← catalogue

The Fifth Queen: And How She Came to Court

by Ford Madox Ford · English · Gutenberg #30188 · 430,743 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Fifth Queen: And How She Came to Court
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Fifth Queen: And How She Came to Court

Author: Ford Madox Ford


        
Release date: October 6, 2009 [eBook #30188]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30188

Credits: Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Suzanne Shell, and the
        Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FIFTH QUEEN: AND HOW SHE CAME TO COURT ***

                         Transcriber's Note.

      This is the First book of the trilogy, The Fifth Queen, by
      Ford Madox Ford. The other books are The Privy Seal and
      The Fifth Queen Crowned.



                                 THE

                             FIFTH QUEEN


                     _and how she came to court_

       *       *       *       *       *




                      CONTENTS

PART ONE

The Coming,                 11

PART TWO

The House of Eyes,          71

PART THREE

The King Moves,            179

       *       *       *       *       *




PART ONE

THE COMING

I


Magister Nicholas Udal, the Lady Mary's pedagogue, was very hungry and
very cold. He stood undecided in the mud of a lane in the Austin
Friars. The quickset hedges on either side were only waist high and
did not shelter him. The little houses all round him of white daub
with grey corner beams had been part of the old friars' stables and
offices. All that neighbourhood was a maze of dwellings and gardens,
with the hedges dry, the orchard trees bare with frost, the arbours
wintry and deserted. This congregation of small cottages was like a
patch of common that squatters had taken; the great house of the Lord
Privy Seal, who had pulled down the monastery to make room for it, was
a central mass. Its gilded vanes were in the shape of men at arms, and
tore the ragged clouds with the banners on their lances. Nicholas Udal
looked at the roof and cursed the porter of it.

'He could have given me a cup of hypocras,' he said, and muttered, as
a man to whom Latin is more familiar than the vulgar tongue, a
hexameter about 'pocula plena.'

He had reached London before nine in one of the King's barges that
came from Greenwich to take musicians back that night at four. He had
breakfasted with the Lady Mary's women at six off warm small beer and
fresh meat, but it was eleven already, and he had spent all his money
upon good letters.

He muttered: '_Pauper sum, pateor, fateor, quod Di dant fero_,' but it
did not warm him.

The magister had been put in the Lady Mary's household by the Lord
Privy Seal, and he had a piece of news as to the Lady's means of
treasonable correspondence with the Emperor her uncle. He had imagined
that the news--which would hurt no one because it was imaginary--might
be worth some crowns to him. But the Lord Privy Seal and all his
secretaries had gone to Greenwich before it was light, and there was
nothing there for the magister.

'You might have known as much, a learned man,' the porter had snarled
at him. 'Isn't the new Queen at Rochester? Would our lord bide here?
Didn't your magistership pass his barge on the river?'

'Nay, it was still dark,' the magister answered. The porter sniffed
and slammed to the grating in the wicket. Being of the Old Faith he
hated those Lutherans--or those men of the New Learning--that it
pleased his master to employ.

Udal hesitated before the closed door; he hesitated in the lane beyond
the corner of the house. Perhaps there would be no barges at the
steps--no King's barges. The men of the Earl Marshal's service, being
Papists, would pelt him with mud if he asked for a passage; even the
Protestant lords' men would jeer at him if he had no pence for
them--and he had none. He would do best to wait for the musicians'
barge at four.

Then he must eat and shelter--and find a wench. He stood in the mud:
long, thin, brown in his doctor's gown of fur, with his black flapped
cap that buttoned well under his chin and let out his brown, lean,
shaven and humorous face like a woodpecker's peering out of a hole in
a tree.

The volumes beneath his arms were heavy: they poked out his gown on
each side, and the bitter cold pinched his finger ends as if they had
been caught in a door. The weight of the books pleased him for there
was much good letters there--a book of Tully's epistles for himself
and two volumes of Plautus' comedies for the Lady Mary. But what among
his day's purchases pleased him most was a medallion in silver he had
bought in Cheapside. It showed on the one side Cupid in his sleep and
on the other Venus fondling a peacock. It was a heart-compelling gift
to any wench or lady of degree.

He puckered up his deprecatory and comical lips as he imagined that
that medal would purchase him the right to sigh dolorously in front of
whatever stomacher it finally adorned. He could pour out odes in the
learned tongue, for the space of a week, a day, or an afternoon
according to the rank, the kindness or the patience of the recipient.

Something invisible and harsh touched his cheek. It might have been
snow or hail. He turned his thin cunning face to the clouds, and they
threatened a downpour. They raced along, like scarves of vapour, so
low that you might have thought of touching them if you stood on
tiptoe.

If he went to Westminster Hall to find Judge Combers, he would get his
belly well filled, but his back wet to the bone. At the corner of the
next hedge was the wicket gate of old Master Grocer Badge. There the
magister would find at least a piece of bread, some salt and warmed
mead. Judge Combers' wife was easy and bounteous: but old John Badge's
daughter was a fair and dainty morsel.

He licked his full lips, leered to one side, muttered, 'A curse on all
lords' porters,' and made for John Badge's wicket. Badge's dwelling
had been part of the monastery's curing house. It had some good rooms
and two low storeys--but the tall garden wall of the Lord Privy Seal
had been built against its side windows. It had been done without word
or warning. Suddenly workmen had pulled down old Badge's pigeon house,
set it up twenty yards further in, marked out a line and set up this
high wall that pressed so hard against the house end that there was
barely room for a man to squeeze between. The wall ran for half a
mile, and had swallowed the ground of twenty small householders. But
never a word of complaint had reached the ears of the Privy Seal other
than through his spies. It was, however, old Badge's ceaseless grief.
He had talked of it without interlude for two years.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Badges' room--their houseplace--was fair sized, but so low ceiled
that it appeared long, dark and mysterious in the winter light There
was a tall press of dark wood with a face minutely carved and fretted
to represent the portal of Amiens Cathedral, and a long black table,
littered with large sheets of printed matter in heavy black type, that
diffused into the cold room a faint smell of ink. The old man sat
quavering in the ingle. The light of the low fire glimmered on his
silver hair, on his black square cap two generations old; and, in his
old eyes that had seen three generations of changes, it twinkled
starrily as if they were spinning round. In the cock forward of his
shaven chin, and the settling down of his head into his shoulders,
there was a suggestion of sinister and sardonic malice. He was
muttering at his son:

'A stiff neck that knows no bending, God shall break one day.'

His son, square, dark, with his sleeves rolled up showing immense
muscles developed at the levers of his presses, bent his black beard
and frowned his heavy brows above his printings.

'Doubtless God shall break His engine when its work is done,' he
muttered.

'You call Privy Seal God's engine?' the old man quavered ironically.
'Thomas Cromwell is a brewer's drunken son. I know them that have seen
him in the stocks at Putney not thirty years ago.'

The printer set two proofs side by side on the table and frowningly
compared them, shaking his head.

'He is the flail of the monks,' he said abstractedly. 'They would have
burned me and thousands more but for him.'

'Aye, and he has put up a fine wall where my arbour stood.'

The printer took a chalk from behind his ear and made a score down his
page.

'A wall,' he muttered; 'my Lord Privy Seal hath set up a wall against
priestcraft all round these kingdoms----'

'Therefore you would have him welcome to forty feet of my garden?'
the old man drawled. 'He pulls down other folks' crucifixes and sets
up his own walls with other folks' blood for mortar.'

The printer said darkly:

'Papists' blood.'

The old man pulled his nose and glanced down.

'We were all Papists in my day. I have made the pilgrimage to
Compostella, for all you mock me now.'

He turned his head to see Magister Udal entering the door furtively
and with eyes that leered round the room. Both the Badges fell into
sudden, and as if guilty, silence.

'_Domus parva, quies magna_,' the magister tittered, and swept across
the rushes in his furs to rub his hands before the fire. 'When shall I
teach your Margot the learned tongues?'

'When the sun sets in the East,' the printer muttered.

Udal sent to him over his shoulder, as words of consolation:

'The new Queen is come to Rochester.'

The printer heaved an immense sigh:

'God be praised!'

Udal snickered, still over his shoulder:

'You see, neither have the men of the Old Faith put venom in her food,
nor have the Emperor's galleys taken her between Calais and Sandwich.'

'Yet she comes ten days late.'

'Oh moody and suspicious artificer. _Afflavit deus!_ The wind hath
blown dead against Calais shore this ten days.'

The old man pulled his long white nose:

'In my day we could pray to St Leonard for a fair wind.'

He was too old to care whether the magister reported his words to
Thomas Cromwell, the terrible Lord Privy Seal, and too sardonic to
keep silence for long about the inferiority of his present day.

'When shall I teach the fair Margot the learned tongue?' Udal asked
again.

'When wolves teach conies how to play on pipes,' the master printer
snarled from his chest.

'The Lord Privy Seal never stood higher,' Udal said. 'The match with
the Cleves Lady hath gained him great honour.'

'God cement it!' the printer said fervently.

The old man pulled at his nose and gazed at nothing.

'I am tired with this chatter of the woman from Cleves,' he croaked,
like a malevolent raven. 'An Anne she is, and a Lutheran. I mind we
had an Anne and a Lutheran for Queen before. She played the whore and
lost her head.'

'Where's your niece Margot?' Udal asked the printer.

'You owe me nine crowns,' the old man said.

'I will give your Margot ten crowns' worth of lessons in Latin.'

'Hold and enough,' the printer muttered heavily. 'Tags from Seneca in
a wench's mouth are rose garlands on a cow's horns.'

'The best ladies in the land learn of me,' Udal answered.

'Aye, but my niece shall keep her virtue intact.'

'You defame the Lady Mary of England,' Udal snickered.

The old man said vigorously, 'God save her highness, and send us her
for Queen. Have you begged her to get me redress in the matter of that
wall?'

'Why, Providence was kind to her when it sent her me for her master,'
Udal said. 'I never had apter pupil saving only one.'

'Shall Thomas Cromwell redress?' the old man asked.

'If good learning can make a good queen, trust me to render her one,'
Udal avoided the question. 'But alas! being declared bastard--for very
excellent reasons--she may not----'

'You owe me nine crowns,' old Badge threatened him. He picked
irritably at the fur on his gown and gazed at the carved leg of the
table. 'If you will not induce Privy Seal to pull down his wall I will
set the tipstaves on you.'

Master Udal laughed. 'I will give thy daughter ten crowns' worth of
lessons in the learned tongues.'

'You will receive another broken crown, magister,' the younger John
said moodily. 'Have you not scars enow by your wenching?'

Udal pushed back the furs at his collar. 'Master Printer John Badge
the Younger,' he flickered, 'if you break my crown I will break your
chapel. You shall never have license to print another libel. Give me
your niece in wedlock?'

The old man said querulously, 'Here's a wantipole without ten crowns
would marry a wench with three beds and seven hundred florins!'

Udal laughed. 'Call her to bring me meat and drink,' he said. 'Large
words ill fill an empty stomach.'

The younger John went negligently to the great Flemish press. He
opened the face and revealed on its dark shelves a patty of cold fish
and a black jack. With heavy movements and a solemn face he moved
these things, with a knife and napkins, on to the broad black table.

The old man pulled his nose again and grinned.

'Margot's in her chamber,' he chuckled. 'As you came up the wicket way
I sent my John to turn the key upon her. It's there at his girdle.' It
clinked indeed among rules, T-squares and callipers at each footstep
of the heavy printer between press and table.

Magister Udal stretched his thin hands towards it. 'I will give you
the printing of the Lady Mary's commentary of Plautus for that key,'
he said.

The printer murmured 'Eat,' and set a great pewter salt-cellar, carved
like a Flemish pikeman, a foot high, heavily upon the cloth.

Udal had the appetite of a wolf. He pulled off his cap the better to
let his jaws work.

'Here's a letter from the Doctor Wernken of Augsburg,' he said. 'You
may see how the Lutherans fare in Germany.'

The printer took the letter and read it, standing, frowning and heavy.
Magister Udal ate; the old man fingered his furs and, leaning far back
in his mended chair, gazed at nothing.

'Let me have the maid in wedlock,' Udal grunted between two bites.
'Better women have looked favourably upon me. I had a pupil in the
North----'

'She was a Howard, and the Howards are all whores,' the printer said,
over the letter. 'Your Doctor Wernken writes like an Anabaptist.'

'They are even as the rest of womenkind,' Udal laughed, 'but far
quicker with their learning.'

A boy rising twenty, in a grey cloak that showed only his bright red
stockings and broad-toed red shoes, rattled the back door and slammed
it to. He pulled off his cap and shook it.

'It snows,' he said buoyantly, and then knelt before his grandfather.
The old man touched his grandson's cropped fair head.

'_Benedicite_, grandson Hal Poins,' he muttered, and relapsed into his
gaze at the fire.

The young man bent his knee to his uncle and bowed low to the
magister. Being about the court, he had for Udal's learning and office
a reverence that neither the printer nor his grandfather could share.
He unfastened his grey cloak at the neck and cast it into a corner
after his hat. His figure flashed out, lithe, young, a blaze of
scarlet with a crowned rose embroidered upon a chest rendered enormous
by much wadding. He was serving his apprenticeship as ensign in the
gentlemen of the King's guard, and because his dead father had been
beloved by the Duke of Norfolk it was said that his full ensigncy was
near. He begged his grandfather's leave to come near the fire, and
stood with his legs apart.

'The new Queen's come to Rochester,' he said; 'I am here with the
guard to take the heralds to Greenwich Palace.'

The printer looked at him unfavourably from the corner of his dark and
gloomy eyes.

'You come to suck up more money,' he said moodily. 'There is none in
this house.'

'As Mary is my protectress!' the boy laughed, 'there is!' He stuck his
hands into his breeches pocket and pulled out a big fistful of crowns
that he had won over-night at dice, and a long and thin Flemish chain
of gold. 'I have enow to last me till the thaw,' he said. 'I came to
beg my grandfather's blessing on the first day of the year.'

'Dicing ... Wenching ...' the printer muttered.

'If I ask thee for no blessing,' the young man said, 'it's because,
uncle, thou'rt a Lutheran that can convey none. Where's Margot? This
chain's for her.'

'The fair Margot's locked in her chamber,' Udal snickered.

'Why-som-ever then? Hath she stolen a tart?'

'Nay, but I would have her in wedlock.'

'Thou--you--your magistership?' the boy laughed incredulously. The
printer caught in his tone his courtier's contempt for the artificer's
home, and his courtier's reverence for the magister's learning.

'Keep thy sister from beneath this fox's tooth,' he said. 'The likes
of him mate not with the like of us.'

'The like of thee, uncle?' the boy retorted, with a good-humoured
insolence. 'My father was a gentleman.'

'Who married my sister for her small money, and died leaving thee and
thy sister to starve.'

'Nay, I starve not,' the boy said. 'And Margot's a plump faggot.'

'A very Cynthia among willow-trees,' the magister said.

'Why, your magistership shall have her,' the boy said. 'I am her
lawful guardian.'

His grandfather laughed as men laugh to see a colt kick up its heels
in a meadow.

But the printer waved his bare arm furiously at the magister.

'Get thee gone out of this decent house.' His eyes rolled, and his
clenched fist was as large as a ham. 'Here you come not a-wenching.'

'Moody man,' the magister said, 'your brains are addled with
suspicions.'

The young man swelled his scarlet breast still more consequentially.
'This is no house of thine, uncle, but my grandfar's.'

'Young ass's colt!' the printer fulminated. 'Would'st have thy sister
undone by this Latin mouth-mincer?'

Udal grinned at him, and licked his lips. The printer snarled:

'Know'st thou not, young ass, that this man was thrown out of his
mastership at Eton for his foul living?'

Udal was suddenly on his feet with the long pasty-knife held back
among the furs of his gown.

'Ignoble ...' he began, but he lost his words in his trembling rage.
The printer snatched at his long measuring stick.

'Down knife,' he grunted, for his fury, too, made his throat catch.

'Have a care, nunkey,' the young man laughed at the pair of them.
'They teach knife-thrusts in his Italian books.'

'I will have thy printer's licence revoked, ignoble man,' the magister
said, grinning hideously. 'Thou, a Lutheran, to turn upon me who was
undone by Papist lies! They said I lived foully; they said I stole the
silver cellars....'

He turned upon the old man, stretching out the hand that held the
knife in a passionate gesture:

'Your Papists said that,' he appealed. 'But not a one of them believed
it, though you dub me Lutheran.... See you, do I not govern now the
chief Papist of you all? Would that be if they believed me filthy in
my living. Have I not governed in the house of the Howards, the lord
of it being absent? Would that have been if they had believed it of
me?... And then....' He turned again upon the printer. 'For the sake
of your men ... for the sake of the New Learning, which God prosper, I
was cast down.'

The printer grunted surlily:

''Tis known no wench is safe from thy amorousness. How many husbands
have broken thy pate?'

The magister threw the knife on to the table and rose, frostily
rustling in his gown.

'I shall bring thee down, ignoble man,' he said.

'If thou hast the power to do that,' the old man asked suddenly,
'wherefore canst not get me redress in the matter of my wall?'

The magister answered angrily:

'Privy Seal hath swallowed thy land: he shall not disgorge. But this
man he shall swallow. Know you not that you may make a jack swallow,
but no man shall make him give back; I, nor thou, nor the devil's
self?'

'Oh, a God's name bring not Flail Crummock into this household,' the
young man cut in. 'Would you undo us all?'

'Ignoble, ignoble, to twit a man with that Eton villainy,' the
magister answered.

'A God's name bring not Privy Seal into the quarrel,' the young man
repeated. 'None of us of the Old Faith believe that lie.'

'Keep thy tongue off Cromwell's name, young fool,' his grandfather
said. 'We know not what walls have ears.'

The young man went pale: the printer himself went pale, remembering
suddenly that the magister was a spy of Cromwell's; all three of them
had their eyes upon Udal; only the old man, with his carelessness of
his great age, grinned with curiosity as if the matter were a play
that did not concern him. The magister was making for the door with
the books beneath his arm and a torturing smile round his lips. The
boy, with a deep oath, ran out after him, a scarlet flash in the
darkening room.

Old Badge pulled at his nose and grinned maliciously at the fire
beside him.

'That is thy deliverer: that is thy flail of the monks,' he croaked at
his son. The printer gazed moodily at the fire.

'Nay, it is but one of his servants,' he answered mechanically.

'And such servants go up and down this realm of England and ride us
with iron bridles.' The old man laughed dryly and bitterly. 'His
servant? See how we are held--we dare not shut our doors upon him
since he is Cromwell's servant, yet if he come in he shall ruin us,
take our money that we dare not refuse, deflower our virgins.... What
then is left to us between this setter up of walls and his servants?'

The printer, fingering the T-square in his belt, said, slowly, 'I
think this man loves too well that books should be printed in the
Latin tongue to ruin any printer of them upon a private quarrel. Else
I would get me across the seas.'

'He loves any wench much better,' the old man answered maliciously.
'Hearken!'

Through the wall there came a scuffling sound, thumps, and the noise
of things falling. The wall there touched on the one that Cromwell had
set up, so that there was bare room for a man to creep between.

'Body of God,' the printer said, 'is he eavesdropping now?'

'Nay, this is courtship,' the old man answered. His head leaned
forward with a birdlike intentness; he listened with one hand held out
as if to still any sound in the room. They heard footsteps from the
floor above, a laugh and voices. 'Now Margot talks to him from her
window.'

The printer had a motion of convulsed rage:

'I will break that knave's spine across my knee.'

'Nay, let be,' the old man said. 'I command thee, who am thy father,
to let the matter be.'

'Would you have him ...' the printer began with a snarl.

'I would not have my house burnt down because this Cromwell's spy's
body should be found upon our hands.... To-morrow the wench shall be
sent to her aunt Wardle in Bedfordshire--aye, and she shall be soundly
beaten to teach her to love virtue.'

The young man opened the house door and came in, shivering in his
scarlet because he had run out without his cloak.

'A pretty medley you have made,' he said to his uncle, 'but I have
calmed him. Wherefore should not this magister marry Margot?' He made
again for the fire. 'Are we to smell always of ink?' He looked
disdainfully at his uncle's proofs, and began to speak with a boy's
seriousness and ingenuous confidence. They would tell his uncle at
Court that if good print be the body of a book, good learning is even
the soul of it. At Court he would learn that it is thought this
magister shall rise high. There good learning is much prized. Their
Lord the King had been seen to talk and laugh with this magister. 'For
our gracious lord loveth good letters. He is in such matters skilled
beyond all others in the realm.'

The old man listened to his grandson, smiling maliciously and with
pride; the printer shrugged his shoulders bitterly; the muffled sounds
and the voices through the house-end continued, and the boy talked on,
laying down the law valiantly and with a cheerful voice.... He would
gain advancement at Court through his sister's marriage with the
magister.

Going back to the palace at Greenwich along with the magister, in the
barge that was taking the heralds to the King's marriage with Anne of
Cleves, the young Poins was importunate with Udal to advance him in
his knowledge of the Italian tongue. He thought that in the books of
the Sieur Macchiavelli upon armies and the bearing of arms there were
unfolded many secret passes with the rapier and the stiletto. But Udal
laughed good-humouredly. He had, he said, little skill in the Italian
tongue, for it was but a bastard of classical begettings. And for
instruction in the books of the Sieur Macchiavelli, let young Poins go
to a man who had studied them word by word--to the Lord Privy Seal,
Thomas Cromwell.

They both dropped their voices at the name, and, another gentleman of
the guard beginning to talk of rich men who had fallen low by the
block, the stake, and gaming, Udal mentioned that that day he had seen
a strange sight.

'There was in the Northern parts, where I governed in his absence the
Lord Edmund Howard's children, a certain Thomas Culpepper. Main rich
he was, with many pastures and many thousands of sheep. A cousin of my
lady's he was, for ever roaring about the house. A swaggerer he was,
that down there went more richly dressed than earls here.'

That day Udal had seen this Culpepper alone, without any servants,
dressed in uncostly green, and dragging at the bridle of a mule, on
which sat a doxy dressed in ancient and ragged furs. So did men fall
in these difficult days.

'How came he in London town?' the Norroy King-at-Arms asked.

'Nay, I stayed not to ask him,' Udal answered. He sighed a little.
'Yet then, in my Lord Edmund's house I had my best pupil of all, and
fain was I to have news of her.... But he was a braggart; I liked him
not, and would not stay to speak with him.'

'I'll warrant you had dealings with some wench he favoured, and you
feared a drubbing, magister,' Norroy accused him.

The long cabin of the state barge was ablaze with the scarlet and
black of the guards, and with the gold and scarlet of the heralds.
Magister Udal sighed.

'You had good, easy days in Lord Edmund's house?' Norroy asked.


II

The Lord Privy Seal was beneath a tall cresset in the stern of his
barge, looking across the night and the winter river. They were rowing
from Rochester to the palace at Greenwich, where the Court was
awaiting Anne of Cleves. The flare of the King's barge a quarter of a
mile ahead moved in a glowing patch of lights and their reflections,
as though it were some portent creeping in a blaze across the sky.
There was nothing else visible in the world but the darkness and a
dusky tinge of red where a wave caught the flare of light further out.

He stood invisible behind the lights of his cabin; and the thud of
oars, the voluble noises of the water, and the crackling of the
cresset overhead had, too, the quality of impersonal and supernatural
phenomena. His voice said harshly:

'It is very cold; bring me my greatest cloak.'

Throckmorton, the one of Cromwell's seven hundred spies who at that
time was his most constant companion, was hidden in the deep shadow
beside the cabin-door. His bearded and heavy form obscured the light
for a moment as he hurried to fetch the cloak. But merely to be the
Lord Cromwell's gown-bearer was in those days a thing you would run
after; and an old man in a flat cap--the Chancellor of the
Augmentations, who had been listening intently at the door--was
already hurrying out with a heavy cloak of fur. Cromwell let it be
hung about his shoulders.

The Chancellor shivered and said, 'We should be within a quarter-hour
of Greenwich.'

'Get you in if you be cold,' Cromwell answered. But the Chancellor was
quivering with the desire to talk to his master. He had seen the heavy
King rush stumbling down the stairs of the Cleves woman's lodging at
Rochester, and the sight had been for him terrible and prodigious. It
was Cromwell who had made him Chancellor of the Augmentations--who had
even invented the office to deal with the land taken from the
Abbeys--and he was so much the creature of this Lord Privy Seal that
it seemed as if the earth was shivering all the while for the fall of
this minister, and that he himself was within an inch of the ruin,
execration, and death that would come for them all once Cromwell were
down.

Throckmorton, a giant man with an immense golden beard, issued again
from the cabin, and the Privy Seal's voice came leisurely and cold:

'What said Lord Cassilis of this? And the fellow Knighton? I saw them
at the stairs.'

Privy Seal had such eyes that it was delicate work lying to him. But
Throckmorton brought out heavily:

'Cassilis, that this Lady Anne should never be Queen.'

'Aye, but she must,' the Chancellor bleated. He had been bribed by two
of the Cleves lords to get them lands in Kent when the Queen should
be in power. Cromwell's silence made Throckmorton continue against his
will:

'Knighton, that the Queen's breath should turn the King's stomach
against you! Dr. Miley, the Lutheran preacher, that by this evening's
work the Kingdom of God on earth was set trembling, the King having
the nature of a lecher....'

He tried to hold back. After all, it came into his mind, this man was
nearly down. Any one of the men upon whom he now spied might come to
be his master very soon. But Cromwell's voice said, 'And then?' and he
made up his mind to implicate none but the Scotch lord, who was at
once harmless and unliable to be harmed.

'Lord Cassilis,' he brought out, 'said again that your lordship's head
should fall ere January goes out.'

He seemed to feel the great man's sneer through the darkness, and was
coldly angry with himself for having invented no better lie. For if
this invisible and threatening phantom that hid itself among these
shadows outlasted January he might yet outlast some of them. He
wondered which of Cromwell's innumerable ill-wishers it might best
serve him to serve. But for the Chancellor of the Augmentations the
heavy silence of calamity, like the waiting at a bedside for death to
come, seemed to fall upon them. He imagined that the Privy Seal hid
himself in that shadow in order to conceal a pale face and shaking
knees. But Cromwell's voice came harsh and peremptory to Throckmorton:

'What men be abroad at this night season? Ask my helmsmen.'

Two torchlights, far away to the right, wavered shaking trails in the
water that, thus revealed, shewed agitated and chopped by small waves.
The Chancellor's white beard shook with the cold, with fear of
Cromwell, and with curiosity to know how the man looked and felt. He
ventured at last in a faint and bleating voice:

What did his lordship think of this matter? Surely the King should
espouse this lady and the Lutheran cause.

Cromwell answered with inscrutable arrogance:

'Why, your cause is valuable. But this is a great matter. Get you in
if you be cold.'

Throckmorton appeared noiselessly at his elbow, whilst the Chancellor
was mumbling: 'God forbid I should be called Lutheran.'

The torches, Throckmorton said, were those of fishers who caught eels
off the mud with worms upon needles.

'Such night work favours treason,' Cromwell muttered. 'Write in my
notebook, "The Council to prohibit the fishing of eels by night."'

'What a nose he hath for treasons,' the Chancellor whispered to
Throckmorton as they rustled together into the cabin. Throckmorton's
face was gloomy and pensive. The Privy Seal had chosen none of his
informations for noting down. Assuredly the time was near for him to
find another master.

The barge swung round a reach, and the lights of the palace of
Greenwich were like a flight of dim or bright squares in mid air, far
ahead. The King's barge was already illuminating the crenellated arch
at the top of the river steps. A burst of torches flared out to meet
it and disappeared. The Court was then at Greenwich, nearly all the
lords, the bishops and the several councils lying in the Palace to
await the coming of Anne of Cleves on the morrow. She had reached
Rochester that evening after some days' delay at Calais, for the
winter seas. The King had gone that night to inspect her, having been
given to believe that she was soberly fair and of bountiful charms.
His courteous visit had been in secret and in disguise; therefore
there were no torchmen in the gardens, and darkness lay between the
river steps and the great central gateway. But a bonfire, erected by
the guards to warm themselves in the courtyard, as it leapt up or
subsided before the wind, shewed that tall tower pale and high or
vanishing into the night with its carved stone garlands, its stone men
at arms, its lions, roses, leopards, and naked boys. The living houses
ran away from the foot of the tower, till the wings, coming towards
the river, vanished continually into shadows. They were low by
comparison, gabled with false fronts over each set of rooms and, in
the glass of their small-paned windows, the reflection of the fire
gleamed capriciously from unexpected shadows. This palace was called
Placentia by the King because it was pleasant to live in.

Cromwell mounted the steps with a slow gait and an arrogant figure.
Under the river arch eight of his gentlemen waited upon him, and in
the garden the torches of his men shewed black yew trees cut like
peacocks, clipped hedges like walls with archways above the broad and
tiled paths, and fountains that gleamed and trickled as if secretly in
the heavy and bitter night.

A corridor ran from under the great tower right round the palace. It
was full of hurrying people and of grooms who stood in knots beside
doorways. They flattened themselves against the walls before the Lord
Privy Seal's procession of gentlemen in black with white staves, and
the ceilings seemed to send down moulded and gilded stalactites to
touch his head. The beefeater before the door of the Lady Mary's
lodgings spat upon the ground when he had passed. His hard glance
travelled along the wall like a palpable ray, about the height of a
man's head. It passed over faces and slipped back to the gilded
wainscoting; tiring-women upon whom it fell shivered, and the serving
men felt their bowels turn within them. His round face was hard and
alert, and his lips moved ceaselessly one upon another. All those
serving people wondered to see his head so high, for already it was
known that the King had turned sick at the sight of his bedfellow that
should be. And indeed the palace was only awake at that late hour
because of that astounding news, dignitaries lingering in each other's
quarters to talk of it, whilst in the passages their waiting men
supplied gross commentaries.

He entered his door. In the ante-room two men in his livery removed
his outer furs deftly so as not to hinder his walk. Before the fire of
his large room a fair boy knelt to pull off his jewelled gloves, and
Hanson, one of his secretaries, unclasped from his girdle the corded
bag that held the Privy Seal. He laid it on a high stand between two
tall candles of wax upon the long table.

The boy went with the gloves and Hanson disappeared silently behind
the dark tapestry in the further corner. Cromwell was meditating above
a fragment of flaming wood that the fire had spat out far into the
tiled fore-hearth. He pressed it with his foot gently towards the
blaze of wood in the chimney.

His plump hands were behind his back, his long upper lip ceaselessly
caressed its fellow, moving as one line of a snake's coil glides above
another. The January wind crept round the shadowy room behind the
tapestry, and as it quivered stags seemed to leap over bushes, hounds
to spring in pursuit, and a crowned Diana to move her arms, taking an
arrow from a quiver behind her shoulder. The tall candles guarded the
bag of the Privy Seal, they fluttered and made the gilded heads on the
rafters have sudden grins on their faces that represented kings with
flowered crowns, queens with their hair combed back on to pillows, and
pages with scolloped hats. Cromwell stepped to an aumbry, where there
were a glass of wine, a manchet of bread, and a little salt. He began
to eat, dipping pieces of bread into the golden salt-cellar. The face
of a queen looked down just above his head with her eyes wide open as
if she were amazed, thrusting her head from a cloud.

'Why, I have outlived three queens,' he said to himself, and his round
face resignedly despised his world and his times. He had forgotten
what anxiety felt like because the world was so peopled with
blunderers and timid fools full of hatred.

The marriage with Cleves was the deathblow to the power of the Empire.
With the Protestant Princes armed behind his back, the imbecile called
Charles would never dare to set his troops on board ship in Flanders
to aid the continual rebellions, conspiracies and risings in England.
He had done it too often, and he had repented as often, at the last
moment. It was true that the marriage had thrown Charles into the arms
of France: the French King and he were at that very minute supping
together in Paris. They would be making treaties that were meant to be
broken, and their statesmen were hatching plots that any scullion
would reveal. Francis and his men were too mean, too silly, too
despicable, and too easily bribed to hold to any union or to carry out
any policy....

He sipped his wine slowly. It was a little cold, so he set it down
beside the fire. He wanted to go to bed, but the Archbishop was coming
to hear how Henry had received his Queen, and to pour out his fears.
Fears! Because the King had been sick at sight of the Cleves woman! He
had this King very absolutely in his power; the grey, failing but
vindictive and obstinate mass known as Henry was afraid of his
contempt, afraid really of a shrug of the shoulder or a small sniff.

With the generosity of his wine and the warmth of his fire, his
thoughts went many years ahead. He imagined the King either married to
or having repudiated the Lady from Cleves, and then dead. Edward, the
Seymour child, was his creature, and would be king or dead. Cleves
children would be his creations too. Or if he married the Lady Mary he
would still be next the throne.

His mind rested luxuriously and tranquilly on that prospect. He would
be perpetually beside the throne, there would be no distraction to
maintain a foothold. He would be there by right; he would be able to
give all his mind to the directing of this world that he despised for
its baseness, its jealousies, its insane brawls, its aimless
selfishness, and its blind furies. Then there should be no more war,
as there should be no more revolts. There should be no more
jealousies; for kingcraft, solid, austere, practical and inspired,
should keep down all the peoples, all the priests, and all the nobles
of the world. 'Ah,' he thought, 'there would be in France no power to
shelter traitors like Brancetor.' His eyes became softer in the
contemplation of this Utopia, and he moved his upper lip more slowly.

Now the Archbishop was there. Pale, worn with fears and agitation, he
came to say that the King had called to him Bishop Gardiner and the
more Catholic lords of the Council. Cranmer's own spy Lascelles had
made this new report.

His white sleeves made a shivering sound, the fur that fell round his
neck was displaced on one shoulder. His large mouth was open with
panic, his lips trembled, and his good-natured and narrow eyes seemed
about to drop tears.

'Your Grace knoweth well what passed to-night at Rochester,' Cromwell
said. He clapped his hands for a man to snuff the candles. 'You have
the common report.'

'Ah, is it even true?' The Archbishop felt a last hope die, and he
choked in his throat. Cromwell watched the man at the candles and
said:

'Your Grace hath a new riding mule. I pray it may cease to affright
you.'

'Why?' he said, as the man went. 'The King's Highness went even to
Rochester, disguised, since it was his good pleasure, as a French
lord. You have seen the lady. So his Highness was seized with a make
of palsy. He cursed to his barge. I know no more than that.'

'And now they sit in the council.'

'It seems,' Cromwell said.

'Ah, dear God have mercy.'

The Archbishop's thin hands wavered before the crucifix on his breast,
and made the sign of the cross.

The very faces of his enemies seemed visible to him. He saw Gardiner,
of Winchester, with his snake's eyes under the flat cap, and the Duke
of Norfolk with his eyes malignant in a long, yellow face. He had a
vision of the King, a huge red lump beneath the high dais at the head
of the Council table, his face suffused with blood, his cheeks
quivering.

He wrung his hands and wondered if at Smithfield the Lutherans would
pray for him, or curse him for having been lukewarm.

'Why, goodman gossip,' Cromwell said compassionately, 'we have been
nearer death ten times.' He uttered his inmost thoughts out of
pity:--All this he had awaited. The King's Highness by the report of
his painters, his ambassadors, his spies--they were all in the pay of
Cromwell--had awaited a lady of modest demeanour, a coy habit, and a
great and placid fairness. 'I had warned the Almains at Rochester to
attire her against our coming. But she slobbered with ecstasy and
slipped sideways, aiming at a courtesy. Therefore the King was hot
with new anger and disgust.'

'You and I are undone.' Cranmer was passive with despair.

'He is very seldom an hour of one mind,' Cromwell answered. 'Unless in
that hour those you wot of shall work upon him, it will go well with
us.'

'They shall. They shall.'

'I wait to see.'

There seemed to Cranmer something horrible in this impassivity. He
wished his leader to go to the King, and he had a frantic moment of
imagining himself running to a great distance, hiding his head in
darkness.

Cromwell's lips went up in scorn. 'Do you imagine the yellow duke
speaking his mind to the King? He is too craven.'

A heavy silence fell between them. The fire rustled, the candles again
needed snuffing.

'Best get to bed,' Cromwell said at last.

'Could I sleep?' Cranmer had the irritation of extreme fear. His
master seemed to him to have no bowels. But the waiting told at last
upon Cromwell himself.

'I could sleep an you would let me,' he said sharply. 'I tell you the
King shall be another man in the morning.'

'Ay, but now. But now....' He imagined the pens in that distant room
creaking over the paper with their committals, and he wished to
upbraid Cromwell. It was his policy of combining with Lutherans that
had brought them to this.

Heavy thundering came on the outer door.

'The King comes,' Cromwell cried victoriously. He went swiftly from
the room. The Archbishop closed his eyes and suddenly remembered the
time when he had been a child.

Privy Seal had an angry and contemptuous frown at his return. 'They
have kept him from me.' He threw a little scroll on to the table. Its
white silence made Cranmer shudder; it seemed to have something of the
heavy threatening of the King's self.

'We may go to bed,' Cromwell said. 'They have devised their shift.'

'You say?'

'They have temporised, they have delayed. I know them.' He quoted
contemptuously from the letter: 'We would have you send presently to
ask of the Almain Lords with the Lady Anne the papers concerning her
pre-contract to the Duke of Lorraine.'

Cranmer was upon the point of going away in the joy of this respite.
But his desire to talk delayed him, and he began to talk about the
canon law and pre-contracts of marriage. It was a very valid cause of
nullity all the doctors held.

'Think you I have not made very certain the pre-contract was
nullified? This is no shift,' and Cromwell spoke wearily and angrily.
'Goodman Archbishop, dry your tears. To-night the King is hot with
disgust, but I tell you he will not cast away his kingdom upon whether
her teeth be white or yellow. This is no woman's man.'

Cranmer came nearer the fire and stretched out his lean hands.

'He hath dandled of late with the Lady Cassilis.'

'Well, he hath been pleasant with her.'

Cranmer urged: 'A full-blown man towards his failing years is more
prone to women than before.'

'Then he may go a-wenching.' He began to speak with a weary passion.
To cast away the Lady Anne now were a madness. It would be to stand
without a friend before all nations armed to their downfall. This King
would do no jot to lose a patch upon his sovereignty.

Cranmer sought to speak.

'His Highness is always hot o'nights,' Cromwell kept on. 'It is in his
nature so to be. But by morning the German princes shall make him
afraid again and the Lutherans of this goodly realm. Those mad swine
our friends!'

'He will burn seven of them on to-morrow sennight,' Cranmer said.

'Nay! I shall enlarge them on Wednesday.'

Cranmer shivered. 'They grow very insolent. I am afraid.'

Cromwell answered with a studied nonchalance:

'My bones tell me it shall be an eastward wind. It shall not rain on
the new Queen's bridals.' He drank up his warm wine and brushed the
crumbs from the furs round his neck.

'You are a very certain man,' the Archbishop said.

Going along the now dark corridors he was afraid that some ruffling
boy might spring upon him from the shadows. Norfolk, as the Earl
Marshal, had placed his lodgings in a very distant part of the palace
to give him long journeys that, telling upon his asthma, made him
arrive breathless and convulsed at the King's rooms when he was sent
for.


III

The shadow of the King kept hands from throats in the palace, but
grooms were breaking each others' heads in the stables till towards
morning. They fought about whether it were lawful to eat fish on a
Friday, and just after daybreak a gentleman's oarsman from
Sittingbourne had all his teeth to swallow for asserting that the
sacrament should be administered in the two kinds. The horses were
watered by ostlers who hummed the opprobrious song about Privy Seal,
called 'Crummock.'

In the hillocks and lawns of the park round the palace Lutherans
waited all night to welcome their Queen. They lit small fires on the
turf and, standing round them, sang triumphal hymns. A Princess was
coming from Cleves, a Lutheran; the day-spring from on high was
visiting them; soon, soon now, the axe and the flail should be given
into their hands.

In the dawn their boats could be seen pulling like water-beetles all
across the pallid river from the Essex shores. They clustered in grey
masses round the common steps.

A German horse merchant from the City pulled a putrid cat out of the
river mud and held it over his head. He shrieked: 'Hic hocus pocus,'
parodying the '_Hoc corpus meum_' of the Mass. The soldiers of the
Duke of Norfolk were unable to reach him for the crowd. There were but
ten of them, under a captain, set to guard the little postern in the
side wall of the garden. Towards ten o'clock the Mayor of London came
by land. He had with him all his brotherhood with their horses and
armed guards in a long train. The mayor and his aldermen had entrance
into the palace, but the Duke had given orders that men and horses
must bide in the park. There were forty battles of them, each of one
hundred men.

The great body came in sight, white, shining even in the grey among
the trees along the long garden wall.

'Body of God,' the captain said, 'there shall be broken crowns.' He
bade his men hold their pikes across, and paced unconcernedly up and
down before the door.

The City men came down in a solid body, and at sight of the red
crosses on their white shoulders the Lutherans set up a cry of 'Rome,
Rome.' Their stones began to fly at once, and, because they pressed so
closely in, the City bowmen had no room to string their bows. The
citizens struck out with their silvered staves, but the heavy armour
under their white surcoats hindered them. The Lutherans cried out
that the Kingdom of God was come on earth because a Queen from Cleves
was at hand.

An alderman's charger was struck by a stone. It broke loose and
crashed all foaming and furious through a tripe stall on which a
preacher was perched to hold forth. The riot began then. All in among
the winter trees the City men in their white and silver were fighting
with the Lutherans in their grey frieze. The citizens' hearts were
enraged because their famous Dominican preacher had been seized by the
Archbishop and spirited into Kent. They cried to each other to avenge
Dr. Latter on these lowsels.

Men struck out at all and sundry. A woman, covered to the face in a
fur hood and riding a grey mule, was hit on the arm by the
quarterstaff of a Protestant butcher from the Crays, because she wore
a crucifix round her neck. She covered her face and shrieked
lamentably. A man in green at the mule's head, on the other side,
sprang like a wild cat under the beast's neck. His face blazed white,
his teeth shone like a dog's, he screamed and struck his dagger
through the butcher's throat.

His motions were those of a mad beast; he stabbed the mule in the
shoulder to force it to plunge in the direction of the soldiers who
kept the little gate, before in the throng the butcher had reached the
ground. The woman was flogging at the mule with her reins. 'I have
killed 'un,' he shrieked.

He dived under the pikes of the soldiers and gripped the captain by
both shoulders. 'We be the cousins of the Duke of Norfolk,' he cried.
His square red beard trembled beneath his pallid face, and suddenly he
became speechless with rage.

Hands were already pulling the woman from her saddle, but the guards
held their pikes transversely against the faces of the nearest,
crushing in noses and sending sudden streaks of blood from jaws. The
uproar was like a hurricane and the woman's body, on high, swayed into
the little space that the soldiers held. She was crying with the pain
of her arm that she held with her other hand. Her cousin ran to her
and mumbled words of inarticulate tenderness, ending again in 'I have
killed 'un.'

The mob raged round them, but the soldiers stood firm enough. A
continual cry of 'Harlot, harlot,' went up. Stones were scarce on the
sward of the park, but a case bottle aimed at the woman alighted on
the ear of one of the guards. It burst in a foam of red, and he fell
beneath the belly of the mule with a dry grunt and the clang of iron.
The soldiers put down the points of their pikes and cleared more
ground. Men lay wallowing there when they retreated.

The man shouted at the captain: 'Can you clear us a way to yon
stairs?' and, at a shake of the head, 'Then let us enter this gate.'

The captain shook his head again.

'I am Thomas Culpepper. This is the Duke's niece, Kat,' the other
shouted.

The captain observed him stoically from over his thick and black
beard.

'The King's Highness is within this garden,' he said. He spoke to the
porter through the little niche at the wicket. A company of the City
soldiers, their wands beating like flails, cleared for a moment the
space in front of the guards.

Culpepper with the hilt of his sword was hammering at the studded
door. The captain caught him by the shoulder and sent him to stagger
against the mule's side. He was gasping and snatched at his hilt. His
bonnet had fallen off, his yellow hair was like a shock of wheat, and
his red beard flecked with foam that spattered from his mouth.

'I have killed one. I will kill thee,' he stuttered at the captain.
The woman caught him round the neck.

'Oh, be still,' she shrieked. 'Still. Calm. Y' kill me.' She clutched
him so closely that he was half throttled. The captain paced stoically
up and down before the gate.

'Madam,' he said, 'I have sent one hastening to his duke-ship.
Doubtless you shall enter.' He bent to pull the soldier from beneath
the mule's belly by one foot, and picking up his pike, leaned it
against the wall.

With his face pressed against his cousin's furred side, Thomas
Culpepper swore he would cut the man's throat.

'Aye, come back again,' he answered. 'They call me Sir Christopher
Aske.'

The red jerkins of the King's own guards came in a heavy mass round
the end of the wall amid shrieks and curses. Their pike-staves rose
rhythmically and fell with dull thuds; with their clumsy gloved hands
they caught at throats, and they threw dazed men and women into the
space that they had cleared before the wall. There armourers were
ready, with handcuffs and leg-chains hanging like necklaces round
their shoulders.

The door in the wall opened silently, the porter called through his
niche: 'These have leave to enter.' Thomas Culpepper shouted
'Coneycatcher' at the captain before he pulled the mule's head round.
The beast hung back on his hand, and he struck it on its closed eyes
in a tumult of violent rage. It stumbled heavily on the threshold, and
then darted forward so swiftly that he did not hear the direction of
the porter that they should turn only at the third alley.

Tall and frosted trees reached up into the dim skies, the deserted
avenues were shrouded in mist, and there was a dead and dripping
silence.

'Seven brawls y' have brought me into,' the woman's voice came from
under her hood, 'this weary journey.'

He ran to her stirrup and clutched her glove to his forehead. 'Y'ave
calmed me,' he said. 'Your voice shall ever calm me.'

She uttered a hopeless 'Oh, aye,' and then, 'Where be we?'

They had entered a desolate region of clipped yews, frozen fountains,
and high, trimmed hedges. He dragged the mule after him. Suddenly
there opened up a very broad path, tiled for a width of many feet. On
the left it ran to a high tower's gaping arch. On the right it sloped
nobly into a grey stretch of water.

'The river is even there,' he muttered. 'We shall find the stairs.'

'I would find my uncle in this palace,' she said. But he muttered,
'Nay, nay,' and began to beat the mule with his fist. It swerved, and
she became sick and dizzy with the sudden jar on her hurt arm. She
swayed in her saddle and, in a sudden flaw of wind, her old and torn
furs ruffled jaggedly all over her body.


IV

The King was pacing the long terrace on the river front. He had been
there since very early, for he could not sleep at nights, and had no
appetite for his breakfast. When a gentleman from the postern gate
asked permission for Culpepper and the mule to pass to the private
stairs, he said heavily:

'Let me not be elbowed by cripples,' and then: 'A' God's name let them
come,' changing his mind, as was his custom after a bad night, before
his first words had left his thick, heavy lips. His great brow was
furrowed, his enormous bulk of scarlet, with the great double dog-rose
embroidered across the broad chest, limped a little over his right
knee and the foot dragged. His eyes were bloodshot and heavy, his head
hung forward as though he were about to charge the world with his
forehead. From time to time his eyebrows lifted painfully, and he
swallowed with an effort as if he were choking.

Behind him the three hundred windows of the palace Placentia seemed to
peer at him like eyes, curious, hostile, lugubrious or amazed. He tore
violently at his collar and muttered: 'I stifle.' His great hand was
swollen by its glove, sewn with pearls, to an immense size.

The gentleman told him of the riot in the park, and narrated the
blasphemy of the German Lutheran, who had held up a putrid dog in
parody of the Holy Mass.

The face of the King grew suffused with purple blood.

'Let those men be cut down,' he said, and he conceived a sorting out
of all heresy, a cleansing of his land with blood. He looked swiftly
at the low sky as if a thunderbolt or a leprosy must descend upon his
head. He commanded swiftly, 'Let them be taken in scores. Bid the
gentlemen of my guard go, and armourers with shackles.'

The sharp pain of the ulcer in his leg gnawed up to his thigh, and he
stood, dejected, like a hunted man, with his head hanging on his
chest, so that his great bonnet pointed at the ground. He commanded
that both Privy Seal and the Duke of Norfolk should come to him there
upon the instant.

This grey and heavy King, who had been a great scholar, dreaded to
read in Latin now, for it brought the language of the Mass into his
mind; he had been a composer of music and a skilful player on the
lute, but no music and no voices could any more tickle his ears.

Women he had loved well in his day. Now, when he desired rest, music,
good converse and the love of women, he was forced to wed with a
creature whose face resembled that of a pig stuck with cloves. He had
raged over-night, but, with the morning, he had seen himself growing
old, on a tottering throne, assailed by all the forces of the Old
Faith in Christendom. Rebellions burst out like fires every day in all
the corners of his land. He had no men whom he could trust: if he
granted a boon to one party it held them only for a day, and the other
side rose up. Now he rested upon the Lutherans, whom he hated, and,
standing on that terrace, he had watched gloomily the great State
barges of the Ambassadors from the Empire and from France come with
majestic ostentation downstream abreast, to moor side by side against
the steps of his water-gate.

It was a parade of their new friendship. Six months ago their trains
could not have mingled without bloodshed.

At last there stood before him Thomas Cromwell, un-bonneted, smiling,
humorous, supple and confident for himself and for his master's cause,
a man whom his Prince might trust. And the long melancholy and
sinister figure of the Duke of Norfolk stalked stiffly down among the
yew trees powdered with frost. The furs from round his neck fluttered
about his knees like the wings of a crow, and he dug his Earl
Marshal's golden staff viciously into the ground. He waved his
jewelled cap and stood still at a little distance. Cromwell regarded
him with a sinister and watchful amusement; he looked back at Privy
Seal with a black malignancy that hardened his yellow features, his
hooked nose and pursed lips into the likeness of a mask representing
hatred.

This Norfolk was that Earl of Surrey who had won Flodden Field. They
all then esteemed him the greatest captain of his day--in the field a
commander sleepless, cunning, cautious, and, in striking, a Hotspur.

A dour and silent man, he was the head of all the Catholics, of all
the reaction of that day. But, in the long duel between himself and
Cromwell he had seemed fated to be driven from post to post, never
daring to proclaim himself openly the foe of the man he dreaded and
hated. Cranmer, with his tolerant spirit, he despised. Here was an
archbishop who might rack and burn for discipline's sake, and he did
nothing.... And all these New Learning men with their powers of
language, these dark bearded men with twinkling and sagacious eyes, he
detested. He went clean shaved, lean and yellow-faced, with a hooked
nose that seemed about to dig into his chin. It was he who said first:
'It was merry in England before this New Learning came in.'

The night before, the King had sworn that he would have Privy Seal's
head because Anne of Cleves resembled a pig stuck with cloves. And,
shaking and shivering with cold that penetrated his very inwards, with
a black pain on his brow and sparks dancing before his jaundiced eyes,
the Duke cursed himself for not having urged then the immediate arrest
of the Privy Seal. For here stood Cromwell, arrogantly by the King's
side with the King graciously commanding him to cover his head because
it was very cold and Cromwell was known to suffer with the earache.

'You are Earl Marshal,' the King's voice drowned Norfolk's morning
greeting. He veered upon the Duke with such violence that his enormous
red bulk seemed about to totter over upon the tall and bent figure. A
searing pain had shot up his side, and, as he gripped it, he appeared
to be furiously plucking at his dagger. He had imagined Chapuys and
Marillac, the Ambassadors, coming upon guards with broken heads and
sending to Paris letters over which Francis and his nephew should
snigger and chuckle.

'You are Earl Marshal. You have the ordering of these ceremonies, and
you let rebels and knaves break heads within my very park for all the
world to see!'

In his rage Norfolk blurted out:

'Privy Seal hath his friends, too--these Lutherans. What man could
have foreseen how insolent they be grown, for joy at welcoming a Queen
of their faith,' he repeated hotly. 'No man could have foreseen. My
bands are curtailed.'

Cromwell said:

'Aye, men are needed to keep down the Papists of your North parts.'

The two men faced each other. It had been part of the Duke's plan--and
Cromwell knew it very well--that the City men should meet with the
Lutherans there in the King's own park. It would show the insolence of
the heretics upon whom the Privy Seal relied, and it might prove, too,
the strength of the Old Faith in the stronghold of the City.

Henry rated violently. It put him to shame, he repeated many times.
'Brawling beneath my face, cries in my ears, and the smell of
bloodshed in my nose.'

Norfolk repeated dully that the Protestants were wondrous insolent.
But Cromwell pointed out with a genial amusement: 'My Lord Duke should
have housed the City men within the palace. Cat will fight with dog
the world over if you set them together.'

The Duke answered malignantly:

'It was fitting the citizens should wait to enter. I would not cumber
his Highness' courtyards. We know not yet that this Lady cometh to be
welcomed Queen.'

'Body of God,' the King said with a new violence: 'do ye prate of
these matters?' His heavy jaws threatened like a dog's. 'Hast thou set
lousy knaves debating of these?'

Norfolk answered darkly that it had been treated of in the Council
last night.

'My Council! My Council!' The King seemed to bay out the words. 'There
shall some mothers' sons rue this!'

Norfolk muttered that he had spoken of it with no man not a
Councillor. The King's Highness' self had moved first in this.

Henry suddenly waved both hands at the sky.

'Take you good order,' he said heavily into the lean and yellow face
of the Duke. 'Marshal these ceremonies fitly from henceforth. Let
nothing lack. Get you gone.' An end must be made of talk and gossip.
The rumour of last night's Council must appear an idle tale, a
falsehood of despairing Papists. 'The Queen cometh,' he said.

With the droop of the Duke's long arms his hat seemed to brush the
stones, his head fell on his chest. It was finished.

He had seen so many things go that he loved. And now this old woman
with her Germans, her heresies--her children doubtless--meant the
final downfall of the Old Order in his day. It would return, but he
would never see it. And under Cromwell's sardonic gaze his head hung
limply, and his eyes filled with hot and blinding drops. His face
trembled like that of a very old man.

The King had thrust his hand through Cromwell's arm, and, with a heavy
familiarity as if he would make him forget the Council of last night,
he was drawing him away towards the water-gate. He turned his head
over his shoulder and repeated balefully:

'The Queen cometh.'

As he did so his eye fell upon a man tugging at the bridle of a mule
that had a woman on its back. He passed on with his minister.


V

In turning, Norfolk came against them at the very end of the path. The
man's green coat was spotted with filth, one of his sleeves was torn
off and dangled about his heel. The mule's knees were cut, and the
woman trembled with her hidden face and shrinking figure.

They made him choke with rage and fear. Some other procession might
have come against these vagabonds, and the blame would have been his.
It disgusted him that they were within a yard of himself.

'Are there no side paths?' he asked harshly.

Culpepper blazed round upon him:

'How might I know? Why sent you no guide?' His vivid red beard was
matted into tails, his face pallid and as if blazing with rage. The
porter had turned them loose into the empty garden.

'Kat is sore hurt,' he mumbled, half in tears. 'Her arm is welly
broken.' He glared at the Duke. 'Care you no more for your own blood
and kin?'

Norfolk asked:

'Who is your Kat? Can I know all the Howards?'

Culpepper snarled:

'Aye, we may trust you not to succour your brother's children.'

The Duke said:

'Why, she shall back to the palace. They shall comfort her.'

'That shall she not,' Culpepper flustered. 'Sh'ath her father's
commands to hasten to Dover.'

The Duke caught her eyes in the fur hood that hid her face like a
Moorish woman's veil. They were large, grey and arresting beneath the
pallor of her forehead. They looked at him, questioning and judging.

'Wilt not come to my lodging?' he asked.

'Aye, will I,' came a little muffled by the fur.

'That shall she not,' Culpepper repeated.

The Duke looked at him with gloomy and inquisitive surprise.

'Aye, I am her mother's cousin,' he said. 'I fend for her, which you
have never done. Her father's house is burnt by rioters, and her men
are joined in the pillaging. But I'll warrant you knew it not.'

Katharine Howard with her sound hand was trying to unfasten her hood,
hastily and eagerly.

'Wilt come?' the Duke asked hurriedly. 'This must be determined.'

Culpepper hissed: 'By the bones of St. Nairn she shall not.' She
lifted her maimed hand involuntarily, and, at the sear of pain, her
eyes closed. Immediately Culpepper was beside her knees, supporting
her with his arms and muttering sounds of endearment and despair.

The Duke, hearing behind him the swish pad of heavy soft shoes, as if
a bear were coming over the pavement, faced the King.

'This is my brother's child,' he said. 'She is sore hurt. I would not
leave her like a dog,' and he asked the King's pardon.

'Why, God forbid,' the King said. 'Your Grace shall succour her.'
Culpepper had his back to them, caring nothing for either in his
passion. Henry said: 'Aye, take good care for her,' and passed on with
Privy Seal on his arm.

The Duke heaved a sigh of relief. But he remembered again that Anne of
Cleves was coming, and his black anger that Cromwell should thus once
again have the King thrown back to him came out in his haughty and
forbidding tone to Culpepper:

'Take thou my niece to the water-gate. I shall send women to her.' He
hastened frostily up the path to be gone before Henry should return
again.

Culpepper resolved that he would take barge before ever the Duke
could send. But the mule slewed right across the terrace; his cousin
grasped the brute's neck and her loosened hood began to fall back from
her head.

The King, standing twenty yards away, with his hand shaking Cromwell's
shoulder, was saying:

'See you how grey I grow.'

The words came hot into a long harangue. He had been urging that he
must have more money for his works at Calais. He was agitated because
a French chalk pit outside the English lines had been closed to his
workmen. They must bring chalk from Dover at a heavy cost for barges
and balingers. This was what it was to quarrel with France.

Cromwell had his mind upon widening the breach with France. He said
that a poll tax might be levied on the subjects of Charles and Francis
then in London. There were goldsmiths, woolstaplers, horse merchants,
whore-masters, painters, musicians and vintners....

The King's eyes had wandered to the grey river, and then from a deep
and moody abstraction he had blurted out those words.

Henry was very grey, and his face, inanimate and depressed, made him
seem worn and old enough. Cromwell was not set to deny it. The King
had his glass....

He sighed a little and began:

'The heavy years take their toll.'

Henry caught him up suddenly:

'Why, no. It is the heavy days, the endless nights. You can sleep,
you.' But him, the King, incessant work was killing.

'You see, you see, how this world will never let me rest.' In the
long, black nights he started from dozing. When he took time to dandle
his little son a panic would come over him because he remembered that
he lived among traitors and had no God he could pray to. He had no
mind to work....

Cromwell said that there was no man in England could outwork his
King.

'There is no man in England can love him.' His distracted eyes fell
upon the woman on the mule. 'Happy he whom a King never saw and who
never saw King,' he muttered.

The beast, inspired with a blind hatred of Culpepper, was jibbing
across the terrace, close at hand. Henry became abstractedly
interested in the struggle. The woman swayed forward over her knees.

'Your lady faints,' he called to Culpepper.

In his muddled fury the man began once again trying to hold her on the
animal. It was backing slowly towards a stone seat in the balustrade,
and man and woman swayed and tottered together.

The King said:

'Let her descend and rest upon the seat.'

His mind was swinging back already to his own heavy sorrows. On the
stone seat the woman's head lay back upon the balustrade, her eyes
were closed and her face livid to the sky. Culpepper, using his teeth
to the finger ends, tore the gloves from his hands.

Henry drew Cromwell towards the gatehouse. He had it dimly in his mind
to send one of his gentlemen to the assistance of that man and woman.

'Aye, teach me to sleep at night,' he said. 'It is you who make me
work.'

'It is for your Highness' dear sake.'

'Aye, for my sake,' the King said angrily. He burst into a sudden
invective: 'Thou hast murdered a many men ... for my sake. Thou hast
found out plots that were no plots: old men hate me, old mothers,
wives, maidens, harlots.... Why, if I be damned at the end thou shalt
escape, for what thou didst thou didst for my sake? Shall it be that?'
He breathed heavily. 'My sins are thy glory.'

They reached the long wall of the gatehouse and turned mechanically. A
barge at the river steps was disgorging musicians with lutes like half
melons set on staves, horns that opened bell mouths to the sky, and
cymbals that clanged in the rushing of the river. With his eyes upon
them Henry said: 'A common man may commonly choose his bedfellow.'
They had reminded him of the Queen for whose welcome they had been
commanded.

Cromwell swept his hand composedly round the half horizon that held
the palace, the grey river and the inlands.

'Your Highness may choose among ten thousand,' he answered.

The sound of a horn blown faintly to test it within the gatehouse, the
tinkle of a lutestring, brought to the King's lips: 'Aye. Bring me
music that shall charm my thoughts. You cannot do it.'

'A Queen is in the nature of a defence, a pledge, a cement, the
keystone of a bulwark,' Cromwell said. 'We know now our friends and
our foes. You may rest from this onwards.'

He spoke earnestly: This was the end of a long struggle. The King
should have his rest.

They moved back along the terrace. The woman's head still lay back,
her chin showed pointed and her neck, long, thin and supple. Culpepper
was bending over her, sprinkling water out of his cap upon her
upturned face.

The King said to Cromwell: 'Who is that wench?' and, in the same tone:
'Aye, you are a great comforter. We shall see how the cat jumps,' and
then, answering his own question, 'Norfolk's niece?'

His body automatically grew upright, the limp disappeared from his
gait and he moved sturdily and gently towards them.

Culpepper faced round like a wild cat from a piece of meat, but seeing
the great hulk, the intent and friendly eyes, the gold collar over the
chest, the heavy hands, and the great feet that appeared to hold down
the very stones of the terrace, he stood rigid in a pose of
disturbance.

'Why do ye travel?' the King asked. 'This shall be Katharine Howard?'

Culpepper's hushed but harsh voice answered that they came out of
Lincolnshire on the Norfolk border. This was the Lord Edmund's
daughter.

'I have never seen her,' the King said.

'Sh'ath never been in this town.'

The King laughed: 'Why, poor wench!'

'Sh'ath been well schooled,' Culpepper answered proudly, 'hath had
mastern, hath sung, hath danced, hath your Latin and your Greek....
Hath ten daughters, her father.'

The King laughed again: 'Why, poor man!'

'Poorer than ever now,' Culpepper muttered. Katharine Howard stirred
uneasily and his face shot round to her. 'Rioters have brent his only
house and wasted all his sheep.'

The King frowned heavily: 'Anan? Who rioted?'

'These knaves that love not our giving our ploughlands to sheep,'
Culpepper said. 'They say they starved through it. Yet 'tis the only
way to wealth. I had all my wealth by it. By now 'tis well gone, but I
go to the wars to get me more.'

'Rioters?' the King said again, heavily.

''Twas a small tulzie--a score of starved yeomen here and there. I
killed seven. The others were they that were hanged at Norwich.... But
the barns were brent, the sheep gone, and the house down and the
servants fled. I am her cousin of the mother's side. Of as good a
strain as Howards be.'

Henry, with his eyes still upon them, beckoned behind his back for
Cromwell to come. A score or so of poor yeomen, hinds and women, cast
out of their tenancies that wool might be grown for the Netherlands
weavers, starving, desperate, and seeing no trace of might and order
in their hidden lands, had banded, broken a few hedges and burnt a few
barns before the posse of the country could come together and take
them.

The King had not heard of it or had forgotten it, because such risings
were so frequent. His brows came down into portentous and bulging
knots, his eyes were veiled and threatening towards the woman's face.
He had conceived that a great rebellion had been hidden from his
knowledge.

She raised her head and shrieked at the sight of him, half started to
her feet, and once more sank down on the bench, clasping at her
cousin's hand. He said:

'Peace, Kate, it is the King.'

She answered: 'No, no,' and covered her face with her hands.

Henry bent a little towards her, indulgent, amused, and gentle as if
to a child.

'I am Harry,' he said.

She muttered:

'There was a great crowd, a great cry. One smote me on the arm. And
then this quiet here.'

She uncovered her face and sat looking at the ground. Her furs were
all grey, she had had none new for four years, and they were tight to
her young body that had grown into them. The roses embroidered on her
glove had come unstitched, and, against the steely grey of the river,
her face in its whiteness had the tint of mother of pearl and an
expression of engrossed and grievous absence.

'I have fared on foul ways this journey,' she said.

'Thy father's barns we will build again,' the King answered. 'You
shall have twice the sheep to your dower. Show me your eyes.'

'I had not thought to have seen the King so stern,' she answered.

Culpepper caught at the mule's bridle.

'Y' are mad,' he muttered. 'Let us begone.'

'Nay, in my day,' the King answered, 'y'ad found me more than kind.'

She raised her eyes to his face, steadfast, enquiring and unconcerned.
He bent his great bulk downwards and kissed her upon the temple.

'Be welcome to this place.' He smiled with a pleasure in his own
affability and because, since his beard had pricked her, she rubbed
her cheek. Culpepper said:

'Come away. We stay the King's Highness.'

Henry said: 'Bide ye here.' He wished to hear what Cromwell might say
of these Howards, and he took him down the terrace.

Culpepper bent over her with his mouth opened to whisper.

'I am weary,' she said. 'Set me a saddle cushion behind my shoulders.'

He whispered hurriedly:

'I do not like this place.'

'I like it well. Shall we not see brave shews?'

'The mule did stumble on the threshold.'

'I marked it not. The King did bid us bide here.'

She had once more laid her head back on the stone balustrade.

'If thou lovest me....' he whispered. It enraged and confused him to
have to speak low. He could not think of any words.

She answered unconcernedly:

'If thou lovest my bones ... they ache and they ache.'

'I have sold farms to buy thee gowns,' he said desperately.

'I never asked it,' she answered coldly.

Henry was saying:

'Ah, Princes take as is brought them by others. Poor men be commonly
at their own choice.' His voice had a sort of patient regret. 'Why
brought ye not such a wench?'

Cromwell answered that in Lincoln, they said, she had been a coin that
would not bear ringing.

'You do not love her house,' the King said. 'Y' had better have
brought me such a one.'

Cromwell answered that his meaning was she had been won by others. The
King's Highness should have her for a wink.

Henry raised his shoulders with a haughty and angry shrug. Such a
quarry was below his stooping. He craved no light loves.

'I do not miscall the wench,' Cromwell answered. She was as her kind.
The King's Highness should find them all of a make in England.

'Y' are foul-mouthed,' Henry said negligently. ''Tis a well-spoken
wench. You shall find her a place in the Lady Mary's house.'

Cromwell smiled, and made a note upon a piece of paper that he pulled
from his pocket.

Culpepper, his arms jerking angularly, was creaking out:

'Come away, a' God's name. By all our pacts. By all our secret vows.'

'Ay thou didst vow and didst vow,' she said with a bitter weariness.
'What hast to shew? I have slept in filthy beds all this journey.
Speak the King well. He shall make thee at a word.'

He spat out at her.

'Is thine eye cocked up to that level?... I am very hot, very
choleric. Thou hast seen me. Thou shalt not live. I will slay thee. I
shall do such things as make the moon turn bloody red.'

'Aye art thou there?' she answered coldly. 'Ye have me no longer upon
lone heaths and moors. Mend thy tongue. Here I have good friends.'

Suddenly he began to entreat:

'Thy mule did stumble--an evil omen. Come away, come away. I know well
thou lovest me.'

'I know well I love thee too well,' she answered, as if in scorn of
herself.

'Come away to thy father.'

'Why what a bother is this,' she said. 'Thou wouldst to the wars to
get thee gold? Thou wouldst trail a pike? Thou canst do little without
the ear of some captain. Here is the great captain of them all.'

'I dare not speak here,' he muttered huskily. 'But this King....' He
paused and added swiftly: 'He is of an ill omen to all Katharines.'

'Why, he shall give me his old gloves to darn,' she laughed. 'Fond
knave, this King standeth on a mountain a league high. A King shall
take notice of one for the duration of a raindrop's fall. Then it is
done. One may make oneself ere it reach the ground, or never. Besides,
'tis a well-spoken elder. 'Tis the spit of our grandfather Culpepper.'

When Henry came hurrying back, engrossed, to send Culpepper and the
mule to the gatehouse for a guide, she laughed gently for pleasure.

Culpepper said tremulously: 'She hath her father's commands to hasten
to Dover.'

'Her father taketh and giveth commands from me,' Henry answered, and
his glove flicked once more towards the gate. He had turned his face
away before Culpepper's hand grasped convulsively at his dagger and he
had Katharine Howard at his side sweeping back towards Cromwell.

She asked, confidingly and curiously: 'Who is that lord?' and, after
his answer, she mused, 'He is no friend to Howards.'

'Nay, that man taketh his friends among mine,' he answered. He stopped
to regard her, his face one heavy and indulgent smile. The garter on
his knee, broad and golden, showed her the words: '_Y pense_'; the
collars moved up and down on his immense chest, the needlework of
roses was so fine that she wondered how many women had sat up how many
nights to finish it: but the man was grey and homely.

'I know none of your ways here,' she said.

'Never let fear blanch thy cheeks till we are no more thy friend,' he
reassured her. He composed one of his gallant speeches:

'Here lives for thee nothing but joy.' Pleasurable hopes should be her
comrades while the jolly sun shone, and sweet content at night her
bedfellow....

He handed her to the care of the Lord Cromwell to take her to the Lady
Mary's lodgings. It was unfitting that she should walk with him, and,
with his heavy and bearlike gait, swinging his immense shoulders, he
preceded them up the broad path.


VI

Cromwell watched the King's great back with an attentive smile. He
said, ironically, that he was her ladyship's servant.

'I would ye were,' she answered. 'They say you love not those that I
love.'

'I would have you not heed what men say,' he answered, grimly. 'I am
douce to those that be of good-will to his Highness. Those that hate
me are his ill-wishers.'

'Then the times are evil,' she said, 'for they are many.'

She added suddenly, as if she could not keep a prudent silence:

'I am for the Old Faith in the Old Way. You have hanged many dear
friends of mine whose souls I pray for.'

He looked at her attentively.

She had a supple, long body, a fair-tinted face, fair and reddish
hair, and eyes that had a glint of almond green--but her cheeks were
flushed and her eyes sparkled. She was so intent upon speaking her
mind that she had forgotten the pain of her arm. She thought that she
must have said enough to anger this brewer's son. But he answered
only:

'I think you have never been in the King's court'--and, from his
tranquil manner, she realised very suddenly that this man was not the
dirt beneath her feet.

She had never been in the King's court; she had never, indeed, been
out of the North parts. Her father had always been a very poor man,
with an ancient castle and a small estate that he had nearly always
neglected because it had not paid for the farming. Living men she had
never respected--for they seemed to her like wild beasts when she
compared them with such of the ancients as Brutus or as Seneca. She
had been made love to and threatened by such men as her cousin; she
had been made love to and taught Latin by her pedagogues. She was more
learned than any man she had ever met--and, thinking upon the heroes
of Plutarch, she found the present times despicable. She hardly owed
allegiance to the King. Now she had seen him and felt his
consciousness of his own power, she was less certain. But the King's
writs had hardly run in the Northern parts. Her men-folk and her
mother's people had hanged their own peasants when they thought fit.
She had seen bodies swinging from tree-tops when she rode hawking. All
that she had ever known of the King's power was when the convent by
their castle gates had been thrown out of doors, and then her
men-folk, cursing and raging, had sworn that it was the work of
Crummock. 'Knaves ruled about the King.'

If knaves ruled about him, the King was not a man that one need
trouble much over. Her own men-folk, she knew, had made and unmade
Kings. So that, when she thought of the hosts of saints and of the
blessed angels that hovered, wringing their hands and weeping above
England, she had wondered a little at times why they had never unmade
this King.

But to her all these things had seemed very far away. She had nothing
to do but to read books in the learned tongues, to imagine herself
holding disquisitions upon the spiritual republic of Plato, to ride,
to shoot with the bow, to do needlework, or to chide the maids. Her
cousin had loved her passionately; it was true that once, when she had
had nothing to her back, he had sold a farm to buy her a gown. But he
had menaced her with his knife till she was weary, and the ways of men
were troublesome to her; nevertheless she submitted to them with a
patient wisdom.

She submitted to the King; she submitted--though she hated him by
repute--to Cromwell's catechism as they followed the King at a decent
interval.

He walked beside her with his eyes on her face. He spoke of the King's
bounty in a voice that implied his own power. She was to be the Lady
Mary's woman. He had that lady especially in his good will, he saved
for her household ladies of egregious gifts, presence and attainments.
They received liberal honorariums, seven dresses by the year, vails,
presents, perfumes from the King's own still-rooms, and a parcel-gilt
chain at the New Year. The Lady Rochford, who ruled over these ladies,
was kind, courteous, free in her graces as in the liberties she
allowed the ladies under her easy charge.

He enlarged upon this picture as if it were a bribe that he alone
could offer or withhold. And something at once cautious and priestly
in his tone let her quick intuition know that he was both warning her
and sounding her, to see how far her mutinous spirit would carry her.
Once he said, 'There must be tranquillity in the kingdom. The times
are very evil!'

She had felt very quickly that insults to this man would be a useless
folly. He could not even feel them, and she kept her eyes on the
ground and listened to him.

He went on sounding her. It was part of his profession of kingcraft to
know the secret hearts of every person with whom he spoke.

'And your goodly cousin?' He paused. The King had commanded that a
place should be found for him. 'Should he be best at Calais? There
shall be blows struck there.'

She knew very well that he was trying to discover how much she loved
her cousin, and she answered in a low voice, 'I would have him stay
here. He is the sole friend I have in this place.'

Cromwell said, with a hidden and encouraging meaning, her cousin was
not her only friend there.

'Aye, but your lordship is not so old a friend as he.'

'Not me. Call me your good servant.'

'There is even then my uncle.'

'Little good of a friend you will have of Norfolk. 'Tis a bitter apple
and a very rotten plank to lean upon.'

She could not any longer miss his meaning. The King's scarlet and
immense figure was already in the grey shadow of the arch under the
tower. In walking, they had come near him, and while they waited he
stood for a minute, gazing back down the path with boding and pathetic
eyes; then he disappeared.

She looked at Cromwell and thanked him for the warning, '_quia spicula
praevisa minus laedunt_.'

'I would have you read it: _gaudia plus laetificant_,' he answered
gravely.

A man with a conch-shaped horn upturned was suddenly blowing beneath
the archway seven hollow and reverberating grunts of sound that
drowned his voice. A clear answering whistle came from the water-gate.
Cromwell stayed, listening attentively; another stood forward to blow
four blasts, another six, another three. Each time the whistle
answered. They were the great officers' signals for their barges that
the men blew, and the whistle signified that these lay at readiness in
the tideway. A bustle of men running, calling, and making pennons
ready, began beyond the archway in the quadrangle.

Cromwell's face grew calm and contented; the King was sending to meet
Anne of Cleves.

'Y' are well read?' he asked her slowly.

'I was brought up in the Latin tongue or ever I had the English,' she
answered. 'I had a good master, one that spoke the learned language
always.'

'Aye, Nicholas Udal,' Cromwell said.

'You know all men in the land,' she said, with fear and surprise.

'I had him to master for the Lady Mary, since he is well disposed.'

''Tis an arrant knave tho' the best of pedagogues,' she answered. 'He
was cast out of his mastership at Eton for being a rogue.'

'For that, the worshipful your father had him to master,' he said
ironically.

'No, for that he was a ruined man, and taught for his victuals. We
welly starved at home, my sisters and I.'

He said slowly:

'The better need that you should grow beloved here.'

Standing there, before the bushes where no ears could overhear, he put
to her more questions. She had some Greek, more than a little French,
she could judge a good song, she could turn a verse in Latin or the
vulgar tongue. She professed to be able to ride well, to be conversant
with the terms of venery, to shoot with the bow, and to have studied
the Fathers of the Church.

'These things are well liked in high places,' he said. 'His Highness'
self speaks five tongues, loveth a nimble answer, and is a noble
huntsman.' He surveyed her as if she were a horse he were pricing.
'But I doubt not you have appraised yourself passing well,' he
uttered.

'I have had some to make me pleasant speeches,' she answered, 'but too
many cannot be had.'

'See you,' he said slowly, 'these tuckets that they blow from the gate
signify that the new Queen cometh with a great state.' He bit his
under lip and looked at her meaningly. 'But a great state ensueth a
great heaviness to the head of the State. _Principis hymen, principium
gravitatis_.... 'Tis a small matter to me; you may make it a great one
to your ladyship's light fortunes.'

She knew that he awaited her saying:

'I do not take your lordship,' and she pulled the hood further over
her face because it was cold, and uttered the words with her eyes on
the ground.

'Why,' he said readily, 'you are a lady having gifts that are much in
favour in these days. Be careful to use those gifts and no others.
Meddle in nothing that does not concern you. So you may make a great
marriage with some lord in favour. But meddle in naught else!'

She would find many to set her an evil example. The other ladies
amongst whom she was going were a mutinous knot. Let her be careful!
If by her good behaviour she earned it, he would put the King in mind
to advance her. If by good speeches and good example--since she had
great store of learning--she could turn the hearts of these wicked
ladies; if she could report to him evil designs or plots, he would
speak to the King in such wise that His Highness should give her a
great dower and any lord would marry her. Or he would advance her
cousin so that he should become marriageable.

She said submissively:

'Your lordship would have me become a spy upon the ladies who shall be
my fellows?'

He waved his hand with a large and calming gesture.

'I would have you work for the good of the State as you find it,' he
said gravely. 'That, too, is a doctrine of the Ancients.' He cited the
case of Seneca, who supported the government of Nero, and she noted
that he twisted to suit his purpose Tacitus' account of the soldiers
of that same Prince.

Nevertheless, she made no comment. For she knew that it is the nature
of men calmly to ask hateful sacrifices of women. But her throat ached
with rage. And when she followed him along the corridors of the palace
she seemed to feel that each man, each woman that they passed hated
that lord with a hatred born of fear.

He walked in front of her arrogantly, as if she were a straw to be
drawn along in the wind of his progress. Doors flew open at a flick of
his finger.

Suddenly they were in a tall room, long, and dim because it faced the
north. It seemed an empty cavern, but there were in it many books upon
a long table and at the far end, so that they looked quite small, two
figures stood before a reading-pulpit. The voice of the serving man
who had thrown open the door made the words 'The Lord Privy Seal of
England' echo mournfully along the gilded and dim rafters of the
ceiling.

Cromwell hastened over the smooth, cold floor. The woman's figure in
black, the long tail of her hood falling almost to her feet like a
widow's veil, turned from the pulpit; a man remained bent down at his
reading.

'_Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum_,' Cromwell's voice uttered. The lady
stood, rigid and straight, her hands clasped before her. Her face,
pale so that not even a touch of red showed above the cheekbones and
hardly any in the tightly-pursed lips, was as if framed in her black
hood that fastened beneath the chin. The high, narrow forehead had the
hair tightly drawn back so that none was visible, and the coif that
showed beneath the hood was white, like a nun's; the temples were
hollowed so that she looked careworn inexpressibly, and her lips had
hard lines around them. Above her head all sounds in that dim room
seemed to whisper for a long time among the rafters as if here dwelt
something mysterious, sepulchral, a great grief or a great passion.

'I announce to you a master-joy,' Cromwell was saying. 'I bring your
La'ship a damsel of great erudition and knowledge of good letters.'

His voice was playful and full; his back was bent supply. His face lit
up with a debonnaire and pleasant smile. The lady's eyes turned upon
the girl, forbidding and suspicious; she remained motionless, even her
lips did not move. Cromwell said that this was a Katharine of the
Howards, and one fit to aid her Ladyship and Magister Udal with their
erudite commentary of Plautus his works.

The man at the reading desk looked round and then back at his book.
His pen scratched upon the margin of a great volume. Katharine Howard
was upon her knees grasping at the lady's hand to kiss it. But it was
snatched roughly away.

'This is a folly,' the voice came harshly from the pursed lips. 'Get
up, wench.' Katharine remained kneeling. For this was the Lady Mary of
England--a martyr for whom she had prayed nightly since she could
pray.

'Get up, fool,' the voice said above her head. 'It is proclaimed
treason to kneel to me. This is to risk your neck to act thus before
Privy Seal.'

The hard words were aimed straight at the face of Cromwell.

'Your ladyship knows well I would fain have it otherwise,' he answered
softly.

'I do not ask it,' she answered.

He maintained a gentle smile of deprecation, beckoning a little with
his head and with his eyes, begging her for private conversation. She
lifted Katharine roughly to her feet and followed him to a distant
window. She seemed as if she were an automaton without will or
independent motions of her own, so small were her steps and her feet
so hidden beneath her stiff black skirts. He began talking to her in a
voice of which only the persuasive higher notes came into the room.

At that time she was still proclaimed bastard, and her name was erased
from the list of those it was lawful to pray for in the churches. At
times she endured great hardships, even to going short of food, for
she suffered from a wasting complaint that made her a great eater. But
starvation could not make her submit to the King, her father, or to
the Lord Cromwell who was ruler in the land. Sometimes they gave her a
great train, strove to make her dress herself richly, and dragged her
to such festivals as this of the marriage with Anne of Cleves. This
was done when the Lord Privy Seal dangled her before the eyes of the
Emperor of France as a match; then it was necessary to increase the
appearance of her worth in England. But sometimes the King, out of a
warm and generous feeling of satisfaction with his young son, was
moved to behave bountifully to his daughter, and, seeking to dazzle
her with his munificence, gave her golden crosses and learned books
annotated with his own hand, richly jewelled and with embroidered
covers. Or when the Emperor, her cousin, interceded that she should be
treated more kindly, she was threatened with the block. Of late
Cromwell had set himself to gain her heart with his intrigue that he
could make so smooth and with his air that could be so gentle--that
the King found so lovable. But nothing moved her to set her hand to a
deed countenancing her dead mother's disgrace; to smile upon her
father and his minister, who had devised the means for casting down
her mother; or to consent to relinquish her right to the throne. So
that at times, when the cloud of the Church abroad, and of the
rebellions all over the extremities of the kingdoms, threatened very
greatly, the King was driven to agonies of fear and rage lest his
enemies or his subjects should displace him who was excommunicated and
set her, whom all Catholics regarded as undergoing a martyrdom, on
his throne. He feared her sometimes so much that it was only Cromwell
that saved her from death. Cromwell would spend hours of his busy days
in the long window of her work room, urging her to submission,
dilating upon the powers that might be hers, studying her tastes to
devise bribes for her. It was with that aim, because her whole days in
her solitude were given to the learned writers, that he had sought out
for her Magister Udal as a companion and preceptor who might both
please her with his erudition and induce her to look kindly upon the
New Learning and a more lax habit of mind. But she never thanked
Cromwell. Whilst he talked she remained frozen and silent. At times,
under the spur of a cold rage, she said harsh things of himself and
her father, calling upon the memory of her mother and the wrongs her
Church had suffered--and, on his departing, before he had even left
the room she would return, frigidly and without change of face, to the
book upon her desk.

So the Privy Seal talked to her by the window for the fiftieth time.
Katharine Howard saw, before the high reading pulpit, the back of a
man in the long robes of a Master of Arts. He held a pen in his hand
and turned over his shoulder at her a face thin, brown, humorous and
deprecatory, as if he were used to bearing chiding with philosophy.

'Magister Udal!' she uttered.

He motioned with his mouth for her to be silent, but pointed with the
feather of his quill to a line of a little book that lay upon the
pulpit near his elbow. She came closer to read:

'_Circumspectatrix cum oculis emisitiis!_' and written above it in a
minute hand: 'A spie with eyes that peer about and stick out.'

He pointed over his shoulder at the Lord Privy Seal.

'How poor this room is, for a King's daughter!' she said, without much
dropping her voice.

He hissed: 'Hush! hush!' with an appearance of terror, and whispered,
forming the words with his lips rather than uttering them: 'How fared
you and your house in the nonce?'

'I have read in many texts,' she answered, 'to pass the heavy hours.'

He spoke then, aloud and with an admonitory air:

'Never say the heavy hours--for what hours are heavy that can be spent
with the ancient writers for companions?'

She avoided his reproachful eyes with:

'My father's house was burnt last month; my cousin Culpepper is in the
courts below. Dear Nick Ardham, with his lute, is dead an outlaw
beyond sea, and Sir Ferris was hanged at Doncaster--both after last
year's rising, pray all good men that God assail them!'

Udal muttered:

'Hush, for God's dear sake. That is treason here. There is a listener
behind the hangings.'

He began to scrawl hastily with a dry pen that he had not time to dip
in the well of ink. The shadow of the Lord Cromwell's silent return
was cast upon them both, and Katharine shivered.

He said harshly to the magister:

'I will that you write me an interlude in the vulgar tongue in three
days' time. Such a piece as being spoken by skilful players may make a
sad man laugh.'

Udal said: 'Well-a-day!'

'It shall get you advancement. I am minded the piece shall be given at
my house before his Highness and the new Queen in a week.'

Udal remained silent, dejected, his head resting upon his breast.

'For,' Cromwell spoke with a raised voice, 'it is well that the King
be distracted of his griefs.' He went on as if he were uttering an
admonition that he meant should be heeded and repeated. The times were
very evil with risings, mutinies in close fortresses, schism, and the
bad hearts of men. Here, therefore, he would that the King should find
distraction. Such of them as had gifts should display those talents
for his beguiling; such of them as had beauty should make valuable
that beauty; others whose wealth could provide them with rich garments
and pleasant displays should work, each man and each woman, after his
sort or hers. 'And I will that you report my words where either of you
have resort. Who loves me shall hear it; who fears me shall take
warning.'

He surveyed both Katharine and the master with a heavy and encouraging
glance, having the air of offering great things if they aided him and
avoided dealing with his enemies.

The Lady Mary was gliding towards them like a cold shadow casting
itself upon his warm words; she would have ignored him altogether,
knowing that contempt is harder to bear than bitter speeches. But the
fascination of hatred made it hard to keep aloof from her father's
instrument. He looked negligently over his shoulder and was gone
before she could speak. He did not care to hear more bitter words that
could make the breach between them only wider, since words once spoken
are so hard to wash away, and the bringing of this bitter woman back
to obedience to her father was so great a part of his religion of
kingcraft. In that, when it came, there should be nothing but concord
and oblivion of bitter speeches, silent loyalty, and a throne upheld,
revered, and unassailable.

Udal groaned lamentably when the door closed upon him:

'I shall write to make men laugh! In the vulgar tongue! I! To gain
advancement!'

The Lady Mary's face hardly relaxed:

'Others of us take harder usage from my lord,' she said. She addressed
Katharine: 'You are named after my mother. I wish you a better fate
than your namesake had.' Her harsh voice dismayed Katharine, who had
been prepared to worship her. She had eaten nothing since dawn, she
had travelled very far and with this discouragement the pain in her
arm came back. She could find no words to say, and the Lady Mary
continued bitterly: 'But if you love that dear name and would sojourn
near me I would have you hide it. For--though I care little--I would
yet have women about me that believe my mother to have been foully
murdered.'

'I cannot easily dissemble.' Katharine found her tongue. 'Where I hate
I speak things disparaging.'

'That I attest to of old,' Udal commented. 'But I shall be shamed
before all learned doctors, if I write in the vulgar tongue.'

'Silence is ever best for me!' the Lady Mary answered her deadly. 'I
live in the shadows that I love.'

'That, full surely, shall be reversed,' Katharine said loyally.

'I do not ask it,' Mary said.

'Wherefore must I write in the vulgar tongue?' Udal asked again, 'Oh,
Mistress of my actions and my heart, what whim is this? The King is an
excellent good Latinist!'

'Too good!' the Lady Mary said bitterly. 'With his learning he hath
overset the Church of Christ.'

She spoke harshly to Katharine: 'What reversal should give my mother
her life again? Wench! Wench!...' Then she turned upon Udal
indifferently:

'God knows why this man would have you write in the vulgar tongue. But
so he wills it.'

Udal groaned.

'My dinner hour is here,' the Lady Mary said. 'I am very hungry. Get
you to your writing and take this lady to my women.'


VII

The Lady Mary's rooms were seventeen in number; they ran the one into
the other, but they could each be reached by the public corridor
alongside. It was Magister Udal's privilege, his condition being above
that of serving man, to make his way through the rooms if he knew that
the Lady Mary was not in one of them. These chambers were tall and
gloomy; the light fell into them bluish and dismal; in one a pane was
lacking in a window; in another a stool was upset before a fire that
had gone out.

To traverse this cold wilderness Udal had set on his cap. He stood in
front of Katharine Howard in the third room and asked:

'You are ever of the same mind towards your magister?'

'I was never of any mind towards you,' she answered. Her eyes went
round the room to see how Princes were housed. The arras pictured the
story of the nymph Galatea; the windows bore intertwined in red glass
the cyphers H and K that stood for Katharine of Aragon. 'Your broken
fortunes are mended?' she asked indifferently.

He pulled a small book out of his pocket, ferreted among the leaves
and then setting his eye near the page pointed out his beloved line:

'_Pauper sum, pateor, fateor, quod Di dant fero._' Which had been
translated: 'I am poor, I confess; I bear it, and what the gods
vouchsafe that I take'--and on the broad margin of the book had
written: 'Cicero sayeth: That one cannot sufficiently praise them that
be patient having little: And Seneca: The first measure of riches is
to have things necessary--and, as ensueth therefrom, to be therewith
content!'

'I will give you a text from Juvenal,' she said, 'to add to these: Who
writes that no man is poor unless he be worthy of ridicule.'

He winced a little.

'Nay, you are hard! The text should be read: Nothing else maketh
poverty so hard to bear as that it forceth men to ridiculous
shifts.... _Quam quod ridiculos esse_....'

'Aye, magister, you are more learned even yet than I,' she said
indifferently. She made a step towards the next door but he stood in
front of her holding up his thin hands.

'You were my best pupil,' he said, with a hungry humility as if he
mocked himself. 'Poor I am, but mated to me you should live as do the
Hyperboreans, in a calm and voluptuous air.'

'Aye, to hang myself of weariness, as they do,' she answered.

He corrected her with the version of Pliny, but she answered only: 'I
have a great thirst upon me.'

His eyes were humorous, despairing and excited.

'Why should a lady not love her master?' he asked. 'There are
examples. Know you not the old rhyme:

    '"_It was a lording's daughter, the fairest one of three,_
      _Why lovéd of her master...._"'

'Ah, unspeakable!' she said. 'You bring me examples in the vulgar
tongue!'

'I babble for joy at seeing you and for grief at your harsh words,' he
answered.

She stood waiting with a sort of haughty submissiveness.

'I would you would delay your wooing. I have been on the road since
dawn with neither bit nor sup.'

He protested that he had starved more hideously than Tantalus since he
had seen her last.

She gave him indifferently her cheek to kiss.

'For pity's sake take me where I may rest,' she said, 'I have a maimed
arm.'

       *       *       *       *       *

He uttered her panegyric, after a model of Tibullus, to the Lady
Rochford and the seven maids of honour under that lady's charge. He
was set upon Katharine's enjoyment, and he invented a lie that the
King had commanded a dress to be found for her to attend at the revels
that night. The maids were already dressing themselves. Two of them
were fairheaded, and four neither fair nor dark; but one was dark as
night, and dressed all in black with a white coif, so that she
resembled a magpie. Some were curling each other's hair and others
tightening stay-laces with little wheels set in their companions'
backs. Their bare shoulders were blue with the cold of the great
room, and their dresses lay in heaps upon sheets that were spread
about the clean floor--brocades sewn with pearls, velvets that were
inlaid with filagree work, indoor furs and coifs of fine lawn that
were delicately edged with black thread.

The high sounds of their laughter had reached through the door, but a
dead silence fell. The dark girl with a very long bust that raked back
like a pigeon's, and with dark and sparkling eyes, tittered derisively
at the magister and went on slowly rubbing a perfumed ointment into
the skin of her throat and shoulders.

'Shall he bring his ragged doxies here too?' she laughed. 'What a
taradiddle is this of Cophetua and a beggar wench.' The other maids
all tittered derisively at Udal.

The Lady Rochford, warming her back close before the fire, said
helplessly, 'I have no dresses beyond what you see.' She was already
attired in a bountiful wine-coloured velvet that was embroidered with
silver wire into entwined monograms of the initials of her name. Her
hood of purple made, above her ample brows, a castellated pattern
resembling the gate of a drawbridge. She, being the mistress of that
household, and compassionately loved by the ladies because she was so
helpless, timorous, and unable to control them, they had combined to
comb and perfume her and to lace her stomacher before setting about
their own clothing. White-haired and with a wrinkled face, she
appeared, under her rich clothes, like some will-less and pallid
captive that had been gorgeously bedizened to grace a conqueror's
triumph. She was cousin to the late Queen Anne Boleyn, and the terror
of her own escape, when the Queen and so many of her house had been
swept away, seemed still to remain in the drawing-in of her eyes. In
the mien of the youngest girls there, there could be seen a strained
tenseness of lids and lips as though, in the midst of laughter, they
were hearkening for distant sounds or the rustle of listeners behind
the tapestry. And where a small door came into one wall they had
pulled down the arras from in front of it, so that no one should enter
unobserved. Lady Rochford addressed herself to Katharine with limp
gestures of protest:

'God knows I would help you to a gown, but we have no more than we are
granted; here are seven ladies and seven dresses. Where can another be
got? The King's Highness knoweth little of ladies' gowns or he had
never ordered one against to-night. Each of those hath taken the women
seven weeks to sew.'

Udal said with a touch of anger, since it enraged him to have to
invent further, as if the one lie about the King were not enough: 'The
Lord Privy Seal commanded very strictly this thing to be done. He is
this lady's very diligent protector. Have a care how you disoblige
her.'

The ladies rustled their slight clothing at that name, turned their
backs, and looked at Katharine above their shoulders. The Lady
Rochford recoiled so far that her skirts were in danger from the fire
in the great hearth; her woebegone, flaccid face was suddenly drawn at
the mention of Cromwell, and she appeared about to kneel at
Katharine's feet. She looked round at the figures of the girls.

'One of these can stay if your ladyship will wear her dress,' she
flustered. 'But who is tall enow? Cicely is too long in the shank.
Bess's shoulders are too broad. Alack! God help me! I will do what I
can'--and she waved her hands disconsolately.

Cold, fatigue, and her maimed arm made Katharine waver on her feet.
This white-haired woman's panic seemed to her grotesque and
disgusting.

'Why, the magister lies,' she said. 'I am no such friend of Privy
Seal's.'

Swift and wicked glances passed among the girls; the dark one threw
back her head and laughed discordantly, like a magpie. She came with a
deft and hopping step and gazed at Katharine with her head on one
side.

'Old Crummock will want our teeth next to make him a new set. He may
have my head, tell him. I have no need for it, it aches so since he
killed my men-folk.'

Lady Rochford shuddered as if she had been struck.

'Beseech you,' she said weakly to Katharine. 'Cicely Elliott is
sometimes distraught. Believe not that we speak like this among
ourselves.' Her eyes wandered in a flustered and piteous way over her
girls and she whimpered, 'Jane Gaskell, stand back to back with this
lady.'

Katharine Howard cried out, 'Keep your gowns for your backs and your
tongues still. Woe betide the girl who calls me a gossip of Privy
Seal.'

Cicely Elliott cast her dark head back and uttered one of her
discordant laughs at the ceiling, and a girl, hiding behind the
others, called out, 'What a fine ----!'

Katharine cried, 'It is all lies that this fool magister utters. I
will go to no masques nor revels.' She turned upon Lady Rochford, her
face pallid, her lips open: 'Give me water,' she said harshly. 'I will
get me back to my pig-sties.'

Lady Rochford wrung her hands and protested that her ladyship should
not repeat that they were always thus. Privy Seal should not visit it
upon them.

The magister blinked upon the riot that his muddling had raised. He
called out, 'Be quiet. Be quiet. This lady is sick!' and stretched out
his hands to hold Katharine on her feet.

Cicely Elliott cried, 'God send all Crummock's informers always sick.'

'Thou dastard!' Katharine screamed aloud. She tried to speak but she
choked; she grasped Udal's hand as if to wring from him the denial of
his foolish lies, but a sharp and numbing pain shot up her maimed
wrist to her shoulders and leaped across her forehead.

'Thou filthy spy,' the dark girl laughed wildly into her agonised
face. 'If there had never been any like thee all the dear men of my
house had still breathed.'

Katharine sprang wildly towards her tormentor, but a black sheet
seemed to drop across her eyes. She fell right down and screamed as
her elbow struck the floor.




PART TWO

THE HOUSE OF EYES

I


A grave and bearded man was found to cup her. He gave her a potion
composed of the juice of nightshade and an infusion of churchyard
moss. Her eyes grew dilated and she had evil dreams. She lay in a
small chamber that was quite bare and had a broken window, and the
magister ran from room to room begging for quilts to cover her.

It was nobody's affair. The Lord Privy Seal, her uncle, the Catholics,
and the King were still perturbed about Anne of Cleves, and there were
no warrants signed for Katharine's housing or food. All the palace was
trembling with confusion, for, when the Queen had been upon the point
of setting out from Rochester, the King was said to have been overcome
by a new spasm of disgust: she was put by again.

The young Earl of Surrey, a cousin of Katharine's, gave Udal
contemptuously a couple of crowns towards her nourishment. Udal
applied them to bribing Throckmorton, the spy who had been with Privy
Seal upon the barge, to inscribe on his lord's tablets the words:
'Katharine Howard to be provided for.' Udal made up his courage
sufficiently to speak to the Duke, whom he met in a corridor. The Duke
was jaundiced against his niece, because her cousin Culpepper had
fallen upon Sir Christopher Aske, the Duke's captain who had kept the
postern. It had needed seven men to master him, and this great tumult
had arisen in the King's own courtyard. Nevertheless, the Duke sent
his astrologer to cast Katharine's horoscope. He signed, too, an order
that some girl be found to attend on her.

Udal filled in the girl's name as Margot Poins, the granddaughter of
old Badge, of Austin Friars. Even among these clamours his tooth
watered for her, and he gave the order to young Poins to execute. The
young man rode off into Bedfordshire, where his sister had been sent
out of the way to the house of their aunt. He presented the order as
in the nature of a writ from the Duke, and amongst Lutherans in London
a heavy growl of rage went up--against Norfolk, against the Papists of
the Privy Council, and, above all, against Katharine Howard, whom they
called the New Harlot.

Katharine, having taken much nightshade juice, was raving upon her
bed. The leech became convinced that she was possessed by a demon,
because the pupils of her eyes were as large as silver groats, and her
hands picked at the coverlets. He ordered that thirteen priests should
say an exorcism at the door of her room, and that the potion of
nightshade--since it might inconvenience without dislodging the fiend
inhabiting her slender body--should be discontinued.

Udal sought for priests, but having no money, he was disregarded by
them. He ran to the chaplain of the Bishop of Winchester. For the
clergy upheld or ordained by Archbishop Cranmer were held to be less
efficacious in matters of witchcraft and possession. Just then
Cromwell had triumphed, and Anne of Cleves was upon the water coming
to the palace.

Bishop Gardiner's chaplain, a fat man, with beady and guileless eyes
sunk in under an immense forehead, imagined that Udal's visit was a
pretext for overhearing the words of rage and discomfiture that in
that Papist centre might be let drop about the new Queen. For Udal,
because Privy Seal had set him with the Lady Mary, passed amongst the
Papists for one of Cromwell's informants, and it amused his sardonic
and fantastic nature to affect mysterious denials, which made the
fiction the more firmly believed and gave to Udal himself a certain
hated prestige. The chaplain answered that in the present turmoil no
such body as thirteen clergymen could be found.

'But the lady shall be torn in pieces,' Udal shrieked. Panic had
overcome him. Who knew that the fiend, having torn his Katharine
asunder, might not enter into the body of his Margot, who was already
at her bedside? His lips quivered with terror, his eyes smiled
furiously, he wrung his hands. He swore he would penetrate to the
King's Highness' self. Udal was a man who stuck at nothing to gain a
point. He had heard from Katharine that the King had spoken graciously
to her, and he swore once more that she was the apple of the King's
eye, as well as a beloved disciple of Privy Seal's.

'Be sure,' he foamed, 'they shall be avenged on a Gardiner and his
crew if you let her die.'

The chaplain said impassively: 'God forbid that we, who are loyal to
his Highness, should listen to these tales you bring us of his
lechery!' They had there a new Queen, their duty was to her, and to no
Katharine Howard. The bishop's clergy were all joyfully setting to
welcome the lady from Cleves, they had no time to waste over a leman's
demons. It overjoyed him to refuse Privy Seal's man a boon on the plea
of loyalty to the new Queen. Nevertheless, he went straight to the
presence of the bishop, and told him the marvels that Udal had
reported.

'The man is incontinent and a babbler,' the chaplain said. 'We may
believe one tenth.'

'Well, you shall find for once how this wench is housed and where,'
his master answered moodily. 'God knows what we may believe in these
days. Doubtless the Nuntio of Satan hath a new plot in the hatching.'
Making these enquiries, the chaplain came upon the backwash of Udal's
reports that the King loved some leman. Some lady, somewhere--some
said a Howard, some a Rochford, some would have it a Spanish
woman--was being hidden up, either by the King, by the Duke of
Norfolk, or by Privy Seal. God knew the truth of these things: but
similar had happened before; and it was certain that the Cleves woman
had been for long kept dangling at Rochester. Perhaps that was the
reason. His Highness had his own ways in these matters: but where
there was smoke, generally fire was to be found. The chaplain brought
this budget back to Bishop Gardiner. Gardiner swore a wild oath that,
by the bones of the Confessor, they had unmasked a new plot of Satan's
Legate, the Privy Seal. But, by the grace of God, he would
counter-plot him.

Udal, who had started all these rumours, had run to get the help of a
Dean of Durham, with whom formerly he had had much converse as to the
position of the Islands of the Blest. He never found him; the palace
was in confusion, with the doors all open and men running from room to
room to ask of each other how far it might be safe to be extravagant
in their demonstrations of joy at the coming of the new Queen.

All night long, from about dusk, the palace rang with salvos of
artillery, loud shouts and the blowing of horns: the windows glowed
duskily now and again with the light of bonfires that leapt up and
subsided. Margot Poins, who was used to rejoicings in the City, set
the heavy wooden bar across the door in Katharine Howard's room,
turned the immense key in the rusty lock, and opened to no knocking
until the day broke. There were shouts and stumblings in the corridor
outside and the magister himself, very intoxicated and shrieking, came
hammering at the door with several others towards one in the morning.

Katharine could walk by noon to the lodging that had at last been
assigned to her by Privy Seal's warrant. The magister, having got
himself soundly beaten the night before, was still sleeping away the
effects of it, so she and Margot stayed for an hour in solitude.
Voices passed the door many times, and at last a Master Viridus
entered stealthily. He was one of the Lord Cromwell's secretaries, and
he bore a purse. His name had been Greene but he had translated it to
give a more worshipful sound. His eyes were furtive and he moved his
lips perpetually in imitation of his master; wore a hooded cap, and
made much use of the Italian language.

'Bounty is the sign of the great, and honourable service ensureth its
continuance,' he said in a dry and arrogant voice. 'This is my Lord
Privy Seal's vails. My lord hath gone to his own house.'

He presented the purse of gold, and peered round at the room which,
following the warrant, had been assigned by a clerk from the Earl
Marshal's office.

'I thank your lord, and shall endeavour to deserve his good bounty,'
Katharine said. The nightshade juice being left two days behind she
had the use of her eyes and much of the stiffness had gone out of her
wrist.

'Your ladyship had much the wiser,' he answered. He lifted the
hangings and, under pretence of examining into her comfort, peered
into the great Flemish press and felt under the heavy black table to
see if it had a drawer for papers. Cromwell had been forced, following
the King's command, to give Katharine her place. But he had no love
for Howards, and already the maids of the Lady Mary were a mutinous
knot. Viridus was instructed to keep an attentive eye upon this
girl--for they might hang her very easily since she was outspoken; or,
having got her neck into a noose, they could work upon her terror and
make her spy upon the Lady Mary herself. None of the Lady Mary's women
were housed very sumptuously, but in this room there were at least an
old tapestry, a large Flemish chair, a feather bed in a niche like an
arched cell over which the hangings could be drawn, and a cord of wood
for the fire. He hummed and hawed that workmen must come to bring her
better hangings, and a servitor be found to keep her door. A watch was
to be set on her; the women who measured her for clothes would try to
discover whom she loved and hated, and the serving man at her door
would report her visitors.

'My lord hath you very present in his mind,' Viridus said.

She was commanded to go on the Saturday to the house in Austin
Friars, where my lord was preparing a great feast in the honour of the
Queen.

Katharine said that she had no dress to go in.

'A seemly decent habit shall be got ready,' he answered. 'You shall
sit in a gallery in private, and it shall be pointed out to you what
lords you shall speak with and whom avoid.' For '_com' è bella
giovinezza_' ... How beautiful is youth, what a pleasant season! And
since it lasted but a short space it behoved us all--and her as much
as any--to make as much as might be whilst it endured. The regard of a
great lord such as Privy Seal brought present favours and future
honours in the land, honours being pleasant in their turn, when youth
is passed, like the mellow suns of autumn. 'Thereby indeed,' he
apostrophised her, 'the savour of youth reneweth itself again and
again.... "_Anzi rinuova come fa la luna_," in the words of Boccace.'

Her fair and upright beauty made Viridus acknowledge how excellent a
spy upon the Lady Mary she might make. Papistry and a loyal love for
the Old Faith seemed to be as strong in her candid eyes as it was
implicit in her name. The Lady Mary might trust her for that and talk
with her because of her skill in the learned tongues. Then, if they
held her in their hands, how splendid a spy she might make, being so
trusted! She might well be won for their cause by the offer of liberal
rewards, though Privy Seal's hand had been heavy upon all her
kinsfolk. These men of Privy Seal's get from him a maxim which he got
in turn from his master Macchiavelli: '_Advance therefore those whom
it shall profit thee to make thy servants: for men forget sooner the
death of a father than the loss of a patrimony_'--and either by
threats or by rewards they might make her very useful.

She had been minded to mock him in the beginning of his speech, but
his dangerous pale-blue eyes made her feel that if he were ridiculous
he was also very powerful, and that she was in the hands of these men.

Therefore she answered that youth indeed was a pleasant season when
health, good victuals and the love of God sustained it.

He surveyed her out of the corners of his eyes.

'Seek, then, to deserve these good things,' he said. He stayed some
time longer directing her how she should wear her clothes, and then in
the gathering dusk he dwindled stealthily through the door.

'It is to make you like a chained-up beast or slave,' Margot said to
her mistress.

'Why, hold your tongue, coney, after to-day,' Katharine answered, 'the
walls shall hear. I am a very poor man's daughter and must even earn
my bread if I would stay here.'

'They could never tie me so,' Margot retorted.

Her mistress laughed:

'Why, you may set nets for the wind, but what a man will catch is
still uncertain.'

It was cold, and they piled up the fire, waiting for some one to bring
them candles.

A tall and bulky figure, with a heavy cloak cast over one shoulder in
the Spanish fashion, but with a priest's cap, was suddenly in the
doorway.

'Ha, magister,' Katharine said, knowing no other man that could visit
her. But the firelight shone upon a heavy, firm jaw that was never the
magister's, on white hands and in threatening, steadfast eyes.

'I am the unworthy Bishop Gardiner, of Winchester,' a harsh voice
said. 'I seek one Katharine Howard. Peace be with you in these evil
days.'

Katharine fell upon her knees before this holy man. He gave her his
blessing perfunctorily, and muttered some words of the exorcism
against demons.

'I am even cured,' Katharine said.

He sent Margot Poins from the room, and stood in the firelight that
threw his great shadow to shake upon the hangings, towering above
Katharine Howard upon her knees. He was silent, as if he would
threaten her, and his brooding eyes glowed and devoured her face. Here
then, she thought, was the man from the other camp descending
secretly upon her. He had no need to threaten, for she was of his
side.

He said that a Magister Udal had reported that she stood in need of
Christian aid, and, speaking Latin with a heavy voice, he interrogated
her as to her faith. The times were evil: many and various heresies
stalked about the land: let her beware of trafficking with them.

Kneeling still in the firelight, she answered that, so far as was
lawful, she was a daughter of the Church.

He muttered: 'Lawful!' and looked at her for a long time with brooding
and fanatical eyes. 'I hear you have read many heathen books under a
strange master.'

She answered: 'Most Reverend, I am for the Old Faith in the old way.'

'A prudent tongue is also a Christian possession,' he muttered.

'Nay there is no one to hear in this room,' she said.

He bent over her to raise her to her feet and holding before her eyes
his missal, he indicated to her certain prayers that she should recite
in order to prevent the fiend's coming to her again. Suddenly he
commanded her to tell him how often she had conversed with the King's
Highness.

Gardiner was the bitterest of all whom Cromwell had to hate him. He
had been of the King's Council, and a secretary before Cromwell had
reached the Court, and, but for Cromwell, he might well have been the
King's best minister. But Cromwell had even taken his secretaryship;
and he was set upon having Privy Seal down all through those ten
years. He had been bishop before any of these changes had been thought
of, and by such Papists as Katharine Howard he was esteemed the most
holy man in the land.

She told him that she had seen the King but once for a little time.

'They told me it was many times,' he answered fiercely. 'Should I have
come here merely to chatter with you?'

There was something sinister and harsh even in the bluish tinge of his
shaven jaws, and his agate-blue eyes were sombre, threatening and
suspicious.

She answered: 'But once,' and related the story very soberly.

He threatened her with his finger.

'Have a care that you speak truth. Things will not always remain in
this guise. I come to warn you that you speak the King with a loyal
purpose. His Highness listens sometimes to the promptings of his
women.'

'You might have saved your journey,' she answered. 'I could speak no
otherwise if he loved me.'

He gazed involuntarily round at the hangings as if he suspected a
listener.

'Your Most Reverence does ill to doubt me,' Katharine said
submissively. 'I am of a true house.'

'No house is true save where it finds its account,' he answered
moodily. He could not believe that she spoke the truth--for he was
unable to believe that any man could speak the truth--but it was true
she was poorly housed, raggedly dressed and hidden up in a corner.
Nevertheless, these might be artifices. He made ostentatiously and
disdainfully towards the door.

'Why, God keep you,'--he moved his fingers in a negligent blessing--'I
believe you are true, though you are of little use.' Suddenly he shot
out:

'If you would stay here in peace your cousin Culpepper must begone.'

Katharine put her hand to her heart in sudden fear of these men who
surrounded her and knew everything.

'What hath Tom done?' she asked.

'He hath put a shame upon thee,' the bishop answered. He had fallen
upon Sir Christopher Aske: he had been set in chains for it, in the
Duke's ward room. But upon the coming of the Queen the night before,
all misdemeanants had been cast loose again. Culpepper had been kept
by the guards from entering the palace, where he had no place. But he
had fallen in with the Magister Udal in the courtyard. Being maudlin
and friendly at the time, he had cast his arms round the magister's
neck claiming him for a loved acquaintance. They had drunk together
and had started, towards midnight, to find the chamber of Katharine
Howard, Culpepper seeking his cousin, and the magister, Margot Poins.
On the way they had enlisted other jovial souls, and the tumult in the
corridor had arisen. 'These scandals are best avoided,' the bishop
finished. 'I have known women lose their lives through them when they
came to have husbands.'

'I could have calmed him,' Katharine said. 'He is always silent at a
word from me.'

Gardiner stood pondering, his head hanging down. His eyes, hard and
blue, flashed at her and then down again at the floor.

'They told me you were the King's good friend,' he said, resentfully.
'Your gossip Udal told my chaplain, and it hath been repeated.'

'They will talk where there are a many together,' Katharine answered;
'the magister is a notorious babbler and will have told many lies.'

'He is a spy of Privy Seal's and deep in his councils,' Gardiner
answered gloomily.

A heavy wind that had arisen hurled itself against the dark casement.
Little flaws of cold air penetrated the room, and the bishop pulled
his cap further down over his ears.

'My Lord Privy Seal would send my cousin to Calais where there is
fighting to come,' Katharine said.

Gardiner raised his head sharply at Cromwell's name.

'You speak sense at the end,' he muttered. To him too it had occurred
that if she was to be the King's peaceably, this madman must begone.
If Cromwell wished this lover of this girl out of the way, the reason
was not obscure.

'A man of his hath been here this very day,' Katharine said.

'Privy Seal learned whoremastering in Italy,' Gardiner cried
triumphantly. 'He saw signs that his Highness inclined to you. Have a
care for your little soul.'

'Why, I think Privy Seal had no such vain imagination,' Katharine
answered submissively. She would have laughed that the magister's
insane babblings should have raised such a coil; but Gardiner was a
man esteemed very saintly, and she kept her eyes on the floor.

'Give thou ear to no doctrines of Privy Seal's,' he answered swiftly.
'Thy soul should burn: I will curse thee. If the King shall offer thee
favours for thy friends come thou to me for spiritual guidance.'

She opened amazed and candid eyes upon him.

'But this is a folly,' she said. 'A King may regard one for a minute,
then it is past. Privy Seal would not bring me up against the King.'

He flashed his gloomy blue eyes at her, suspecting her, and still
threatening.

'I know how Privy Seal will plot,' he said passionately. 'Having
failed with one woman he will bring another.'

He clenched his hands angrily and unclenched them: the wind moaned for
a moment among the chimney stacks.

'So it is!' he cried, from deep down in his chest. 'If it were not so,
how is there all this clamour about his Highness and a woman?'

'Most Reverend,' she said, 'there is no end to the inventions of
Magister Udal.'

'There is none to the machinations of the fiend, and Udal is of his
councils,' he said. 'Be careful, I tell you, for your soul's sake.
Cromwell shall come to you offering you great bribes. Have a care I
say!'

She attempted to say that Udal had no voice at all in Privy Seal's
councils, being a garrulous magpie that no sane man would trust. But
Gardiner had crossed his arms and stood, immense and shadowy, in the
firelight. He hissed irritably between his teeth when she spoke, as if
she interrupted his meditation.

'All the world knows Udal for his spy,' he said, sombrely. 'If Udal
hath babbled, God be thanked. I say again: if Privy Seal bring thee to
the King, come thou to me. But, by the Grace of Heaven, I will
forestall Privy Seal with thee and the King!'

She forbore to contradict him any more; he had this maggot in his
head, and was so wild to defeat Privy Seal with his own tool.

He muttered: 'Think you Privy Seal knoweth not the King's taste? I
tell you he hath seen an inclination in him towards you. This is a
plot, but I have sounded it!'

She let him talk, and asked, with a malice too fine for him to
discern:

'I should not shun the King's presence for my soul's sake?'

'God forbid,' he answered. 'I may use thee to bring down Privy Seal.'

He picked up a piece of bark from a faggot beside the fire and rolled
it between his fingers. She stood looking at him intently, her lips a
little parted, tall, graceful and submissive.

'You are more fair-skinned than any his Highness has favoured before,'
he said in a meditative voice. 'Yet Cromwell knows the King's tastes
better than any man.' He sank down into her tall-backed chair and
suddenly tossed the piece of bark into the fire. 'I would have you
walk across the floor, elevating your arms as you were the goddess
Flora.'

She tripped towards the door, held her arms above her head, turned her
long body to right and left, bent very low in a courtesy to him, and
let her hands fall restfully into her lap. The firelight shone upon
the folds of her dress and in the white lining of her hood. He looked
at her, leaning over the arm of the chair, his blue eyes hard with the
strenuous rage of his new project.

'You could take a part in an Italian interlude? A masque?'

'I have a better memory of the French or Latin,' she answered.

'You do not turn pale? Your knees knock not together?'

'I think I blush most,' she said seriously.

He answered, 'You will be the better of a little colour,' and began
muffling his face with his cloak.

'See you, then,' his harsh voice commanded. 'You shall see their
Highnesses at Privy Seal's house on the Saturday; but they shall see
you at mine on the Tuesday. If you are good enough to serve the turn
of Privy Seal, you may be good enough to serve mine. The King listens
sometimes to the promptings of his women. I will teach you how you may
bring this man down and set me in his place.'

She reflected for a moment. 'I would well serve you,' she said. 'But I
do not believe this fable of the King, and I have no memory of
Italian.' She talked of being the Lady Mary's servant, or that she
must get her lady's leave.

His brows grew heavy, his eyes threatening and alarming beneath their
heavy lids.

'Be you faithful to me,' he thundered. Even his thin and delicate
hands seemed to menace her. 'Retain your obedience to your Faith. Your
duty is to that, and to no earthly lady before that.'

Her eyes were cast down, her lips did not move. He said, harshly, 'It
will go ill with you if it become known to Cromwell I have visited
you. Keep this matter secret as you love your liberty. I will send you
the words you shall say by a private bearer. After, maybe, his
Highness shall safeguard you, I admonishing him. But the Lady Mary
shall bid you obey me in all things.'

He opened the door and put his head out cautiously. Suddenly he drew
it back and said in Latin, 'Here is a spy.' He did not flinch, but
advanced into the corridor, keeping his back to the servitor whom
already Master Viridus had sent to keep her door. Gardiner fumbled in
his robes and pulled out his missal. He turned the pages over, and,
speaking in a feigned and squeaky voice, once more indicated to her
prayers against the visitations of fiends. Reading them aloud, he
interspersed the Latin of the missal with the phrases, 'You may pray
to God he have not seen my face. Be you very silent and secret, or you
are undone. I could in no wise save you from Cromwell unless the King
becomes your protector.' He finished in the vulgar tongue. 'I pray my
prayers with you may have availed to give you relief. But a simple
priest as myself is of small skill in these visitations. You should
have sent to some great Churchman or one of the worshipful bishops.'

'Good Father Henry, I thank you,' she answered, having entered into
his artifice. He went away, feigning to limp on his right knee, and
keeping his face from the spy.

At the corner of the corridor Margot Poins, an immense blonde and
gentle figure in Lutheran grey, stood back in the hangings. The
Magister Udal leant over her, supporting himself with one hand against
the wall above her head and one leg crossed beneath his gown.

'Come you into my room,' Katharine said to the girl; and to the
magister, 'Avoid, man of books. I will have no maid of mine undone by
thee.'

'_Venio honoris causa_,' he said pertly, and Margot uttered, 'He seeks
me in wedlock,' in a gruff, uncontrolled voice of a great young girl's
confusion, and immense blushes covered her large cheeks.

Katharine laughed; she was sorely afraid of the serving man behind
her, for that he was a spy set there by Viridus she was very sure, and
she was casting about in her mind for a device that should let her
tell whether or no he had known the bishop. The squeaky voice and the
feigned limp seemed to her stratagems ignoble and futile on the part
of a great Churchman, and his mania of plots and counter-plottings had
depressed and wearied her, for she expected the great to be wise. But
she played her part for him as it was her duty. She spoke to the girl
with her scarlet cheeks.

'Believe thou the magister after he hath ta'en thee afore a priest. He
hath sought me and two score others in the cause of honour. Get you
in, sweetheart.'

She pushed the girl in at the door. The serving man sat on his stool;
his shock of yellow hair had never known a comb, but he had a decent
suit of a purplish wool-cloth. He had his eyes dully on the ground.

'As you value your servitorship, let no man come into my room when I
be out,' Katharine said to him. 'Saving only the Father Henry that was
here now.'

The man raised expressionless blue eyes to her face.

'I know not his favours,' he said in a peasant's mutter. 'Maybe I
should know him if I saw him again. I am main good at knowing people.'

'Why, he is from the Sheeres,' Katharine added, still playing, though
she was certain that the man knew Gardiner. 'You shall know him by his
voice and his limp.'

He answered, 'Maybe,' and dropped his eyes to the ground. She sent him
to fetch her some candles, and shut the door upon him.


II

The Queen came to the revels given in her honour by the Lord Privy
Seal. Cromwell had three hundred servants dressed in new liveries:
pikemen with their staves held transversely, like a barrier, kept the
road all the way from the Tower Steps to Austin Friars, and in that
Lutheran quarter of the town there was a great crowding together. Caps
were pitched high and lost for ever, and loud shouts of praise to God
went up when the Queen and her Germans passed, with boys casting
branches of holm, holly, bay and yew, the only plants that were green
in the winter season, before the feet of her mule. But the King did
not come. It was reported to the crowd that he was ill at Greenwich.

It was known very well by those that sat at dinner with her that,
after three days, he had abandoned his Queen and kept his separate
room. She sat eating alone, on high beneath the dais, heavy, silent,
placid and so fair that her eyebrows appeared to be white upon her red
forehead. She did not speak a word, having no English, and it was
considered disgusting that she wiped her fingers upon pieces of bread.

Hostile lords remarked upon all her physical imperfections, which the
King, it was known, had reported to his physicians in a writing of
many pages. Besides, she had no English, no French, no Italian; she
could not even play cards with his Highness. It was true that they had
squeezed her into English stays, but she was reported to have wept at
having to mount a horse. So she could not go a-hawking, neither could
she shoot with the bow, and her attendants--the women, bound about the
middle and spreading out above and below like bolsters, and the men,
who wore their immense scolloped hats falling over their ears even at
meal-times--excited disgust and derision by the noises they made when
they ate.

The Master Viridus had Katharine Howard in his keeping. He took her up
into a small gallery near the gilded roof of the long hall and pointed
out to her, far below, the courtiers that it was safe for her to
consort with, because they were friends of Privy Seal. His manner was
more sinister and more meaning.

'You would do well to have to do with no others,' he said.

'I am like to have to do with none at all,' Katharine answered, 'for
no mother's son cometh anigh me.'

He looked away from her. Down below she made out her cousin Surrey,
sitting with his back ostentatiously turned to a Lord Roydon, of
Cromwell's following; her uncle, plunged in his silent and malignant
gloom; and Cromwell, his face lit up and smiling, talking earnestly
with Chapuys, the Ambassador from the Emperor.

'Eleven hundred dishes shall be served this day,' Viridus proclaimed,
seeming to warn her. 'There can no other lord find so many plates of
parcel gilt.' His level and cold voice penetrated through all the
ascending din of voices, of knives, of tuckets of trumpets that
announced the courses of meat and of the three men's songs that
introduced the sweet jellies which only Privy Seal, it was said, could
direct to be prepared.

'Other lordings all,' Viridus continued with his sermon, 'ha' ruined
themselves seeking in vain to vie with my lord. Most of those you see
are broken men, whose favour would be worth naught to you.'

Tables were ranged down each side of the great hall, the men sitting
on the right, each wearing upon his shoulder a red rose made of silk
since no flowers were to be had. The women, sitting upon the left, had
white favours in their caps. In the wide space between these tables
were two bears; chained to tall gilt posts, they rolled on their hams
and growled at each other. From time to time the serving men who went
up and down in the middle let fall great dishes containing craspisces,
cranes, swans or boars. These meats were kicked contemptuously aside
for the bears to fight over, and their places supplied immediately
with new. Other serving men broke priceless bottles of Venetian glass
against the corners of tables, and let the costly Rhenish wines run
about their feet.

This, the Master Viridus said, was intended to point out the wealth of
their lord and his zealousness to entertain his Sovereigns.

'It would serve the purpose as well to give them twice as much fare,'
Katharine said.

'They could never contain it,' Viridus answered gravely, 'so great is
the bounty of my lord.'

Throckmorton, the spy, enormous, bearded and with the half-lion badge
of the Privy Seal hanging round his neck from a gilt chain, walked up
and down behind the guests, bearing the wand of a major-domo,
affecting to direct the servers when to fill goblets and listening at
tables where much wine had been served. Once he looked up at the
gallery, and his scrutinising and defiant brown eyes remained for a
long time upon Katharine's face, as if he too were appraising her
beauty.

'I would not drink much wine with that man listening at my back. He
came from my country, and was such a foul villain that mothers fright
their children with his name,' Katharine said.

Viridus moved his lips quickly one upon another, and suddenly directed
her to observe the new Queen's head-dress, broad and stiffened with a
wire of gold, upon which large pearls had been sewn.

'Many ladies will now get themselves such headdresses,' he said.

'That will I never,' she answered. It appeared atrocious and
Flemish-clumsy, spreading out and overshadowing the Queen's heavy
face. Their English hoods with the tails down made the head sleek and
comely; or, with the tails folded up and pinned square like flat caps
they could give to the face a gallant or a pensive expression.

'Why, I could never get me in at the door of the confessional with
such a spreading cloth.'

Viridus had his chin on the rail of the gallery; he gazed down below
with his snaky eyes. She could not tell whether he were old or young.

'You would more prudently abandon the confessing,' he said, without
looking at her. 'My lord is minded that ladies who look to him should
wear such.'

'That is to be a bond-slave,' Katharine cried indignantly. He looked
round.

'Here is a great magnificence,' he uttered, moving his hand towards
the hall. 'My Lord Privy Seal hath a mighty power.'

'Not power enow to make me a laughing-stock for the men.'

'Why, this is a free land,' he answered. 'You may rot in a ditch if
you will, or worse if treasonable actions be brought home to you.'

Down below, wild men dressed in the skins of wolves, hares and stags
ran round the tethered bears bearing torches of sweet wood, and a
heavy and languorous smoke, like incense, mounted up to the gallery.
Viridus' unveiled threat made the necessity for submission come once
more into her mind. Other wild men were leading in a lion, immense and
lean as if it were a fawn-coloured ass. It roared and pulled at the
golden chains by which the knot of men held it. Many ladies shrieked
out, but the men dragged the lion into the open space before the dais
where the Queen sat unmoved and stolid.

'Would your master have me dip my fingers in the dish and wipe them on
bread-manchets as the Queen does?' Katharine asked in a serious
expostulation.

'It were an excellent action,' Viridus answered.

There was a brazen flare of trumpets so that the smoke swirled among
the rafters. Men with brass helmets and shields of brass were below in
the hall.

'They are costumed as the ancient Romans,' Katharine said, lost in
other thoughts.

Suddenly she saw that whilst all the other eyes were upon the lion,
Throckmorton's glare was again upon her face. He appeared to shake his
head and to bow his immense and bearded form. It brought into her mind
the dangerous visit of Bishop Gardiner. Suddenly he dropped his eyes.

'You see some friends,' Viridus' voice asked beside her.

'Nay, I have no friends here,' Katharine answered.

She could not tell that the bearded spy's eyes were not merely amorous
in their intention, for such looks she was used to, and he was a very
vile man.

'In short,' Viridus spoke, 'it were an excellent action to act in all
things as the Queen does. For fashions are a matter of fashion. It is
all one whether you wipe your fingers on bread-manchets or on napkins.
But when a fashion becometh general its strangeness departeth and it
is esteemed fit for a King's Court. Thus you may earn your bread: this
is your duteous work. Observe the king of the beasts. See how it shall
do its duty before the Queen, and mark the lesson.' His voice
penetrated, low and level, through all the din from below. Yet the men
dressed like gladiators advanced towards the dais where the Queen sat
eating unmoved. The lion before her growled frightfully, and dragged
its keepers towards the men in brass. They drew their short swords and
beat upon their shields crying: 'We be Roman traitors that war upon
this land.' Then it appeared that among them in their crowd they had a
large mannikin, dressed like themselves in brass and running upon
wheels.

The ladies pressed the tables with their hands, making as if to rise
in terror. But the mannikin toppling forward fell before the lion with
a hollow sound of brass. The lean beast, springing at its throat, tore
it to reach the highly smelling flesh that was concealed within the
tunic, and the Romans fled, casting away their shields and swords. One
of them had a red forked beard and wide-open blue eyes. He brought
into Katharine's mind the remembrance of her cousin. She wondered
where he could be, and imagined him with that short sword, cutting his
way to her side.

'That sight is allegorically to show,' Viridus was commenting beside
her, 'how the high valour of Britain shall defend from all foes this
noble Queen.'

The lion having reached its meat lay down upon it.

Katharine remembered that Bishop Gardiner said that her cousin must be
begone. She tried to say to Viridus: 'Sir, I would fain obey you in
these things, but I have a cousin that shall much hinder me.'

But the applause of the people below drowned her voice and Viridus
continued talking.

Let it be true that the Queen, being alone, showed amongst their
English fineries and nicenesses a gross and repulsive strangeness. But
if their ladies put on her manners she should no longer be alone, and
it would appear to the King and to all men that her example was both
commended and emulated. It was a matter of kingcraft, and so the Lord
Privy Seal was minded and determined.

'Then I will even get myself such a hat and tear my capons apart with
my fingers,' Katharine said.

'You had much the wiser,' he answered.

The hall was now full of wild men, nymphs in white gowns, men bearing
aspergers with which to scatter perfumes, and merry andrews, so that
the floor could no longer be seen. A party of lords had overset a
table in their efforts to get to the nymphs. The Queen was schooled
to go out behind the arras, and the ladies, laughing, calling to each
other and to the men at the other tables, and pinning up their hoods,
filed out after her.

'I shall do my best to please your master and mine,' Katharine said.
'But he must even help me, or I can be no example to emulate, but one
at whom the finger of scorn is likely to be pointed.'

Viridus paused before he led his charge from the gallery. His
pale-blue eyes were more placable.

'You shall be well seconded. But have a care. Dally with no traitors.
Speak fairly of your master's friends.' He touched her above the left
breast with a claw-like finger. 'The Italian writes: "Whoso mocketh my
love mocketh also mine own self."'

'I mock none,' Katharine said. 'But I have a cousin to be provided for
that neither you nor I shall mock with much safety if he be sober
enough to stand.'

He listened to her with his hand upon the door of the gallery: his air
was attentive and aroused. She related very simply how Culpepper had
besieged her door--'He came to London to help me on my way and to seek
fortune in some war. I would that a place might be found for him, for
here he is like to ruin both himself and me.'

'We have need of good swordsmen for an errand,' he said, in an
absorbed voice.

'There was never a better than Tom,' Katharine said. 'He hath cut a
score of throats. Your lord would have sent him to Calais.'

He muttered:

'Why, there are places other than Calais where a man may make a
fortune.'

Something sinister in his brooding voice made her say:

'I would not have him killed. He hath made me many presents.'

He looked at her expressionlessly:

'It is very certain that you can not serve my lord with such a
firebrand to your tail,' he said. 'I will find him an errand.'

'But not where he shall be killed,' she said again.

'Why,' he said slowly, 'I will send him where he will make a great
fortune.'

'A great fortune would help him little,' she answered. 'I would have
him sent where he may fight evenly matched.'

He laid his hand upon her wrist.

'He is in as much danger here as anywhere. This is not Lincolnshire,
but an ordered Court.'--A man drew his sword with some peril there,
for there were laws against it. If men came brawling in the maids'
quarters at nights there were penalties of losing fingers, hands, or
even heads. And the maids themselves were liable to be whipped.--He
shook his head at her:

'If your cousin hath so violent an inclination to you I were your best
friend to send him far away.'

It was in his mind that if they were to breed this girl to be a spy
they must keep her protected from madmen. Something of mystery in his
manner penetrated to her quick senses.

'God help me, what a dangerous place this is!' she said. 'I would I
had never spoken to you of my cousin.'

He eyed her solemnly and said that if she were minded to wed this
roaring boy they might both, and soon, earn fortunes to buy them land
in a distant shire.


III

The young Poins, in his scarlet and black, drew his sister into a
corner of the hall in which the gentry of the Lords that were there
had already dined. It was a vast place, used as a rule for hearing
suitors to the Lord Privy Seal and for the audit dinners of his
tenantry in London. On its whitened walls there were trophies of arms,
and between the wall and the platform at the end of the hall was a
small space convenient for private talk. The rest of the people there
were playing round games for kissing forfeits or clustered round a
magician who had brought a large ape to tell fortunes by the _Sortes
Virgilianæ_. It fumbled about in the pages of a black-letter Æneid,
and scratched its side voluptuously: taking its own time it looked at
the pages attentively with a mournful parody of an aged sage, and set
its finger upon a line that the fates directed.

'Here's a great ado about thee,' Poins said, laughing at his sister.
'Thy name is up in this town of London.'

He had come in the bodyguard of the Queen, and had made time to slip
round to old Badge's low house behind the wall in order to beg from
his grandfather ten crowns to pay for a cloak he had lost at cards.

'Such a cackle among these Lutherans,' he mocked at Margot. 'Heard you
no hootings as your lady rode here behind us of the guard?'

'I heard none, nor she deserveth none,' Margot answered. 'For I love
her most well.'

'Aye, she hath done a rape on thee,' he laughed. 'Aye, our good uncle
hath printed a very secret libel upon her.' He began to whisper: Let
it not be known or a sudden vengeance might fall upon their house. It
was no small matter to print unlicensed broadsides. But their moody
uncle was out of all fear of consequences, so mad with rage. 'He would
have broken my back, because I tore thee from his tender keeping.'

'Sure it was never so tender,' Margot said. 'When was there a day that
he did not beat me?' But he would have married her to his apprentice,
a young fellow with a golden tongue, that preached every night to a
secret congregation in a Cripplegate cellar.

'Why, an thou observest my maxims,' the boy said, sententiously, 'I
will have thee a great lady. But uncle hath printed this libel, and
tongues are at work in Austin Friars.' It was said that this was a new
Papist plot. Margot was but the first that they should carry off. The
Duke and Bishop Gardiner were reported to have signed papers for
abducting all the Lutheran virgins in London. They were to be led from
the paths of virtue into Catholic lewdnesses, and all their boys were
to be abducted and sent into monasteries across the seas.

'Thus the race of Lutherans should die out,' he laughed. 'Why they are
hiding their maidens in pigeon-houses in Holborn. A boy called Hugh
hath gone out and never come home, and it is said that masked men in
black stuff gowns were seen to put him into a sack in Moorfields.'

'Well, here be great marvels,' Margot laughed.

He shook his red sides, and his blue eyes grew malicious and teasing:

'Such a strumpet as thy lady,' he uttered. 'A Papist Howard that is
known to have been loved by twenty men in Lincoln.'

Margot passed from laughter into hot anger:

'It is a marvel God strikes not their tongues with palsy that said
that,' she said swiftly. 'Why do you not kill some of them if you be a
man?'

'Why, be calmed,' he said. 'You have heard such tales before now. It
is no more than saying that a woman goes not to their churches to
pray.'

A young Marten Pewtress, half page, half familiar to the Earl of
Surrey, came towards them calling, 'Hal Poins.' He had black down upon
his chin and a roving eye. He wore a purple coat like a tabard, and a
cap with his master's arms upon a jewelled brooch.

'They say there's a Howard wench come to Court,' he cried from a
distance, 'and thy sister in her service.'

'We talk of her,' Poins answered. 'Here is my sister.'

The young Pewtress kissed the girl upon the cheek.

'Pray, you, sweetheart, unfold,' he said. 'You are a pretty piece, and
have a good brother that's my friend.'

He asked all of a breath whether this lady had yet had the small-pox?
whether her hair were her own? how tall she stood without high heels
to her shoon? whether her breath were sweet or her language unpleasing
in the Lincolnshire jargon? whether the King had sent her many
presents?

Margaret Poins was a very large, fair, and credulous creature, rising
twenty. Florid and slow-speaking, she had impulses of daring that
covered her broad face with immense blushes. She was dressed in grey
linsey-woolsey, and wore a black hood after the manner of the stricter
Protestants, but she had round her neck a gilt medallion on a gold
chain that Katharine Howard had given her already. She was, it was
true, the daughter of a gentleman courtier, but he had been knocked on
the head by rebels near Exeter just before her birth, and her mother
had died soon after. She had been treated with gloomy austerity by her
uncle and with sinister kindness by her grandfather, whom she dreaded.
So that, coming from her Bedfordshire aunt, who had a hard cane, to
this palace, where she had seen fine dresses and had already been
kissed by two lords in the corridors, she was ready to aver that the
Lady Katharine had a breath as sweet as the kine, a white skin which
the small-pox had left unscarred, hair that reached to her ankles, and
a learning and a wit unimaginable. Her own fortune was made, she
believed, in serving her. Both the magister and her brother had sworn
it, and, living in an age of marvels--dragons, portents from the
heavens, and the romances of knight errantry--she was ready to believe
it. It was true that the lady's room had proved a cell more bare and
darker than her own at home, but Katharine's bright and careless
laughter, her fair and radiant height, and her ready kisses and
pleasant words, made the girl say with hot loyalty:

'She is more fair than any in the land, and, indeed, she is the apple
of the King's eye.' Her voice was gruff with emotion, but, suddenly
becoming very aware that she was talking to a strange young gentleman
who might scoff, she seemed to choke and put her hand over her mouth.

Brocades for dresses, perfumes, gloves, oranges, and even another
netted purse of green silk holding gold had continued to be brought to
their chamber ever since Privy Seal had signed the warrant, and, it
being about the new year, these ordinary vails and perquisites of a
Maid of Honour made a show. Margot believed very sincerely that these
things came direct from the King's hands, since they were formally
announced as coming of his Highness' great bounty.

She reported to young Pewtress, 'And even now she is with the Lord
Privy Seal, who brought her to Court.'

'He will go poaching among our Howards now,' Pewtress said. He stood
considering with an air of gloom that the Norfolk servants imitated
from their master, along with such sayings as that the times were very
evil, and that no true man's neck was safe on his shoulders. 'Pray
you, Sweetlips, tell no one this for a day until I have told my
master. It may get me some crowns.' He pinched her chin between his
thumb and forefinger. 'I will be your sweetheart, pretty.'

'Nay, I am provided with a good one,' Margot said seriously.

'You cannot have too many in this place. Take me for when the other's
in gaol and another for when I am hung, as all good men are like to
be.' He turned away lightly and loosened one of his jewelled garters,
so that his stockings should hang in slovenly folds to prove that he
was a man and despised niceness in his dress.

'I would that you be not too cheap to these gentry,' her brother said,
with his eyes on Pewtress.

'I did naught,' she answered. 'If a gentleman will kiss one, it is
uncourtly to turn away the cheek.'

'There is a way of not lending the lip,' he lectured her. 'I shall
school you. A kiss here, a kiss there, I grant you. But consider that
you be a gentleman's child, and ask who a man is.'

'He was well enough favoured,' she remonstrated.

'In these changing days many upstarts are come about the Court,' he
went on with his lesson. 'Such were not here in the old days. Crummock
hath wrought this. Seek advancement; pleasure your mistress, who can
advance you; smile upon the magister, who, being advanced, can advance
you. Speak courteous and fair words to any great lords that shall
observe you. So we can rise in the world.'

'I will observe thy words,' she said submissively, for he seemed to
her great and learned; 'but I like not that thou call'st me "you."'

'Why, these be grave matters,' he replied, 'and "you" is graver than
"thou." But I love thee well. I will take thee a walk if the sun shine
to-morrow.' He tightened his belt and took his pike from the corner.
'As for your lady; those that made these lies are lowsels. I could
slay a score of them if they pressed upon you two.'

'I would not be so spoken of,' Margot answered.

'Then you must never rise in the world, as I am minded you shall,' he
retorted, 'for, you being in a high place, eyes will be upon you.'

Nevertheless, Katharine Howard heard no evil words shouted after her
that day. Pikemen and servitors of Cromwell were too thick upon all
the road to the Tower, where the courtiers took barge again. Cromwell
made very good order that no insults should reach the ears of such of
the Papist nobles as came to his feast; they would make use with the
King of evil words if any such were shouted. Thus the more dangerous
and the most foul-mouthed of that neighbourhood, when the Court went
by, found hands pressed over their mouths or scarves suddenly
tightened round their throats by stalwart men that squeezed behind
them in the narrow ways, so that not many more than twenty heads on
both sides were broken that day; and Margot Poins kept her mouth
closed tight with a sort of rustic caution--a shyness of her mistress
and a desire to spare her any pain. Thus it was not until long after
that Katharine heard of these rumours.

Katharine was in high good spirits. She had no great reason, for
Viridus had threatened her; the Queen had rolled her large eyes round
when Katharine had made her courtesy, but no words intelligible to a
Christian had come from the thick lips; and no lord or lady had
noticed her with a word except that, late in the afternoon, her cousin
Surrey, a young man with a sleepily insolent air and front teeth that
resembled a rabbit's, had suddenly planted himself in front of her as
she sat on a stool against the hangings. He had begun to ask her where
she was housed, when another young man caught him by the shoulder and
pulled him away before he could do more than bid her sit there till he
came again. She had been in no mood to do that for her cousin Surrey;
besides, she would not be seen to speak much with a Papist henchman in
that house. He could seek her if he wanted her company, so she went
into another part of the hall, where they were all strangers.

Except for the mere prudence of pretending to obey Viridus until it
should be safe to defy him and his master, she troubled little about
what was going to happen to her. It was enough that she was away from
the home where she had pined and been lonely. She sat on her stool,
watched the many figures that passed her, marked fashions of
embroidery, and thought that such speeches as she chanced to hear were
ill-turned. Her sister Maids of Honour turned their backs upon her.
Only the dark girl, Cicely Elliott, who had gibed at her a week ago,
helped her to pin her sleeve that had been torn by a sword-hilt of
some man who had turned suddenly in a crowd. But Katharine had learnt,
as well as the magister, that when one is poor one must accept what
the gods send. Besides, she knew that in the Lady Mary's household she
was certain to be avoided, for she was regarded still as a spy of old
Crummock's. That, most likely, would end some day, and she had no love
for women's chatter.

She sat late at night correcting the embroidery of some
true-love-knots that Margot had been making for her. A huckster had
been there selling ribands from France, and showing a doll dressed as
the ladies of the French King's Court were dressing that new year. He
had been talking of a monster that had been born to a pig-sty on
Cornhill, and lamenting that travel was become a grievous costly thing
since the monasteries, with their free hostel, had been done away
with. The monster had been much pondered in the city; certainly it
portended wars or strange public happenings, since it had the face of
a child, greyhound's ears, a sow's forelegs, and a dragon's tail. But
the huckster had gone to another room, and Margot was getting her
supper with the Lady Mary's serving-maids.

'Save us!' Katharine said to herself over her embroidery-frame, 'here
be more drunkards. If I were a Queen I would make a law that any man
should be burnt on the tongue that was drunk more than seven times in
the week.' But she was already on her feet, making for the door, her
frame dropped to the ground. There had been a murmur of voices through
the thick oak, and then shouts and objurgations.

Thomas Culpepper stood in the doorway, his sword drawn, his left hand
clutching the throat of the serving man who was guarding her room.

'God help us!' Katharine said angrily; 'will you ruin me?'

'Cut throats?' he muttered. 'Aye, I can cut a throat with any man in
Christendom or out.' He shook the man backwards and forwards to
support himself. 'Kat, this offal would have kept me from thee.'

Katharine said, 'Hush! it is very late.'

At the sound of her voice his face began to smile.

'Oh, Kat,' he stuttered jovially, 'what law should keep me from thee?
Thou'rt better than my wife. Heathen to keep man and wife apart, I
say, I.'

'Be still. It is very late. You will shame me,' she answered.

'Why, I would not have thee shamed, Kat of the world,' he said. He
shook the man again and threw him good humouredly against the wall.
'Bide thou there until I come out,' he muttered, and sought to replace
his sword in the scabbard. He missed the hole and scratched his left
wrist with the point. 'Well, 'tis good to let blood at times,' he
laughed. He wiped his hand upon his breeches.

'God help thee, thou'rt very drunk,' Katharine laughed at him. 'Let me
put up thy sword.'

'Nay, no woman's hand shall touch this blade. It was my father's.'

An old knight with a fat belly, a clipped grey beard and roguish,
tranquil eyes was ambling along the gallery, swinging a small pair of
cheverel gloves. Culpepper made a jovial lunge at the old man's chest
and suddenly the sword was whistling through the shadows.

The old fellow planted himself on his sturdy legs. He laughed
pleasantly at the pair of them.

'An' you had not been very drunk I could never have done that,' he
said to Culpepper, 'for I am passed of sixty, God help me.'

'God help thee for a gay old cock,' Culpepper said. 'You could not
have done it without these gloves in your fist.'

'See you, but the gloves are not cut,' the knight answered. He held
them flat in his fat hands. 'I learnt that twist forty years ago.'

'Well, get you to the wench the gloves are for,' Culpepper retorted.
'I am not long together of this pleasant mind.' He went into
Katharine's room and propped himself against the door post.

The old man winked at Katharine.

'Bid that gallant not draw his sword in these galleries,' he said.
'There is a penalty of losing an eye. I am Rochford of Bosworth
Hedge.'

'Get thee to thy wench, for a Rochford,' Culpepper snarled over his
shoulder. 'I will have no man speak with my coz. You struck a good
blow at Bosworth Hedge. But I go to Paris to cut a better throat than
thine ever was, Rochford or no Rochford.'

The old man surveyed him sturdily from his head to his heels and
winked once more at Katharine.

'I would I had had such manners as a stripling,' he uttered in a round
and friendly voice. 'I might have prospered better in love.' Going
sturdily along the corridor he picked up Culpepper's sword and set it
against the wall.

Culpepper, leaning against the doorpost, was gazing with ferocious
solemnity at the open clothes-press in which some hanging dresses
appeared like women standing. He smoothed his red beard and thrust
his cap far back on his thatch of yellow hair.

'Mark you,' he addressed the clothes-press harshly, 'that is Rochford
of Bosworth Hedge. At the end of that day they found him with
seventeen body wounds and the corpses of seventeen Scotsmen round him.
He is famous throughout Christendom. Yet in me you see a greater than
he. I am sent to cut such a throat. But that's a secret. Only I am a
made man.'

Katharine had closed her door. She knew it would take her twenty
minutes to get him into the frame of mind that he would go peaceably
away.

'Thou art very pleasant to-night,' she said. 'I have seldom seen thee
so pleasant.'

'For joy of seeing thee, Kat. I have not seen thee this six days.' He
made a hideous grinding sound with his teeth. 'But I have broken some
heads that kept me from thee.'

'Be calm,' Katharine answered; 'thou seest me now.'

He passed his hand over his eyes.

'I'll be calm to pleasure thee,' he muttered apologetically. 'You said
I was very pleasant, Kat.' He puffed out his chest and strutted to the
middle of the room. 'Behold a made man. I could tell you such secrets.
I am sent to slay a traitor at Rome, at Ravenna, at Ratisbon--wherever
I find him. But he's in Paris, I'll tell thee that.'

Katharine's knees trembled; she sank down into her tall chair.

'Whom shalt thou slay?'

'Aye, and that's a secret. It's all secrets. I have sworn upon the
hilt of my knife. But I am bidden to go by an old-young man, a make of
no man at all, with lips that minced and mowed. It was he bade the
guards pass me to thee this night.'

'I would know whom thou shalt slay,' she asked harshly.

'Nay, I tell no secrets. My soul would burn. But I am sent to slay
this traitor--a great enemy to the King's Highness, from the Bishop
of Rome. Thus I shall slay him as he comes from a Mass.'

He squatted about the room, stabbing at shadows.

'It is a man with a red hat,' he grunted. 'Filthy for an Englishman to
wear a red hat these days!'

'Put up your knife,' Katharine cried, 'I have seen too much of it.'

'Aye, I am a good man,' he boasted, 'but when I come back you shall
see me a great one. There shall be patents for farms given me. There
shall be gold. There shall be never such another as I. I will give
thee such gowns, Kat.'

She sat still, but smoothed back a lock of her fair hair that glowed
in the firelight.

'When I am a great man,' he babbled on, 'I will not wed thee, for who
art thou to wed with a great man? Thou art more cheaply won. But I
will give thee....'

'Thou fool,' she shrieked suddenly at him. 'These men shall slay thee.
Get thee to Paris to murder as thou wilt. Thou shalt never come back
and I shall be well rid of thee.'

He gave her a snarling laugh:

'Toy thou with no man when I am gone,' he said with sudden ferocity,
so that his blue eyes appeared to start from his head.

'Poor fool, thou shalt never come back,' she answered.

He had an air of cunning and triumph.

'I have settled all this with that man that's no man, Viridus; thou
art here as in a cloister amongst the maids of the Court. No man shall
see thee; thou shalt speak with none that wears not a petticoat. I
have so contracted with that man.'

'I tell thee they have contrived this to be rid of thee,' she said.

His tone became patronising.

'Wherefore should they?' he asked. When there came no answer from her
he boasted, 'Aye, thou wouldst not have me go because thou lovest me
too well.'

'Stay here,' she said. 'I will give thee money.' He stood gazing at
her with his jaw fallen. 'Thou art a drunkard and a foul tongue,' she
said, 'but if thou goest to Paris to murder a cardinal thou shalt
never come out of that town alive. Be sure thou shalt be rendered up
to death.'

He staggered towards her and caught one of her hands.

'Why, it is but cutting of a man's throat,' he said. 'I have cut many
throats and have taken no harm. Be not sad! This man is a cardinal.
But 'tis all one. It shall make me a great man.'

She muttered, 'Poor fool.'

'I have sworn to go,' he said. 'I am to have great farms and a great
man shall watch over thee to keep thee virtuous. They have promised it
or I had not gone.'

'Do you believe their promises?' she asked derisively.

'Why, 'tis a good knave, yon Viridus. He promised or ever I asked it.'

He was on his knees before her as she sat, with his arms about her
waist.

'Sha't not cry, dear dove,' he mumbled. 'Sha't go with me to Paris.'

She sighed:

'No, no. Bide here,' and passed her hand through his ruffled hair.

'I would slay thee an thou were false to me,' he whispered over her
hand. 'Get thee with me.'

She said, 'No, no,' again in a stifled voice.

He cried urgently:

'Come! Come! By all our pacts. By all our secret vows.'

She shook her head, sobbing:

'Poor fool. Poor fool. I am very lonely.'

He clutched her tightly and whispered in a hoarse voice:

'It were merrier at home now. Thou didst vow. At home now. Of a
summer's night....'

She whispered: 'Peace. Peace.'

'At home now. In June, thou didst....'

She said urgently: 'Be still. Wouldst thou woo me again to the
grunting of hogs?'

'Aye, would I,' he answered. 'Thou didst....'

She moved convulsively in her chair. He grasped her more tightly.

'Thou yieldest, I know thee!' he cried triumphantly. He staggered to
his feet, still holding her hand.

'Thou shalt come to Paris. Sha't be lodged like a Princess. Sha't see
great sights.'

She sprang up, tearing herself from him.

'Get thee gone from here,' she shivered. 'I am done with starving with
thee. I know thy apple orchard wooings. Get thee gone from here. It is
late. I shall be shamed if a man be seen to leave my room so late.'

'Why, I would not have thee shamed, Kat,' he muttered, her strenuous
tone making him docile as a child.

'Get thee gone,' she answered, panting. 'I will not starve.'

'Wilt not come with me?' he asked ruefully. 'Thou didst yield in my
arms.'

'I do bid thee begone,' she answered imperiously. 'Get thee gold if
thou would'st have me. I have starved too much with thee.'

'Why, I will go,' he muttered. 'Buss me. For I depart towards Dover
to-night, else this springald cardinal will be gone from Paris ere I
come.'


IV

'Men shall make us cry, in the end, steel our hearts how we will,' she
said to Margot Poins, who found her weeping with her head down upon
the table above a piece of paper.

'I would weep for no man,' Margot answered.

Large, florid, fair, and slow speaking, she gave way to one of her
impulses of daring that covered her afterwards with immense blushes
and left her buried in speechless confusion. 'I could never weep for
such an oaf as your cousin. He beats good men.'

'Once he sold a farm to buy me a gown,' Katharine said, 'and he goes
to a sure death if I may not stay him.'

'It is even the province of men--to die,' Margot answered. Her voice,
gruff with emotion, astonished herself. She covered her mouth with the
back of her great white hand as if she wished to wipe the word away.

'Beseech you, spoil not your eyes with sitting to write at this hour
for the sake of this roaring boy.'

Katharine sat to the table: a gentle knocking came at the door. 'Let
no one come, I have told the serving knave as much.' She sank into a
pondering over the wording of her letter to Bishop Gardiner. It was
not to be thought of that her cousin should murder a Prince of the
Church; therefore the bishop must warn the Catholics in Paris that
Cromwell had this in mind. And Bishop Gardiner must stay her cousin on
his journey: by a false message if needs were. It would be an easy
matter to send him such a message as that she lay dying and must see
him, or anything that should delay him until this cardinal had left
Paris.

The great maid behind her back was fetching from the clothes-prop a
waterglobe upon its stand; she set it down on the table before the
rush-light, moving on tiptoe, for to her the writing of a letter was a
sort of necromancy, and she was distressed for Katharine's sake. She
had heard that to write at night would make a woman blind before
thirty. The light grew immense behind the globe; watery rays flickered
broad upon the ceiling and on the hangings, and the paper shone with a
mellow radiance. The gentle knocking was repeated, and Katharine
frowned. For before she was half way through with the humble words of
greeting to the bishop it had come to her that this was a very
dangerous matter to meddle in, and she had no one by whom to send the
letter. Margot could not go, for it was perilous for her maid to be
seen near the bishop's quarters with all Cromwell's men spying about.

Behind her was the pleasant and authoritative voice of old Sir
Nicholas Rochford talking to Margot Poins. Katharine caught the name
of Cicely Elliott, the dark maid of honour who had flouted her a week
ago, and had pinned up her sleeve that day in Privy Seal's house.

The old man stood, grey and sturdy, his hand upon her doorpost. His
pleasant keen eyes blinked upon her in the strong light from her globe
as if he were before a good fire.

'Why, you are as fair as a saint with a halo, in front of that
jigamaree,' he said. 'I am sent to offer you the friendship of Cicely
Elliott.' When he moved, the golden collar of his knighthood shone
upon his chest; his cropped grey beard glistened on his chin, and he
shaded his eyes with his hand.

'I was writing of a letter,' Katharine said. She turned her face
towards him: the stray rays from the globe outlined her red curved
lips, her swelling chest, her low forehead; and it shone like the moon
rising over a hill, yellow and fiery in the hair above her brow. The
lines of her face drooped with her perplexities, and her eyes were
large and shadowed, because she had been shedding many tears.

'Cicely Elliott shall make you a good friend,' he said, with a modest
pride of his property; 'she shall marry me, therefore I do her such
services.'

'You are old for her,' Katharine said.

He laughed.

'Since I have neither chick nor child and am main rich for a subject.'

'Why, she is happy in her servant,' Katharine said abstractedly. 'You
are a very famous knight.'

'There are ballads of me,' he answered complacently. 'I pray to die in
a good tulzie yet.'

'If Cicely Elliott have her scarf in your helmet,' Katharine said, 'I
may not give you mine.' She was considering of her messenger to the
bishop. 'Will you do me a service?'

'Why,' he answered, with a gentle mockery, 'you have one tricksy
swordsman to bear your goodly colours.'

Katharine turned clean about to him and looked at him with attention,
to make out whether he might be such a man as would carry her letter
for her.

He returned her gaze directly, for he was proud of himself and of his
fame. He had fought in all the wars that a man might fight in since he
had been eighteen, and for fifteen years he had been captain of a
troop employed by the Council in keeping back the Scots of the
Borders. It was before Flodden Field that he had done his most famous
deed, about which there were many ballads. Being fallen upon by a bevy
of Scotsmen near a tall hedge, after he had been unhorsed, he had set
his back into a thorn bush, and had fought for many hours in the rear
of the Scottish troop, alone and with only his sword. The ballad that
had been made about him said that seventeen corpses lay in front of
the bush after the English won through to him. But since Cromwell had
broken up the Northern Councils, and filled them again with his own
men of no birth, the old man had come away from the Borders,
disdaining to serve at the orders of knaves that had been butchers'
sons and worse. He owned much land and was very wealthy, and, having
been very abstemious, because he came of an old time when knighthood
had still some of the sacredness and austerity of a religion, he was a
man very sound in limb and peaceable of disposition. In his day he had
been esteemed the most graceful whiffler in the world: now he used
only the heavy sword, because he was himself grown heavy.

Katharine answered his gentle sneer at her cousin:

'It is true that I have a servant, but he is gone and may not serve
me.' Yet the knight would find it in the books of chivalry that
certain occasions or great quests allowed of a knight's doing the
errands of more than one lady: but one lady, as for instance the
celebrated Dorinda, might have her claims asserted by an illimitable
number of knights, and she begged him to do her a service.

'I have heard of these Errantry books,' he said. 'In my day there were
none such, and now I have no letters.'

'How, then, do you pass the long days of peace,' Katharine asked, 'if
you neither drink nor dice?'

He answered: 'In telling of old tales and teaching their paces to the
King's horses.'

He drew himself up a little. He would have her understand that he was
not a horse leech: but there was in these four-footed beasts a certain
love for him, so that Richmond, the King's favourite gelding, would
stand still to be bled if he but laid his hand on the great creature's
withers to calm him. These animals he loved, since he grew old and
might not follow arguments and disputations of _hic_ and _hoc_. 'There
were none such in my day. But a good horse is the same from year's end
to year's end....'

'Will you carry a letter for me?' Katharine asked.

'I would have you let me show you some of his Highness' beasts,' he
added. 'I breed them to the manage myself. You shall find none that
step more proudly in Christendom or Heathenasse.'

'Why, I believe you,' she answered. Suddenly she asked: 'You have
ridden as knight errant?'

He said: 'For three weeks only. Then the Scots came on too thick and
fast to waste time.' His dark eyes blinked and his broad lips moved
humorously with his beard. 'I swore to do service to any lady; pray
you let me serve you.'

'You can do me a service,' she said.

He moved his hand to silence her.

'Pray you take it not amiss. But there is one that hates you.'

She said:

'Perhaps there are a many; but do me a service if you will.'

'Look you,' he said, 'these times are no times of mine. But I know it
is prudent to have servitors that love one. I saw yours shake a fist
at your door.'

Katharine said:

'A man?' She looked at Margot, who, big, silent and flushed, was
devouring the celebrated hero of ballads with adoring eyes. He
laughed.

'That maid would kiss your feet. But, in these days, it is well to
make friends with them that keep doors. The fellow at yours would spit
upon you if he dared.'

Katharine said carelessly:

'Let him even spit in his imagination, and I shall whip him.'

The old knight looked out of the door. He left it wide open, so that
no man might listen.

'Why, he is still gone,' he said. He cleared his throat. 'See you,' he
began. 'So I should have said in the old days. These fellows then we
could slush open to bathe our feet in their warm blood when we came
tired-foot from hunting. Now it is otherwise. Such a loon may be a spy
set upon one.'

He turned stiffly and majestically to move back her new hangings that
only that day, in her absence at Privy Seal's, had been set in place.
He tapped spots in the wall with his broad and gentle fingers, talking
all the time with his broad back to her.

'See you, you have had here workmen to hang you a new arras. There be
tricks of boring ear-holes through walls in hanging these things. So
that if you have a cousin who shall catch a scullion by the
throat....'

Katharine said hastily:

'He hath heard little to harm me.'

'It is what a man swears he hath heard that shall harm one,' the old
knight answered. 'I meddle in no matters of statecraft, but I am sent
to you by certain ladies; one shall wed me and I am her servant; one
bears my name and wedded a good cousin of mine, now dead for his
treasons.'

Katharine said:

'I am beholden to Cicely Elliott and the Lady Rochford....'

He silenced her with one of his small gestures of old-fashioned
dignity and distinction.

'I meddle in none of these matters,' he said again. 'But these ladies
know that you hate one they hate.'

He said suddenly, 'Ah!' a little grunt of satisfaction. His fingers
tapping gently made what seemed a stone of the wall quiver and let
drop small flakes of plaster. He turned gravely upon Katharine:

'I do not ask what you spoke of with that worshipful swordsman,' he
said. 'But your servitor is gone to tell upon you. A stone is gone
from here and there is his ear-hole, like a drum of canvas.'

Katharine said swiftly:

'Take, then, a letter for me--to the Bishop of Winchester!'

He started back with a little exaggerated pantomime of horror.

'Must I go into your plots?' he asked, blinking and amused, as if he
had expected the errand.

She said urgently:

'I would have you tell me what Englishman now wears a red hat and is
like to be in Paris. I am very ignorant in these matters.'

'Then meddle not in them,' he said, 'for that man is even Cardinal
Pole; one that the King's Highness would very willingly know to be
dead.'

'God forbid that my cousin should murder a Prince of the Church, and
be slain in that quarrel,' she answered.

He started back and held his hands over his head.

'Why, God help you, child! Is that your errand?' he said, deep from
his chest. 'I meddle not in this matter.'

She answered obstinately:

'Pray you--by your early vows--consent to carry me my letter.'

He shook his head bodingly.

'I thought it had been a matter of a masque at the Bishop of
Winchester's; or I had never come nigh you. Cicely Elliott hath copied
out the part you should speak. Pray you ask me no more of the other
errand.'

She said:

'For a great knight you are a friend only in little matters!'

He uttered reproachfully:

'Child: it is no little matter to act as go-between for the Bishop of
Winchester, even if it be for no more than a masque. How otherwise
does he not send to you direct? So much I was ready to do for you, a
stranger, who am a man that has no party.'

She uttered maliciously:

'Well, well. I thought you came of the better times before our day.'

'I have shewn myself a good enough man,' he said composedly. He
pointed one of his fingers at her.

'Pole is not one that shall be easily slain. He is like to have in his
pay the defter spadassins of the two. I have known him since he was a
child till when he fled abroad.'

'But my cousin!' Katharine pleaded.

'For the sake of your own little neck, let that gallant be hanged,' he
said smartly. 'You have need of many friends; I can see it in your
complexion, which is of a hasty loyalty. But I tell you, I had never
come near you, so your cousin miscalled me, a man of worth and credit,
had these ladies not prayed me to come to you.'

She raised herself to her full height.

'It is not in the books of your knight-errantry,' she cried, 'that one
should leave one's friends to the hangman of Paris.'

The large figure of Margot Poins thrust itself upon them.

'A' God's name,' said her gruff voice of great emotion, 'hear the
words of this valiant soldier. Your cousin shall ruin you. It is true
that he will drive from you all your good friends....' She faltered,
and her impulse carried her no further. Rochford tapped her flushed
cheek gently with his glove, but a light and hushing step in the
corridor made them all silent.

The Magister Udal stood before the door blinking his eyes at the
light; Katharine addressed him imperiously--

'You will carry a letter for me to save my cousin from death.'

He started, and leered at Margot, who was ready to sink into the
ground.

'Why, I had rather carry a bull to the temple of Jupiter, as Macrobius
has it,' he said, 'meaning that....'

'Yet you have drunk with him,' Katharine interrupted him hotly, 'you
have gone hurling through the night with him. You have shamed me
together.'

'Yet I cannot forget Tully,' he answered sardonically, 'who warns me
that a prudent man should be able to moderate the course of his
friendship, even as he reins his horse. _Est prudentis sustinere ut
cursum_....'

'Mark you that!' the old knight said to Katharine. 'I will get my boy
to read to me out of Tully, for that is excellent wisdom.'

'God help me, this is Christendom!' Katharine said, bitterly. 'Shall
one abandon one that lay in the same cradle with one?'

'Your ladyship hath borne with him a day too long,' Udal said. 'He
beat me like a dog five days since. Have you heard of the city called
Ponceropolis, founded by the King Philip? Your good cousin should be
ruler of that city, for the Great King peopled it with all the
brawlers, cut-throats, and roaring boys of his dominions, to be rid of
them.' She became aware that he was very angry, for his whisper shook
like the neigh of a horse.

The old knight winked at Margot.

'Why this is a monstrous wise man,' he said, 'who yet speaks some
sense.'

'In short,' the magister said, 'If you will stick to this man, you
shall lose me. For I have taken beatings and borne no malice--as in
the case of men with whose loves or wives I have prospered better than
themselves. But that this man should miscall me and beat me for the
pure frenzy of his mind, causelessly, and for the love of blows! That
is unbearable. To-night I walk for the first time after five days
since he did beat me. And I ask you whom you shall here find the
better servant?'

His thin figure was suddenly shaking with rage.

'Why, this is conspiracy!' Katharine cried.

'A conspiracy!' Udal's voice rose up into a shriek. 'If your ladyship
were a Queen I would not be a Queen's cousin's whipping post.' His
arms jerked with the spasms of his rage like those of a marionette.

'A shame that learned men should be so beaten!' Margot's gruff voice
uttered.

Katharine turned upon her.

'That is what made you speak e'ennow. You have been with this
flibbertigibbet.'

'This is a free land,' the girl mumbled, her mild eyes sparkling with
the contagious anger of her lover.

The old knight stood blinking upon Katharine.

'You are like to lose all your servants in this quarrel,' he said.

Katharine wrung her hands, and then turned her back upon them and
drummed upon the table with her fingers. Udal caught Margot's large
hand and fumbled it beneath the furs of his robe: the old knight kept
his smiling eyes upon Katharine's back. Her voice came at last:

'Why, I will not have Tom killed upon this occasion into which I
brought him.'

Rochford shrugged his shoulders up to his ears.

'Oh marvellous infatuation,' he said.

Katharine spoke, still with her back turned and her shoulders heaving:

'A marvellous infatuation!' she said, her voice coming softly and
deeply in her chest. 'Why, after his fashion this man loved me. God
help us, what other men have I seen here that would strike a straight
blow? Here it is moving in the dark, listening at pierced walls,
swearing of false treasons----'

She swept round upon the old man, her face moved, her eyes tender and
angry. She stretched out her hand, and her voice was pitiful and
urgent.

'Sir! Sir! What counsel do you give me, who are a knight of honour?
Would you let a man who lay in the cradle with you go to a shameful
death in an errand you had made for him?'

She leaned back upon the table with her eyes upon his face. 'No you
would not. How then could you give me such counsel?'

He said: 'Well, well. You are in the right.'

'Nearly I went with him to another place,' she answered, 'but half an
hour ago. Would to God I had! for here it is all treacheries.'

'Write your letter, child,' he answered. 'You shall give it to Cicely
Elliott to-morrow in the morning. I will have it conveyed, but I will
not be seen to handle it, for I am too young to be hanged.'

'Why, God help you, knight,' Udal whispered urgently from the doorway,
'carry no letter in this affair--if you escape, assuredly this mad
pupil of mine shall die. For the King----?' Suddenly he raised his
voice to a high nasal drawl that rang out like a jackdaw's: 'That is
very true; and, in this matter of Death you may read in Socrates'
Apology. Nevertheless we may believe that if Death be a transmigration
from one place into another, there is certainly amendment in going
whither so many great men have already passed, and to be subtracted
from the way of so many judges that be iniquitous and corrupt.'

'Why, what a plague....' Katharine began.

He interrupted her quickly.

'Here is your serving man back at last if you would rate him for
leaving your door unkept.'

The man stood in the doorway, his lanthorn dangling in his hand, his
cudgel stuck through his belt, his shock of hair rough like an old
thatch, and his eyes upon the ground. He mumbled, feeling at his
throat:

'A man must eat. I was gone to my supper.'

'You are like to have the nightmare, friend,' the old knight said
pleasantly. 'It is ill to eat when most of the world sleeps.'


V

Cicely Elliott had indeed sent her old knight to Katharine with those
overtures of friendship. Careless, dark, and a madcap, she had flown
at Katharine because she had believed her a creature of Cromwell's,
set to spy upon the Lady Mary's maids. They formed, the seven of them,
a little, mutinous, babbling circle. Their lady's cause they adored,
for it was that of an Old Faith, such as women will not let die. The
Lady Mary treated them with a hard indifference: it was all one to her
whether they loved her or not; so they babbled, and told evil tales of
the other side. The Lady Rochford could do little to hold them, for,
having come very near death when the Queen Anne fell, she had been
timid ever since, and Cicely Elliott was their ringleader.

Thus it was to her that one of Gardiner's priests had come begging her
to deliver to Katharine a copy of the words she was to speak in the
masque, and from the priest Cicely had learnt that Katharine loved the
Old Faith and hated Privy Seal as much as any of them. She had been
struck with a quick remorse, and had suddenly seen Katharine as one
that must be helped and made amends to. Thus she had pinned up her
sleeve at Privy Seal's. There, however, it had not been safe to speak
with her.

'Dear child,' she said to Katharine next morning, 'we may well be
foils one to another, for I am dark and pert, like a pynot. They call
me Mag Pie here. You shall be Jenny Dove of the Sun. But I am not
afraid of your looks. Men that like the touch of the sloe in me shall
never be drawn away by your sweet lips.'

She was, indeed, like a magpie, never still for a minute, fingering
Katharine's hair, lifting the medallion upon her chest, poking her
dark eyes close to the embroidery on her stomacher. She had a trick of
standing with her side face to you, so that her body seemed very long
to her hips, and her dark eyes looked at you askance and roguish,
whilst her lips puckered to a smile, a little on one side.

'It was not your old knight called me Sweetlips,' Katharine said. 'I
miscalled him foully last night.'

Cicely Elliott threw back her head and laughed.

'Why, he is worshipful heavy to send on a message; but you may trust
his advice when he gives it.'

'I am come to think the same,' Katharine said; 'yet in this one matter
I cannot take it.'

Cicely Elliott had taken to herself the largest and highest of the
rooms set apart for these maids. The tapestries, which were her own,
were worked in fair reds and greens, like flowers. She had a great
silver mirror and many glass vases, in which were set flowers worked
in silver and enamel, and a large, thin box carved out of an
elephant's tusk, to hold her pins; and all these were presents from
the old knight.

'Why,' she said, 'sometimes his advice shall fit a woman's mood;
sometimes he goes astray, as in the case of these gloves. Cheverel is
a skin that will stretch so that after one wearing you may not tell
the thumbs from stocking-feet. Nevertheless, I would be rid of your
cousin.'

'Not in this quarrel,' Katharine answered. 'Find him an honourable
errand, and he shall go to Kathay.'

Cicely threw the stretched cheverel glove into the fire.

'My knight shall give me a dozen pairs of silk, stitched with gold to
stiffen them,' she said. 'You shall have six; but send your cousin in
quest of the Islands of the Blest. They lie well out in the Western
Ocean. If you can make him mislay his compass he will never come back
to you.'

Katharine laughed.

'I think he would come without compass or chart. Nevertheless, I will
send me my letter by means of your knight to Bishop Gardiner.'

Cicely Elliott hung her head on her chest.

'I do not ask its contents, but you may give it me.'

Katharine brought it out from the bosom of her dress, and the dark
girl passed it up her sleeve.

'This shall no doubt ruin you,' she said. 'But get you to our
mistress. I will carry your letter.'

Katharine started back.

'You!' she said. 'It was Sir Nicholas should have it conveyed.'

'That poor, silly old man shall not be hanged in this matter,' Cicely
answered. 'It is all one to me. If Crummock would have had my head he
could have shortened me by that much a year ago.'

Katharine's eyes dilated proudly.

'Give me my letter,' she said; 'I will have no woman in trouble for
me.'

The dark girl laughed at her.

'Your letter is in my sleeve. No hands shall touch it before mine
deliver it to him it is written to. Get you to our mistress. I thank
you for an errand I may laugh over; laughter here is not over
mirthful.'

She stood side face to Katharine, her mouth puckered up into her
smile, her eyes roguish, her hands clasped behind her back.

'Why, you see Cicely Elliott,' she said, 'whose folk all died after
the Marquis of Exeter's rising, who has neither kith nor kin, nor
house nor home. I had a man loved me passing well. He is dead with the
rest; so I pass my time in pranks because the hours are heavy. To-day
the prank is on thy side; take it as a gift the gods send, for
to-morrow I may play thee one, since thou art soft, and fair, and
tender. That is why they call me here the Magpie. My old knight will
tell you I have tweaked his nose now and again, but I will not have
him shortened by the head for thy sake.'

'Why, you are very bitter,' Katharine said.

The girl answered, 'If your head ached as mine does now and again when
I remember my men who are dead; if your head ached as mine does....'
She stopped and gave a peal of laughter. 'Why, child, your face is
like a startled moon. You have not stayed days enough here to have met
many like me; but if you tarry here for long you will laugh much as I
laugh, or you will have grown bl

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/30188