‘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.
T
HE YOUNG
P
OINS
, 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.’