'Aye,' the printer said heavily, 'good news is come of Cleves.'
'Ye ha' news from Cleves?' Throckmorton asked swiftly.
'From Cleves not,' the printer answered; 'but from the Court by way of
Paris and thence from Cleves.' And to the interested spy he related,
accurately enough, that a make of mouthing, mowing, magister of the
Latin tongues had come from Paris, having stolen copies of the Cleves
envoy's letters in that town, and that these letters said that Cleves
was fast inclined to the true Schmalkaldner league of Lutherans and
would pay tribute truly, but no more than that do fealty to the
accursed leaguer of the Pope called Charles the Emperor.
Throckmorton inclined his cap at an angle to the floor.
'How had ye that news that was so secret?' he asked.
The printer shook his dark beard with an air of heavy pleasure.
'Ye have a great organisation of spies,' he said, 'but better is the
whisper of God among the faithful.'
'Why,' Throckmorton answered, 'the magister Udal hath to his
sweetheart thy niece Margot Poins.'
At her name the printer's eyes filled with a sudden and violent heat.
'Seek another channel,' he cried, and waved his arms at the low
ceiling. 'Before the face of Almighty God I swear that I ha' no truck
with Margot my niece. Since she has been sib with the whore of the
devil called Kat Howard, never hath she told me a secret through her
paramour or elsewise. A shut head the heavy logget keepeth--let her
not come within reach of my hand.' He swayed back upon his feet. 'Let
her not come,' he said. He bent his brows upon Throckmorton. 'I
marvel,' he uttered, 'that ye who are so faithful a servant o' Privy
Seal's can have truck with the brother of my niece Margot.'
'Printer,' Throckmorton answered him, 'ye know well that when the
leaven of Protestantism hath entered in there, houses are divided
against themselves. A wench may be a foul Papist and serve, if ye
will, Kat Howard; but her brother shall yet be an indifferent good
servant for me.'
The printer, who had tolerated that his men should hear his panegyric
of the Bible and Privy Seal, scowled at them now so that again the
arms swung to and fro with the levers, the leads clicked. He put his
great head nearer Throckmorton's and muttered:
'Are ye certain my nephew serveth ye well? He was never wont to favour
our cause, and, before ye sent him on this errand, he was wont to cry
out in his cups that he was disgraced for having carried letters
betwixt Kat Howard and the King. If this were true he was no friend of
ours.'
'Why, it was true,' Throckmorton uttered negligently.
The printer caught at the spy's wrist, and the measure of his
earnestness showed the extent of his passion for Privy Seal's cause.
'Use him no more,' he said. 'Both children of my sister were ever
indifferents. They shall not serve thee well.'
'It was ever Privy Seal's motto and habit to use for his servitors
those that had their necks in his noose. Such men serve him ever the
best.'
The printer shook his head gloomily.
'I wager my nephew will yet play the traitor to Privy Seal.'
'I will do it myself ere that,' and Throckmorton yawned, throwing his
head back.
'The scaldhead is there,' the printer said; and in the doorway there
stood, supporting himself by the lintel, the young Poins. His face was
greenish white; a plaster was upon his shaven head; he held up one
foot as if it pained him to set it to the floor. Through the
house-place where sat the aged grandfather with his cap pulled over
his brows, pallid, ironical and seeming indescribably ancient, the
printer led the spy. The boy hobbled after them, neglecting the old
man's words:
'Ha' no truck with men of Privy Seal's. Privy Seal hath stolen my
ground.' In the long shed where they ate all, printer, grandfather,
apprentices and journeymen, the printer thrust open the door with a
heavy gesture, entering first and surveying the long trestles.
'Ye can speak here,' he said, and motioned away an aged woman. She
bent above a sea coal fire on the hearth where boiled, hung from a
hook, a great pot. The old thing, in short petticoats and a linsey
woolsey bodice that had been purple and green, protested shrilly. Her
crock was on the boil; she was not there to be driven away; she had
work like other folk, and had been with the printer's mother eight
years before he was born. His voice, raised to its height, was useless
to drown her words. She could not hear him; and shrugging his
shoulders, he said to Throckmorton that she heard less than the walls,
and that was the best place he had for them to talk in. He slammed the
door behind him.
Throckmorton set his foot upon the bench that ran between table and
wall. He scowled fell-ly at the boy, so that his brows came down below
his nose-top. 'Ye ha' not stayed him,' he said.
The boy burst forth in a torrent of rage and despair. He cursed
Throckmorton to his face for having sent him upon this errand.
'I ha' been beaten by a gatewarden! by a knave! by a ploughman's son
from Lincolnshire!' he cried. 'A' cracked my skull with a pikestave
and kicked me about the ribs when I lay on the ship's floor, sick like
a pig. God curse the day you sent me to Calais, a gentleman's son, to
be beat by a boor!' He broke off and began again. 'God curse you and
the day I saw you! God curse Kat Howard and the day I carried her
letter! God curse my sister Margot and the day she gar'd me carry the
letters! And may a swift death of the pox take off Kat Howard's
cousin--may he rot and stink through the earth above his grave. He
would not fight with me, but aboard a ship when I was sick set a
Lincolnshire logget to beat me, a gentleman's son!'
'Why, thy gentility shall survive it,' Throckmorton said. 'But an it
will not have more beating to its back, ye shall tell me where ye left
T. Culpepper.'
'At Greenwich,' said the young Poins, and vomited forth curses. The
old woman came from her pots to peer at the plasters on his skull, and
then returned to the fire gibbering and wailing that she was not in
that house plasters for to make.
'Knave,' Throckmorton said, 'an ye will not tell me your tale swiftly
ye shall right now to the Tower. It is life and death to a leaden
counter an I find not Culpepper ere nightfall.'
The young Poins stretched forth his arm and groaned.
'Part is bruises and part is sickness of the waves,' he muttered; 'but
if I make not shift to slit his weazand ere nightfall, pox take all my
advancement for ever. I will tell my weary tale.'
Throckmorton paused, held his head down, fingered his beard, and said:
'When left ye him at Greenwich?'
'This day at dawn,' Poins answered, and cursed again.
'Drunk or sober?'
'Drunk as a channel codfish.'
The old woman came, a sheaf of jack-knives in her arms, muttering
along the table.
'Get you to bed,' she croaked. 'I will not ha' warmed new sheets for
thee, and thee not use them. Get thee to bed.'
Throckmorton pushed her back, and caught the boy by the jacket near
the throat.
'Ye shall tell me the tale as we go,' he said, and punctuated his
words by shakes. 'But, oaf that I trusted to do a man's work, ye swing
beneath a tree this night an we find not the man ye failed to stay.'
The young Poins--he panted out the story as he trotted, wofully
keeping pace to Throckmorton's great strides between the hedges--had
stuck to Culpepper as to his shadow, in Calais town. At each turn he
had showed the warrant to be master of the lighters; he had handed
over the gold that Throckmorton had given him. But Culpepper had
turned a deaf ear to him, and, setting up a violent friendship with
the Lincolnshire gatewarden over pots of beer in a brewhouse, had
insisted on buying Hogben out of his company and taking him over the
sea to be witness of his wedding with Katharine Howard. Dogged, and
thrusting his word and his papers in at every turn, the young Poins
had pursued them aboard a ship bound for the Thames.
This story came out in jerks and with divagations, but it was evident
to Throckmorton that the young man had stuck to his task with a dogged
obtuseness enough to have given offence to a dozen Culpeppers. He had
begged him, in the inn, to take the lieutenancy of the Calais
lighters; he had trotted at Culpepper's elbow in the winding streets;
he had stood in his very path on the gangway to the ship that was to
take them to Greenwich. At every step he had pulled out of his poke
the commission for the lieutenancy--so that Throckmorton had in his
mind, by the time they sat in the stern of the swift barge, the image
of Culpepper as a savage bulldog pursued along streets and up
ship-sides by a gambolling bear cub that pulled at his ears and
danced before him. And he could credit Culpepper only with a saturnine
and drunken good humour at having very successfully driven Cardinal
Pole out of Paris. That was the only way in which he could account for
the fact that Culpepper had not spitted the boy at the first
onslaught. But for the sheer ill-luck of his sword's having been
stolen, he might have done it, and been laid by the heels for six
months in Calais. For Calais being a frontier town of the English
realm, it was an offence very serious there for English to draw sword
upon English, however molested.
It was that upon which Throckmorton had counted; and he cursed the day
when Culpepper had entered the thieves' hut outside Ardres. But for
that Culpepper must have drawn upon the boy; he must have been lying
then in irons in Calais holdfast. As it was, there was this long
chase. God knew whether they would find him in Greenwich; God knew
where they would find him. He had gone to Greenwich, doubtless,
because when he had left England the Court had been in Greenwich, and
he expected there to find his cousin Kat. He would fly to Hampton as
soon as he knew she was at Hampton; but how soon would he know it? By
Poins' account, he was too drunk to stand, and had been carried ashore
on the back of his Lincolnshire henchman. Therefore he might be lying
in the streets of Greenwich--and Greenwich was a small place. But
different men carried their liquor so differently, and Culpepper might
go ashore too drunk to stand and yet reach Hampton sober enow to be
like a raging bear by eventide.
That above all things Throckmorton dreaded. For that evening Katharine
would be come back from the interview with Anne of Cleves at Windsor;
and whether she had succeeded or not with her quest, the King was
certain to be with her in her room--to rejoice on the one hand, or
violently to plead his cause on the other. And Throckmorton knew his
King well enough--he knew, that is to say, his private image of his
King well enough--to be assured that a meeting between the King then
and Culpepper there, must lead Katharine to her death. He considered
the blind, immense body of jealousy that the King was. And, at
Hampton, Privy Seal would have all avenues open for Culpepper to come
to his cousin. Privy Seal had detailed Viridus, who had had the matter
all the while in hand, to inflame Culpepper's mind with jealousy so
that he should run shouting through the Court with a monstrous outcry.
It was because of this that Throckmorton dreaded to await Culpepper at
Hampton; there he was sure enow to find him, sooner or later, but
there would be the many spies of Privy Seal's around all the avenues
to the palace. He might himself send away the spies, but it was too
dangerous; for, say what he would, if he held Culpepper from Katharine
Howard, Cromwell would visit it mercilessly upon him.
He turned the nose of his barge down the broadening, shining grey
stream towards Greenwich. The wind blew freshly up from the sea; the
tide ran down, and Throckmorton pulled his bonnet over his eyes to
shade them from sea and breeze, and the wind that the rowers made. For
it was the swiftest barge of the kingdom: long, black, and narrow,
with eight watermen rowing, eight to relieve them, and always eight
held in reserve at all landing stages for that barge's crew. So well
Privy Seal had organised even the mutinous men of the river that his
service might be swift and sudden. Throckmorton had set down the bower
at the stern, that the wind might have less hold.
Nevertheless it blew cold, and he borrowed a cloak and a pottle of
sack to warm the young Poins, who had run with him capless and without
a coat. For, listening to the boy's disjointed tale out in the broad
reaches below London, Throckmorton recognised that if the young man
were incredibly a fool he was incredibly steadfast too, and a
steadfast fool is a good tool to retain for simple work. He had,
too--the boy--a valuable hatred for Culpepper that he allowed to
transfer itself to Katharine herself: a brooding hatred that hung in
his blue eyes as he gazed downwards at the barge floor or spat at the
planks of the side. Its ferocity was augmented by the patches of
plaster that stretched over his skull and dropped over one blonde
eyebrow.
'Cod!' he ejaculated. 'Cod! Cod! Cod!' and waved a fist ferociously at
the rushes that spiked the waters of the river in their new green.
'They waited till I was too sick of the sickness of the sea, too sick
to stand--more mortal sick than ever man was. I hung to a rope and
might not let go. And Cod! Cod! Cod! Culpepper lay under the
sterncastle in a hole and set his Lincolnshire beast to baste my
ribs.'
He spat again with gloomy quiescence into the bottom of the boat.
'In the mid of the sea,' he said, 'where the ship pointed at heaven
and then at the fiend his home, I hung to a rope and was basted! And
that whore's son lay in his hole and laughed. For I was a cub, says
he, and not fit for a man's converse or striking.'
Throckmorton's eyes glimmered a little.
'You have been used as befits no gentleman's son,' he said. 'I will
see to the righting of your wrongs.'
Poins swore with an amazing obscenity.
'Shall right 'em myself,' he said, 'so I meet T. Culpepper in this
flesh as a man.'
Throckmorton leaned gently forward and touched his arm.
'I will right thy wrongs,' he said, 'and see to thine advancement; for
if in this service you ha' failed, yet ha' you been persistent and
feal.' He dabbled one white hand in the water, 'Nevertheless,' he said
slowly, 'I would have you consider that your service in this ends
here.' He spoke still more slowly: 'I would have you to understand
this. Aforetime I gave you certain instructions as to using your sword
upon this Culpepper if you might not otherwise stay him.' He held up
one finger. 'Now mark; your commission is ceased. You shall no longer
for my service draw sword, knife or dagger, stave nor club, upon this
man.'
Poins looked at him with gloomy surprise that was changing swiftly to
hot rage.
'I am under oath to a certain one to use no violence upon this man,'
Throckmorton said, 'and to encourage no other to do violence.'
Poins thrust his round, brick-red brow out like a turkey cock's from
the boat cloak into Throckmorton's face.
'I am under no oath of yourn!' he shouted. Throckmorton shrugged his
shoulders and wagged one finger at him. 'No oath o' yourn!' the boy
repeated. 'God knows who ye be or why it is so. But I ha' heard ye ha'
my neck in a noose; I ha' heard ye be dangerous. Yet, before God, I
swear in your teeth that if I meet this man to his face, or come upon
his filthy back, drunk, awake, asleep, I will run him through the
belly and send his soul to hell. He had me, a gentleman's son, basted
by a hind!'
This long speech exhausted his breath, and he fell back panting.
'I had as soon ye had my head as not,' he muttered desperately, 'since
I have been basted.'
'Why,' Throckmorton answered, 'for your private troubles, I know
naught of them. There may be some that will thank ye or advance ye for
spitting of this gallant. But I am not one of them. Nevertheless will
I be your friend, whom ye would have served better an ye could.'
He smiled in his inward manner and went to polishing of his nails. A
little later he felt the bruises on the boy's arms, and stayed the
barge for a moment the stage where, swiftly, eight oarsmen took the
places of the eight that had rowed two shifts out of three--stayed the
barge for time enough to purchase for the boy a ham, a little ginger,
some raw eggs and sack.
The barge rushed forward, with the jar of oars and the sound, like
satin tearing, of the water at the bows, across the ruffled reaches of
the broad waters. The gilded roofs, the gabled fronts of the palace at
Greenwich called Placentia, winked in the fresh sunlight. Throckmorton
had a great fever of excitement, but having sworn to let his oarsmen
be scourged with leathern thongs if they made no more efforts, he lay
back upon the purple cushions and toyed with the strings of the yellow
ensign that floated behind them. It was his purpose to put heart in
the boy and to feed his rage, so that alternately he promised to give
him the warding of the Queen's door--a notable advancement--or
assented to the lad's gloom when he said that he was fit only for the
stables, having been beaten by a groom. So that at the quay the boy
sprang forth mightily, swaying the boat behind him. The trace of his
sea-sickness had left him; he swore to tear Culpepper's throat apart
as if it had been capon flesh.
Throckmorton swiftly quartered the gardens, sending, in his passage
beneath the tall palace arch, a dozen men to search all the paths for
any drunkards that might there lie hidden. He sent the young Poins to
search the three alehouses of the village where seamen new landed sat
to drink. But, having found the sergeant of void palaces asleep in a
small cell at the house end, he learned that two men, speaking
Lincolnshire, had been there two hours agone, questing for Master
Viridus and swearing that they had rid France of the devil and were to
be made great lords for it. The sergeant, an old, corpulent Spaniard
who had been in England forty years, having come with the dead Queen
Katharine and been given this honourable post because the queen had
loved him, folded his fat hands across his round stomach as he sat on
the floor, his legs stretched out, his head against the hangings.
'I might not make out if they were lords or what manner of cavaliers,'
he said. 'They sought some woman whom they would not name, and ran
through a score of empty rooms. God knows whither they went.'
He pulled his nightcap further over his head, nodded at Throckmorton,
and resumed his meditations.
There was no finding them in the still and empty corridors of the
palace; but at the gateway he heard that the two men had clamoured to
know where they might purchase raw shinbone of beef, and had been
directed to the house of a widow Emden. There Throckmorton found
their tracks, for the sacking that covered the window-holes was burst
outwards, beef-bones lay on the road before the door, and, within, the
widow, black, begrimed and very drunk, lay inverted on the clay of the
floor, her head beneath the three legs of the chopping block, so that
she was as if in a pillory, but too fuddled to do more than wave her
legs. A prentice who crouched, with a broken head, in a corner of the
filthy room, said that a man from Lincolnshire, all in Lincoln green,
with a red beard, had wrought this ruin of beef-bones that he had cast
through the windows, and had then comforted the screaming widow with
much strong drink from a black bottle. They had wanted raw beef to
make them valiant against some wedding, and they threw the beef-bones
through the sacking because they said the place stunk villainously.
They seemed, these two, to have visited every hovel in the damp and
squalid village that lay before the palace gates. They had kicked beds
of straw over the floors, thrown crocks at the pigs, melted pewter
plates in the fires.
For pure joy at being afoot and ashore in England again, they had cast
coins into all the houses and hovels of mud; they had brought out cans
and casks from the alehouses, and cast pies into the streets, and
caused the dismal ward to cry out: 'God save free Englishmen!' 'Curse
the sea!' and 'A plague of Frenchmen that be devils!'
And the after effects of their carnival menaced Throckmorton, for from
the miserable huts, where ragged women were rearranging the scattered
straws and wiping egg-yolk from the broken benches, there issued a
ragged crowd of men with tangled and muddy hair and boys unclothed
save for sacks that whistled about their lean hips. The liquor that
Culpepper and Hogben had distributed had rendered them curious or full
of mutiny and discontent, and they surrounded Throckmorton's brilliant
figure in its purple velvet, with the gold neck-chains and the
jewelled hat, and some of them asked for money, and some called him
'Frenchman,' and some knew him for a spy, and some caught up stones
and jawbones furtively to cast at him.
But, arrogant and with his head set high, he borrowed a whip from a
packman that shouldered his way through the street, and lashed at
their legs and ragged heads. The crowd slunk, one by one, back under
the darkness that was beneath the roofs of reeds, and the idea of a
good day that for a moment had risen in their minds at Culpepper's
legendary approach, sank down and flickered out once more in their
hungry bellies and fever-dimmed minds.
'God!' he said, 'we will have hangmen here,' and pursued his search.
He met the young Poins at the head of the village street, and learned
from him that Culpepper and his supporter had hired horses to ride to
Hampton and had galloped away three hours before, holding legs of
mutton by the feet and using them for cudgels to beat their horses.
'Before God!' the boy said, 'an I had money to hire horses I would
overtake them, if I overtook not the devil erstwhile.'
Throckmorton pulled out his purple purse that was embroidered with
silk crosses. He extracted from it four crowns of gold.
'Lad,' he said, 'I do not give thee gold to follow Kat Howard's cousin
with. This is thy wage for the service thou hast done aforetime.' He
reflected for a moment. 'If thou wilt have a horse--but I urge it
not--to go to Hampton where thy fellows of the guard are--for, having
served well ye may once more and without danger rejoin your mates--if
ye will have such a horse, go to the horseward of the palace and say I
sent you. Withouten doubt ye are mad to hasten back to your mates, a
commendable desire. And the King's horses shall hasten faster than any
hired horse--so that ye may easily overtake a man that hath but two
hours' start towards Hampton.'
Whilst Poins was already hastening towards the gateway, Throckmorton
cried to him at a distance:
'Ask at each cross-road guard-house and at all ferries and bridges if
some have passed that way; and at the landing-stage if perchance
caballeros have altered their desires and had it in their minds to
take to boats.'
He sped through the wind to the riverside, set again his oars in
motion and swept up the tide. It had turned and they made good
progress.