It was at this point that the magister was moved to keep no longer silence.
‘Now, by all the gods of high Olympus!’ he cried out, ‘such things shall not be alleged against me. For I do swear, before Venus and all the saints, that I am your man.’
Nevertheless, it was Margot Poins, wavering between her love for her magister and her love for her mistress, that most truly was carried away by Katharine’s eloquence.
‘Mistress,’ she said, and she indicated both the magister and his tall and bearded companion, ‘these two have made up a pretty plot upon the stairs. There are in it papers from Cleves and a matter of deceiving Privy Seal and thou shouldst be kept in ignorance asking to—to—’
Her gruff voice failed and her blushes overcame her, so that she wanted for a word. But upon the mention of papers and Privy Seal the old knight fidgeted and faltered:
‘Why, let us begone.’ Cicely Elliott glanced from one to the other of them with a malicious glee, and Throckmorton’s eyes blinked sardonically above his beard.
It had been actually upon the stairs that he had come upon the magister, newly down from his horse, and both stiff and bruised, with Margot Poins hanging about his neck and begging him to spare her a moment. Throckmorton crept up the dark stairway with his shoes soled with velvet. The magister was seeking to disengage himself from the girl with the words that he had a treaty form of the Duke of Cleves in his bosom and must hasten on the minute to give it to her mistress.
‘Before God!’ Throckmorton had said behind his back, ‘ye will do no such thing,’ and Udal had shrieked out like a rabbit caught by a ferret in its bury. For here he had seemed to find himself caught by the chief spy of Privy Seal upon a direct treason against Privy Seal’s self.
But, dragging alike the terrified magister and the heavy, blonde girl who clung to him out from the dark stairhead into the corridor, where, since no one could come upon them unseen or unheard, it was the safest place in the palace to speak, Throckmorton had whispered into his ear a long, swift speech in which he minced no matters at all.
The time, he said, was ripe to bring down Privy Seal. He himself—Throckmorton himself—loved Kat Howard with a love compared to which the magister’s was a rushlight such as you bought fifty for a halfpenny. Privy Seal was ravening for a report of that treaty. They must, before all things, bring him a report that was false. For, for sure, upon that report Privy Seal would act, and, if they brought him a false report, Privy Seal would act falsely.
Udal stood perfectly still, looking at nothing, his thin brown hand clasped round his thin brown chin.
‘But, above all,’ Throckmorton had concluded, ‘show ye no papers to Kat Howard. For it is very certain that she will have no falsehoods employed to bring down Privy Seal, though she hate him as the Assyrian cockatrice hateth the symbol of the Cross.’
‘Sir Throckmorton,’ Margot Poins had uttered, ‘though ye be a paid spy, ye speak true words there.’
He pulled his beard and blinked at her.
‘I am minded to reform,’ he said. ‘Your mistress hath worked a miracle of conversion in me.’
She shrugged her great fair shoulders at this, and spoke to the magister:
‘It is very true,’ she said, ‘that this spying knight affects my mistress. But whether it be for the love of virtue, or for the love of her body, or because the cat jumps that way and there he observeth fortune to rise, I leave to God who reads all hearts.’
‘There speaks a wench brought up and taught by Protestants,’ Throckmorton gibed pleasantly at her; ‘or ye have caught the trick of Kat Howard, who, though she be a Papist as good as I, yet prates virtue like a Lutheran.’
‘Ye lie!’ Margot said; ‘my mistress getteth her virtue from good letters.’
Throckmorton smiled at her again.
‘Wench,’ he said, ‘in all save doctrine, this Kat Howard and her learning are nearer Lutheran than of the old faith.’
With his malice he set himself to bewilder Margot. They made a little, shadowy knot in the long corridor. For he wished to give Udal, who in his long gown stood deaf-faced, like a statue of contemplation, the time to come to a conclusion.
‘Why, you are a very mean wag,’ Margot said. ‘I have heard my uncle—who is, as ye wot, a Protestant and a printer—I have heard him speak of Luther and of Bucer and of the word of God and suchlike canting books, but never once of Seneca and Tully, that my mistress loves.’
‘Why, ye are learning the trick of tongues,’ Throckmorton mocked. ‘Please God, when your mistress cometh to be Queen—may He send it soon!—there shall be such a fashion and contagion of talking—’
Having his eyes on Udal, he broke off suddenly, and said with a harsh sharpness:
‘I have given you time to make a resolution. Speak quickly. Will you come into our boat with us that will bring down Privy Seal?’
Udal winced, but Throckmorton held him by the wrist.
‘Then unpouch quickly thy Cleves papers,’ he said; ‘we have but a little time to turn them round.’
Udal’s thin hand sought nervously the opening of his jerkin beneath his gown: he drew it back, moved it forward again, and stood quivering with doubt.
Throckmorton stood vaingloriously back upon his feet and combed his great beard with his white fingers.
‘Magister,’ he uttered triumphantly, ‘well you wot that such a man as you cannot plot for himself alone; you will make naught of your treasure trove save a cleft neck!’
And, furtively, cringing back into the dark hangings, a bent, broken figure like a miser unpouching his gold, Udal undid his breast lacings.
It was hot from this colloquy that Margot Poins had led the two men in upon her mistress in her large dim room. Because she hated the great spy, since he loved Kat Howard and had undone many good men with false tales, she had not been able to keep her tongue from seeking to wound him.
‘Ye are too true to mix in plots,’ she brought out gruffly.
Cicely Rochford came close to Katharine and measured her neck with the span of her small hand.
‘There is room!’ she said. ‘Hast a long and a straight neck.’
Her husband muttered that he liked not these talkings. By diligent avoidance of such, he had kept his own hair and neck uncut in troublesome times.
‘I will take thee to another place,’ Cicely threw at him over her shoulder. ‘Shalt kiss me in a dark room. It is very certain maids’ talk is no fit hearing for thy jolly old ears.’
She took him delicately at the end of his short white beard between her long finger and thumb, and, with her high and mincing step, led him through the door.
‘God save this room, where all the virtues bide!’ she cried out, and drew her overskirt closer to her as she passed near the great, bearded spy.
Katharine turned and faced Throckmorton.
‘It is even as the maid saith,’ she uttered. ‘I am too true to mix in plots.’
‘Neither will ye give us to death!’ Throckmorton faced her back so that she paused for breath, and the pause lasted a full minute.
‘Sir,’ she said, ‘I do give you a fair and a full warning that, if you do plot against Privy Seal, and if knowledge of your plotting cometh to mine ears—though I ask not to know of them—I will tell of your plottings—’
‘Oh, before God!’ Udal cried out, ‘I have suckled you with learned writers; I have carried letters for you; will you give me to die?’ and Margot wailed from a deep chest: ‘The magister so well hath loved thee. Give him not into the hands of Cur Crummock!—would I had never told thee that they plotted!’
‘Fool!’ Throckmorton said; ‘it is to the King she will go with her tales.’ He sat down upon her yellow-wood table and swung one crimson leg before the other, laughing gleefully at Katharine’s astonished face.
‘Sir,’ she said at last; ‘it is true that I will go, not to my lord Privy Seal, but to the King.’
Throckmorton held up one of his white hands to the light and, with the other, smoothed down its lit
tle finger.
‘See you?’ he gibed softly at Margot. ‘How better I guess this thing, mistress, than thou. For I do know her better.’
Katharine looked at him with a soft glance and said pitifully:
‘Nevertheless, what shall it profit thee if I take a tale of thy treasons to the King’s Highness?’
Throckmorton sprang from the table and clapped his heels together on the floor.
‘It shall get me made an earl,’ he said. ‘The King will do that much for the man that shall rid him of his minister.’ He reflected foxily and for a quick moment. ‘Before God!’ he said, ‘take this tale to the King, for it is the true tale: That the Duke of Cleves seeks, in France, to have done with his alliance. He will no more cleave to his brother-in-law, but will make submission to the Emperor and to Rome!’
He paused, and then finished:
‘For that news the King shall love you much more than before. But God help me! it takes thee the more out of my reach!’
As they left the room to go to the audience with Cromwell, Katharine, squaring the frills of her hood behind her back, could hear Margot Poins grumbling to the magister:
‘After these long days ye ha’ time for five minutes to hold my hand,’ and the magister, perturbed and fumbling in his bosom, muttered:
‘Nay, I have no minutes now. I must write much in Latin ere thy mistress return.’
VI
‘BY GOD,’ Wriothesley said when she entered the long gallery where the men were. ‘This is a fair woman!’
She had command of her features, and her eyes were upon the ground; it was a part of a woman’s upbringing to walk well, and her masters had so taught her when she had lived with her grandmother, the old duchess. Not the tips of her shoes shewed beneath the zigzag folds of her russet-brown underskirt; the tips of her scarlet sleeves netted with gold touched the waxed wood of the floor; her hood fell behind to the ground, and her fair hair was golden where the sunlight fell on it with a last, watery ray.
Upon Privy Seal she raised her eyes; she bent her knees so that her gown spread out all around her when she curtsied, and, having arranged it with a slow hand, she came to her height again, rustling as if she rose from a wave.
‘Sir,’ she said, ‘I come to pray you to right a great wrong done by your servants.’
‘By God!’ Wriothesley said, ‘she speaks high words.’
‘Madam Howard,’ Cromwell answered—and his eyes graciously dwelt upon her tall form. She had clasped her hands before her lap and looked into his face. ‘Madam Howard, you are more learned in the better letters than I; but I would have you call to memory one Pancrates, of whom telleth Lucian. Being in a desert or elsewhere, this magician could turn sticks, stocks and stakes into servants that did his will. Mark you, they did his will—no more and no less.’
‘Sir,’ Katharine said, ‘ye have better servants than ever had Pancrates. They do more than your behests.’
Cromwell bent his back, stretched aside his white hand and smiled still.
‘Ye trow truth,’ he said. ‘Yet ye do me wrong; for had I the servants of Pancrates, assuredly he should hear no groans of injustice from men of good will.’
‘It is too good hearing,’ Katharine said gravely. ‘This is my tale—’
Once before she had trembled in this man’s presence, and still she had a catching in the throat as her eyes measured his face. She was mad to do right and to right wrongs, yet in his presence the doing of the right, the righting of wrongs, seemed less easy than when she stood before any other man. ‘Sir,’ she uttered, ‘I have thought ye have done ill afore now. I am nowise certain that ye thought your ill-doing an evil. I beseech you for a patient hearing.’
But, though she told her story well—and it was an old story that she had learned by heart—she could not be rid of the feeling that this was a less easy matter than it had seemed to her, to call Cromwell accursed. She had a moving tale of wrongs done by Cromwell’s servant, Dr Barnes, a visitor of a church in Lincolnshire near where her home had been. For the lands had been taken from a little priory upon an excuse that the nuns lived a lewd life; and so well had she known the nuns, going in and out of the convent every week-day, that well she knew the falseness of Cromwell’s servant’s tale.
‘Sir,’ she said to Cromwell, ‘mine own foster-sister had the veil there; mine own mother’s sister was there the abbess.’ She stretched out a hand. ‘Sir, they dwelled there simply and godly, withdrawn from the world; succouring the poor; weaving of fine linens, for much flax grew upon those lands by there; and praying God and the saints that blessings fall upon this land.’
Wriothesley spoke to her slowly and heavily:
‘Such little abbeys ate up the substance of this land in the old days. Well have we prospered since they were done away who ate up the fatness of this realm. Now husbandmen till their idle soil and cattle are in their buildings.’
‘Gentleman whose name I know not,’ she turned upon him, ‘more wealth and prosperity God granted us in answer to their prayers than could be won by all the husbandmen of Arcadia and all the kine of Cacus. God standeth above all men’s labours.’ But Cromwell’s servants had sworn away the lands of the small abbey, and now the abbess and her nuns lay in gaol accused—and falsely—of having secreted an image of Saint Hugh to pray against the King’s fortunes.
‘Before God,’ she said, ‘and as Christ is my Saviour, I saw and make deposition that these poor simple women did no such thing but loved the King as he had been their good father. I have seen them at their prayers. Before God, I say to you that they were as folk astonished and dismayed; knowing so little of the world that ne one ne other knew whence came the word that had bared them to the skies. I have seen them—I.’
‘Where went they?’ Wriothesley said; ‘what worked they?’
‘Gentleman,’ she answered; ‘being cast out of their houses and their veils, they knew nowhither to go; homes they had none; they lived with their own hinds in hovels, like frightened lambs, the saints their pastors being driven from their folds.’
‘Aye,’ Wriothesley said grimly, ‘they cumbered the ground; they did meet in knots for mutinies.’
‘God had appointed them the duty of prayer,’ Katharine answered him. ‘They met and prayed in sheds and lodges of the house that had been theirs, poor ghosts revisiting and bewailing their earthly homes. I have prayed with them.’
‘Ye have done a treason in that day,’ Wriothesley answered.
‘I have done the best that ever I did for this land,’ she met him fully. ‘I prayed naught against the King and the republic. I have prayed you and your like might be cast down. So do I still. I stand here to avow it. But they never did, and they do lie in gaol.’ She turned again upon Cromwell and spoke piteously from her full throat. ‘My lord,’ she cried. ‘Soften your heart and let the wax in your ears melt so that ye hear. Your servants swore falsely when they said these women lived lewdly; your men swore falsely when they said that these women prayed treasonably. For the one count they took their lands and houses; for the other they lay them in the gaols. Sir, my lord, your servants go up and down this land; sir, my lord, they ride rich men with boots of steel and do strangle the poor with gloves of iron. I do think ye know they do it; I do pray ye know not. But, sir, if ye will right this wrong I will kiss your hands; if you will set up again these homes of prayer I will take a veil, and in one of them spend my days praying that good befall you and yours.’ She paused in her speaking and then began again: ‘Before I came here I had made me a fair speech. I have forgot it, and words come haltingly to me. Sirs, ye think I seek mine own aggrandisement; ye think I do wish ye cast down. Before God, I wish ye were cast down if ye continue in these ways; but I have prayed to God who sent the Pentecostal fires, to give me the gift of tongues that shall soften your hearts—’
Cromwell interrupted her, smiling that Venus, who made her so fair, gave her no need of a gift of tongues, and Minerva, who made her so learned, gave her no need of fairness.
For the sake of the one and the other, he would very diligently enquire into these women’s courses. If they ha been guiltless, they should be richly repaid; if they ha been guilty, they should be pardoned.
Katharine flushed with a hot anger.
‘Ye are a very craven lord,’ she said. ‘If you may find them guilty, you shall have my head. But if you do find them innocent and shield them not, I swear I will strive to have thine.’ Anger made her blue eyes dilate. ‘Have you no bowels of compassion for the right? Ye treat me as a fair woman—but I speak as a messenger of the King’s, that is God’s, to men who too long have hardened their hearts.’
Throckmorton laid back his head and laughed suddenly at the ceiling; Cranmer crossed himself; Wriothesley beat his heel upon the floor and shrugged his shoulders bitterly—but Lascelles, the Archbishop’s spy, kept his eyes upon Throckmorton’s face with a puzzled scrutiny.
‘Why now does that man laugh?’ he asked himself. For it seemed to him that by laughing Throckmorton applauded Katharine Howard. And indeed, Throckmorton applauded Katharine Howard. As policy her speech was neither here nor there, but as voicing a spirit, infectious and winning to men’s hearts, he saw that such speaking should carry her very far. And, if it should embroil her more than ever with Cromwell, it would the further serve his adventures. He was already conspiring to betray Cromwell, and he knew that, very soon now, Cromwell must pierce his mask of loyalty; and the more Katharine should have cast down her glove to Cromwell, the more he could shelter behind her; and the more men she could have made her friends with her beauty and her fine speeches, the more friends he too should have to his back when the day of discovery came. In the meantime he had in his sleeve a trick that he would speedily play upon Cromwell, the most dangerous of any that he had played. For below the stairs he had Udal, with his news of the envoy from Cleves to France, and with his copies of the envoy’s letters. But, in her turn, Katharine played him, unwittingly enough, a trick that puzzled him.
‘Bones of St Nairn!’ he said; ‘she has him to herself. What mad prank will she play now?’
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