The Fifth Queen (3 page)

He puckered up his deprecatory and comical lips as he imagined that that medal would purchase him the right to sigh dolorously in front of whatever stomacher it finally adorned. He could pour out odes in the learned tongue, for the space of a week, a day, or an afternoon according to the rank, the kindness or the patience of the recipient.

Something invisible and harsh touched his cheek. It might have been snow or hail. He turned his thin cunning face to the clouds, and they threatened a downpour. They raced along, like scarves of vapour, so low that you might have thought of touching them if you stood on tiptoe.

If he went to Westminster Hall to find Judge Combers, he would get his belly well filled, but his back wet to the bone. At the corner of the next hedge was the wicket gate of old Master Grocer Badge. There the magister would find at least a piece of bread, some salt and warmed mead. Judge Combers’ wife was easy and bounteous: but old John Badge’s daughter was a fair and dainty morsel.

He licked his full lips, leered to one side, muttered, ‘A curse on all lords’ porters,’ and made for John Badge’s wicket. Badge’s dwelling had been part of the monastery’s curing house. It had some good rooms and two low storeys—but the tall garden wall of the Lord Privy Seal had been built against its side windows. It had been done without word or warning. Suddenly workmen had pulled down old Badge’s pigeon house, set it up twenty yards further in, marked out a line and set up this high wall that pressed so hard against the house end that there was barely room for a man to squeeze between. The wall ran for half a mile, and had swallowed the ground of twenty small householders. But never a word of complaint
had reached the ears of the Privy Seal other than through his spies. It was, however, old Badge’s ceaseless grief. He had talked of it without interlude for two years.

The Badges’ room—their houseplace—was fair sized, but so low ceiled that it appeared long, dark and mysterious in the winter light. There was a tall press of dark wood with a face minutely carved and fretted to represent the portal of Amiens Cathedral, and a long black table, littered with large sheets of printed matter in heavy black type, that diffused into the cold room a faint smell of ink. The old man sat quavering in the ingle. The light of the low fire glimmered on his silver hair, on his black square cap two generations old; and, in his old eyes that had seen three generations of changes, it twinkled starrily as if they were spinning round. In the cock forward of his shaven chin, and the settling down of his head into his shoulders, there was a suggestion of sinister and sardonic malice. He was muttering at his son:

‘A stiff neck that knows no bending, God shall break one day.’

His son, square, dark, with his sleeves rolled up showing immense muscles developed at the levers of his presses, bent his black beard and frowned his heavy brows above his printings.

‘Doubtless God shall break His engine when its work is done,’ he muttered.

‘You call Privy Seal God’s engine?’ the old man quavered ironically. ‘Thomas Cromwell is a brewer’s drunken son. I know them that have seen him in the stocks at Putney not thirty years ago.’

The printer set two proofs side by side on the table and frowningly compared them, shaking his head.

‘He is the flail of the monks,’ he said abstractedly. ‘They would have burned me and thousands more but for him.’

‘Aye, and he has put up a fine wall where my arbour stood.’

The printer took a chalk from behind his ear and made a score down his page.

‘A wall,’ he muttered; ‘my Lord Privy Seal hath set up a wall against priestcraft all round these kingdoms—’

‘Therefore you would have him welcome to forty feet of my garden?’ the old man drawled. ‘He pulls down other folks’ crucifixes and sets up his own walls with other folks’ blood for mortar.’

The printer said darkly:

‘Papists’ blood.’

The old man pulled his nose and glanced down.

‘We were all Papists in my day. I have made the pilgrimage to Compostella, for all you mock me now.’

He turned his head to see Magister Udal entering the door furtively and with eyes that leered round the room. Both the Badges fell into sudden, and as if guilty, silence.

‘Domus parva, quies magna,’
the magister tittered, and swept across the rushes in his furs to rub his hands before the fire. ‘When shall I teach your Margot the learned tongues?’

‘When the sun sets in the East,’ the printer muttered.

Udal sent to him over his shoulder, as words of consolation:

‘The new Queen is come to Rochester.’

The printer heaved an immense sigh:

‘God be praised!’

Udal snickered, still over his shoulder:

‘You see, neither have the men of the Old Faith put venom in her food, nor have the Emperor’s galleys taken her between Calais and Sandwich.’

‘Yet she comes ten days late.’

‘Oh moody and suspicious artificer.
Afflavit deus!
The wind hath blown dead against Calais shore this ten days.’

The old man pulled his long white nose:

‘In my day we could pray to St Leonard for a fair wind.’

He was too old to care whether the magister reported his
words to Thomas Cromwell, the terrible Lord Privy Seal, and too sardonic to keep silence for long about the inferiority of his present day.

‘When shall I teach the fair Margot the learned tongue?’ Udal asked again.

‘When wolves teach conies how to play on pipes,’ the master printer snarled from his chest.

‘The Lord Privy Seal never stood higher,’ Udal said. ‘The match with the Cleves Lady hath gained him great honour.’

‘God cement it!’ the printer said fervently.

The old man pulled at his nose and gazed at nothing.

‘I am tired with this chatter of the woman from Cleves,’ he croaked, like a malevolent raven. ‘An Anne she is, and a Lutheran. I mind we had an Anne and a Lutheran for Queen before. She played the whore and lost her head.’

‘Where’s your niece Margot?’ Udal asked the printer.

‘You owe me nine crowns,’ the old man said.

‘I will give your Margot ten crowns’ worth of lessons in Latin.’

‘Hold and enough,’ the printer muttered heavily. ‘Tags from Seneca in a wench’s mouth are rose garlands on a cow’s horns.’

‘The best ladies in the land learn of me,’ Udal answered.

‘Aye, but my niece shall keep her virtue intact.’

‘You defame the Lady Mary of England,’ Udal snickered.

The old man said vigorously, ‘God save her highness, and send us her for Queen. Have you begged her to get me redress in the matter of that wall?’

‘Why, Providence was kind to her when it sent her me for her master,’ Udal said. ‘I never had apter pupil saving only one.’

‘Shall Thomas Cromwell redress?’ the old man asked.

‘If good learning can make a good queen, trust me to render her one,’ Udal avoided the question. ‘But alas! being declared bastard—for very excellent reasons—she may not—’

‘You owe me nine crowns,’ old Badge threatened him. He picked irritably at the fur on his gown and gazed at the carved
leg of the table. ‘If you will not induce Privy Seal to pull down his wall I will set the tipstaves on you.’

Master Udal laughed. ‘I will give thy daughter ten crowns’ worth of lessons in the learned tongues.’

‘You will receive another broken crown, magister,’ the younger John said moodily. ‘Have you not scars enow by your wenching?’

Udal pushed back the furs at his collar. ‘Master Printer John Badge the Younger,’ he flickered, ‘if you break my crown I will break your chapel. You shall never have license to print another libel. Give me your niece in wedlock?’

The old man said querulously, ‘Here’s a wantipole without ten crowns would marry a wench with three beds and seven hundred florins!’

Udal laughed. ‘Call her to bring me meat and drink,’ he said. ‘Large words ill fill an empty stomach.’

The younger John went negligently to the great Flemish press. He opened the face and revealed on its dark shelves a patty of cold fish and a black jack. With heavy movements and a solemn face he moved these things, with a knife and napkins, on to the broad black table.

The old man pulled his nose again and grinned.

‘Margot’s in her chamber,’ he chuckled. ‘As you came up the wicket way I sent my John to turn the key upon her. It’s there at his girdle.’ It clinked indeed among rules, T-squares and callipers at each footstep of the heavy printer between press and table.

Magister Udal stretched his thin hands towards it. ‘I will give you the printing of the Lady Mary’s commentary of Plautus for that key,’ he said.

The printer murmured ‘Eat,’ and set a great pewter salt-cellar, carved like a Flemish pikeman, a foot high, heavily upon the cloth.

Udal had the appetite of a wolf. He pulled off his cap the better to let his jaws work.

‘Here’s a letter from the Doctor Wernken of Augsburg,’ he said. ‘You may see how the Lutherans fare in Germany.’

The printer took the letter and read it, standing, frowning and heavy. Magister Udal ate; the old man fingered his furs and, leaning far back in his mended chair, gazed at nothing.

‘Let me have the maid in wedlock,’ Udal grunted between two bites. ‘Better women have looked favourably upon me. I had a pupil in the North—’

‘She was a Howard, and the Howards are all whores,’ the printer said, over the letter. ‘Your Doctor Wernken writes like an Anabaptist.’

‘They are even as the rest of womenkind,’ Udal laughed, ‘but far quicker with their learning.’

A boy rising twenty, in a grey cloak that showed only his bright red stockings and broad-toed red shoes, rattled the back door and slammed it to. He pulled off his cap and shook it.

‘It snows,’ he said buoyantly, and then knelt before his grandfather. The old man touched his grandson’s cropped fair head.

‘
Benedicite
, grandson Hal Poins,’ he muttered, and relapsed into his gaze at the fire.

The young man bent his knee to his uncle and bowed low to the magister. Being about the court, he had for Udal’s learning and office a reverence that neither the printer nor his grandfather could share. He unfastened his grey cloak at the neck and cast it into a corner after his hat. His figure flashed out, lithe, young, a blaze of scarlet with a crowned rose embroidered upon a chest rendered enormous by much wadding. He was serving his apprenticeship as ensign in the gentlemen of the King’s guard, and because his dead father had been beloved by the Duke of Norfolk it was said that his full ensigncy was near. He begged his grandfather’s leave to come near the fire, and stood with his legs apart.

‘The new Queen’s come to Rochester,’ he said; ‘I am here with the guard to take the heralds to Greenwich Palace.’

The printer looked at him unfavourably from the corner of his dark and gloomy eyes.

‘You come to suck up more money,’ he said moodily. ‘There is none in this house.’

‘As Mary is my protectress!’ the boy laughed, ‘there is!’ He stuck his hands into his breeches pocket and pulled out a big fistful of crowns that he had won over-night at dice, and a long and thin Flemish chain of gold. ‘I have enow to last me till the thaw,’ he said. ‘I came to beg my grandfather’s blessing on the first day of the year.’

‘Dicing.… Wenching …’ the printer muttered.

‘If I ask thee for no blessing,’ the young man said, ‘it’s because, uncle, thou’rt a Lutheran that can convey none. Where’s Margot? This chain’s for her.’

‘The fair Margot’s locked in her chamber,’ Udal snickered.

‘Why-som-ever then? Hath she stolen a tart?’

‘Nay, but I would have her in wedlock.’

‘Thou—you—your magistership?’ the boy laughed incredulously. The printer caught in his tone his courtier’s contempt for the artificer’s home, and his courtier’s reverence for the magister’s learning.

‘Keep thy sister from beneath this fox’s tooth,’ he said. ‘The likes of him mate not with the like of us.’

‘The like of thee, uncle?’ the boy retorted, with a good-humoured insolence. ‘My father was a gentleman.’

‘Who married my sister for her small money, and died leaving thee and thy sister to starve.’

‘Nay, I starve not,’ the boy said. ‘And Margot’s a plump faggot.’

‘A very Cynthia among willow-trees,’ the magister said.

‘Why, your magistership shall have her,’ the boy said. ‘I am her lawful guardian.’

His grandfather laughed as men laugh to see a colt kick up its heels in a meadow.

But the printer waved his bare arm furiously at the magister.

‘Get thee gone out of this decent house.’ His eyes rolled, and his clenched fist was as large as a ham. ‘Here you come not a-wenching.’

‘Moody man,’ the magister said, ‘your brains are addled with suspicions.’

The young man swelled his scarlet breast still more consequentially. ‘This is no house of thine, uncle, but my grandfar’s.’

‘Young ass’s colt!’ the printer fulminated. ‘Would’st have thy sister undone by this Latin mouth-mincer?’

Udal grinned at him, and licked his lips. The printer snarled:

‘Know’st thou not, young ass, that this man was thrown out of his mastership at Eton for his foul living?’