Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (174 page)

‘I would not have him killed. He hath made me many presents.’

He looked at her expressionlessly:

‘It is very certain that you can not serve my lord with such a firebrand to your tail,’ he said. ‘I will find him an errand.’

‘But not where he shall be killed,’ she said again.

‘Why,’ he said slowly, ‘I will send him where he will make a great fortune.’

‘A great fortune would help him little,’ she answered. ‘I would have him sent where he may fight evenly matched.’

He laid his hand upon her wrist.

‘He is in as much danger here as anywhere. This is not Lincolnshire, but an ordered Court.’ — A man drew his sword with some peril there, for there were laws against it. If men came brawling in the maids’ quarters at nights there were penalties of losing fingers, hands, or even heads. And the maids themselves were liable to be whipped. — He shook his head at her:

‘If your cousin hath so violent an inclination to you I were your best friend to send him far away.’

It was in his mind that if they were to breed this girl to be a spy they must keep her protected from madmen. Something of mystery in his manner penetrated to her quick senses.

‘God help me, what a dangerous place this is!’ she said. ‘I would I had never spoken to you of my cousin.’

He eyed her solemnly and said that if she were minded to wed this roaring boy they might both, and soon, earn fortunes to buy them land in a distant shire.

II
I

The young Poins, in his scarlet and black, drew his sister into a corner of the hall in which the gentry of the Lords that were there had already dined. It was a vast place, used as a rule for hearing suitors to the Lord Privy Seal and for the audit dinners of his tenantry in London. On its whitened walls there were trophies of arms, and between the wall and the platform at the end of the hall was a small space convenient for private talk. The rest of the people there were playing round games for kissing forfeits or clustered round a magician who had brought a large ape to tell fortunes by the
Sortes Virgilianæ
. It fumbled about in the pages of a black-letter Æneid, and scratched its side voluptuously: taking its own time it looked at the pages attentively with a mournful parody of an aged sage, and set its finger upon a line that the fates directed.

‘Here’s a great ado about thee,’ Poins said, laughing at his sister. ‘Thy name is up in this town of London.’

He had come in the bodyguard of the Queen, and had made time to slip round to old Badge’s low house behind the wall in order to beg from his grandfather ten crowns to pay for a cloak he had lost at cards.

‘Such a cackle among these Lutherans,’ he mocked at Margot. ‘Heard you no hootings as your lady rode here behind us of the guard?’

‘I heard none, nor she deserveth none,’ Margot answered. ‘For I love her most well.’

‘Aye, she hath done a rape on thee,’ he laughed. ‘Aye, our good uncle hath printed a very secret libel upon her.’ He began to whisper: Let it not be known or a sudden vengeance might fall upon their house. It was no small matter to print unlicensed broadsides. But their moody uncle was out of all fear of consequences, so mad with rage. ‘He would have broken my back, because I tore thee from his tender keeping.’

‘Sure it was never so tender,’ Margot said. ‘When was there a day that he did not beat me?’ But he would have married her to his apprentice, a young fellow with a golden tongue, that preached every night to a secret congregation in a Cripplegate cellar.

‘Why, an thou observest my maxims,’ the boy said, sententiously, ‘I will have thee a great lady. But uncle hath printed this libel, and tongues are at work in Austin Friars.’ It was said that this was a new Papist plot. Margot was but the first that they should carry off. The Duke and Bishop Gardiner were reported to have signed papers for abducting all the Lutheran virgins in London. They were to be led from the paths of virtue into Catholic lewdnesses, and all their boys were to be abducted and sent into monasteries across the seas.

‘Thus the race of Lutherans should die out,’ he laughed. ‘Why they are hiding their maidens in pigeon-houses in Holborn. A boy called Hugh hath gone out and never come home, and it is said that masked men in black stuff gowns were seen to put him into a sack in Moorfields.’

‘Well, here be great marvels,’ Margot laughed.

He shook his red sides, and his blue eyes grew malicious and teasing:

‘Such a strumpet as thy lady,’ he uttered. ‘A Papist Howard that is known to have been loved by twenty men in Lincoln.’

Margot passed from laughter into hot anger:

‘It is a marvel God strikes not their tongues with palsy that said that,’ she said swiftly. ‘Why do you not kill some of them if you be a man?’

‘Why, be calmed,’ he said. ‘You have heard such tales before now. It is no more than saying that a woman goes not to their churches to pray.’

A young Marten Pewtress, half page, half familiar to the Earl of Surrey, came towards them calling, ‘Hal Poins.’ He had black down upon his chin and a roving eye. He wore a purple coat like a tabard, and a cap with his master’s arms upon a jewelled brooch.

‘They say there’s a Howard wench come to Court,’ he cried from a distance, ‘and thy sister in her service.’

‘We talk of her,’ Poins answered. ‘Here is my sister.’

The young Pewtress kissed the girl upon the cheek.

‘Pray, you, sweetheart, unfold,’ he said. ‘You are a pretty piece, and have a good brother that’s my friend.’

He asked all of a breath whether this lady had yet had the small-pox? whether her hair were her own? how tall she stood without high heels to her shoon? whether her breath were sweet or her language unpleasing in the Lincolnshire jargon? whether the King had sent her many presents?

Margaret Poins was a very large, fair, and credulous creature, rising twenty. Florid and slow-speaking, she had impulses of daring that covered her broad face with immense blushes. She was dressed in grey linsey-woolsey, and wore a black hood after the manner of the stricter Protestants, but she had round her neck a gilt medallion on a gold chain that Katharine Howard had given her already. She was, it was true, the daughter of a gentleman courtier, but he had been knocked on the head by rebels near Exeter just before her birth, and her mother had died soon after. She had been treated with gloomy austerity by her uncle and with sinister kindness by her grandfather, whom she dreaded. So that, coming from her Bedfordshire aunt, who had a hard cane, to this palace, where she had seen fine dresses and had already been kissed by two lords in the corridors, she was ready to aver that the Lady Katharine had a breath as sweet as the kine, a white skin which the small-pox had left unscarred, hair that reached to her ankles, and a learning and a wit unimaginable. Her own fortune was made, she believed, in serving her. Both the magister and her brother had sworn it, and, living in an age of marvels — dragons, portents from the heavens, and the romances of knight errantry — she was ready to believe it. It was true that the lady’s room had proved a cell more bare and darker than her own at home, but Katharine’s bright and careless laughter, her fair and radiant height, and her ready kisses and pleasant words, made the girl say with hot loyalty:

‘She is more fair than any in the land, and, indeed, she is the apple of the King’s eye.’ Her voice was gruff with emotion, but, suddenly becoming very aware that she was talking to a strange young gentleman who might scoff, she seemed to choke and put her hand over her mouth.

Brocades for dresses, perfumes, gloves, oranges, and even another netted purse of green silk holding gold had continued to be brought to their chamber ever since Privy Seal had signed the warrant, and, it being about the new year, these ordinary vails and perquisites of a Maid of Honour made a show. Margot believed very sincerely that these things came direct from the King’s hands, since they were formally announced as coming of his Highness’ great bounty.

She reported to young Pewtress, ‘And even now she is with the Lord Privy Seal, who brought her to Court.’

‘He will go poaching among our Howards now,’ Pewtress said. He stood considering with an air of gloom that the Norfolk servants imitated from their master, along with such sayings as that the times were very evil, and that no true man’s neck was safe on his shoulders. ‘Pray you, Sweetlips, tell no one this for a day until I have told my master. It may get me some crowns.’ He pinched her chin between his thumb and forefinger. ‘I will be your sweetheart, pretty.’

‘Nay, I am provided with a good one,’ Margot said seriously.

‘You cannot have too many in this place. Take me for when the other’s in gaol and another for when I am hung, as all good men are like to be.’ He turned away lightly and loosened one of his jewelled garters, so that his stockings should hang in slovenly folds to prove that he was a man and despised niceness in his dress.

‘I would that you be not too cheap to these gentry,’ her brother said, with his eyes on Pewtress.

‘I did naught,’ she answered. ‘If a gentleman will kiss one, it is uncourtly to turn away the cheek.’

‘There is a way of not lending the lip,’ he lectured her. ‘I shall school you. A kiss here, a kiss there, I grant you. But consider that you be a gentleman’s child, and ask who a man is.’

‘He was well enough favoured,’ she remonstrated.

‘In these changing days many upstarts are come about the Court,’ he went on with his lesson. ‘Such were not here in the old days. Crummock hath wrought this. Seek advancement; pleasure your mistress, who can advance you; smile upon the magister, who, being advanced, can advance you. Speak courteous and fair words to any great lords that shall observe you. So we can rise in the world.’

‘I will observe thy words,’ she said submissively, for he seemed to her great and learned; ‘but I like not that thou call’st me “you.”’

‘Why, these be grave matters,’ he replied, ‘and “you” is graver than “thou.” But I love thee well. I will take thee a walk if the sun shine to-morrow.’ He tightened his belt and took his pike from the corner. ‘As for your lady; those that made these lies are lowsels. I could slay a score of them if they pressed upon you two.’

‘I would not be so spoken of,’ Margot answered.

‘Then you must never rise in the world, as I am minded you shall,’ he retorted, ‘for, you being in a high place, eyes will be upon you.’

Nevertheless, Katharine Howard heard no evil words shouted after her that day. Pikemen and servitors of Cromwell were too thick upon all the road to the Tower, where the courtiers took barge again. Cromwell made very good order that no insults should reach the ears of such of the Papist nobles as came to his feast; they would make use with the King of evil words if any such were shouted. Thus the more dangerous and the most foul-mouthed of that neighbourhood, when the Court went by, found hands pressed over their mouths or scarves suddenly tightened round their throats by stalwart men that squeezed behind them in the narrow ways, so that not many more than twenty heads on both sides were broken that day; and Margot Poins kept her mouth closed tight with a sort of rustic caution — a shyness of her mistress and a desire to spare her any pain. Thus it was not until long after that Katharine heard of these rumours.

Katharine was in high good spirits. She had no great reason, for Viridus had threatened her; the Queen had rolled her large eyes round when Katharine had made her courtesy, but no words intelligible to a Christian had come from the thick lips; and no lord or lady had noticed her with a word except that, late in the afternoon, her cousin Surrey, a young man with a sleepily insolent air and front teeth that resembled a rabbit’s, had suddenly planted himself in front of her as she sat on a stool against the hangings. He had begun to ask her where she was housed, when another young man caught him by the shoulder and pulled him away before he could do more than bid her sit there till he came again. She had been in no mood to do that for her cousin Surrey; besides, she would not be seen to speak much with a Papist henchman in that house. He could seek her if he wanted her company, so she went into another part of the hall, where they were all strangers.

Except for the mere prudence of pretending to obey Viridus until it should be safe to defy him and his master, she troubled little about what was going to happen to her. It was enough that she was away from the home where she had pined and been lonely. She sat on her stool, watched the many figures that passed her, marked fashions of embroidery, and thought that such speeches as she chanced to hear were ill-turned. Her sister Maids of Honour turned their backs upon her. Only the dark girl, Cicely Elliott, who had gibed at her a week ago, helped her to pin her sleeve that had been torn by a sword-hilt of some man who had turned suddenly in a crowd. But Katharine had learnt, as well as the magister, that when one is poor one must accept what the gods send. Besides, she knew that in the Lady Mary’s household she was certain to be avoided, for she was regarded still as a spy of old Crummock’s. That, most likely, would end some day, and she had no love for women’s chatter.

She sat late at night correcting the embroidery of some true-love-knots that Margot had been making for her. A huckster had been there selling ribands from France, and showing a doll dressed as the ladies of the French King’s Court were dressing that new year. He had been talking of a monster that had been born to a pig-sty on Cornhill, and lamenting that travel was become a grievous costly thing since the monasteries, with their free hostel, had been done away with. The monster had been much pondered in the city; certainly it portended wars or strange public happenings, since it had the face of a child, greyhound’s ears, a sow’s forelegs, and a dragon’s tail. But the huckster had gone to another room, and Margot was getting her supper with the Lady Mary’s serving-maids.

‘Save us!’ Katharine said to herself over her embroidery-frame, ‘here be more drunkards. If I were a Queen I would make a law that any man should be burnt on the tongue that was drunk more than seven times in the week.’ But she was already on her feet, making for the door, her frame dropped to the ground. There had been a murmur of voices through the thick oak, and then shouts and objurgations.