Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (257 page)

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V

The Queen was walking in the long gallery of Hampton Court. The afternoon was still new, but rain was falling very fast, so that through the windows all trees were blurred with mist, and all alleys ran with water, and it was very grey in the gallery. The Lady Mary was with her, and sat in a window-seat reading in a book. The Queen, as she walked, was netting a silken purse of a purple colour; her gown was very richly embroidered of gold thread worked into black velvet, and the heavy day pressed heavily on her senses, so that she sought that silence more willingly. For three days she had had no news of her lord, but that morning he was come back to Hampton, though she had not yet seen him, for it was ever his custom to put off all work of the day before he came to the Queen. Thus, if she were sad, she was tranquil; and, considering only that her work of bringing him to God must begin again that night, she let her thoughts rest upon the netting of her purse. The King, she had heard, was with his council. Her uncle was come to Court, and Gardiner of Winchester, and Cranmer of Canterbury, along with Sir A. Wriothesley, and many other lords, so that she augured it would be a very full council, and that night there would be a great banquet if she was not mistaken.

She remembered that it was now many months since she had been shown for Queen from that very gallery in the window that opened upon the Cardinal’s garden. The King had led her by the hand. There had been a great crying out of many people of the lower sort that crowded the terrace before the garden. Now the rain fell, and all was desolation. A yeoman in brown fustian ran bending his head before the tempestuous rain. A rook, blown impotently backwards, essayed slowly to cross towards the western trees. Her eyes followed him until a great gust blew him in a wider curve, backwards and up, and when again he steadied himself he was no more than a blot on the wet greyness of the heavens.

There was an outcry at the door, and a woman ran in. She was crying out still: she was all in grey, with the white coif of the Queen’s service. She fell down upon her knees, her hands held out.

‘Pardon!’ she cried. ‘Pardon! Let not my brother come in. He prowls at the door.’

It was Mary Hall, she that had been Mary Lascelles. The Queen came over to raise her up, and to ask what it was she sought. But the woman wept so loud, and so continually cried out that her brother was the fiend incarnate, that the Queen could ask no questions. The Lady Mary looked up over her book without stirring her body. Her eyes were awakened and sardonic.

The waiting-maid looked affrightedly over her shoulders at the door.

‘Well, your brother shall not come in here,’ the Queen said. ‘What would he have done to you?’

‘Pardon!’ the woman cried out. ‘Pardon!’

‘Why, tell me of your fault,’ the Queen said.

‘I have given false witness!’ Mary Hall blubbered out. ‘I would not do it. But you do not know how they confuse a body. And they threaten with cords and thumbscrews.’ She shuddered with her whole body. ‘Pardon!’ she cried out. ‘Pardon!’

And then suddenly she poured forth a babble of lamentations, wringing her hands, and rubbing her lips together. She was a woman passed of thirty, but thin still and fair like her brother in the face, for she was his twin.

‘Ah,’ she cried, ‘he threated that if I would not give evidence I must go back to Lincolnshire. You do not know what it is to go back to Lincolnshire. Ah, God! the old father, the old house, the wet. My clothes were all mouldered. I was willing to give true evidence to save myself, but they twisted it to false. It was the Duke of Norfolk ...’

The Lady Mary came slowly over the floor.

‘Against whom did you give your evidence?’ she said, and her voice was cold, hard, and commanding.

Mary Hall covered her face with her hands, and wailed desolately in a high note, like a wolf’s howl, that reverberated in that dim gallery.

The Lady Mary struck her a hard blow with the cover of her book upon the hands and the side of her head.

‘Against whom did you give your evidence?’ she said again.

The woman fell over upon one hand, the other she raised to shield herself. Her eyes were flooded with great teardrops; her mouth was open in an agony. The Lady Mary raised her book to strike again: its covers were of wood, and its angles bound with silver work. The woman screamed out, and then uttered —

‘Against Dearham and one Mopock first. And then against Sir T. Culpepper.’

The Queen stood up to her height; her hand went over her heart; the netted purse dropped to the floor soundlessly.

‘God help me!’ Mary Hall cried out. ‘Dearham and Culpepper are both dead!’

The Queen sprang back three paces.

‘How dead!’ she cried. ‘They were not even ill.’

‘Upon the block,’ the maid said. ‘Last night, in the dark, in their gaols.’

The Queen let her hands fall slowly to her sides.

‘Who did this?’ she said, and Mary Hall answered —

‘It was the King!’

The Lady Mary set her book under her arm.

‘Ye might have known it was the King,’ she said harshly. The Queen was as still as a pillar of ebony and ivory, so black her dress was, and so white her face and pendant hands.

‘I repent me! I repent me!’ the maid cried out. ‘When I heard that they were dead I repented me and came here. The old Duchess of Norfolk is in gaol: she burned the letters of Dearham! The Lady Rochford is in gaol, and old Sir Nicholas, and the Lady Cicely that was ever with the Queen; the Lord Edmund Howard shall to gaol and his lady.’

‘Why,’ the Lady Mary said to the Queen, ‘if you had not had such a fear of nepotism, your father and mother and grandmother and cousin had been here about you, and not so easily taken.’

The Queen stood still whilst all her hopes fell down.

‘They have taken Lady Cicely that was ever with me,’ she said.

‘It was the Duke of Norfolk that pressed me most,’ Mary Lascelles cried out.

‘Aye, he would,’ the Lady Mary answered.

The Queen tottered upon her feet.

‘Ask her more,’ she said. ‘I will not speak with her.’

‘The King in his council ...’ the girl began.

‘Is the King in his council upon these matters?’ the Lady Mary asked.

‘Aye, he sitteth there,’ Mary Hall said. ‘And he hath heard evidence of Mary Trelyon the Queen’s maid, how that the Queen’s Highness did bid her begone on the night that Sir T. Culpepper came to her room, before he came. And how that the Queen was very insistent that she should go, upon the score of fatigue and the lateness of the hour. And she hath deponed that on other nights, too, this has happened, that the Queen’s Highness, when she hath come late to bed, hath equally done the same thing. And other her maids have deponed how the Queen hath sent them from her presence and relieved them of tasks — —’

‘Well, well,’ the Lady Mary said, ‘often I have urged the Queen that she should be less gracious. Better it had been if she had beat ye all as I have done; then had ye feared to betray her.’

‘Aye,’ Mary Hall said, ‘it is a true thing that your Grace saith there.’

‘Call me not your Grace,’ the Lady Mary said. ‘I will be no Grace in this court of wolves and hogs.’

That was the sole thing that she said to show she was of the Queen’s party. But ever she questioned the kneeling woman to know what evidence had been given, and of the attitude of the lords.

The young Poins had sworn roundly that the Queen had bidden him to summon no guards when her cousin had broken in upon her. Only Udal had said that he knew nothing of how Katharine had agreed with her cousin whilst they were in Lincolnshire. It had been after his time there that Culpepper came. It had been after his time, too, and whilst he lay in chains at Pontefract that Culpepper had come to her door. He stuck to that tale, though the Duke of Norfolk had beat and threatened him never so.

‘Why, what wolves Howards be,’ the Lady Mary said, ‘for it is only wolves, of all beasts, that will prey upon the sick of their kind.’

The Queen stood there, swaying back as if she were very sick, her eyes fast closed, and the lids over them very blue.

It was only when the Lady Mary drew from the woman an account of the King’s demeanour that she showed a sign of hearing.

‘His Highness,’ the woman said, ‘sate always mute.’

‘His Highness would,’ the Lady Mary said. ‘He is in that at least royal — that he letteth jackals do his hunting.’

It was only when the Archbishop of Canterbury, reading from the indictment of Culpepper, had uttered the words: ‘did by the obtaining of the Lady Rochford meet with the Queen’s Highness by night in a secret and vile place,’ that the King had called out —

‘Body of God! mine own bedchamber!’ as if he were hatefully mocking the Archbishop.

The Queen leant suddenly forward —

‘Said he no more than that?’ she cried eagerly.

‘No more, oh your dear Grace,’ the maid said. And the Queen shuddered and whispered —

‘No more! — And I have spoken to this woman to obtain no more than “no more.”’

Again she closed her eyes, and she did not again speak, but hung her head forward as if she were thinking.

‘Heaven help me!’ the maid said.

‘Why, think no more of Heaven,’ the Lady Mary said, ‘there is but the fire of hell for such beasts as you.’

‘Had you such a brother as mine — —’ Mary Hall began. But the Lady Mary cried out —

‘Cease, dog! I have a worse father, but you have not found him force me to work vileness.’

‘All the other Papists have done worse than I,’ Mary Hall said, ‘for they it was that forced us by threats to speak.’

‘Not one was of the Queen’s side?’ the Lady Mary said.

‘Not one,’ Mary Hall answered. ‘Gardiner was more fierce against her than he of Canterbury, the Duke of Norfolk than either.’

The Lady Mary said —

‘Well! well!’

‘Myself I did hear the Duke of Norfolk say, when I was drawn to give evidence, that he begged the King to let him tear my secrets from my heart. For so did he abhor the abominable deeds done by his two nieces, Anne Boleyn and Katharine Howard, that he could no longer desire to live. And he said neither could he live longer without some comfortable assurance of His Highness’s royal favour. And so he fell upon me — —’

The woman fell to silence. Without, the rain had ceased, and, like heavy curtains trailing near the ground, the clouds began to part and sweep away. A horn sounded, and there went a party of men with pikes across the terrace.

‘Well, and what said you?’ the Lady Mary said.

‘Ask me not,’ Mary Lascelles said woefully. She averted her eyes to the floor at her side.

‘By God, but I will know,’ the Lady Mary snarled. ‘You shall tell me.’ She had that of royal bearing from her sire that the woman was amazed at her words, and, awakening like one in a dream, she rehearsed the evidence that had been threated from her.

She had told of the lascivious revels and partings, in the maid’s garret at the old Duchess’s, when Katharine had been a child there. She had told how Marnock the musicker had called her his mistress, and how Dearham, Katharine’s cousin, had beaten him. And how Dearham had given Katharine a half of a silver coin.

‘Well, that is all true,’ the Lady Mary said. ‘How did you perjure yourself?’

‘In the matter of the Queen’s age,’ the woman faltered.

‘How that?’ the Lady Mary asked.