Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (177 page)

‘Your serving man hath reported. Pray God we come safe out of this!’ Then he went out of the room. Lady Rochford sighed deeply, for no apparent reason.

After a time the Lady Mary raised her head and made a minute, cold beckoning to Katharine. Her dry finger pointed to a word in her book of Plautus.

‘Tell me what you know of this,’ she commanded.

The play was the
Menechmi
, and the phrase ran, ‘
Nimis autem bene ora commetavi
....’ It was difficult for Katharine to bring her mind down to this text, for she had been wondering if indeed her time were at an end before it had begun. She said:

‘I have never loved this play very well,’ to excuse herself.

‘Then you are out of the fashion,’ Mary said coldly, ‘for this
Menechmi
is prized here above all the rest, and shall be played at Winchester’s before his Highness.’

Katharine bowed her head submissively, and read the words again.

‘I remember me,’ she said, ‘I had this play in a manuscript where your
commetavi
read
commentavi
.’

Mary kept her eyes upon the girl’s face, and said:

‘Signifying?’

‘Why, it signifies,’ Katharine said, ‘that Messenio did well mark a face. If you read
commetavi
it should mean that he scratched it with his nails so that it resembled a harrowed field; if
commentavi
, that he bethumped it with his fist so that bruises came out like the stops on a fair writing.’

‘It is true that you are a good Latinist,’ Mary said expressionlessly. ‘Bring me my inkhorn to that window. I will write down your
commentavi
.’

Katharine lifted the inkhorn from its hole in the arm of the chair and gracefully followed the stiff and rigid figure into the embrasure of a distant window.

Mary bent her head over the book that she held in her hand, and writing in the margin, she uttered:

‘Pity that such an excellent Latinist should meddle in matters that nothing concern her.’

Katharine held the inkhorn carefully, as if it had been a precious vase.

‘If you will bid me do naught but serve you, I will do naught else,’ she said.

‘I will neither bid thee nor aid thee,’ Mary answered. ‘The Bishop of Winchester claims thy service. Serve him as thou wilt.’

‘I would serve my mistress in serving him,’ Katharine said. ‘He is a man I love little.’

Mary pulled suddenly from her bodice a piece of crumpled parchment that had been torn across. She thrust it into Katharine’s free hand.

‘Such letters I have had written me by my father’s men,’ she said. ‘If this bishop should come to be my father’s man I would take no service from him.’

Katharine read on the crumpled parchment such words as:

‘Be you dutiful ... I will not protect ... You shall be ruined utterly ... You had better creep underground ... Therefore humble you ...’

‘It was Thomas Cromwell wrote that,’ the Lady Mary cried. ‘My father’s man!’

‘But if this brewer’s son be brought down?’ Katharine pleaded.

‘Why, I tore his letter across for it is filthy,’ Mary said, ‘and I keep the halves of his letter that I may remember. If he be brought down, who shall bring his master down that let him write so?’

Katharine said:

‘If this tempter of the Devil’s brood were brought down there should ensue so great an atonement from his sorrowful master whom he deludes....’

Mary uttered a ‘Tush!’ of scorn and impatience. ‘This is the babbling of a child. My father is no holy innocent as you and your like feign to believe.’

‘Nevertheless I love you most well,’ Katharine pleaded.

Mary snapped her book to. Her cold tone came back over her heat as the grey clouds of a bitter day shut down again upon a dangerous flicker of lightning.

‘Do as you will,’ she said, ‘only if your head fall I will stir no finger to aid you. Or, if by these plottings my father could be got to send me his men upon their knees and bearing crowns, I would turn my back upon them and say no word.’

‘Well, my plottings are like to end full soon,’ Katharine said. ‘Privy Seal hath sent for me upon no pleasant errand.’

Mary said: ‘God help you!’ with a frigid unconcern, and walked back to her chair.

V
I

Cromwell kept as a rule his private courts either in his house at Austin Friars, or in a larger one that he had near the Rolls. But, when the King was as far away from London as Greenwich, or when such ill-wishers as the Duke of Norfolk were in the King’s neighbourhood, Cromwell never slept far out of earshot from the King’s rooms. It was said indeed that never once since he had become the King’s man had he passed a day without seeing his Highness once at least, or writing him a great letter. But he contrived continually to send the nobles that were against him upon errands at a distance — as when Bishop Gardiner was made Ambassador to Paris, or Norfolk sent to put down the North after the Pilgrimage of Grace. Such errands served a double purpose: Gardiner, acting under the pressure of the King, was in Paris forced to make enemies of many of his foreign friends; and the Duke, in his panic-stricken desire to curry favour with Henry, had done more harrying, hanging and burning among the Papists than ever Henry or his minister would have dared to command, for in those northern parts the King’s writ did not run freely. Thus, in spite of himself the Duke at York had been forced to hold the country whilst creatures of Privy Seal, men of the lowest birth and of the highest arrogance, had been made Wardens of the Marches and filled the Councils of the Borders. Such men, with others, like the judges and proctors of the Court of Augmentations, which Cromwell had invented to administer the estates of the monasteries and escheated lords’ lands, with a burgess or two from the shires in Parliament, many lawyers and some suppliants of rank, filled the anterooms of Privy Seal. There was a matter of two hundred of them, mostly coming not upon any particular business so much as that any enemies they had who should hear of their having been there might tremble the more.

Cromwell himself was in the room that had the King’s and Queen’s heads on the ceiling and the tapestry of Diana hunting. He was speaking with a great violence to Sir Leonard Ughtred, whose sister-in-law, the widow of Sir Anthony Ughtred, and sister of the Queen Jane, his son Gregory had married two years before. It was a good match, for it made Cromwell’s son the uncle of the Prince of Wales, but there had been a trouble about their estates ever since.

‘Sir,’ Cromwell threatened the knight, ‘Gregory my son was ever a fool. If he be content that you have Hyde Farm that am not I. His wife may twist him to consent, but I will not suffer it.’

Ughtred hung his head, which was closely shaved, and fingered his jewelled belt.

‘It is plain justice,’ he muttered. ‘The farm was ceded to my brother after Hyde Monastery was torn down. It was to my brother, not to my brother’s wife, who is now your son’s.’

Cromwell turned upon the Chancellor of the Augmentations who stood in the shadow of the tall mantelpiece. He was twisting his fingers in his thin grey beard that wagged tremulously when he spoke.

‘Truly,’ he bleated piteously, ‘it stands in the register of the Augmentations as the worshipful knight says.’

Cromwell cried out, in a studied rage: ‘I made thee and I made thy office: I will unmake the one and the other if it and thou know no better law.’

‘God help me,’ the Chancellor gasped. He shrank again into the shadow of the chimney, and his blinking eyes fell upon Cromwell’s back with a look of dread and the hatred of a beast that is threatened at the end of its hole.

‘Sir,’ Cromwell frowned darkly upon Ughtred, ‘the law stands thus if the Augmentation people know it not. This farm and others were given to your late brother upon his marriage, that the sister of the Queen might have a proper state. The Statute of Uses hath here no say. Understand me: It was the King’s to give; it is the King’s still.’ He opened his mouth so wide that he appeared to bellow. ‘That farm falleth to the survivor of those two, who is now my son’s wife. What judge shall gainsay that?’ He swayed his body round on his motionless and sturdily planted legs, veering upon the Chancellor and the knight in turn, as if he challenged them to gainsay him who had been an attorney for ten years after he had been a wool merchant.

Ughtred shrugged his shoulders heavily, and the Chancellor hastened to bleat:

‘No judge shall gainsay your lordship. Your lordship hath an excellent knowledge of the law.’

‘Why hast thou not as good a one?’ Cromwell rated him. ‘I made thee since I thought thou hadst.’ The Chancellor choked in his throat and waved his hands.

‘Thus the law is,’ Cromwell said to Ughtred. ‘And if it were not so Parliament should pass an Act so to make it. For it is a scandal that a Queen’s sister, an aunt of the Prince that shall be King, should lose her lands upon the death of her husband. It savours of treason that you should ask it. I have known men go to the Tower upon less occasion.’

‘Well, I am a broken man,’ Sir Leonard muttered.

‘Why, God help you,’ Cromwell said. ‘Get you gone. The law takes no account of whether a man be broken, but seeketh to do honour to the King’s Highness and to render justice.’

Viridus and Sadler, who was another of Cromwell’s secretaries, had come in whilst Privy Seal had been speaking, and Cromwell turned upon them laughing as the knight went out, his head hanging.

‘Here is another broken man,’ he said, and they all laughed together.

‘Well, he is another very notable swordsman,’ Viridus said. ‘We might well post him at Milan, lest Pole flee back to Rome that way.’

Cromwell turned upon the Chancellor with a bitter contempt.

‘Find thou for this knight some monk’s lands in Kent. He shall to Milan with them for a price.’

Viridus laughed.

‘Now we shall soon have these broken swordsmen in every town of Italy between France and Rome. Such a net Pole shall not easily break through.’

‘It were well he were done with soon,’ Cromwell said.

‘The King shall love us much the more; and it is time.’

‘Why, there will in two days be such a clamour of assassins in Paris that he shall soon bolt from there towards Rome,’ Viridus answered. ‘It will go hard if he escape all our Italy men. I hold it for certain that Winchester shall have reported to him in Paris that this Culpepper is on the road. Will you speak with this Howard wench?’

Cromwell knitted his brows in uncertainty.

‘It was her cousin that should clamour about this murder in Paris,’ Viridus reminded him.

‘Is she without?’ Cromwell asked. ‘Have you it for certain that she hath reported to my lord of Winchester?’

‘Winchester’s priest of the bedchamber hath shewn me a copy of the letter she wrote. I would have your lordship send some reward to that Father Michael. He hath served us in many other matters.’

Cromwell motioned with his hand that Sadler should note down this Father Michael’s name.

‘Are there many men in my antechambers?’ he asked Viridus, and hearing that there were more than one hundred and fifty: ‘Why, let this wench stay there a half-hour. It humbles a woman to be alone among so many men, and she shall come here without a sound clout to her back for the crush of them.’

He began talking with Sadler about two globes of the world that he had ordered his agent to buy in Antwerp, one for himself and the other for a present to the King. Sadler answered that the price was very high; a thousand crowns or so, he had forgotten just how many. They had been twelve years in the making, but the agent had been afraid of the greatness of the expense.

Cromwell said:

‘Tush; I must have the best of these Flemish furnishings.’

He signed to Viridus to send for Katharine Howard, and went on talking with Sadler about the furnishing of his house in the Austin Friars. He had his agents all over Flanders watching the noted masters of the crafts to see what notable pieces they might turn out; for he loved fine carvings, noble hangings, great worked chests and other signs of wealth, and the money was never thrown away, for the wood and the stuffs and the gold thread remained so long as you kept the moth and the woodlouse from them. To the King too he gave presents every day.

Katharine entered by a door from a corridor at which he had not expected her. She wore a great head-dress of net like the Queen’s and her dress was in no disarray, neither were her cheeks flushed by anything more than apprehension. She said that she had been shown that way by a large gentleman with a great beard. She would not bring herself to mention the name of Throckmorton, so much she detested him.

Cromwell answered with a benevolent smile, ‘Aye, Throckmorton had ever an eye for beauty. Otherwise you had come scurvily out of that wash.’

He twisted his mouth up as if he were mocking her, and asked her suddenly how the Lady Mary corresponded with her cousin the Emperor, for it was certain she had a means of writing to him?

Katharine flushed all over her face with relief and her heart stilled itself a little. Here at least there was no talk of the Tower at once for her, because she had written a letter to Bishop Gardiner. She answered that that day for the first time she had been in the Lady Mary’s service.

He smiled benevolently still, and holding out a hand in a little warning gesture and with an air of pleasant reasonableness, said that she must earn her bread like other folks in his Highness’ service.

‘Why,’ she answered, ‘I have been marvellous ill, but I shall be more diligent in serving my mistress.’

He marked a distinction, pointing a fat finger at her heart-place. In the serving of her mistress she should do not enough work to pay for bodkins nor for sewing silk, since the Lady Mary asked nothing of her maids, neither their attendance, their converse, nor yet their needlework. Such a place asked nothing of one so fortunate as to fill it. To atone for it the service of the King demanded her labours.

‘Why,’ she said again, ‘if I must spy in those parts it is a great pity that I ever came there as your woman; for who there shall open their hearts to me?’

He laughed at her comfortably still.

‘You may put it about that you hate me,’ he said. ‘You may mix with them that love me not. In the end you may worm yourself into their secrets.’

Again a heavy flush covered Katharine’s face from the chin to the brow. It was so difficult for her to keep from speaking her mind with her lips that she felt as if her whole face must be telling the truth to him. But he continued to shake his plump sides as if he were uttering inaudible, ‘Ho — ho — ho’s.’

‘That is so easy,’ he said. ‘A child, I think, could compass it.’ He put his hands behind his back and stretched his legs apart. She was very pleasant to look at with her flushings, and it amused him to toy with frightened women. ‘It is in this way that you shall earn his Highness’ bread.’ It was known that Mary had this treasonable correspondence with the Emperor; in the devilish malignancy of her heart she desired that her sacred father should be cast down and slain, and continually she implored her cousin to invade her father’s dominions, she sending him maps, plans of the new castles in building and the names of such as were malevolent within the realm. ‘Therefore,’ he finished, ‘if you could discover her channels and those channels could then be stopped up, you would indeed both earn your bread and enter into high favour.’

He began again good-humouredly to give her careful directions as to how she should act; as for instance by offering to make for the printers a fair copy of the Lady Mary’s Commentary upon Plautus. By pretending that certain words were obscure to her, she should find opportunities for coming suddenly into the room, and she should afford herself excuses for searching among his mistress’s papers without awakening suspicions.

‘Why, my face is too ingenuous,’ Katharine said. ‘I am not made for playing the spy.’

He laughed at her.

‘That is so much the better,’ he said. ‘The best spies are those that have open countenances. It needs but a little schooling.’

‘I should get me a hang-dog look very soon,’ she answered. She paused for a minute and then spoke earnestly, holding out her hands. ‘I would you would set me a nobler task. Very surely it is shameful that a daughter should so hate the father that begat her; and I know the angels weep to see her desire that the great and noble prince should be cast down and slain by his enemies. But, sir, it were the better task to seek to soften her mind. Such knowledge as I have of goodly writers should aid me rather to persuade her heart towards her father; for I know no texts that should make me skilful as a spy, but I can give you a dozen from Plautus alone that do inculcate a sweet and dutiful love from daughter to sire.’