But the girl cried out, 'Get you gone, I say! In the Lady Mary's room
you shall find my old knight babbling with the maidens. Send him to
me, for my head aches scurvily, and he shall dip his handkerchief in
vinegar and set it upon my forehead.'
'Let me comb thy hair,' Katharine said; 'my hand is sovereign against
a headache.'
'No, get you gone,' the girl said harshly; 'I will have men of war to
do these errands for me.'
Katharine answered, 'Sit thee down. Thou wilt take my letter; I must
ease thy pains.'
'As like as not I shall scratch thy pink face,' Cicely said. 'At these
times I cannot bear the touch of a woman. It was a woman made my
father run with the Marquis of Exeter.'
'Sweetheart,' Katharine said softly, 'I could hold both thy wrists
with my two fingers. I am stronger than most men.'
'Why, no!' the girl cried; 'I may not sit still. Get you gone. I will
run upon your errand. If you had knelt to as many men as I have you
could not sit still either. And not one of my men was pardoned.'
She ran from the room with a sidelong step like a magpie's, and her
laugh rang out discordantly from the corridor.
The Lady Mary sat reading her Plautus in her large painted gallery,
with all her maids about her sewing, some at a dress for her, some
winding silk for their own uses. The old knight stood holding his
sturdy hands apart between a rope of wool that his namesake Lady
Rochford was making into balls. Other gentlemen were beside some of
the maids, toying with their silks or whispering in their ears. No one
much marked Katharine Howard.
She glided to her lady and kissed the dry hand that lay in the lap
motionless. Mary raised her eyes from her book, looked for a leisurely
time at the girl's face, and then began again to read. Old Rochford
winked pleasantly at her, and, after she had saluted his cousin, he
begged her to hold the wool in his stead, for his hands, which were
used to sword and shield, were very cold, and his legs, inured to the
saddle, brooked standing very ill.
'Cicely Elliott hath a headache,' Katharine said; 'she bade me send
you to her.'
He waited before her, helping her to adjust the wool on to her white
hands, and she uttered, in a low voice:
'She hath taken my letter for me.'
He said, 'Why, what a' the plague's name ...' and stood fingering his
peaked little beard in a gentle perplexity.
Lady Rochford pulled at her wool and gave a hissing sigh of pain, for
the joint of her wrist was swollen.
'It has always been easterly winds in January since the Holy Blood of
Hailes was lost,' she sighed. 'In its day I could get me some ease in
the wrist by touching the phial that held it.' She shivered with
discomfort, and smiled distractedly upon Katharine. Her large and
buxom face was mild, and she seemed upon the point of shedding tears.
'Why, if you will put your wool round a stool, I will wind it for
you,' Katharine said, because the gentle helplessness of the large
woman filled her with compassion, as if this were her old, mild
mother.
Lady Rochford shook her head disconsolately.
'Then I must do something else, and my bones would ache more. But I
would you would make my cousin Rochford ask the Archbishop where they
have hidden the Sacred Blood of Hailes, that I may touch it and be
cured.'
The old knight frowned very slightly.
'I have told thee to wrap thy fist in lamb's-wool,' he said. 'A
hundred times I have told thee. It is very dangerous to meddle with
these old saints and phials that are done away with.'
Lady Rochford sighed gently and hung her head.
'My cousin Anne, that was a sinful Queen, God rest her soul ...' she
began.
Sir Nicholas listened to her no more.
'See you,' he whispered to Katharine. 'Peradventure it is best that
Cicely have gone. Being a madcap, her comings and goings are heeded by
no man, and it is true that she resorteth daily to the Bishop of
Winchester, to plague his priests.'
'I would not speak so, being a man,' Katharine said.
He smiled at her and patted her shoulder.
'Why, I have struck good blows in my time,' he said.
'And have learned worldly wisdom,' Katharine retorted.
'I would not risk my neck on grounds where I am but ill acquainted,'
he answered soberly. He was all will to please her. The King, he said,
was coming on the Wednesday, after the Bishop of Winchester's, to see
three new stallions walk in their manage-steps. 'I pray that you will
come with Cicely Elliott to watch from the little window in the
stables. These great creatures are a noble sight. I bred them myself
to it.' His mild brown eyes were bright with enthusiasm and
cordiality.
Suddenly there was a great silence in the room, and the Lady Mary
raised her head. The burly figure of Throckmorton, the spy, was in the
doorway. Katharine shuddered at the sight of him, for, in her
Lincolnshire house, where he was accounted more hateful than Judas who
betrayed the Lord, she had seen him beat the nuns when the convents
had been turned out of doors, and he had brought to death his own
brother, who had had a small estate near her father's house. The smile
upon his face made her feel sick. He stroked his long, golden-brown
beard, glanced swiftly round the room, and advanced to the mistress's
chair, swinging his great shoulders. He made a leg and pulled off his
cap, and at that there was a rustle of astonishment, for it had been
held treasonable to cap the Lady Mary. Her eyes regarded him fixedly,
with a granite cold and hardness, and he seemed to have at once a grin
of power and a shrinking motion of currying favour. He said that Privy
Seal begged her leave that her maid Katharine Howard might go to him
soon after one o'clock. The Lady Mary neither spoke nor moved, but the
old knight shrank away from Katharine, and affected to be talking in
the ear of Lady Rochford, who went on winding her wool. Throckmorton
turned on his heels and swung away, his eyes on the floor, but with a
grin on his evil face.
He left a sudden whisper behind him, and then the silence fell once
more. Katharine stood, a tall figure, holding out the hands on which
the wool was as if she were praying to some invisible deity or
welcoming some invisible lover. Some heads were raised to look at her,
but they fell again; the old knight shuffled nearer her to whisper
hoarsely from his moustachioed lips:
'Your serving man hath reported. Pray God we come safe out of this!'
Then he went out of the room. Lady Rochford sighed deeply, for no
apparent reason.
After a time the Lady Mary raised her head and made a minute, cold
beckoning to Katharine. Her dry finger pointed to a word in her book
of Plautus.
'Tell me what you know of this,' she commanded.
The play was the _Menechmi_, and the phrase ran, '_Nimis autem bene
ora commetavi_....' It was difficult for Katharine to bring her mind
down to this text, for she had been wondering if indeed her time were
at an end before it had begun. She said:
'I have never loved this play very well,' to excuse herself.
'Then you are out of the fashion,' Mary said coldly, 'for this
_Menechmi_ is prized here above all the rest, and shall be played at
Winchester's before his Highness.'
Katharine bowed her head submissively, and read the words again.
'I remember me,' she said, 'I had this play in a manuscript where your
_commetavi_ read _commentavi_.'
Mary kept her eyes upon the girl's face, and said:
'Signifying?'
'Why, it signifies,' Katharine said, 'that Messenio did well mark a
face. If you read _commetavi_ it should mean that he scratched it with
his nails so that it resembled a harrowed field; if _commentavi_, that
he bethumped it with his fist so that bruises came out like the stops
on a fair writing.'
'It is true that you are a good Latinist,' Mary said
expressionlessly. 'Bring me my inkhorn to that window. I will write
down your _commentavi_.'
Katharine lifted the inkhorn from its hole in the arm of the chair and
gracefully followed the stiff and rigid figure into the embrasure of a
distant window.
Mary bent her head over the book that she held in her hand, and
writing in the margin, she uttered:
'Pity that such an excellent Latinist should meddle in matters that
nothing concern her.'
Katharine held the inkhorn carefully, as if it had been a precious
vase.
'If you will bid me do naught but serve you, I will do naught else,'
she said.
'I will neither bid thee nor aid thee,' Mary answered. 'The Bishop of
Winchester claims thy service. Serve him as thou wilt.'
'I would serve my mistress in serving him,' Katharine said. 'He is a
man I love little.'
Mary pulled suddenly from her bodice a piece of crumpled parchment
that had been torn across. She thrust it into Katharine's free hand.
'Such letters I have had written me by my father's men,' she said. 'If
this bishop should come to be my father's man I would take no service
from him.'
Katharine read on the crumpled parchment such words as:
'Be you dutiful ...
I will not protect ...
You shall be ruined utterly ...
You had better creep underground ...
Therefore humble you ...'
'It was Thomas Cromwell wrote that,' the Lady Mary cried. 'My father's
man!'
'But if this brewer's son be brought down?' Katharine pleaded.
'Why, I tore his letter across for it is filthy,' Mary said, 'and I
keep the halves of his letter that I may remember. If he be brought
down, who shall bring his master down that let him write so?'
Katharine said:
'If this tempter of the Devil's brood were brought down there should
ensue so great an atonement from his sorrowful master whom he
deludes....'
Mary uttered a 'Tush!' of scorn and impatience. 'This is the babbling
of a child. My father is no holy innocent as you and your like feign
to believe.'
'Nevertheless I love you most well,' Katharine pleaded.
Mary snapped her book to. Her cold tone came back over her heat as the
grey clouds of a bitter day shut down again upon a dangerous flicker
of lightning.
'Do as you will,' she said, 'only if your head fall I will stir no
finger to aid you. Or, if by these plottings my father could be got to
send me his men upon their knees and bearing crowns, I would turn my
back upon them and say no word.'
'Well, my plottings are like to end full soon,' Katharine said. 'Privy
Seal hath sent for me upon no pleasant errand.'
Mary said: 'God help you!' with a frigid unconcern, and walked back to
her chair.