'Ha! God's mercy! Guards, swords, come!' The furious blood came into
Culpepper's face at the sound. His hand he tore from Katharine's, and
with the dagger raised on high he ran back from her and then forward
towards the Lady Rochford. With an old trick of fence, that she had
learned when she was a child, Katharine Howard set out her foot before
him, and, with the speed of his momentum, he pitched over forward. He
fell upon his face so that his forehead was upon the Lady Rochford's
right foot. His dagger he still grasped, but he lay prone with the drink
and the fever.
'Now, by God in His mercy,' Katharine said to her, 'as I am the Queen I
charge you----'
'Take his knife and stab him to the heart!' the Lady Rochford cried out.
'This will slay us two.'
'I charge you that you listen to me,' the Queen said, 'or, by God, I
will have you in chains!'
'I will call your many,' the Lady Rochford cried out, for terror had
stopped up the way from her ears to her brain, and she made towards the
door. But Katharine set her hand to the old woman's shoulder.
'Call no man,' she commanded. 'This is a device of mine enemies to have
men see this of me.'
'I will not stay here to be slain,' the old woman said.
'Then mine own self will slay you,' the Queen answered. Culpepper moved
in his stupor. 'Before Heaven,' the Queen said, 'stay you there, and he
shall not again stand up.'
'I will go call----' the old woman besought her, and again Culpepper
moved. The Queen stood right up against her; her breast heaved, her face
was rigid. Suddenly she turned and ran to the door. That key she
wrenched round and out, and then to the other door beside it, and that
key too she wrenched round and out.
'I will not stay alone with my cousin,' she said, 'for that is what mine
enemies would have. And this I vow, that if again you squeak I will have
you tried as being an abettor of this treason.' She went and knelt down
at her cousin's head; she moved his face round till it was upon her lap.
'Poor Tom,' she said; he opened his eyes and muttered stupid words.
She looked again at Lady Rochford.
'All this is nothing,' she said, 'if you will hide in the shadow of the
bed and keep still. I have seen my cousin a hundred times thus muddied
with drink, and do not fear him. He shall not stand up till he is ready
to go through the door; but I will not be alone with him and tend him.'
The Lady Rochford waddled and quaked like a jelly to the shadow of the
bed curtains. She pulled back the curtain over the window, and, as if
the contact with the world without would help her, threw back the
casement. Below, in the black night, a row of torches shook and
trembled, like little planets, in the distance.
Katharine Howard held her cousin's head upon her knees. She had seen him
thus a hundred times and had no fear of him. For thus in his cups, and
fevered as he was with ague that he had had since a child, he was always
amenable to her voice though all else in the world enraged him. So that,
if she could keep the Lady Rochford still, she might well win him out
through the door at which he came in.