Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (170 page)

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.’

VI
I

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.