'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 body-guard of spitmen 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.