The Sieur Lascelles looked round him in that dim cave.
'Ho!' he said, 'this place stinks,' and he pulled from his pocket a
dried and shrivelled orange-peel purse stuffed with cloves and ginger.
'Ho!' he said to the cornet that was come behind him with the Queen's
horsemen. 'Come not in here. This will breed a plague amongst your men!'
and he added--
'Did I not tell you my sister was ill-housed?'
'Well, I was not prepared against this,' the cornet said. He was a man
with a grizzling beard that had little patience away from the Court,
where he had a bottle that he loved and a crony or two that he played
all day at chequers with, except when the Queen rode out; then he was of
her train. He did not come over the sill, but spoke sharply to his men.
'Ungird not here,' he said. 'We will go farther.' For some of them were
for setting their pikes against the mud wall and casting their swords
and heavy bottle-belts on to the table before the door. The old man in
the armchair began suddenly to prattle to them all--of a horse-thief
that had been dismembered and then hanged in pieces thirty years
before. The cornet looked at him for a moment and said--
'Sir, you are this woman's father-in-law, I do think. Have you aught to
report against her?' He bent in at the door, holding his nose. The old
man babbled of one Pease-Cod Noll that had no history to speak of but a
swivel eye.
'Well,' the grizzled cornet said, 'I shall get little sense here.' He
turned upon Mary Hall.
'Mistress,' he said, 'I have a letter here from the Queen's High Grace,'
and, whilst he fumbled in his belt to find a little wallet that held the
letter, he spoke on: 'But I misdoubt you cannot read. Therefore I shall
tell you the Queen's High Grace commandeth you to come into her
service--or not, as the report of your character shall be. But at any
rate you shall come to the castle.'
Mary Hall could find no words for men of condition, so long she had been
out of the places where such are found. She swallowed in her throat and
held her breast over her heart.
'Where is the village here?' the cornet said, 'or what justice is there
that can write you a character under his seal?'
She made out to say that there was no village, all the neighbourhood
having been hanged. A half-mile from there there was the house of Sir
Nicholas Throckmorton, a justice. From the house-end he might see it, or
he might have a hind to guide him. But he would have no guide; he would
have no man nor maid nor child to go from there to the justice's house.
He set one soldier to guard the back door and one the front, that none
came out nor went beyond the dyke-end.
'Neither shall you go, Sir Lascelles,' he said.
'Well, give me leave with my sister to walk this knoll,' Lascelles said
good-humouredly. 'We shall not corrupt the grass blades to bear false
witness of my sister's chastity.'
'Ay, you may walk upon this mound,' the cornet answered. Having got out
the packet of the Queen's letter, he girded up his belt again.
'You will get you ready to ride with me,' he said to Mary Hall. 'For I
will not be in these marshes after nightfall, but will sleep at
Shrimpton Inn.'