'Oh no! Oh no!'
He shook her roughly loose.
'An' you do not wed with him how shall I get advancement?' he said. ''A
promised me that when 'a should come to be Chancellor 'a would advance
me.'
He pushed her from him again with his elbow when she came near.
'Y've grown over familiar,' the Queen said, 'with being too much near
me. Y'are grown over familiar. For seven days you shall no longer keep
my door.'
Margot Poins raised her arms over her head, then she leant against a
window-pane and sobbed into the crook of her elbow. The boy's slender
face was convulsed with rage; his blue eyes started from his head; his
callow hair was crushed up.
'Shall a man----' he began to protest.
'I say nothing against that you did beat this Magister,' the Queen said.
'Such passions cannot be controlled, and I pass it by.'
'But will ye not make this man to wed with my sister?' the boy said
harshly.
'I cannot. He hath a wedded wife!'
He dropped his hands to his side.
'Alack; then my father's house is down,' he cried out.
'Gentleman Guard,' Katharine said, 'get you for seven days away from my
door. I will have another sentry whilst you bethink you of a worthier
way to advancement.'
He gazed at her stupidly.
'You will not make this wedding?' he asked.
'Gentleman Guard,' Katharine said, 'you have your answer. Get you gone.'
A sudden rage came into his eyes; he swallowed in his throat and made a
gesture of despair with his hand. The Queen turned back into her room
and busied herself with her task, which was the writing into a little
vellum book of seven prayers to the Virgin that the Lady Elizabeth,
Queen Anne Boleyn's daughter, a child then in London, was to turn each
one into seven languages, written fair in the volume as a gift, against
Christmas, for the King.
'I would not have that boy to guard my door,' the Lady Cicely said to
the Queen.
'Why, 'tis a good boy,' Katharine answered; 'and his sister loves me
very well.'
'Get your Highness another,' the Lady Cicely persisted. 'I do not like
his looks.'
The Queen gazed up from her writing to where the dark girl, her figure
raked very much back in her stiff bodice, played daintily with the
tassels of the curtain next the window.
'My Lady,' Katharine said, 'my Highness must get me a new maid in place
of Margot Poins, that shall away into a nunnery. Is not that grief
enough for poor Margot? Shall she think in truth that she has undone her
father's house?'
'Then advance the springald to some post away from you,' the Lady Cicely
said.
'Nay,' the Queen answered; 'he hath done nothing to merit advancement.'
She continued, with her head bent down over the writing on her knee, her
lips moving a little as, sedulously, she drew large and plain letters
with her pen.
'By Heaven,' the Lady Cicely said, 'you have too tickle a conscience to
be a Queen of this world and day. In the time of Caesar you might have
lived more easily.'
The Queen looked up at her from her writing; her clear eyes were
untroubled.
'Aye,' she said. '_Lucio Domitio, Appio Claudio consulibus_----'
Cicely Rochford set back her head and laughed at the ceiling.
'Aye, your Highness is a Roman,' she tittered like a magpie.
'In the day of Caesar it was simple to do well,' the Queen said.
'Why, I do not believe it,' Cicely answered her.
'Cousin! Cousin!' The old Lady Rochford warned her that this was the
Queen, not her old playmate.
'But now,' the Queen said, 'with such a coming together and a concourse
of peoples about us; with such holes and corners in a great Court----'
She paused and sighed.
'Well, if I may not speak my mind,' Cicely Rochford said to the old
lady, 'what good am I?'
'I did even what I might to keep this lamb Margot from the teeth of that
wolf Magister,' the Queen said. 'I take shame to myself that I did no
more. I will do a penance for it. But still I think that these be
degenerate days.'
'Oh, Queen of dreams and fancies,' Cicely Rochford said. 'I am very
certain that in the days of your noble Romans it was as it is now. Tell
me, if you can, that in all your readings of hic and hoc you lit not
upon such basenesses? You will not lay your hand upon your heart and say
that never a man of Rome bartered his sister for the hope of
advancement, or that never a learned doctor was a corrupter of youth? I
have seen the like in the plays of Plautus that here have been played at
Court.'
'Why,' the Queen said, 'the days of Plautus were days degenerated and
fallen already from the ancient nobleness.'
'You should have Queened it before Goodman Adam fell,' Cicely Rochford
mocked her. 'If you go back before Plautus, go back all the way.'
She shrugged her shoulders up to her ears and uttered a little sound
like '_Pfui!_' Then she said quickly--
'Give me leave to be gone, your Highness, that I may not grow over
familiar like the boy with the pikestaff, for if it do not gall you it
shall wring the withers of this my old husband's cousin!'
The old Lady Rochford, who was always thinking of what had been said two
speeches ago, because she was so slow-witted, raised her gouty hands in
the air and opened her mouth. But the Queen smiled faintly at Cicely.
'When I ask you to mince matters in my little room you shall do it. It
was Lucius the Praetor that went always accompanied by a carping Stoic
to keep him from being puffed up, and it was a good custom.'
'Before Heaven,' Cicely Rochford said in the midst of her curtsey at the
door, 'shall I have the office of such a one as Diogenes who derided
Alexander the Emperor? Then must my old husband live with me in a tub!'
'Pray you,' the Queen said after her through the door, 'look you around
and spy me out a maid to be my tiring-woman and ward my spinsters. For
nowadays I see few maids to choose from.'
When she was gone the old Lady Rochford timorously berated the Queen.
She would have her be more distant with knights' wives and the like. For
it was fitting for a Queen to be feared and deemed awful.
'I had rather be loved and deemed pitiful,' Katharine answered. 'For I
was once such a one--no more--than she or thou, or very little more.
Before the people I bear myself proudly for my lord his high honour. But
I do lead a very cloistered life, and have leisure to reflect upon for
what a little space authority endureth, and how that friendship and true
love between friends are things that bear the weather better.' She did
not say her Latin text, for the old lady had no Latin.