The Fifth Queen

by Ford Madox Ford

  ‘See you; Udal is her go-between with the King, and he shall receive thee as his price. He conveyeth her to his Highness, she hath paid him with thy virtue. Foul wench, be these words not true?’

  She leaned upon her mop handle and said:

  ‘Why, uncle, it is a foul bird that ‘files his own nest.’

  He shook his immense fist in her face.

  ‘Shame shall out in the communion of the godly, be it whose kin it will.’

  ‘Why, I wish the communion of the godly joy in its hot tales,’ she answered. ‘As for me, speak you with the magister when he comes from France. As for my mistress, three times she hath seen the King since Winchester’s feast was three months agone. She in no wise affected his Highness till she had heard his Highness confute the errors of Dr Barnes in the small closet. When she came away therefrom she said that his Highness was like a god for his knowledge of God’s law. If you want better tales than that go to a wench from the stairs to make them for you.’

  ‘Aye,’ said their neighbour, ‘three times hath she been with the King. And the price of the first time was the warrant that took thee to pay Udal for his connivance. And the price of the second was that the King’s Highness should confute our sacred Barnes in the conclave. And the price of the third was that the Lord Cromwell should dine with the Bishop of Winchester and righteousness sit with its head in ashes.’

  ‘Why, have it as thou wilt, Neighbour Ned,’ she answered. ‘In my life of twenty years thou hast brought me twenty sugar cates. God forbid that I should stay thy willing lips over a sweet morsel.’

  In the gloomy and spiritless silence that fell upon them all—since no man there much believed the things that were alleged, but all very thoroughly believed that evil days were stored up against them—the bursting open of the door made so great a sound that the speechless German tilted backward with his chair and lay on the ground, before any of them knew what was the cause. The black figure of a boy shut out the grey light and the torrents of rain. His head was bare, his frieze clothes dripped and sagged upon his skin: he waved his clenched fist half at the sky and half at Margot’s face and screamed:

  ‘I ha’ carried letters for thee, ‘twixt thy mistress and the King! I ha’ carried letters. I … ha’ … been gaoled for it.’

  ‘O fool,’ Margot’s deep voice uttered, unmoved, ‘the letters went not between those two. And thou art free; come in from the rain.’

  He staggered across the prostrate German.

  ‘I ha’ lost my advancement,’ he sobbed. ‘Where shall I go? Twenty hours I have hidden in the reeds by the riverside. I shall be taken again.’

  ‘There is no hot pursuit for thee then,’ Margot said, ‘for in all the twenty hours no man hath sought thee here.’ She had the heavy immobility of an elemental force. No fright could move her till she saw the cause for fright. ‘I will fetch thee a dram of strong waters.’

  He passed his hand across his wet forehead.

  ‘Thy mistress is taken,’ he cried. ‘I saw Privy Seal’s pikes go to her doorway.’

  ‘Now God be praised,’ the printer cried out, and caught at the boy’s wrist. ‘Tell your tale!’ and he shook him on his legs.

  ‘Me, too, Privy Seal had taken—but I ‘scaped free,’ he gasped. ‘These twain had promised me advancement for braving their screeds. And I ha’ lost it.’

  ‘Gossips all,’ the Neighbour Ned barked out, ‘to your feet and let us sing: “A fortress fast is God the Lord.” The harlot of the world is down.’

  II

  DURING THE TIME that had ensued between January and that month of March, it had been proved to Katharine Howard how well Throckmorton, the spy, voiced the men folk of their day. He had left her alone, but she seemed to feel his presence in all the air. He passed her in corridors, and she knew from his very silence that he was carrying on a fumbling game with her uncle Norfolk, and with Gardiner of Winchester. He had not induced her to play his game—but he seemed to have made her see that every man else in the world was playing a game like his. It was not, precisely, any more a world of black and white that she saw, but a world of men who did one thing in order that something very different might happen a long time afterwards.

  The main Court had moved from Greenwich to Hampton towards the end of January, but the Lady Mary, with her ladies, came to a manor house at Isleworth; and shut in as she was with a grim mistress—who assuredly was all white or black—Katharine found herself like one with ears strained to catch sounds from a distance, listening for the smallest rumours that could come from the other great house up stream.

  The other ladies each had their men, as Cicely Elliott had the old knight. One of them had even six, who one day fought a mêlée for her favours on an eyot before the manor windows. These men came by barge in the evenings, or rode over the flats with a spare horse to take their mistresses a-hawking after the herons in the swampy places. So that each of them had her channel by which true gossip might reach her. But Katharine had none. Till the opening of March the magister came to whisper with Margot Poins—then he was sent again to Paris to set his pen at the service of Sir Thomas Wyatt, who had so many letters to write. Thus she heard much women’s tattle, but knew nothing of what passed. Only it seemed certain that Gardiner of Winchester was seeing fit—God knows why—to be hot in favour of the Old Faith. It was certain, from six several accounts, that at Paul’s Cross he had preached a sermon full of a very violent and acceptable doctrine. She wondered what move in the game this was: it was assuredly not for the love of God. No doubt it was part of Throckmorton’s plan. The Lutherans were to be stirred to outrages in order to prove to the King how insolent were they upon whom Privy Seal relied.

  It gratified her to see how acute her prescience had been when Dr Barnes made his furious reply to the bishop. For Dr Barnes was one of Privy Seal’s most noted men: an insolent fool whom he had taken out of the gutter to send ambassador to the Schmalkaldners. And it was on the day when Gardiner made his complaint to the King about Dr Barnes, that her uncle Norfolk sent to her to come to him at Hampton.

  He awaited her, grim and jaundiced, in the centre of a great, empty room, where, shivering with cold, he did not let his voice exceed a croaking whisper though there was panelling and no arras on the dim walls. But, to his queries, she answered clearly:

  ‘Nay, I serve the Lady Mary with her Latin. I hear no tales and I bear none to any man.’ And again:

  ‘Three times I have spoken with the King’s Highness, the Lady Mary being by. And once it was of the Islands of the Blest, and once of the Latin books I read, and once of indifferent matters—such as of how apple trees may be planted against a wall in Lincolnshire.’

  Her uncle gazed at her: his dark eyes were motionless and malignant by habit; he opened his lips to speak; closed them again without a word spoken. He looked at a rose, carved in a far corner of the ceiling, looked at her again, and muttered:

  ‘The French are making great works at Ardres.’

  ‘Oh, aye,’ she answered, ‘my cousin Tom wrote me as much. He is commanded to stay at Calais.’

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘will they go against Calais town in good earnest?’

  ‘If I knew that,’ she answered, ‘I should have had it in private words from my lady whom I serve. And, if I had it in private words I would tell it neither to you nor to any man.’

  He scowled patiently and muttered:

  ‘Then tell in private words back again this: That if the French King or the Emperor do war upon us now Privy Seal will sit upon the King’s back for ever.’

  ‘Ah, I know who hath talked with you,’ she answered. ‘Uncle, give me your hand to kiss, for I must back to my mistress.’

  He put his thin hand grimly behind his back.

  ‘Ye spy, then, for others,’ he said. ‘Go kiss their feet.’

  She laughed in a nettled voice:

  ‘If the others get no more from me than your Grace of Norfolk.…’

  He frowned ominously, pivoted stiffl
y round on his heels, and said over his shoulder:

  ‘Then I will have thy cousin clapped up the first time he is found in a drunken brawl at Calais.’

  She was after him beseechingly, with her hands held out:

  ‘Oh no, uncle,’ and ‘Oh, dear uncle. Let poor fool Tom be drunken when drunken brawls work no manner of ill.’

  ‘Then get you sent to the King of France, through the channel that you wot of, the message I have given you to convey.’ He kept his back to her and spoke as if to the distant door.

  ‘Why must I mull in these matters?’ she asked him piteously, ‘or why must poor Tom? God help him, he found me bread when you had left me to starve.’ It came to her as pitiful that her cousin, swaggering and unconscious, at a great distance, should be undone because these men quarrelled near her. He moved stiffly round again—he was so bolstered over with clothes against the cold.

  ‘It is not you that must meddle here,’ he said. ‘It is your mistress. Only she will be believed by those you wot of.’

  ‘Speak you yourself,’ she said.

  He scowled hatefully.

  ‘Who of the French would believe me,’ he snarled. He had been so made a tool of by Privy Seal in times past that he had lost all hope of credence.

  ‘If I may come to it, I will do it,’ she said suddenly.

  After all, it seemed to her, this action might bring about the downfall of Privy Seal—and she desired his downfall. It would be a folly to refuse her aid merely because her uncle was a craven man or Throckmorton a knave. It was a true thing that she was to ask the Lady Mary to say—that if France and Spain should molest England together the Cleves alliance must stand for good—and with it Privy Seal.

  ‘But, a’ God’s name, let poor Tom be,’ she added.

  He stood perfectly motionless for a moment, shrugged his shoulders straight up and down, stood motionless for another moment, and then held out his hand. She touched it with her lips.

  —

  There was a certain cate, or small cake, made of a paste sweetened with honey and flavoured with cinnamon, that Katharine Howard very much loved. She had never tasted them till one day the King had come to visit his daughter, bearing with his own hands a great box of them. He had had the receipt from Thomas Cromwell, who had had it of a Jew in Italy. Mary so much disaffected her father that, taking them from his hands with one knee nearly upon the ground, she had said that her birth ill-fitted her to eat these princely viands, and she had placed them on a ledge of her writing-pulpit. Heaving a heavy sigh, he glanced at her book and said that he would not have her spoil her eyes with too much of study; let her bid Lady Katharine to read and write for her.

  ‘She will have greater need of her eyes than ever I of mine,’ Mary answered with her passionless voice.

  ‘I will not have you spoil your eyes,’ he said heavily, and she gave him back the reply:

  ‘My eyes are your Highness’.’

  He made with his shoulders a slow movement of exasperation, and, turning to Katharine Howard, he began once more to talk of the Islands of the Blest. He was dressed all in black furs that day, so that his face appeared less pallid than when he had worn scarlet, and it seemed to her suddenly that he was a very pitiful man—a man who could do nothing; and one who, as Throckmorton had said, was nothing but a doubt. There beside him, between the two of them, stood his daughter—pale, straight, silent, her hands clasped before her. And her father had come to placate her. He had brought her cates to eat, or he would have beaten her into loving him. Yet Mary of England stood as rigid as a knife-blade; you could move her neither by love nor by threats. This man had sinned against this daughter; here he was brought up against an implacability. He was omnipotent in everything else; this was his Pillars of Hercules. So she exerted herself to be pleasant with him, and at one moment of the afternoon he stretched out a great hand to the cinnamon cakes and placed one in his own mouth. He sat still, and, his great jaws moving slowly, he said that he scarcely doubted that, if he himself could set sail with a great armada and many men, he should find a calm region of tranquil husbandry and a pure faith.

  ‘It might be found,’ he said; then he sighed heavily, and, looking earnestly at her, brushed the crumbs from the furs about his neck.

  ‘One day, doubtless, your Highness shall find them,’ Katharine answered, ‘if your Highness shall apply yourself to the task.’ She was impatient with him for his sighs. Let him, if he would, abandon his kingdom and his daughter to set out upon a quest, or let him stay where he was and set to work at any other task.

  ‘But whether your Highness shall find them beyond the Western Isles or hidden in this realm of England …’

  He shrugged his great shoulders right up till the furs on them were brushed by the feathers that fell from his bonnet.

  ‘God, wench!’ he said gloomily, ‘that is a question you are main happy to have time to dally with. I have wife and child, and kith and kin, and a plaguey basket of rotten apples to make cider from.’

  He pulled himself out of his chair with both hands on the arms, stretched his legs as if they were cramped, and rolled towards the door.

  ‘Why, read of this matter in old books,’ he said, ‘and if you find the place you shall take me there.’ Then he spoke bitterly to the Lady Mary, who had never moved.

  ‘Since your eyes are mine, I bid you not spoil them,’ he said. ‘Let this lady aid you. She has ten times more of learning than you have.’ But, taking his jewelled walking-stick from beside the door, he added, ‘God, wench! you are my child. I have read your commentary, and I, a man who have as much of good letters as any man in Christendom, am well content to father you.’

  ‘Did your Highness mark—this book being my child—which side of the paper it was written on?’ his daughter asked.

  Katharine Howard sighed, for it was the Lady Mary’s bitter jest that she wrote on the rough side of the paper, having been born on the wrong side of the blanket.

  ‘Madam Howard,’ she said to Katharine with a cold sneer, as of a very aged woman, ‘my father, who has taken many things from me to give to other women, takes now my commentary to give to you. Pray you finish it, and I will save mine eyes.’

  As the King closed the door behind him she moved across to the chair and sat herself down to gaze at the coals. Katharine knelt at her feet and stretched out her hands. She was, she said, her mistress’s woman. But the Lady Mary turned obdurately the side of her face to her suppliant; only her fingers picked at her black dress.

  ‘I am your woman,’ Katharine said. ‘Before God and St Anthony, the King is naught to me! Before God and the Mother of God, no man is aught to me! I swear that I am your woman. I swear that I will speak as you bid me speak, or be silent. May God do so to me if in aught I act other than may be of service to you!’

  ‘Then you may sit motionless till the green mould is over your cheeks,’ Mary answered.

  But two days later, in the afternoon, Katharine Howard came upon her mistress with her jaws moving voraciously. Half of the cinnamon cates were eaten from the box on the writing-pulpit. A convulsion of rage passed over the girl’s dark figure; her eyes dilated and appeared to blaze with a hot and threatening fury.

  ‘If I could have thy head, before God I would shorten thee by the neck!’ she said. ‘Stay now; go not. Take thy hand from the door-latch.’

  Sudden sobs shook her, and tears dropped down her furrowed and pallid cheeks. She was tormented always by a gnawing and terrible hunger that no meat and no bread might satisfy, so that, being alone with the cakes in the cold spring afternoon, she had, in spite of the donor, been forced always nearer and nearer to them.

  ‘God help me!’ she said at last. ‘Udal is gone, and the scullion that supplied me in secret has the small-pox. How may I get me things to eat?’

  ‘To have stayed to ask me!’ Katharine cried. ‘What a folly was here!’ For, as a daughter of the King, the Lady Mary was little more than herself; but because she was daughter to a queen that was at
once a saint and martyr, Katharine was ready to spend her life in her service.

  ‘I would stay to ask a service of any man or woman,’ Mary answered, ‘save only that I have this great hunger.’ She clutched angrily at her skirt, and so calmed herself.

  ‘How may you help me?’ she asked grimly. ‘There are many that would put poison in my food. My mother was poisoned.’

  ‘I would eat myself of all the food that I bring you,’ said Katharine.

  ‘And if thou wast poisoned, I must get me another, and yet another after that. You know who it is that would have me away.’

  At that hint of the presence of Cromwell, Katharine grew more serious.

  ‘I will save of my own food,’ she answered simply.

  ‘Till your bones stick through your skin!’ Mary sneered. ‘See you, do you know one man you could trust?’

  The shadow fell the more deeply upon Katharine, because her cousin—as she remembered every day—the one man that she could trust, was in Calais town.

  ‘I know of two women,’ she said; ‘my maid Margot and Cicely Elliott.’

  Mary of England reflected for a long time. Her eyes sunk deep in her head, grey and baleful, had the look of her father’s.

  ‘Cicely Elliott is too well known for my woman,’ she said. ‘Thy maid Margot is a great lump, too. Hath she no lover?’

  The magister was in Paris.

  ‘But a brother she hath,’ Katharine said; ‘one set upon advancement.’

  Mary said moodily:

  ‘Advancement, then, may be in this. God knoweth his own good time. But you might tell him; or it were better you should bid her tell him.… In short words, and fur … wait.’

  She had a certain snake-like eagerness and vehemence in her motions. She opened swiftly an aumbry in which there stood a tankard of milk. She took a clean pen, and then turned upon Katharine.

  ‘Before thou goest upon this errand,’ she said, ‘I would have thee know that, for thee, there may be a traitor’s death in this—and some glory in Heaven.’