The Fifth Queen (15 page)

‘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.