'Ye might do it against Godiva of Coventry, against the blessed
Katharine or against Caesar's helpmeet in those days,' Katharine said.
'Margot here can match all thy witnesses from the city of London--men
that never were in Lincolnshire.'
Margot's face flushed with a tide of exasperation, and, sitting
motionless, she uttered deeply:
'My uncle the printer hath a man will swear he saw ye walk with a
fiend having horns and a tail.' And indeed these things were believed
among the Lutherans that flocked still to Margot's uncle's printing
room. 'My uncle hath printed this,' she muttered, and fumbled hotly in
her bosom. She drew out a sheet with coarse black letters upon it and
cast it across the floor with a flushed disdain at Throckmorton's
feet. It bore the heading: '_Newes from Lincoln_,' Throckmorton kicked
with his toe the white scroll and scrutinised Katharine's face
dispassionately with his foxy eyes that jumped between his lids like
little beetles of blue. He thrust his cap back upon his head and
laughed.
'Before God!' he said; 'ye are the joyfullest play that ever I heard.
And how will Madam Howard act when the King heareth these things?'
Katharine opened her lips with surprise.
'For a subtile man ye are strangely blinded,' she said; 'there is one
plain way.'
'To deny it and call the saints to witness!' he laughed.
'Even that,' she answered. 'I pray the saints to give me the place and
time.'
'Ha' ye seen the King in a jealous rage?' he asked.
'Subtile man,' she answered, 'the King knows his world.'
'Aye,' he answered, 'knoweth that women be never chaste.'
Katharine bent to pick up her sewing.
'Sir,' she said, 'if the King will not have faith in me I will wed no
King.'
His jaw fell. 'Ye have so much madness?' he asked.
She stretched towards him the hand that held her sewing now.
'I swear to you,' she said--'and ye know me well--I seek a way to
bring these rumours to the King's ears.'
He said nothing, revolving these things in his mind.
'Goodly servant,' she began, and he knew from the round and silvery
sound she drew from her throat that she was minded to make one of the
long speeches that appalled and delighted him with their childish
logic and wild honour. 'If it were not that my cousin would run his
head into danger I would will that he came to the King. Sir, ye are a
wise man, can ye not see this wisdom? There is no good walking but
upon sure ground, and I will not walk where the walking is not good.
Shall I wed this King and have these lies to fear all my life? Shall I
wed this King and do him this wrong? Neither wisdom nor honour counsel
me to it. Since I have heard these lies were abroad I have at frequent
moments thought how I shall bring them before the King.'
He thrust his hands into his pockets, stretched his legs out, and
leaned back as though he were supporting the chimney-piece with his
back.
'The King knoweth how men will lie about a woman,' she began again.
'The King knoweth how ye may buy false witness as ye may buy herrings
in the market-place at so much a score. An the King were such a man as
not to know these things, I would not wed with him. An the King were
such a man as not to trust in me, I would not wed with him. I could
have no peace. I could have no rest. I am not one that ask little, but
much.'
'Why, you ask much of them that do support your cause,' he laughed
from his private thinking.
'I do ask this oath of you,' she answered: 'that neither with sword
nor stiletto, nor with provoked quarrel, nor staves, nor clubs, nor
assassins, ye do seek to stay my cousin's coming.'
He cut across her purpose with asking again: 'Ha' ye seen the King
rage jealously?'
'Knight,' she said, 'I will have your oath.' And, as he paused in
thought, she said: 'Before God! if ye swear it not, I will make the
King to send for him hither guarded and set around with an hundred
men.'
'Ye will not have him harmed?' he asked craftily. 'Ye do love him
better than another?'
She rose to her feet, her lips parted. 'Swear!' she cried.
His fingers felt around his waist, then he raised his hand and
uttered:
'I do swear that ne with sword ne stiletto, ne with staves nor with
clubs, ne with any quarrels nor violence so never will I seek thy
goodly cousin's life.'
He shook his head slowly at her.
'All the men ye have known have prayed ye to be rid of him,' he said;
'ye will live to rue.'
'Sir,' she answered him, 'I had rather live to rue the injury my
cousin should do me than live to rue the having injured him.' She
paused to think for a moment. 'When I am Queen,' she said, 'I will
have the King set him in a command of ships to sail westward over the
seas. He shall have the seeking for the Hesperides or the city of
Atalanta, where still the golden age remains to be a model and
ensample for us.' Her eyes looked past Throckmorton. 'My cousin hath a
steadfast nature to be gone on such pilgrimages. And I would the
discovery were made, this King being King and I his Queen; rather that
than the regaining of France; more good should come to Christendom.'
'Madam Howard,' Throckmorton grinned at her, 'if men of our day and
kin do come upon any city where yet remaineth the golden age, very
soon shall be shewn the miracle of the corruptibility of gold. The
rod of our corruption no golden state shall defy.'
She smiled friendlily at him.
'There we part company,' she said. 'For I do believe God made this
world to be bettered. I think, and answer your question, I could never
ha' loved you. For you be a child of the new Italians and I a disciple
of the older holders of that land, who wrote, Cato voicing it for
them, "Virtue spreadeth even as leaven leaveneth bread; a little lump
in your flour in the end shall redeem all the loaf of the Republic."'
He smiled for a moment noiselessly, his mouth open but no sound coming
out. Then he coaxed her:
'Answer my two other questions.'
'Knight,' she answered; 'for the truth of the last, ask, with
thumbscrews, the witnesses ye found in Lincolnshire, and believe them
as ye list. Or ask at the mouth of a draw-well if fishes be below in
the water before ye ask a woman if she be chaste. For the other,
consider of my actions hereafter if I do love the King's person.'
'Why, then, I shall never have kiss from mouth of thine,' he said, and
pulled his cap down over his eyes to depart.
'When the sun shall set in the east,' she retorted, and gave him her
hand to kiss.
Margot Poins raised her large, fair head from her stitching after he
was gone, and asked:
'Tell me truly how ye love the King's person. Often I ha' thought of
it; for I could love only a man more thin.'
'Child,' Katharine answered, 'his Highness distilleth from his person
a make of majesty; there is no other such a man in Christendom. His
Highness culleth from one's heart a make of pity--for, for sure, there
is not in Christendom a man more tried or more calling to be led
Godwards. The Greek writers had a myth, that the two wings of Love
were made of Awe and Pity. Flaws I may find in him; but hot anger
rises in my heart if I hear him miscalled. I will not perjure myself
at his bidding; but being with him, I will kneel to him unbidden. I
will not, to be his queen, have word in a divorce, for I have no
truck with divorces; but I will humble myself to his Queen that is to
pray her give me ease and him if the marriage be not consummated. For,
so I love him that I will humble mine own self in the dust; but so I
love love and its nobleness that, though I must live and die a
cookmaid, I will not stoop in evil ways.'
'There is no man worth that guise of love,' Margot answered, her voice
coming gruff and heavy, 'not the magister himself. I ha' smote one
kitchenmaid i' the face this noon for making eyes at him.'
V
'My mad nephew,' Master Printer Badge said to Throckmorton, 'shall
travel down from his chamber anon. When ye shall see the pickle he is
in ye shall understand wherefore it needeth ten minutes to his
downcoming.' To Throckmorton's query he shook his dark, bearded head
and muttered: 'Nay; ye used him for your own purposes. Ye should know
better than I what is like to have befallen him.'
Throckmorton swallowed his haste and leant back against the edge of a
press that was not at work. Of these presses there were four there in
the middle of the room: tall, black, compounded of iron and wood, the
square inwards of each rose and fell rhythmically above the flutter of
the printed leaves that the journeymen withdrew as they rose, and
replaced, white, unsullied and damp as they came together again. Along
the walls the apprentice setters stood before the black formes and
with abstruse, deliberate or hesitating expressions, made swift
snatches at the little leaden dice. The sifting sound of the leads
going home and the creak of the presses with the heavy wheeze of one
printer, huge and grizzled like a walrus, pulling the press-lever back
and bending forward to run his eyes across the type--wheeze, creak
and click--made a level and monotonous sound.
'Ye drill well your men,' Throckmorton said lazily, and smoothed his
white fingers, holding them up against the light, as if they of all
things most concerned him.
He had received that day at Hampton a letter from the printer here in
Austin Friars, sent hastening by the hands of the pressman whose idle
machine he now leant against. 'Sir,' the letter said, 'my nephew saith
urgently that T.C. is landed at Greenwich. He might not stay him. What
this importeth best is yknown to your worshipful self. By the swaying
of the sea which late he overpassed, being tempestive, and by other
things, my nephew is rendered incoherent. That God may save you and
guide your counsels and those of your master to the more advantaging
of the Protestant religion that now, praised be God! standeth higher
in the realm than ever it did, is the prayer of Jno. Badge the
Younger.'
Throckmorton had hastened there to the hedges of Austin Friars at the
fastest of his bargemen's oars. The printer had told him that, but
that the business was the Lord Privy Seal's and, as he understood,
went to the advantaging of Protestantism and the casting down of
Popery, never would he ha' sent with the letter his own printer
journeyman, busied as they were with printing of his great Bible in
English.
'Here is an idle press,' he said, pointing at the mute and lugubrious
instrument of black, 'and I doubt I ha' done wrong.' His moody brow
beneath the black, dishevelled hair became overcast so that it
wrinkled into great furrows like crowns. 'I doubt whether I have done
wrong,' and he folded his immense bare arms, on which the hair was
like a black boar's, and pondered. 'If I thought I had done wrong, I
might not sleep seven nights.'
A printer yawned at his loom, and the great dark man shouted at him:
'Foul knave, ye show indolence! Wot ye that ye be printing the Word of
God to send abroad in this land? Wot ye that for this ye shall stand
with the elect in Heaven?' He turned upon Throckmorton. 'Sir,' he
said, 'your master Cromwell advanceth the cause, therefore I ha'
served him in this matter of the letter. But, sir, I am doubtful that,
by losing one moment from the printing of the pure Word of God, I have
not lost more time than a year's work of thy master.'
Throckmorton rubbed gently the long hand that he still held against
the light.
'Ye fall away from Privy Seal?' he asked.
The printer gazed at him with glowering and suffused eyes, choking in
his throat. He raised an enormous hand before Throckmorton's face.
'Courtier,' he cried, 'with this hand I ha' stopped an ox, smiting it
between the eyes. Wo befal the man, traitor to Privy Seal, that I do
meet and betwixt whose eyes this hand doth fall.' The hand quivered in
the air with fury. 'I can raise a thousand 'prentices and a thousand
journeymen to save Privy Seal from any peril; I can raise ten thousand
citizens, and ten thousand to-morrow again from the shires by
pamphlets of my printing; I can raise a mighty army thus to shield him
from Papists and the devil's foul contrivances. An I were a Papist, I
would pray to him, were he dead, as he were a saint.' Throckmorton
moved his face a line or two backwards from the gesticulating ham of a
hand, and blinked his eyes. 'My gold were Privy Seal's an he needed
it; my blood were his and my prayers. Nevertheless,' and his voice
took a more exalted note, 'one letter of the Word of God, God aiding
it, is of more avail than Privy Seal, or I, and all those I can love,
or he. With his laws and his nose for treason he hath smitten the
Amalekites above the belt; but a letter of the Word of God can smite
them hip and thigh, God helping.' He seemed again to choke in his
throat, and said more quietly: 'But ye shall not think a man in land
better loveth this godly flail of the monks.'
'Why, I do think ye would stand up against the King's self,'
Throckmorton said, 'and I am glad to hear it.'
'Against all printers and temporal powers,' the printer answered.
Amongst the apprentices and journeymen a murmur arose of acclamation
or of denial, some being of opinion that the King was divine in origin
and inspiration, but for the most part they supported their master,
and Throckmorton's blue eyes travelled from one to the other.
But the printer heaved a sigh of satisfaction.
'God be thanked,' he said, 'that keepeth the hearts of princes and
guideth with His breath all temporal occurrences.' Throckmorton was
about to touch his cap at the name of Omnipotence, but remembering
that he was among Protestants changed the direction of his hand and
scratched his cheek among the little hairs of his beard; 'the signs
are favourable that our good King's Highness shall still incline to
our cause and Privy Seal's.'