The Fifth Queen (43 page)

‘Nay, goodman Squire; an ye had slain the Cardinal the farms should have been yours. As it lies, ye are no more than lieutenant of Calais stone barges.’

‘Thou liest,’ Culpepper answered negligently, not turning his gaze from the gatewarden to whom he addressed a friendly question of, Who was the woman that had brought the two of them down.

‘Now, Squahre!’ the Lincolnshire man grinned delightedly; ‘thu hast askëd me tü questions. Answer me one: Did
thee
lie upon her when thee put her name up in the township of Stamford?’

‘Stamford in Lincolnshire was thy townplace?’ Culpepper asked. ‘But who was thy woman? I ha’ had so many women and lied about so many more that I never had!’

The Lincolnshire man threw his leather cap to the keystone of the archway, caught it again and set it upon his thatch of hair, having the solemnity of one who performs his rituals.

‘Goodly squahre that thee art!’ he said; ‘thou has harmed a many wenches in truth and in lies.’

Culpepper spied a down feather on his knee.

‘Curse the mattress that I lay upon this night,’ he said amiably.

He set his head back and blew the feather high into the air so that it floated out towards the tranquil and sunny pasture fields of France.

‘Cub!’ he said to Hal Poins, ‘take this as a lesson of the death that lies about the pilgrim’s path. For why am I not a pilgrim? I was sent to rid Paris of a Cardinal Pole, who, being in league with the devil, hath a magic tongue. Mark this story well, cub, who art sent me with money and gifts from the King in his glory to me that sit upon a stone. Now mark—’ He extended his white hand. ‘This hand, o’ yestereen, had a ring with a great green stone. Now no ring is here. It was given me by my seventeenth leman, who had two eyes that looked not together. No twelve robbers had taken it from me by force, since I had made a pact with the devil that these wall eyes should never look across my face whilst that ring was there. Now, God knows, I may find her in Calais. So mark well—’ He had been sent to Paris to rid France of the Cardinal Pole; for the Cardinal Pole, being a succubus of the fiend, had a magical tongue and had been inducing the French King to levy arms, in the name of that arch-devil, the Bishop of Rome, against their goodly King Henry, upon whom God shed His peace. Culpepper raised his bonnet at the Deity’s name, stuck it far back on his red head, and continued: Therefore the mouth of Cardinal Pole was to be stayed in Paris town.

Culpepper smote his breast ferociously and with a black pride.

‘And I have stayed it!’ he peacocked. ‘I and no other. I—T. Culpepper—a made man!’

‘Not so,’ Poins answered stubbornly. ‘Thou wast sent to Paris to slay, and thou hast not slain!’

‘Thou liest!’ Culpepper asseverated. ‘I was sent to purge Paris town, and I ha’ purged un. No pothicary had done it better nor Hercules that was a stall groom and cleaned stables in antick days.’ For, at the first breath of news that Culpepper was in the town, at the first rumour that the king’s assassin was in Paris, Cardinal Pole had gathered his purple skirts about his knees; at the second sound he had cast them off altogether and, arrayed as a woman or a barber’s leech, had fled hot foot to Brescia and thence to Rome.

‘That was a nothing!’ Culpepper asseverated. ‘Though I ha’ heard said that Hercules was made a god for cleaning stables that he found no easy task. But I will grant that it was no task for me to cleanse a whole town. For I needed no besoms, nor even no dagger, but the mere shadow of my beard upon the cobbly stones of Paris sufficed. I say nothing of that which befel in the day’s journey; but mark this! mark what follows!’ He had set out from Paris upon a high horse, with a high heart; he had frighted off all robbers and all sturdy rogues upon the road; he had slept at good inns as became a made man, and had bought himself a goodly pair of embroidered gloves which he could well pay for out of his superfluity. Being in haste to reach England, where he had that that called for him, he had ridden through the town of Ardres at nightfall, being minded to ride his horse dead, reach Calais gates in the hour, and beat down the gate if the warder would not suffer him to enter, it being dark. But outside the town of Ardres upon a make of no man’s ground, being neither French nor English, he had espied a hut, and in the dark hut a lighted window hole that sparkled bravely, and, within, a big, fair woman drinking wine between candles with the light in her
hair and a white tablecloth. And, feeling goodly, and Calais gate being shut, whether he broke it down one hour or three hours later was all one to him. He had gone into the hut to take by force or for payment a glass of wine from the black jacks, a kiss from the woman’s mouth, and what else of ease the place afforded.

‘Now I will have you mark, cub,’ he said—‘cub that shall have to learn many wiles if thy throat be not cut by me within the next two hours. Mark this, cub: these were no Egyptians!’ They were not Bohemians, not swearers, not subtle cozeners, not even black a-vised, or he would have been on his guard against them; but they were plain, fair folks of Normandy. So he had drunk his wine, and cast a main or two at dice with the woman and two men, losing no more and no less than was decent. And he had drunk more wine and had taken his kisses—since it was all one whether he came three hours or four hours later to Calais gate. And there had been candles on the table and stuffs upon the wall, and a crock on the fire for mulling the wine, and a sheet upon the feather bed. But when he awoke in the morning he had lain upon the hard earth, between the bare walls. And all that was his was gone that was worth the taking.

‘Now mark, cub,’ he said. ‘It was a simple thing this flitting with the hangings and the clothes and the pot rolled in bales and hung upon my horse. Upon my horse! But what is not simple is that simple folk of Normandy should have learned the arts of subtlety and drugging of wines. Mark that!’ He pointed a finger at Poins.

‘Had God been good to you you might have been as good a warring boy as Thomas Culpepper, who with the shadow of his hand held back the galleons of France and France’s knights from the goodly realm of England. For this I have done by frighting from Paris, Cardinal Pole that was moving the French King to war on us. Had God been good to you you might have been as brave. But marvel and consider and humble
you in the dust to think that a man with my brain pan and all it holds could have been so cozened. For sure, a dolt like you would have been stripped more clean till you had neither nails to your toes nor hair to your eyebrows.’

Hal Poins snarled that Culpepper would have been shaved too but that red hair stunk in the nostrils even of cozeners and thieves.

Culpepper wagged his head from side to side.

‘This is a main soft stone,’ he said; ‘I am main weary. When the stone grows hard, which is a sign that I shall no longer be minded to rest, I will break thy back with a cudgel.’

Poins stamped his foot with rage and tears filled his eyes.

‘An thou had a sword!’ he said. ‘An only thou had a sword!’

‘A year old carrot to baste thee with!’ Culpepper answered. ‘Swords are for men!’ He turned to Hogben, who was sitting on the ground furbishing his pikehead. ‘Heard you the like of my tale?’ he asked lazily.

‘Oh aye!’ the Lincolnshire man answered. ‘The simple folk of Normandy are simple only because they have no suitors. But they ha’ learned that marlock from the sailors of Rye town. For in Rye town, which is the sinkhole of Sussex, you will meet every morning ten travellers travelling to France in the livery of Father Adam. Normans can learn,’ he added sententiously, ‘as the beasts of the field can learn from a man. My father had a ewe lamb that danced a pavane to my pipe on the farm of Sallowford that you sold to buy a woman the third part of a gown.’

‘Why! Art Nick Hogben?’ Culpepper said.

‘Hast that question answered,’ Hogben said. ‘Now answer me one. Liedst thou when saidst what thou saidst of that wurman?’

Culpepper on the stone swung his legs vain-gloriously:

‘I sold three farms to buy her a gown,’ he said.

‘Aye!’ Nick Hogben answered. ‘So thou saidst in Stamford town three years gone by. And thou saidst more and the manner
of it. But betwixt the buying the gowns and the more of it lie many things. As this: Did she take the gown of thee? Or as this: Having taken the gown of thee, did she pay thee in the kind payment should be made in?’

Culpepper looked up at him with a sharp snarl.

‘For—’ and Nick Hogben shook his head sagaciously, ‘Stamford town believed the more and the manner of it, and Kat Howard’s name is up in the town of Stamford. But I have not yet chiselled out the great piece that shall come from my pike when certain sure I am that Kat Howard is down under a man’s foot.’

Culpepper rose suddenly to his feet and wagged a finger at Hogben.

‘Now I am minded to wed Kat Howard!’ he said. ‘Therefore I will say I lied then. But as for what you shall think, consider that I had her alone many days and nights; consider that though she be over learned in the Latin tongues that set a woman against joyment, I have a proper person and a strong wrist, a pleasant tongue but a hot and virulent purpose. Consider that she welly starved in her father, the Lord Edmund’s, house and I had pies and gowns for her. Consider these things and make a hole or no hole as thou wilt—’

Nicholas Hogben considered with his eyes on the ground; he scratched his head with a black finger.

‘I can make nowt out,’ he said. ‘But I will curse thee for a lily-livered hoggit an thou marry Kat Howard.’

‘Why, I am minded to marry her,’ Culpepper answered, ‘over here in France,’ and he stretched a hand towards the long white road where in the distance the French peasants were driving lean beasts for a true Englishman’s provender in Calais. ‘Over here in France. Body of God!—Body of God!—’ He wavered, being still fevered. ‘In England it had been otherwise. But here, shivering across plains and seas—why, I will wed with her.’

‘Talkest like a Blind God Boy,’ Hogben said sarcastically.
‘How knowest she be thine to take?’ He pointed at the young Poins. ‘Here be another hath had doings with a Kat Howard, though I cannot well discern if she be thine or whose.’

Culpepper sprang, a flash of green, straight at the callow boy. But Poins had sprung too, back and to the left, and his oiled sword was from its scabbard and warring in the air.

‘Holy Sepulchre! I will spit thee—Holy Sepulchre! I will spit thee!’ he cried.

‘Ass!’ Culpepper answered. ‘In God’s time I will break thy back across my knee. But God’s time is not yet.’

He poured out a flood of questions about the Kat Howard Poins had seen.

‘Squahre Thomas,’ Nicholas Hogben interrupted him maliciously, ‘that young man of Kent saith e’ennow: “Kat Howard is like to—” and then he chokes upon his words. Now even what make of thing is it that Kat Howard is like to do or be done by?’

With his sword whiffling before him the young Poins could think rapidly—nay, upon any matter that concerned his advancement he could think rapidly always.

‘Goodman Thomas Culpepper,’ he said in a high voice, ‘the mistress Katharine Howard I spoke of is thin and dark and small, and married to Edward Howard of Biggleswade. She is like to die of a quinsy.’

For well he knew that his advancement depended on his keeping Thomas Culpepper on the hither side of the water; and if it muddled his brain to have been so usefully mishandled for carrying letters betwixt the King’s Grace and the Lady Katharine Howard, he knew enough of a jealous man to know that that was no news to keep Thomas Culpepper in Calais.

Culpepper’s animation dropped like the light of a torch that is dowsed.

‘Put up thy pot skewer,’ he said; ‘my Kat is tall and fairish and unwed. Ha’ ye not seen her with the Lady Mary of England’s women?’

The young Poins, zealous to be rid of the matter, answered fervently:

‘Never. She is not talked of in the Court.’

‘That is the best hearing,’ Thomas Culpepper said. ‘I do absolve thee of five kicks for being the messenger of that.’

T
HEY WERE A-WALKING
in the little garden below the windows of the late Cardinal’s house at Hampton; the April sun shone, for May came on apace, and in that sheltered spot the light lay warm and no breezes came. They took great pleasure there beneath the windows. One girl kept three golden balls flying in the air, whilst three others and two lords sought to distract her by inducing her little hound to bark shrilly below her hands up at the flying balls that caught in them the light of the sun, the blue of the sky, and the red and grey of the warm palace walls. Down the nut walk, where the trees that the dead Cardinal had set were already fifteen years old and dark with young green leaves as bright as little flowers, they had set up archery targets. Cicely Elliott, in black and white, flashing like a magpie in the alleys, ran races with the Earl of Surrey beneath the blinking eyes of her old knight; the Lady Mary, herself habited all in black, moved like a dark shadow upon a dial between the little beds upon paths of red brick between box hedges as high as your ankles. She spoke to none save once when she asked the name of a flower. But laughter went up, and it seemed as if, in this first day out of doors, all the Court opened its lungs to drink the new air; and they were making plans for May Day already.

They asked, too, a riddle: ‘An a nutshell from Candlemas loved a merry bud in March, how should it come to pleasure and content?’ and men who had the answer looked wise and shook their sides at guessing faces.

In a bower at the south end of the small garden Katharine Howard sat to play cat’s-cradle with the old lady of Rochford. This foolish game and this foolish old woman, with her unceasing tales of the Queen Anne Boleyn—who had been her cousin—gave to Katharine a great feeling of ease. With her troubled eyes and weary expression, her occasional groans as the rheumatism gnawed at her joints, the old lady minded her of the mother she had so seldom seen. She had always been somewhere away, all through Katharine’s young years, planning and helping her father to advancement that never came, and hopeless to control her wild children. Thus Katharine had come to love this poor old woman and consorted much with her, for she was utterly bewildered to control the Lady Mary’s maids that were beneath her care.