The Fifth Queen (41 page)

Cromwell said suddenly:

‘How got the magister these papers?’ and Throckmorton answered that it was through the widow that kept the tavern. Cromwell said negligently:

‘Let the magister be rewarded with ten crowns a quarter to
his fees. Set it down in my tables’; and then like lightning came the query:

‘Do ye believe of her cousin and the Lady Katharine?’

Craving a respite for thought and daring to take none for fear Cromwell should read him, Throckmorton answered:

‘Ye know I think yes.’

‘I have said I think no,’ Cromwell answered in turn, but dispassionately as though it were a matter of the courses of stars; ‘though it is very certain that her cousin is so mad with love for her that we had much ado to send him from her to Paris.’ He paced three times from wall to wall and then spoke again:

‘Men enow have said she was too fond with her cousin?’

With despair in his heart Throckmorton answered:

‘It is the common talk in Lincolnshire where her home is. I have seen a cub in a cowherd’s that was said to be her child by him.’

It was useless to speak otherwise to Privy Seal; if he did not report these things, twenty others would. But, beneath his impassive face and his great beard, despair filled him. He might swear treason against Cromwell to the King; but the King would not hear him alone, and without the King and Katharine he was a sparrow in Cromwell’s hawk’s talons.

‘Why,’ Cromwell said, ‘since Cleves is true to us we will have this woman down. An he had played us false I would have kept her near the King.’

This saying, that ran so counter to Throckmorton’s schemes, caused him such dismay that he cried out:

‘God forgive us, why?’

Cromwell smiled at him as one who smiles from a great height, and pointed a finger.

‘This is a hard fight,’ he said; ‘we are in some straits. I trow ye would have voiced it otherwise.’ And then he voiced his own idea—that so long as Cleves was friends with him Katharine was an enemy; if Cleves fell away she was none the less an
enemy, but she would, from her love of justice, bear witness to the King that Cromwell was no traitor. ‘And ye shall be very certain,’ he added pleasantly, ‘that once men see the King so inclined, they will go to the King saying I be a traitor, with Protestants like Wriothesley ready to rise and aid me. In that pass the Lady Katharine should stay by me, in the King’s ear.’

A deep and intolerable dejection overcame Throckmorton and forced from his lips the words:

‘Ye reason most justly.’ And again he cursed himself, for he had forced Cromwell to this reasoning and action. Yet he dared not say that his news of the Cleves embassy was false, that Cleves indeed was minded to turn traitor, and that it most would serve Privy Seal’s turn to stay Katharine Howard up. He dared not say the words, yet he saw his safety crumbling, and he saw Privy Seal set to ruin both himself and Katharine Howard. For in his heart he could not believe that the woman was virtuous, since he believed that no woman was virtuous who had been given the opportunity for joyment. As a spy, he had gone nosing about in Lincolnshire where Katharine’s home had been near her cousin’s. He had heard many tales against her such as rustics will tell against the daughters of poor lords like Katharine’s father. And these tales, before ever he had come to love her, he had set down in Privy Seal’s private registers. Now they were like to undo him and her. And in truth, according to his premonitions, Cromwell spoke:

‘We shall bring very quickly Thomas Culpepper, her cousin, back from France. We shall inflame his mind with jealousy of the King. We shall find a place where he shall burst upon the King and her together. We shall bring witnesses enow from Lincolnshire to swear against her.’

He crossed his hands behind his back.

‘This work of fetching her cousin from Paris I will put into the hands of Viridus,’ he said. ‘I believe her to be virtuous, therefore do you bring many witnesses, and some that shall
swear to have seen her in the act. That shall be your employment. For I tell you she hath so great a power of pleading that, being innocent, she will with difficulty be proved unchaste.’

Throckmorton’s head hung upon his shoulders.

‘Remember,’ Privy Seal said again, ‘you and Viridus shall send to find her cousin in France. Fill him with tales that his cousin plays the leman with the King. He shall burst here like a bolt from heaven. You will find him betwixt Calais and Paris town, dallying in evil places without a doubt. We sent him thither to frighten Cardinal Pole.’

‘Aye,’ Throckmorton said, his mind filled with other and bitter thoughts. ‘He hath frightened the Cardinal from Paris by the mere renown of his violence.’

‘Then let him do some frighting in our goodly town of London,’ Cromwell said.

T
HE YOUNG
P
OINS
, once an ensign of the King’s guard, habited now in grey, stood awaiting Thomas Culpepper, Katharine Howard’s cousin, beneath the new gateway towards the east of Calais. Four days he had waited already and never had he dared to stir, save when the gates were closed for the night. But it had chanced that one of the gatewardens was a man from Lincolnshire—a man, once a follower of the plough, whose father had held a farm in the having of Culpepper himself.

‘—But he sold ’un,’ Nicholas Hogben said, ‘sold ’un clear away.’ He made a wry face, winked one eye, and drawing up the right corner of his mouth, displayed square, huge teeth. The young Poins making no question, he repeated twice: ‘Clear away. Right clear away.’

Poins, however, could hold but one thing of a time in his head. And, by that striving, dangerous servant of Lord Privy Seal, Throckmorton, it had been firmly enjoined upon him that he must not fail to meet Thomas Culpepper and stay him upon his road to England. Throckmorton, with his great beard and cruel snake’s eyes, had said: ‘I hold thy head in fee. If ye would save it, meet Thomas Culpepper in Calais and give him this letter.’ The letter he had in his poke. It carried with it a deed making Culpepper lieutenant of the stone barges in Calais. But he had it too, by word of mouth, that if Thomas Culpepper would not be stayed by the letter, he, Hal
Poins, must stay him—with the sword, with a stab in the back, or by being stabbed himself and calling in the guard to lay Thomas Culpepper’s self by the heels.

‘You will enjoin upon him,’ Throckmorton had said, ‘how goodly a thing is the lieutenancy of stone lighters that in this letter is proffered him. You will tell him that, if a barge of stone go astray, it is yet a fair way to London, and stone fetches good money from townsmen building in Calais. If he will gainsay this you will pick a quarrel with him, as by saying he gives you the lie. In short,’ Throckmorton had finished, earnestly and with a sinuous grace of gesture in his long and narrow hands, ‘you will stay him.’

It was a desperate measure, yet it was the best he could compass. If Culpepper came to London, if he came to the King, Katharine’s fortunes were not worth a rushlight such as were sold at twenty for a farthing. He knew, too, that Viridus had Cromwell’s earnest injunctions to send a messenger that should hasten Culpepper’s return; and, though he had seven hundred of Cromwell’s spies that he could trust to do Privy Seal’s errand, he had not one that he could trust to do his own. There was no one of them that he could trust. If he took a spy and said: ‘At all costs stay Culpepper, but observe very strict secrecy from Privy Seal’s men all,’ the spy would very certainly let the news come to Privy Seal.

It was in this pass that the thought of the young Poins had come to him. Here was a fellow absolutely stupid. He was a brother of Katharine Howard’s tiring maid who had already come near to losing his head in a former intrigue in the Court. He had, at the instigation of his sister, carried two Papist letters of Katharine Howard. And, if it was the King who pardoned him, it was Throckmorton who first had taken him prisoner; it was Throckmorton who had advised him to lie hidden in his grandfather’s house for a month or two. At the time Throckmorton had had no immediate reason to give the boy this counsel. Poins had been so small a tool in the
past embroilment of Katharine’s letter that, had he gone straight back to his post in the yeomanry of the King’s guard, no man would have noticed him. But it had always been part of the devious and great bearded man’s policy—it had been part of his very nature—to play upon people’s fears, to trouble them with apprehensions. It was part of the tradition that Cromwell had given all his men. He ruled England by such fears.

Thus Throckmorton had sent Poins trembling to hide in the old printer’s his grandfather’s house in the wilds of Austin Friars. And Throckmorton had impressed upon him that he alone had really saved him. It was in his grandfather’s mean house that Poins had remained for a brace of months, grumbled at by his Protestant uncle and sneered at by his malicious Papist grandfather. And it was here that Throckmorton had found him, dressed in grey, humbled from his pride and raging for things to do.

The boy would be of little service—yet he was all that Throckmorton had. If he could hardly be expected to trick Culpepper with his tongue, he might wound him with his sword; if he could not kill him he might at least scotch him, cause a brawl in Calais town, where, because the place was an outpost, brawling was treason, and Culpepper might be had by the heels for long enough to let Cromwell fall. Therefore, in the low room with the black presses, in the very shadow of Cromwell’s own walls, Throckmorton—who was given the privacy of the place by the Lutheran printer because he was Cromwell’s man—large, golden-bearded and speaking in meaning whispers, with lifting of his eyebrows, had held a long conference with the lad.

His dangerous and terrifying presence seemed to dominate, for the young Poins, even the dusty archway of the Calais gate—and, even though he saw the flat, green and sunny levels
of the French marshland, with the town of Ardres rising grey and turreted six miles away, the young Poins felt that he was still beneath the eyes of Throckmorton, the spy who had sought him out in his grandfather’s house in Austin Friars to send him here across the seas to Calais. Up above in the archway the stonemasons who came from Lydd sang their Kentish songs as hammers clinked on chisels and the fine dust filtered through the scaffold boards. But the young Poins kept his eyes upon the dusty and winding road that threaded the dykes from Ardres, and thought only that when Thomas Culpepper came he must be stayed. He had oiled his sword that had been his father’s so that it would slip smoothly from the scabbard; he had filed his dagger so that it would pierce through thin coat of mail. It was well to be armed, though he could not see why Thomas Culpepper should not stay willingly at Calais to be lieutenant of the stone lighters and steal stone to fill his pockets, since such were the privileges of the post that Throckmorton offered him.

‘Mayhap, if I stay him, it will get me advancement,’ he grumbled between his teeth. He was enraged in his slow, fierce way. For Throckmorton had promised him only to save his neck if he succeeded. There had been no hint of further rewards. He did not speculate upon why Thomas Culpepper was to be held in Calais; he did not speculate upon why he should wish to come to England; but again and again he muttered between his teeth, ‘A curst business! a curst business!’

In the mysterious embroilment in which formerly he had taken part, his sister had told him that he was carrying letters between the King and Kat Howard. Yes; his large, slow sister had promised him great advancement for carrying certain letters. And still, in spite of the fact that he had been told it was a treason, he believed that the letters he had carried for Kat Howard were love letters to the King. Nevertheless, for his services he had received no advancement; he had, on the contrary, been bidden to leave his comrades of the guard and to
hide himself. Throckmorton had bidden him do this. And instead of advancement, he had received kicks, curses, cords on his wrists, an interview with the Lord Privy Seal that still in the remembrance set him shivering, and this chance, offered him by Throckmorton, that if he stayed Thomas Culpepper he might save his neck.

‘Why, then,’ he grumbled to himself, ‘is it treason to carry the King’s letters to a wench? Helping the King is no treason. I should be advanced, not threatened with a halter. Letters between the King and Kat Howard!’ He even attempted to himself a clumsy joke, polishing it and repolishing it till it came out: ‘A King may write to a Kat. A Kat may write to a King. But my neck’s in danger!’

Beside him, whitened by the dust that fell from above, the gatewarden wandered in speech round
his
grievance.

‘You ask me, young lad, if I know Tom Culpepper. Well I know Tom Culpepper. Y’ ask me if he have passed this way going for England. Well I know he have not. For if Tom Culpepper, squire that was of Durford and Maintree and Sallowford that was my father’s farm—if so be Tom Culpepper had passed this way, I had spat in the dust behind him as he passed.’

He made his wry face, winked his eye and showed his teeth once more. ‘Spat in the dust—I should ha’ spat in the dust,’ he remarked again. ‘Or maybe I’d have cast my hat on high wi’ “Huzzay, Squahre Tom!” according as the mood I was in,’ he said. He winked again and waited.