The Fifth Queen (10 page)

‘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:

‘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 fair-headed, 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 agonized
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.

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 counterplot him.