no more questions,' her step-daughter
answered. 'This signifieth that I ha' heard enow o' thy voice, Queen.'

Katharine did not dare to speak, for she knew well this girl's tyrannous
and capricious nature. But she was nearly faint with emotion and reached
sideways for the chair at the table; there she sat and gazed at the girl
beneath the dais, her lips parted, her body leaning forward.

Mary spread out the great sheet of Throckmorton's parchment letter upon
her black knees. She bent forward so that the light from the mantel at
the room-end might fall upon the writing.

'It seemeth,' she said ironically,'that one descrieth better at the
humble end of the room than here on high'--and she read whilst the Queen
panted.

At last she raised her eyes and bent them darkly upon the Queen's face.

'Will you do what this knight asks?' she uttered. 'For what he asks
seemeth prudent.'

'A' God's name,' Katharine said, 'let me not now hear of this man.'

'Why,' the Lady Mary answered coolly, 'if I am to be of the Queen's
alliance I must be of the Queen's council and my voice have a weight.'

'But will you? Will you?' Katharine brought out.

'Will you listen to my voice?' Mary said. 'I will not listen to yours.
Hear now what this goodly knight saith. For, if I am to be your
well-wisher, I must call him goodly that so well wishes to you.'

Katharine wrung her hands.

'Ye torture me,' she said.

'Well, I have been tortured,' Mary answered, 'and I have come through it
and live.'

She swallowed in her throat, and thus, with her eyes upon the writing,
brought out the words--

'This knight bids you beware of one Mary Lascelles or Hall, and her
brother, Edward Lascelles, that is of the Archbishop's service.'

'I will not hear what Throckmorton says,' Katharine answered.

'Ay, but you shall,' Mary said, 'or I come down from this chair. I am
not minded to be allied to a Queen that shall be undone. That is not
prudence.'

'God help me!' the Queen said.

'God helps most willingly them that take counsel with themselves and
prudence,' her step-daughter answered; 'and these are the words of the
knight.' She held up the parchment and read out:

'"Therefore I--and you know how much your well-wisher I be--upon my
bended knees do pray you do one of two things: either to put out both
these twain from your courts and presence, or if that you cannot or will
not do, so richly to reward them as that you shall win them to your
service. For a little rotten fruit will spread a great stink; a small
ferment shall pollute a whole well. And these twain, I am advised,
assured, convinced, and have convicted them, will spread such a rotten
fog and mist about your reputation and so turn even your good and
gracious actions to evil seeming that--I swear and vow, O most high
Sovereign, for whom I have risked, as you wot, life, limb and the fell
rack----"'

The Lady Mary looked up at the Queen's face.

'Will you not listen to the pleadings of this man?' she said.

'I will so reward Lascelles and his sister as they have merited.' the
Queen said. 'So much and no more. And not all the pleadings of this
knight shall move me to listen to any witness that he brings against any
man nor maid. So help me, God; for I do know how he served his master
Cromwell.'

'For love of thee!' the Lady Mary said.

The Queen wrung her hands as if she would wash a stain from them.

'God help me!' she said. 'I prayed the King for the life of Privy Seal
that was!'

'He would not hear thee,' the Lady Mary said. She looked long upon the
Queen's face with unmoved and searching eyes.

'It is a new thing to me,' she said,'to hear that you prayed for Privy
Seal's life.'

'Well, I prayed,' Katharine said, 'for I did not think he worked treason
against the King.'

The Lady Mary straightened her back where she sat.

'I think I will not show myself less queenly than you,' she said. 'For I
be of a royal race. But hear this knight.'

And again she read:

'"I have it from the lips of the cornet that came with this Lascelles to
fetch this Mary Lascelles or Hall: I, Throckmorton, a knight, swear that
I heard with mine own ears, how for ever as they rode, this Lascelles
plied this cornet with questions about your high self. As thus: 'Did you
favour any gentleman when you rode out, the cornet being of your guard?'
or, 'Had he heard a tale of one Pelham, a knight, of whom you should
have taken a kerchief?'--and this, that and the other, for ever, till
the cornet spewed at the hearing of him. Now, gracious and most high
Sovereign Consort, what is it that this man seeketh?"'

Again the Lady Mary paused to look at the Queen.

'Why,' Katharine said, 'so mine enemies will talk of me. I had been the
fool you styled me if I had not awaited it. But----' and she drew up
her body highly. 'My life is such and such shall be that none such arrow
shall pierce my corslet.'

'God help you,' the Lady Mary said. 'What has your life to do with it,
if you will not cut out the tongues of slanderers?'

She laughed mirthlessly, and added--

'Now this knight concludes--and it is as if he writhed his hands and
knelt and whined and kissed your feet--he concludeth with a prayer that
you will let him come again to the Court. "For," says he, "I will clean
your vessels, serve you at table, scrape the sweat off your horse, or do
all that is vilest. But suffer me to come that I may know and report to
you what there is whispered in these jail places."'

Katharine Howard said--

'I had rather borrow Pelham's kerchief.'

The Lady Mary dropped the parchment on to the floor at her side.

'I rede you do as this knight wills,' she said; 'for, amidst the little
sticklers of spies that are here, this knight, this emperor of spies,
moves as a pillow of shadow. He stalks amongst them as, in the night,
the dread and awful lion of Numidia. He shall be to you more a corslet
of proof than all the virtue that your life may borrow from the precepts
of Diana. We, that are royal and sit in high places, have our feet in
such mire.'

'Now before God on His throne,' Katharine Howard said, 'if you be of
royal blood, I will teach you a lesson. For hear me----'

'No, I will hear thee no more,' the Lady Mary answered; 'I will teach
thee. For thou art not the only one in this land to be proud. I will
show thee such a pride as shall make thee blush.'

She stood up and came slowly down the steps of the dais. She squared
back her shoulders and folded her hands before her; she erected her
head, and her eyes were dark. When she was come to where the Queen sat,
she kneeled down.

'I acknowledge thee to be my mother,' she said, 'that have married the
King, my father. I pray you that you do take me by the hand and set me
in that seat that you did raise for me. I pray you that you do style me
a princess, royal again in this land. And I pray you to lesson me and
teach me that which you would have me do as well as that which it befits
me to do. Take me by the hand.'

'Nay, it is my lord that should do this,' the Queen whispered. Before
that she had started to her feet; her face had a flush of joy; her eyes
shone with her transparent faith. She brushed back a strand of hair from
her brow; she folded her hands on her breasts and raised her glance
upwards to seek the dwelling-place of Almighty God and the saints in
their glorious array.

'It is my lord should do this!' she said again.

'Speak no more words,' the Lady Mary said. 'I have heard enow of thy
pleadings. You have heard me say that.'

She continued upon her knees.

'It is thou or none!' she said. 'It is thou or none shall witness this
my humiliation and my pride. Take me by the hand. My patience will not
last for ever.'

The Queen set her hand between the girl's. She raised her to her feet.

When the Lady Mary stood high and shadowy, in black, with her white face
beneath that dais, she looked down upon the Queen.

'Now, hear me!' she said. 'In this I have been humble to you; but I have
been most proud. For I have in my veins a greater blood than thine or
the King's, my father's. For, inasmuch as Tudor blood is above Howard's,
so my mother's, that was royal of Spain, is above Tudor's. And this it
is to be royal----

'I have had you, a Queen, kneel before me. It is royal to receive
petitions--more royal still it is to grant them. And in this, further, I
am more proud. For, hearing you say that you had prayed the King for
Cromwell's life, I thought, this is a virtue-mad Queen. She shall most
likely fall!--Prudence biddeth me not to be of her party. But shall I,
who am royal, be prudent? Shall I, who am of the house of Aragon, be
more afraid than thou, a Howard?

'I tell you--No! If you will be undone for the sake of virtue, blindly,
and like a fool, unknowing the consequences, I, Mary of Aragon and
England, will make alliance with thee, knowing that the alliance is
dangerous. And, since it is more valiant to go to a doom knowingly than
blindfold, so I do show myself more valiant than thou. For well I
know--since I saw my mother die--that virtue is a thing profitless, and
impracticable in this world. But you--you think it shall set up temporal
monarchies and rule peoples. Therefore, what you do you do for profit. I
do it for none.'

'Now, by the Mother of God,' Katharine Howard said, 'this is the
gladdest day of my life.'

'Pray you,' Mary said, 'get you gone from my sight and hearing, for I
endure ill the appearance and sound of joy. And, Queen, again I bid you
beware of calling any day fortunate till its close. For, before midnight
you may be ruined utterly. I have known more Queens than thou. Thou art
the fifth I have known.'

She added--

'For the rest, what you will I will do: submission to the King and such
cozening as he will ask of me. God keep you, for you stand in need of
it.'

       *       *       *       *       *

At supper that night there sat all such knights and lordlings as ate at
the King's expense in the great hall that was in the midmost of the
castle, looking on to the courtyard. There were not such a many of them,
maybe forty; from the keeper of the Queen's records, the Lord d'Espahn,
who sat at the table head, down to the lowest of all, the young Poins,
who sat far below the salt-cellar. The greater lords of the Queen's
household, like the Lord Dacre of the North, did not eat at this common
table, or only when the Queen herself there ate, which she did at midday
when there was a feast.

Nevertheless, this eating was conducted with gravity, the Lord d'Espahn
keeping a vigilant eye down the table, which was laid with a fair white
cloth. It cost a man a fine to be drunk before the white meats were
eaten--unless, indeed, a man came drunk to the board--and the
salt-cellar of state stood a-midmost of the cloth. It was of silver from
Holland, and represented a globe of the earth, opened at the top, and
supported by knights' bannerets.

The hall was all of stone, with creamy walls, only marked above the iron
torch-holds with brandons of soot. A scutcheon of the King's arms was
above one end-door, with the Queen's above the other. Over each window
were notable deers' antlers, and over each side-door, that let in the
servers from the courtyard, was a scutcheon with the arms of a king
deceased that had visited the castle. The roof was all gilded and
coloured, and showed knaves' faces leering and winking, so that when a
man was in drink, and looked upwards with his head on his chair back,
these appeared to have life. The hall was called the Dacre Hall, because
the Lords Dacre of the North had built it to be an offering to various
kings that died whilst it was a-building.

Such knights as had pages had them behind their chairs, holding napkins
and ready to fill the horns with wine or beer. From kitchens or from
buttery-hatches the servers ran continually across the courtyard and
across the tiled floor, for the table was set back against the farther
wall, all the knights being on the wall side, since there were not so
many, and thus it was easier to come to them. There was a great clatter
with the knives going and the feet on the tiles, but little conversing,
for in that keen air eating was the principal thing, and in five minutes
a boar or a sheep's head would be stripped till the skull alone was
shown.

It was in this manner that Thomas Culpepper came into the hall when they
were all well set to, without having many eyes upon him. But the Lord
d'Espahn was aware, suddenly, of one that stood beside him.

'Gentleman, will you have a seat?' he said. 'Tell me your name and
estate, that I may appoint you one.' He was a grave lord, with a pointed
nose, dented at the end, a grey, square beard, and fresh colours on his
face. He wore his bonnet because he was the highest there, and because
there were currents of air at the openings of the doors.

Thomas Culpepper's face was of a chalky white. Somewhere Lascelles had
found for him a suit of green and red stockings. His red beard framed
his face, but his lips were pursed.

'Your seat I will have,' he said, 'for I am the Queen's cousin, T.
Culpepper.'

The Lord d'Espahn looked down upon his platter.

'You may not have my seat,' he said. 'But you shall have this seat at my
right hand that is empty. It is a very honourable seat, but mine you may
not have for it is the Queen's own that I hold, being her vicar here.'

'Your seat I will have,' Culpepper said.

The Lord d'Espahn was set upon keeping order and quiet in that place
more than on any other thing. He looked again down upon his platter, and
then he was aware of a voice that whispered in his ear--

'A' God's name, humour him, for he is very mad,' and, turning his eyes a
little, he saw that it was Lascelles above his chair head.

'Your seat I will have,' Culpepper said again. 'And this fellow, that
tells me he is the most potent lord there is here, shall serve behind my
chair.'

The Lord d'Espahn took up his knife and fork in one hand and his manchet
of bread in the other. He made as if to bow to Culpepper, who pushed him
by the shoulder away. Some lordlings saw this and wondered, but in the
noise none heard their words. At the foot of the table the squires said
that the Lord d'Espahn must have been found out in a treason. Only the
young Poins said that that was the Queen's cousin, come from Scotland,
withouten leave, for love of the Queen through whom he was sick in the
wits. This news ran through the castle by means of servers, cooks,
undercooks, scullions, maids, tiring-maids, and maids of honour, more
swiftly than it progressed up the table where men had the meats to keep
their minds upon.

Culpepper sat, flung back in his chair, his eyes, lacklustre and open,
upon the cloth where his hands sprawled out. He said few words--only
when the Lord d'Espahn's server carved boar's head for him, he took one
piece in his mouth and then threw the plate full into the server's face.
This caused great offence amongst the serving-men, for this server was a
portly fellow that had served the Lord d'Espahn many years, and had a
face like a ram's, so grave it was. Having drunk a little of his wine,
Culpepper turned out the rest upon the cloth; his salt he brushed off
his plate with his sleeve. That was remembered for long afterwards by
many men and women. And it was as if he could not swallow, for he put
down neither meat nor drink, but sat, deadly and pale, so that some said
that he was rabid. Once he turned his head to ask the Lord d'Espahn--

'If a quean prove forsworn, and turn to a Queen, what should her true
love do?'

The Lord d'Espahn never made any answer, but wagged his beard from side
to side, and Culpepper repeated his question three separate times.
Finally, the platters were raised, and the Lord d'Espahn went away to
the sound of trumpets. Many of the lords there came peering round
Culpepper to see what sport he might yield. Lascelles went away,
following the scarlet figure of the young Poins, working his hand into
the boy's arm and whispering to him. The servers and disservers went to
their work of clearing the board.

But Culpepper sat there without word or motion, so that none of those
lords had any sport out of him. Some of them went away to roast pippins
at the Widow Amnot's, some to speak with the alchemist that, on the
roof, watched the stars. So one and the other left the room; the torches
burned out, most of them, and, save for two lords of the Archbishop's
following, who said boldly that they would watch and care for this man,
because he was the Queen's cousin, and there might be advancement in it,
Culpepper was left alone.

His sword he had not with him, but he had his dagger, and, just as he
drew it, appearing about to stab himself in the heart, there ran across
the hall the black figure of Lascelles, so that he appeared to have been
watching through a window, and the two lords threw themselves upon
Culpepper's arm. And all three began to tell him that there was better
work for him to do than that of stabbing himself; and Lascelles brought
with him a flagon of _aqua vitae_ from Holland, and poured out a little
for Culpepper to drink. And one of the lords said that his room was up
in the gallery near the Queen's, and, if Culpepper would go with him
there, they might make good cheer. Only he must be silent in the going
thither; afterwards it would not so much matter, for they would be past
the guards. So, linking their arms in his, they wound up and across the
courtyard, where the torchmen that waited on their company of diners to
light them, blessed God that the sitting was over, and beat their
torches out against the ground.

In the shadow of the high walls, and some in the moonlight, the
serving-men held their parliament. They discoursed of these things, and
some said that it was a great pity tha

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