The Fifth Queen

by Ford Madox Ford

  He groaned a little.

  ‘Let us love to-day that’s here,’ he said, ‘I will read thee a verse from Lucretius, and you shall tell me the history of that fourth capon’—he pointed to a browned carcase that, upon the spit, whirled its elbows a full third longer than any of the line.

  ‘That is the master roasting-piece,’ she said, ‘so he browns there not too far, nor too close, for the envoy’s own eating.’

  He considered the chicken with his head to one side.

  ‘It is the place of a wife to be subject to her lord,’ he said.

  ‘It is the place of a husband that he fendeth for ’s wife,’ she answered him. She tapped her fingers determinedly upon her elbows.

  ‘So it is,’ she continued. ‘To-morrow you shall set out for London city to make road towards becoming Sir Chancellor.’ Whilst he groaned she laid down for him her law. He was to go to England, he was to strive for great posts: if he gained, she would come share them; if he failed, he might at odd moments come back to her fireside. ‘Have done with groaning now,’ she said, stilling his lamentations. ‘Keep them even for the next wench that you shall sue to—of me you have had all you asked.’

  He considered for five seconds, his elbow upon his crossed knees and his wrist supporting his lean brown face.

  ‘It is in the essence of it a good bargain,’ he said. ‘You put against the chance of being, you a chancellor’s madam, mine of having for certain a capon in Paris town.’

  He tapped his long nose. ‘Nevertheless, for your stake you have cast down a very little: three nights of bed and board against the chaining me up.’

  ‘Husband,’ she answered. ‘More than that you shall have.’

  He wriggled a little beneath his furs.

  ‘Husband is an ill name,’ he commented. ‘It smarts.’

  ‘But it fills the belly.’

  ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Therefore I am minded to bide here and take with the sourness the sweet of it.’

  She laughed a little, and, with a great knife, cut a large manchet from the loaf between them.

  ‘Nay,’ she said, ‘to-morrow my army with their spits and forks shall drive thee from the door.’

  He grinned with his lips. She was fair and fat beneath her hood, but she was resolute. ‘I have it in me greatly to advance you,’ she said.

  A boy brought her a trencher filled with chopped things, and a man in a blue jerkin came to her side bearing a middling pig, seared to a pale clear pinkness. The boy held the slit stomach carefully apart, and she lined it with slices of bread, dropping into the hollow chives, nutmegs, lumps of salt, the buds of bergamot, and marigold seeds with their acrid perfume, and balls of honied suet. She bound round it a fair linen cloth that she stitched with a great bone needle.

  ‘Oh ingenuous countenance,’ the magister mused above the pig’s mild face. ‘Is it not even the spit of the Cleves envoy’s? And the Cleves envoy shall eat this adorable monster. Oh, cruel anthropophagist!’

  She resigned her burden to the spit and gave the loaf to the boy, wiped her fingers upon her apron, and said:

  ‘That pig shall help thee far upon thy road.’

  ‘Goes it into my wallet?’ he asked joyfully.

  She answered: ‘Nay; into the Cleves envoy’s weam.’

  ‘You speak in hard riddles,’ he uttered.

  ‘Nay,’ she laughed, ‘a baby could unriddle it.’ She looked at him for a moment to enjoy her triumph of mystery. ‘Husband mine, a pig thus stuffed is good eating for Cleves men. I have not kept a hostel for twelve years for envoys and secretaries without learning what each eats with pleasure. And long have I thought that if I wed a man it should be such a man as could thrive by learning of envoys’ secrets.’

  He leaned towards her earnestly.

  ‘You know wherefore the man from Cleves is come?’

  ‘You are, even as I have heard it said, a spy of Thomas Cromwell?’ she asked in return.

  He looked suddenly abashed, but she held to her question.

  ‘I pass for Privy Seal’s man,’ he answered at last.

  ‘But you have played him false,’ she said. He grew pale, glanced over his shoulder, and put his finger on his lips.

  ‘I’ll wager it was for a woman,’ she accused him. She wiped her lips with her apron and dropped her hands upon her lap.

  ‘Why, keep troth to Cromwell if you can,’ she said.

  ‘I do think his sun sets,’ he whispered.

  ‘Why, I am sorry for it,’ she answered. ‘I have always loved him for a brewer’s son. My father was a brewer.’

  ‘Cromwell was begotten even by the devil,’ Udal answered. ‘He made me write a comedy in the vulgar tongue.’

  ‘Be it as you will,’ she answered. ‘You shall know on which side to bite your cake better than I.’

  He was still a little shaken at the thought of Privy Seal.

  ‘If you know wherefore cometh Cleves’ envoy, much it shall help me to share the knowledge,’ he said at last, ‘for by that I may know whether Cromwell or we do rise or fall.’

  ‘If you have made a pact with a woman, have very great cares,’ she answered dispassionately. ‘Doubtless you know how the dog wags its tail; but you are always a fool with a woman.’

  ‘This woman shall be Queen if Cromwell fall,’ the magister said, ‘and I shall rise with her.’

  ‘But is no woman from Cleves’ Queen there now?’ she asked.

  ‘Cicely,’ he answered highly, ‘you know much of capons and beeves, but there are queens that are none and do not queen it, and queans that are no queens and queen it.’

  ‘And so ‘twill be whilst men are men,’ she retorted. ‘But neither my first nor my second had his doxies ruling within my house, do what they might beyond the door.’

  He tried to impart to her some of the adoration he had for Katharine Howard—her learning, her faith, her tallness, her wit, and the deserved empiry that she had over King Henry VIII; but she only answered:

  ‘Why, kiss the wench all you will, but do not come to tell me how she smells!’—and to his new protests: ‘Aye, you may well be right and she may well be Queen—for I know you will sacrifice your ease for no wench that shall not help you somewhere forwards.’

  The magister held his hands above his head in shocked negation of this injustice—but there came from the street the thin wail of a trumpet; another joined it, and a third; the three sounds executed a triple convolution and died away one by one. Holding his thin hand out for silence and better hearing, he muttered:

  ‘Norfolk’s tucket! Then it is true that Norfolk comes to Paris.’

  His wife slipped down from her seat.

  ‘Gave I you not the ostler’s gossip from Calais three days since?’ she said, and went towards her roastings.

  ‘But wherefore comes the yellow dog to Paris?’ Udal persisted.

  ‘That you may go seek,’ she answered. ‘But believe always what an innkeeper says of who are on the road.’

  Udal too slipped down from the window-seat; he buttoned his gown down to his shins, pulled his hat over his ears and hurried through the galleried courtyard into the comfortless shadows of the street. There was no doubt that Norfolk was coming; round the tiny crack that, two houses away, served for all the space that the road had between the towering housefronts, two men in scarlet and yellow, with leopards and lions and fleurs-de-lis on their chests, walked between two in white, tabarded with the great lilies of France. They crushed round the corner, for there was scarce space for four men abreast; behind them squeezed men in purple with the Howard knot, bearing pikes, and men in mustard yellow with the eagle’s wing and ship badge of the Provost of Paris. In the broader space before the arch of Udal’s courtyard they stayed to wait for the horsemen to disentangle themselves from the alley; the Englishmen looked glumly at the tall housefronts; the French loosened the mouthplates of their helmets to breathe the air for a minute. Hostlers, packmen and pedlars began to fill the space behind Udal, and he heard his wife�
�s voice calling shrilly to a cook who had run across the yard.

  The crowd a little shielded him from the draught which came through the arch, and he waited with more contentment. Undoubtedly there was Norfolk upon a great yellow horse, so high that it made his bonnet almost touch the overhanging storey of the third house; behind him the white and gold litter of the provost, who, having three weeks before broken his leg at tennis-play, was still unable to sit in a saddle. The duke rode as if implacably rigid, his yellow, long face set, listening as if with a sour deafness to something that the provost from below called to him with a great, laughing voice.

  The provost’s litter, too, came up alongside the duke’s horse in the open space, then they all moved forward at the slow processional: three steps and a halt for the trumpets to blow a tucket; three more and another tucket; the great yellow horse stepping high and casting up his head, from which flew many flakes of white foam. With its slow, regularly interrupted gait, dominated by the impassive yellow face of Norfolk, the whole band had an air of performing a solemn dance, and Udal shivered for a long time, till amidst the train of mules bearing leathern sacks, cupboards, chests and commodes, he saw come riding a familiar figure in a scholar’s gown—the young pedagogue and companion of the Earl of Surrey. He was a fair, bearded youth with blue eyes, riding a restless colt that embroiled itself and plunged amongst the mules’ legs. The young man leaned forward in the saddle and craned to avoid a clothes chest.

  The magister called to him:

  ‘Ho, Longstaffe!’ and having caught his pleased eyes: ‘Ecce quis sto in arce plenitatis. Veni atque bibe! Magister sum. Udal sum. Longstaffe ave.’

  Longstaffe slipped from his horse, which he left to be rescued by whom it might from amongst the hard-angled cases.

  ‘Assuredly,’ he said, ‘there is no love between that beast and me as there was betwixt his lord and Bucephalus,’ and he followed Udal into the galleried courtyard, where their two gowned figures alone sought shelter from the March showers.

  ‘News from overseas there is none,’ he said. ‘Privy Seal ruleth still about the King; the German astronomers have put forth a tract De Quadratura Circuli; the lost continent of Atlantis is a lost continent still—and my bones ache.’

  ‘But your mission?’ Udal asked.

  The doctor, his hard blue eyes spinning with sardonic humour beneath his black beretta, said that his mission, even as Udal’s had been, was to gain some crowns by setting into the learned language letters that should pass between his ambassador and the King’s men of France. Udal grinned disconcertedly.

  ‘Be certified in your mind,’ he said, ‘that I am not here a spy or informer of Privy Seal’s.’

  ‘Forbid it, God,’ Doctor Longstaffe answered good-humouredly. None the less his jaw hardened beneath his fair beard and he answered, ‘I have as yet written no letters—litteras nullas scripsi: argal nihil scio.’

  ‘Why, ye shall drink a warmed draught and eat a drippinged soppet,’ Udal said, ‘and you shall tell me what in England is said of this mission.’

  He led the fair doctor into the great kitchen, and felt a great stab of dislike when the young man set his arm round the hostess’s waist and kissed her on the red cheeks. The young man laughed:

  ‘Aye indeed; I am mancipium paucae lectionis set beside so learned a man as the magister.’

  The hostess received him with a bridling favour, rubbing her cheek pleasantly, whilst Udal was seeking to persuade himself that, since the woman was in law no wife of his, he had no need to fear. Nevertheless rage tore him when the doctor, leaning his back against the window-side, talked to the woman. She stood between them holding a pewter flagon of mulled hypocras upon a salver of burnished pewter.

  ‘Who I be,’ he said, gazing complacently at her, ‘is a poor student of good letters; how I be here is as one of the amanuenses of the Duke of Norfolk. Origen, Eusebius telleth, had seven, given him by Ambrosius to do his behest. The duke hath but two, given him by the grace of God and of the King’s high mercy.’

  ‘I make no doubt,’ she answered, ‘ye be as learned as the seven were.’

  ‘I be twice as hungry,’ he laughed; ‘but with me it has always been “Quid scribam non quemadmodum,” wherein I follow Seneca.’

  ‘Doctor,’ the magister uttered, quivering, ‘you shall tell me why this mission—which is a very special embassy—at this time cometh to this town of Paris.’

  ‘Magister,’ the doctor answered, wagging his beard upon his poor collar to signify that he desired to keep his neck where it was, ‘I know not.’

  ‘Injurious man,’ Udal fulminated, ‘I be no spy.’

  The doctor surveyed his perturbation with cross-legged calmness.

  ‘An ye were,’ he said—‘and it is renowned that ye are—ye could get no knowledge from where none is.’

  ‘Why, tell me of a woman,’ the hostess said. ‘Who is Kat Howard?’

  The doctor’s blue eyes shot a hard glance at her, and he let his head sink down.

  ‘I have copied to her eyes a sonnet or twain,’ he said, ‘and they were writ by my master, Surrey, the Duke o’ Norfolk’s son.’

  ‘Then these rave upon her as doth the magister?’ she asked.

  ‘Why, an ye be jealous of the magister here,’ the doctor clipped his words precisely, ‘cast him away and take me who am a proper sweetheart.’

  ‘I be wed,’ she answered pleasantly.

  ‘What matters that,’ he said, ‘when husbands are not near?’

  The magister, torn between his unaccustomed gust of jealousy and the desire to hide his marriage from a disastrous discovery in England, clutched with straining fingers at his gown.

  ‘Tell wherefore cometh your mission,’ he said.

  ‘We spoke of a fair woman,’ the doctor answered. ‘Shame it were before Apollo and Priapus that men’s missions should come before kings’ mistresses.’

  ‘It is true, then, that she shall be queen?’ Udal’s wife asked.

  The fall of a great dish in the rear of the tall kitchen gave the scholar time to collect his suspicions—for he took it for an easy thing that this woman, if she were Udal’s leman, might be, she too, a spy in the service of Privy Seal.

  ‘Forbid it, God,’ he said, ‘that ye take my words as other than allegorical. The lady Katharine may be spoken of as a king’s mistress since in truth she were a fit mistress for a king, being fair, devout, learned, courteous, tall and sweet-voiced. But that she hath been kind to the King, God forbid that I should say it.’

  ‘Aye,’ Udal said, ‘but if she hath sent this mission?’

  Panic rose in the heart of the doctor; he beheld himself there, in what seemed a spy’s kitchen, asked disastrous questions by a man and woman and pinned into a window-seat. For there was no doubt that the rumour ran in England that this mission had been sent by the King because Katharine Howard so wished it sent. In that age of spies and treacheries no man’s head was safe on his shoulders—and here were Cromwell’s spies asking news of Cromwell’s chief enemy.

  He stretched out a calm hand and spoke slowly:

  ‘Madam hostess,’ he said, ‘if ye be jealous of the magister ye may well be jealous, for great beauty and worship hath this lady.’ Yet she need be little jealous, for this lady was nowadays prized so high that she might marry any man in the land—and learned men were little prized. Any man in the land of England she might wed—saving only such as were wed, amongst whom was their lord the King, who was happily wed to the gracious lady whom my Lord Privy Seal did bring from Cleves to be their very virtuous Queen.

  Here, it seemed to him, he had cleared himself very handsomely of suspicion of ill will to Privy Seal or of wishing ill to Anne of Cleves.

  ‘For the rest,’ he said, sighing with relief to be away from dangerous grounds, ‘your magister is safe from the toils of marriage with the Lady Katharine.’ Still it might be held that jealousy is aroused by the loving and not by the returning of that love; for it was very certain that the magister
much had loved this lady. Many did hold it a treachery in him, till now, to the Privy Seal whom he served. But now he might love her duteously, since our lord the King had commanded the Lady Katharine to join hands with Privy Seal, and Privy Seal to cement a friendly edifice in his heart towards the lady. Thus it was no treason to Privy Seal in him to love her. But to her it was a treason great and not to be comprehended.

  He ogled Udal’s wife in the gallant manner and prayed her to prepare a bed for him in that hostelry. He had been minded to lodge with a Frenchman named Clement; but having seen her …

  ‘Learned sir,’ she answered, ‘a good bed I have for you.’ But if he sought to go beyond her lips she had a bodyguard of spit-men that the magister’s self had seen.

  The doctor kissed her agreeably and, with a great sigh of relief, hurried from the door.

  ‘May Bacchus who maketh mad, and the Furies that pursued Orestes, defile the day when I cross this step again,’ he muttered as he swung under the arch and ran to follow the mule train.

  For the magister, by playing with his reputation of being Cromwell’s spy, had so effectually caused terror of himself to pervade those who supported the old faith that he had much ado at times to find company even amongst the lovers of good letters.

  III

  IN THE KITCHEN the spits had ceased turning, the dishes had been borne upstairs to the envoy from Cleves, the scullions were wiping knives, the maids were rubbing pieces of bread in the dripping pans and licking their fingers after the succulent morsels. The magister stood, a long crimson blot in the window-way; the hostess was setting flagons carefully into the great armoury.

  ‘Madam wife,’ the magister said to her at last, when she came near, ‘ye see how weighty it is that I bide here.’

  ‘Husband,’ she said, ‘I see how weighty it is that ye hasten to London.’

  His rage broke—he whirled his arms above his head.

  ‘Naughty woman!’ he screamed harshly. ‘Shalt be beaten.’ He strode across to the basting range and gripped a great ladle, his brown eyes glinting, and stood caressing his thin chin passionately.