The Fifth Queen (61 page)

‘Magister,’ she said, ‘though you have wrought me the greatest grief I think ye could, by so injuring one I like well, yet this is to me so great a service that I will entreat the King to remit some of your pains.’

He stumbled up from his stool and this time managed to kneel.

‘Oh, Queen,’ he said,
‘Doctissima fuisti;
you were the best pupil that ever I had—’ She tried to silence him with a motion of her hand. But he twined his lean hands together with the little chains hanging from them. ‘I call this to your pitiful mind,’ he brought out, ‘not because I would have you grateful, but to make you mindful of what I suffer—
non quia grata sed ut clemens sis
. For, for advancement I have no stomach, since by advancing me you will advance my wife from Paris, and for liberty I have no use since you may never make me free of her. Leave me to rot in my cell, but, if it be but the tractate of Diodorus Siculus, a very dull piece, let me be given some book in a learned tongue. I faint, I starve, I die for lack of good letters. I that no day in my life have passed
—nulla die sine
—no day
without reading five hours in goodly books since I was six and breeched. Bethink you, you that love learning—’

‘Now tell me,’ Cicely Elliott cried out, ‘which would you rather in your cell—the Letters of Cicero or a kitchen wench?’

The Queen bade her hold her peace, and to the Magister she uttered—

‘Books I will have sent you, for I think it well that you should be so well employed. And, for your future, I will have you set down in a monastery where there shall be for you much learning and none of my sex. You have done harm enow! Now, get you gone!’

He sighed that she had grown so stern, and she was glad to be rid of him. But he had not been gone a minute into the other room when there arose such a clamour of harsh voices and shrieks and laughter that she threw her door open, coming to it herself before the other ladies could close their mouths, which had opened in amazement.

The young Poins was beating the Magister, so that the fur gown made a greyish whirl about his scarlet suit in the midst of a tangle of spun wool; spinning wheels were overset, Margot Poins crashed around upon them, wailing; the girls with their distaffs were crouching against the window-places and in corners, crying out each one of them.

The Queen had a single little gesture of the hand with which she dismissed all her waiting-women. She stood alone in the inner doorway with the Lady Cicely and the Lady Rochford behind her. The Lady Rochford wrung her gouty hands; the Lady Cicely set back her head and laughed.

The Queen spoke no word, but in the new silence it was as if the Magister fell out of the boy’s hands. He staggered amidst the trails of wool, nearly fell, and then made stiff zigzags towards the open outer door, where his prison guards awaited him, since they had no warrant to enter the antechamber. He dragged after him a little trail of fragments of spinning wheels and spindles.

‘Well, there’s a fine roister-doister!’ the Lady Cicely laughed behind the Queen’s back. The Queen stood very still and frowned. To her the disturbance was monstrous and distasteful, for she was minded to have things very orderly and quiet. The boy, in his scarlet, pulled off his bonnet and panted, but he was not still more than a second, and suddenly he called out to the Queen—

‘Make that pynot to marry my sister!’

Margot Poins hung round him and cried out—

‘Oh no! Oh no!’

He shook her roughly loose.

‘An’ you do not wed with him how shall I get advancement?’ he said. ‘ ’A promised me that when ’a should come to be Chancellor ’a would advance me.’

He pushed her from him again with his elbow when she came near.

‘Y’ve grown over familiar,’ the Queen said, ‘with being too much near me. Y’are grown over familiar. For seven days you shall no longer keep my door.’

Margot Poins raised her arms over her head, then she leant against a window-pane and sobbed into the crook of her elbow. The boy’s slender face was convulsed with rage; his blue eyes started from his head; his callow hair was crushed up.

‘Shall a man—’ he began to protest.

‘I say nothing against that you did beat this Magister,’ the Queen said. ‘Such passions cannot be controlled, and I pass it by.’

‘But will ye not make this man to wed with my sister?’ the boy said harshly.

‘I cannot. He hath a wedded wife!’

He dropped his hands to his side.

‘Alack; then my father’s house is down,’ he cried out.

‘Gentleman Guard,’ Katharine said, ‘get you for seven days away from my door. I will have another sentry whilst you bethink you of a worthier way to advancement.’

He gazed at her stupidly.

‘You will not make this wedding?’ he asked.

‘Gentleman Guard,’ Katharine said, ‘you have your answer. Get you gone.’

A sudden rage came into his eyes; he swallowed in his throat and made a gesture of despair with his hand. The Queen turned back into her room and busied herself with her task, which was the writing into a little vellum book of seven prayers to the Virgin that the Lady Elizabeth, Queen Anne Boleyn’s daughter, a child then in London, was to turn each one into seven languages, written fair in the volume as a gift, against Christmas, for the King.

‘I would not have that boy to guard my door,’ the Lady Cicely said to the Queen.

‘Why, ’tis a good boy,’ Katharine answered; ‘and his sister loves me very well.’

‘Get your Highness another,’ the Lady Cicely persisted. ‘I do not like his looks.’

The Queen gazed up from her writing to where the dark girl, her figure raked very much back in her stiff bodice, played daintily with the tassels of the curtain next the window.

‘My Lady,’ Katharine said, ‘my Highness must get me a new maid in place of Margot Poins, that shall away into a nunnery. Is not that grief enough for poor Margot? Shall she think in truth that she has undone her father’s house?’

‘Then advance the springald to some post away from you,’ the Lady Cicely said.

‘Nay,’ the Queen answered; ‘he hath done nothing to merit advancement.’

She continued, with her head bent down over the writing on her knee, her lips moving a little as, sedulously, she drew large and plain letters with her pen.

‘By Heaven,’ the Lady Cicely said, ‘you have too tickle a conscience to be a Queen of this world and day. In the time of Cæsar you might have lived more easily.’

The Queen looked up at her from her writing; her clear eyes were untroubled.

‘Aye,’ she said. ‘
Lucio Domitio, Appio Claudio consulibus—
’

Cicely Rochford set back her head and laughed at the ceiling.

‘Aye, your Highness is a Roman,’ she tittered like a magpie.

‘In the day of Cæsar it was simple to do well,’ the Queen said.

‘Why, I do not believe it,’ Cicely answered her.

‘Cousin! Cousin!’ The old Lady Rochford warned her that this was the Queen, not her old playmate.

‘But now,’ the Queen said, ‘with such a coming together and a concourse of peoples about us; with such holes and corners in a great Court—’ She paused and sighed.

‘Well, if I may not speak my mind,’ Cicely Rochford said to the old lady, ‘what good am I?’

‘I did even what I might to keep this lamb Margot from the teeth of that wolf Magister,’ the Queen said. ‘I take shame to myself that I did no more. I will do a penance for it. But still I think that these be degenerate days.’

‘Oh, Queen of dreams and fancies,’ Cicely Rochford said. ‘I am very certain that in the days of your noble Romans it was as it is now. Tell me, if you can, that in all your readings of hic and hoc you lit not upon such basenesses? You will not lay your hand upon your heart and say that never a man of Rome bartered his sister for the hope of advancement, or that never a learned doctor was a corrupter of youth? I have seen the like in the plays of Plautus that here have been played at Court.’

‘Why,’ the Queen said, ‘the days of Plautus were days degenerated and fallen already from the ancient nobleness.’

‘You should have Queened it before Goodman Adam fell,’ Cicely Rochford mocked her. ‘If you go back before Plautus, go back all the way.’

She shrugged her shoulders up to her ears and uttered a little sound like
‘Pfui!’
Then she said quickly—

‘Give me leave to be gone, your Highness, that I may not grow over familiar like the boy with the pikestaff, for if it do not gall you it shall wring the withers of this my old husband’s cousin!’

The old Lady Rochford, who was always thinking of what had been said two speeches ago, because she was so slow-witted, raised her gouty hands in the air and opened her mouth. But the Queen smiled faintly at Cicely.

‘When I ask you to mince matters in my little room you shall do it. It was Lucius the Praetor that went always accompanied by a carping Stoic to keep him from being puffed up, and it was a good custom.’

‘Before Heaven,’ Cicely Rochford said in the midst of her curtsey at the door, ‘shall I have the office of such a one as Diogenes who derided Alexander the Emperor? Then must my old husband live with me in a tub!’

‘Pray you,’ the Queen said after her through the door, ‘look you around and spy me out a maid to be my tiring-woman and ward my spinsters. For nowadays I see few maids to choose from.’

When she was gone the old Lady Rochford timorously berated the Queen. She would have her be more distant with knights’ wives and the like. For it was fitting for a Queen to be feared and deemed awful.

‘I had rather be loved and deemed pitiful,’ Katharine answered. ‘For I was once such a one—no more—than she or thou, or very little more. Before the people I bear myself proudly for my lord his high honour. But I do lead a very cloistered life, and have leisure to reflect upon for what a little space authority endureth, and how that friendship and true love between friends are things that bear the weather better.’ She did not say her Latin text, for the old lady had no Latin.

I
N THE UNDERGROUND CELL
, above the red and gold table that afternoon, Lascelles wrought at a fair copy of the King’s letter to the Pope, amended as it had been by Udal’s hand. The Archbishop had come into the room reading a book as he came from his prayers, and sate him down in his chair at the tablehead without glancing at his gentleman.

‘Prithee, your Grace,’ Lascelles said, ‘suffer me to carry this letter mine own self to the Queen.’

The Archbishop looked up at him; his mournful eyes started wide; he leaned forward.

‘Art thou Lascelles?’ he asked.

‘Aye, Lascelles I am,’ the gentleman answered; ‘but I have cut off my beard.’

The Archbishop was very weak and startled; he fell into an anger.

‘Is this a time for vanities?’ he said. ‘Will you be after the wenches? You look a foolish boy! I do not like this prank.’

Lascelles put up his hand to stroke his vanished beard. His risible lips writhed in a foxy smile; his chin was fuller than you would have expected, round and sensuous with a dimple in the peak of it.

‘Please it, your Grace,’ he said, ‘this is no vanity, but a scheme that I will try.’

‘What scheme? What scheme?’ the Archbishop said. ‘Here have been too many schemes.’ He was very shaken and afraid, because this world was beyond his control.

‘Please it, your Grace,’ Lascelles answered, ‘ask me not what this scheme is.’

The Archbishop shook his head and pursed his lips feebly.

‘Please it, your Grace,’ Lascelles urged, ‘if this scheme miscarry, your Grace shall hear no more of it. If this scheme succeed I trow it shall help some things forward that your
Grace would much have forwarded. Please it, your Grace, to ask me no more, and to send me with this letter to the Queen’s Highness.’

The Archbishop opened his nerveless hands before him; they were pale and wrinkled as if they had been much soddened in water. Since the King had bidden him compose that letter to the Pope of Rome, his hands had grown so. Lascelles wrote on at the new draft of the letter, his lips following the motions of his pen. Still writing, and with his eyes down, he said—

‘The Queen’s Highness will put from her her tire-woman in a week from now.’

The Archbishop moved his fingers as who should say—

‘What is that to me!’ His eyes gazed into the space above his book that lay before him on the table.

‘This Margot Poins is a niece of the master-printer Badge, a Lutheran, of the Austin Friars.’ Lascelles pursued his writing for a line further. Then he added—

‘This putting away and the occasion of it shall make a great noise in the town of London. It will be said amongst the Lutherans that the Queen is answerable therefor. It will be said that the Queen hath a very lewd Court and companionship.’

The Archbishop muttered wearily—

‘It hath been said already.’

‘But not,’ Lascelles said, ‘since she came to be Queen.’

The Archbishop directed upon him his hang-dog eyes, and his voice was the voice of a man that would not be disturbed from woeful musings.

‘What use?’ he said bitterly; and then again, ‘What use?’

Lascelles wrote on sedulously. He used his sandarach to the end of the page, blew off the sand, eyed the sheet sideways, laid it down, and set another on his writing-board.

‘Why,’ he brought out quietly, ‘it may be brought to the King’s Highness’ ears.’

‘What way?’ the Archbishop said heavily, as if the thing were impossible. His gentleman answered—

‘This way and that!’ The King’s Highness had a trick of wandering about among his faithful lieges unbeknown; foreign ambassadors wrote abroad such rumours which might be re-reported from the foreign by the King’s servants.

‘Such a report,’ Lascelles said, ‘hath gone up already to London town by a swift carrier.’

The Archbishop brought out wearily and distastefully—

‘How know you? Was it you that wrote it?’

‘Please it, your Grace,’ his gentleman answered him, ‘it was in this wise. As I was passing by the Queen’s chamber wall I heard a great outcry—’

He laid down his pen beside his writing-board the more leisurely to speak.

He had seen Udal, beaten and shaking, stagger out from the Queen’s door to where his guards waited to set him back in prison. From Udal he had learned of this new draft of the letter; of Udal’s trouble he knew before. Udal gone, he had waited a little, hearing the Queen’s voice and what she said very plainly, for the castle was very great and quiet. Then out had come the young Poins, breathing like a volcano through his nostrils, and like to be stricken with palsy, boy though he was. Him Lascelles had followed at a convenient distance, where he staggered and snorted. And, coming upon the boy in an empty guard-room near the great gate, he had found him aflame with passion against the Queen’s Highness.