The Fifth Queen (16 page)

The old knight winked at Margot.

‘Why this is a monstrous wise man,’ he said, ‘who yet speaks some sense.’

‘In short,’ the magister said, ‘if you will stick to this man, you shall lose me. For I have taken beatings and borne no malice—as in the case of men with whose loves or wives I have prospered better than themselves. But that this man should miscall me and beat me for the pure frenzy of his mind, causelessly, and for the love of blows! That is unbearable. To-night
I walk for the first time after five days since he did beat me. And I ask you whom you shall here find the better servant?’

His thin figure was suddenly shaking with rage.

‘Why, this is conspiracy!’ Katharine cried.

‘A conspiracy!’ Udal’s voice rose up into a shriek. ‘If your ladyship were a Queen I would not be a Queen’s cousin’s whipping post.’ His arms jerked with the spasms of his rage like those of a marionette.

‘A shame that learned men should be so beaten!’ Margot’s gruff voice uttered.

Katharine turned upon her.

‘That is what made you speak e’ennow. You have been with this flibbertigibbet.’

‘This is a free land,’ the girl mumbled, her mild eyes sparkling with the contagious anger of her lover.

The old knight stood blinking upon Katharine.

‘You are like to lose all your servants in this quarrel,’ he said.

Katharine wrung her hands, and then turned her back upon them and drummed upon the table with her fingers. Udal caught Margot’s large hand and fumbled it beneath the furs of his robe: the old knight kept his smiling eyes upon Katharine’s back. Her voice came at last:

‘Why, I will not have Tom killed upon this occasion into which I brought him.’

Rochford shrugged his shoulders up to his ears.

‘Oh marvellous infatuation,’ he said.

Katharine spoke, still with her back turned and her shoulders heaving:

‘A marvellous infatuation!’ she said, her voice coming softly and deeply in her chest. ‘Why, after his fashion this man loved me. God help us, what other men have I seen here that would strike a straight blow? Here it is moving in the dark, listening at pierced walls, swearing of false treasons—’

She swept round upon the old man, her face moved, her
eyes tender and angry. She stretched out her hand, and her voice was pitiful and urgent.

‘Sir! Sir! What counsel do you give me, who are a knight of honour? Would you let a man who lay in the cradle with you go to a shameful death in an errand you had made for him?’

She leaned back upon the table with her eyes upon his face. ‘No you would not. How then could you give me such counsel?’

He said: ‘Well, well. You are in the right.’

‘Nearly I went with him to another place,’ she answered, ‘but half an hour ago. Would to God I had! for here it is all treacheries.’

‘Write your letter, child,’ he answered. ‘You shall give it to Cicely Elliott to-morrow in the morning. I will have it conveyed, but I will not be seen to handle it, for I am too young to be hanged.’

‘Why, God help you, knight,’ Udal whispered urgently from the doorway, ‘carry no letter in this affair—if you escape, assuredly this mad pupil of mine shall die. For the King—?’ Suddenly he raised his voice to a high nasal drawl that rang out like a jackdaw’s: ‘That is very true; and, in this matter of Death you may read in Socrates’ Apology. Nevertheless we may believe that if Death be a transmigration from one place into another, there is certainly amendment in going whither so many great men have already passed, and to be subtracted from the way of so many judges that be iniquitous and corrupt.’

‘Why, what a plague …’ Katharine began.

He interrupted her quickly.

‘Here is your serving man back at last if you would rate him for leaving your door unkept.’

The man stood in the doorway, his lanthorn dangling in his hand, his cudgel stuck through his belt, his shock of hair rough like an old thatch, and his eyes upon the ground. He mumbled, feeling at his throat:

‘A man must eat. I was gone to my supper.’

‘You are like to have the nightmare, friend,’ the old knight said pleasantly. ‘It is ill to eat when most of the world sleeps.’

C
ICELY
E
LLIOTT HAD INDEED
sent her old knight to Katharine with those overtures of friendship. Careless, dark, and a madcap, she had flown at Katharine because she had believed her a creature of Cromwell’s, set to spy upon the Lady Mary’s maids. They formed, the seven of them, a little, mutinous, babbling circle. Their lady’s cause they adored, for it was that of an Old Faith, such as women will not let die. The Lady Mary treated them with a hard indifference: it was all one to her whether they loved her or not; so they babbled, and told evil tales of the other side. The Lady Rochford could do little to hold them, for, having come very near death when the Queen Anne fell, she had been timid ever since, and Cicely Elliott was their ringleader.

Thus it was to her that one of Gardiner’s priests had come begging her to deliver to Katharine a copy of the words she was to speak in the masque, and from the priest Cicely had learnt that Katharine loved the Old Faith and hated Privy Seal as much as any of them. She had been struck with a quick remorse, and had suddenly seen Katharine as one that must be helped and made amends to. Thus she had pinned up her sleeve at Privy Seal’s. There, however, it had not been safe to speak with her.

‘Dear child,’ she said to Katharine next morning, ‘we may well be foils one to another, for I am dark and pert, like a pynot. They call me Mag Pie here. You shall be Jenny Dove of the Sun. But I am not afraid of your looks. Men that like the touch of the sloe in me shall never be drawn away by your sweet lips.’

She was, indeed, like a magpie, never still for a minute, fingering Katharine’s hair, lifting the medallion upon her chest, poking her dark eyes close to the embroidery on her stomacher. She had a trick of standing with her side face to you, so that her body seemed very long to her hips, and her dark eyes looked at you askance and roguish, whilst her lips puckered to a smile, a little on one side.

‘It was not your old knight called me Sweetlips,’ Katharine said. ‘I miscalled him foully last night.’

Cicely Elliott threw back her head and laughed.

‘Why, he is worshipful heavy to send on a message; but you may trust his advice when he gives it.’

‘I am come to think the same,’ Katharine said; ‘yet in this one matter I cannot take it.’

Cicely Elliott had taken to herself the largest and highest of the rooms set apart for these maids. The tapestries, which were her own, were worked in fair reds and greens, like flowers. She had a great silver mirror and many glass vases, in which were set flowers worked in silver and enamel, and a large, thin box carved out of an elephant’s tusk, to hold her pins; and all these were presents from the old knight.

‘Why,’ she said, ‘sometimes his advice shall fit a woman’s mood; sometimes he goes astray, as in the case of these gloves. Cheverel is a skin that will stretch so that after one wearing you may not tell the thumbs from stocking-feet. Nevertheless, I would be rid of your cousin.’

‘Not in this quarrel,’ Katharine answered. ‘Find him an honourable errand, and he shall go to Kathay.’

Cicely threw the stretched cheverel glove into the fire.

‘My knight shall give me a dozen pairs of silk, stitched with gold to stiffen them,’ she said. ‘You shall have six; but send your cousin in quest of the Islands of the Blest. They lie well out in the Western Ocean. If you can make him mislay his compass he will never come back to you.’

Katharine laughed.

‘I think he would come without compass or chart. Nevertheless, I will send me my letter by means of your knight to Bishop Gardiner.’

Cicely Elliott hung her head on her chest.

‘I do not ask its contents, but you may give it me.’

Katharine brought it out from the bosom of her dress, and the dark girl passed it up her sleeve.

‘This shall no doubt ruin you,’ she said. ‘But get you to our mistress. I will carry your letter.’

Katharine started back.

‘You!’ she said. ‘It was Sir Nicholas should have it conveyed.’

‘That poor, silly old man shall not be hanged in this matter,’ Cicely answered. ‘It is all one to me. If Crummock would have had my head he could have shortened me by that much a year ago.’

Katharine’s eyes dilated proudly.

‘Give me my letter,’ she said; ‘I will have no woman in trouble for me.’

The dark girl laughed at her.

‘Your letter is in my sleeve. No hands shall touch it before mine deliver it to him it is written to. Get you to our mistress. I thank you for an errand I may laugh over; laughter here is not over mirthful.’

She stood side face to Katharine, her mouth puckered up into her smile, her eyes roguish, her hands clasped behind her back.

‘Why, you see Cicely Elliott,’ she said, ‘whose folk all died after the Marquis of Exeter’s rising, who has neither kith nor kin, nor house nor home. I had a man loved me passing well. He is dead with the rest; so I pass my time in pranks because the hours are heavy. To-day the prank is on thy side; take it as a gift the gods send, for to-morrow I may play thee one, since thou art soft, and fair, and tender. That is why they call me here the Magpie. My old knight will tell you I have tweaked
his nose now and again, but I will not have him shortened by the head for thy sake.’

‘Why, you are very bitter,’ Katharine said.

The girl answered, ‘If your head ached as mine does now and again when I remember my men who are dead; if your head ached as mine does …’ She stopped and gave a peal of laughter. ‘Why, child, your face is like a startled moon. You have not stayed days enough here to have met many like me; but if you tarry here for long you will laugh much as I laugh, or you will have grown blind long since with weeping.’

Katharine said, ‘Poor child, poor child!’

But the girl cried out, ‘Get you gone, I say! In the Lady Mary’s room you shall find my old knight babbling with the maidens. Send him to me, for my head aches scurvily, and he shall dip his handkerchief in vinegar and set it upon my forehead.’

‘Let me comb thy hair,’ Katharine said; ‘my hand is sovereign against a headache.’

‘No, get you gone,’ the girl said harshly; ‘I will have men of war to do these errands for me.’

Katharine answered, ‘Sit thee down. Thou wilt take my letter; I must ease thy pains.’

‘As like as not I shall scratch thy pink face,’ Cicely said. ‘At these times I cannot bear the touch of a woman. It was a woman made my father run with the Marquis of Exeter.’

‘Sweetheart,’ Katharine said softly, ‘I could hold both thy wrists with my two fingers. I am stronger than most men.’

‘Why, no!’ the girl cried; ‘I may not sit still. Get you gone. I will run upon your errand. If you had knelt to as many men as I have you could not sit still either. And not one of my men was pardoned.’

She ran from the room with a sidelong step like a magpie’s, and her laugh rang out discordantly from the corridor.

The Lady Mary sat reading her Plautus in her large painted gallery, with all her maids about her sewing, some at a dress
for her, some winding silk for their own uses. The old knight stood holding his sturdy hands apart between a rope of wool that his namesake Lady Rochford was making into balls. Other gentlemen were beside some of the maids, toying with their silks or whispering in their ears. No one much marked Katharine Howard.

She glided to her lady and kissed the dry hand that lay in the lap motionless. Mary raised her eyes from her book, looked for a leisurely time at the girl’s face, and then began again to read. Old Rochford winked pleasantly at her, and, after she had saluted his cousin, he begged her to hold the wool in his stead, for his hands, which were used to sword and shield, were very cold, and his legs, inured to the saddle, brooked standing very ill.

‘Cicely Elliott hath a headache,’ Katharine said; ‘she bade me send you to her.’

He waited before her, helping her to adjust the wool on to her white hands, and she uttered, in a low voice:

‘She hath taken my letter for me.’

He said, ‘Why, what a’ the plague’s name.…’ and stood fingering his peaked little beard in a gentle perplexity.

Lady Rochford pulled at her wool and gave a hissing sigh of pain, for the joint of her wrist was swollen.

‘It has always been easterly winds in January since the Holy Blood of Hailes was lost,’ she sighed. ‘In its day I could get me some ease in the wrist by touching the phial that held it.’ She shivered with discomfort, and smiled distractedly upon Katharine. Her large and buxom face was mild, and she seemed upon the point of shedding tears.

‘Why, if you will put your wool round a stool, I will wind it for you,’ Katharine said, because the gentle helplessness of the large woman filled her with compassion, as if this were her old, mild mother.

Lady Rochford shook her head disconsolately.

‘Then I must do something else, and my bones would ache
more. But I would you would make my cousin Rochford ask the Archbishop where they have hidden the Sacred Blood of Hailes, that I may touch it and be cured.’

The old knight frowned very slightly.

‘I have told thee to wrap thy fist in lamb’s-wool,’ he said. ‘A hundred times I have told thee. It is very dangerous to meddle with these old saints and phials that are done away with.’

Lady Rochford sighed gently and hung her head.

‘My cousin Anne, that was a sinful Queen, God rest her soul.…’ she began.

Sir Nicholas listened to her no more.

‘See you,’ he whispered to Katharine. ‘Peradventure it is best that Cicely have gone. Being a madcap, her comings and goings are heeded by no man, and it is true that she resorteth daily to the Bishop of Winchester, to plague his priests.’

‘I would not speak so, being a man,’ Katharine said.

He smiled at her and patted her shoulder.

‘Why, I have struck good blows in my time,’ he said.

‘And have learned worldly wisdom,’ Katharine retorted.

‘I would not risk my neck on grounds where I am but ill acquainted,’ he answered soberly. He was all will to please her. The King, he said, was coming on the Wednesday, after the Bishop of Winchester’s, to see three new stallions walk in their manage-steps. ‘I pray that you will come with Cicely Elliott to watch from the little window in the stables. These great creatures are a noble sight. I bred them myself to it.’ His mild brown eyes were bright with enthusiasm and cordiality.