I
March was a month of great storms of rain in that year, and the
river-walls of the Thames were much weakened. April opened fine enough
for men to get about the land, so that, on a day towards the middle of
the month, there was a meeting of seven Protestant men from Kent and
Essex, of two German servants of the Count of Oberstein, and of two
other German men in the living-room of Badge, the printer, in Austin
Friars. It happened that the tide was high at four in the afternoon,
and, after a morning of glints of sun, great rain fell. Thus, when the
Lord Oberstein's men set out into the weather, they must needs turn
back, because the water was all out between Austin Friars and the
river. They came again into the house, not very unwillingly, to resume
their arguments about Justification by Faith, about the estate of the
Queen Anne, about the King's mind towards her, and about the price of
wool in Flanders.
The printer himself was gloomy and abstracted; arguments about
Justification interested him little, and when the talk fell upon the
price of wool, he remained standing, absolutely lost in gloomy dreams.
It grew a little dark in the room, the sky being so overcast, and
suddenly, all the voices having fallen, there was a gurgle of water by
the threshold, and a little flood, coming in between sill and floor,
reached as it were, a tiny finger of witness towards his great feet.
He looked down at it uninterestedly, and said:
'Talk how you will, I can measure this thing by words and by print.
Here hath this Queen been with us a matter of four months. Now in my
chronicle the pageants that have been made in her honour fill but five
pages.' Whereas the chronicling of the jousts, pageants, merry-nights,
masques and hawkings that had been given in the first four months of
the Queen Jane had occupied sixteen pages, and for the Queen Anne
Boleyn sixty and four. 'What sort of honour is it, then, that the
King's Highness showeth the Queen?' He shook his head gloomily.
'Why, goodman,' a woolstapler from the Tower Hamlets cried at him,
'when they shot off the great guns against her coming to Westminster
in February all my windows were broken by the shrinking of the earth.
Such ordnance was never yet shot off in a Queen's honour.'
The printer remained gloomily silent for a minute; the wind howled in
the chimney-place, and the embers of the fire spat and rustled.
'Even as ye are held here by the storm, so is the faith of God in
these lands,' he said. 'This is the rainy season.' More water came in
beneath the door, and he added, 'Pray God we be not all drowned in our
holes.'
A motionless German, who had no English, shifted his feet from the wet
floor to the cross-bar of his chair. Gloom, dispiritude, and dampness
brooded in the low, dark room. But a young man from Kent, who, being
used to ill weather, was not to be cast down by gloomy skies, cried
out in his own dialect that they had arms to use and leaders to lead
them.
'Aye, and we have racks to be stretched on and hang-men to stretch
them,' the printer answered. 'Is it with the sound of ordnance that a
Queen is best welcomed? When she came to Westminster, what welcome had
she? Sirs, I tell you the Mayor of London brought only barges and
pennons and targets to her honour. The King's Highness ordered no
better state; therefore the King's Highness honoureth not this Queen.'
A scrivener who had copied chronicles for another printer answered
him:
'Master Printer John Badge, ye are too much in love with velvet; ye
are too avid of gold. Earlier records of this realm told of blows
struck, of ships setting sail, of godly ways of life and of towns in
France taken by storm. But in your books of the new reign we read all
day of cloths of estate, of cloth of gold, of blue silk full of eyes
of gold, of garlands of laurels set with brims of gold, of gilt bars,
of crystal corals, of black velvet set with stones, and of how the
King and his men do shift their suits six times in one day. The fifth
Harry never shifted his harness for fourteen days in the field.'
The printer shrugged his enormous shoulders.
'Oh, ignorant!' he said. 'A hundred years ago kings made war with
blows. Now it is done with black velvets or the lack of black velvets.
And I love laurel with brims of gold if such garlands crown a Queen of
our faith. And I lament their lack if by it the King's Highness maketh
war upon our faith. And Privy Seal shall dine with the Bishop of
Winchester, and righteousness kiss with the whoredom of abomination.'
'An my Lord Cromwell knew how many armed men he had to his beck he had
never made peace with Winchester,' the man from Kent cried. He rose
from his bench and went to stand near the fire.
A door-latch clicked, and in the dark corner of the room appeared
something pale and shining--the face of old Badge, who held open the
stair-door and grinned at the assembly, leaning down from a high step.
'Weather-bound all,' he quavered maliciously. 'I will tell you why.'
He slipped down the step, pulling behind him the large figure of his
grandchild Margot.
'Get you gone back,' the printer snarled at her.
'That will I not,' her gruff voice came. 'See where my back is wet
with the drippings through the roof.'
She and her grandfather had been sitting on a bed in the upper room,
but the rain was trickling now through the thatch. The printer made a
nervous stride to his printing stick, and, brandishing it in the air,
poured out these words:
'Whores and harlots shall not stand in the sight of the godly.'
Margot shrank back upon the stair-place and remained there, holding
the bolt of the door in her hand, ready to shut off access to the
upper house.
'I will take no beating, uncle,' she panted; 'this is my grandfather's
abode and dwelling.'
The old man was sniggering towards the window. He had gathered up his
gown about his knees and picked his way between the pools of water on
the floor and the Lutherans on their chairs towards the window. He
mounted upon an oak chest that stood beneath the casement and, peering
out, chuckled at what he saw.
'A mill race and a dam,' he muttered. 'This floor will be a duck pond
in an hour.'
'Harlot and servant of a harlot,' the printer called to his niece. The
Lutherans, who came from houses where father quarrelled with son and
mother with daughter, hardly troubled more than to echo the printer's
words of abuse. But one of them, a grizzled man in a blue cloak, who
had been an ancient friend of the household, broke out:
'Naughty wench, thou wast at the ordeal of Dr Barnes.'
Margot, drawing her knees up to her chin where she sat on the stairs,
answered nothing. Had she not feared her uncle's stick, she was minded
to have taken a mop to the floor and to have put a clout in the
doorway.
'Abominable naughty wench,' the grizzled man went on. 'How had ye the
heart to aid in that grim scene? Knew ye no duty to your elders?'
Margot closed the skirts round her ankles to keep away the upward
draught and answered reasonably:
'Why, Neighbour Ned, my mistress made me go with her to see a heretic
swinged. And, so dull is it in our service, that I would go to a
puppet show far less fine and thank thee for the chance.'
The printer spat upon the floor when she mentioned her mistress.
'I will catechize,' he muttered. 'Answer me as I charge thee.'
The old man, standing on the chest, tapped one of the Germans on the
shoulder.
'See you that wall, friend?' he laughed. 'Is it not a noble dam to
stay the flood back into our house? Now the Lord Cromwell....'
The Lanzknecht rolled his eyes round, because he understood no
English. The old man went on talking, but no one there, not even
Margot Poins, heeded him. She looked at her uncle reasonably, and
said:
'Why, an thou wilt set down thy stick I will even consider thee,
uncle.' He threw the stick into the corner and immediately she went to
fetch a mop from the cooking closet, where there lived a mumbling old
housekeeper. The printer followed her with gloomy eyes.
'Is not thy mistress a naughty woman?' he asked, as a judge talks to a
prisoner condemned.
She answered, 'Nay,' as if she had hardly attended to him.
'Is she not a Papist?'
She answered, 'Aye,' in the same tone and mopped the floor beneath a
man's chair.
Her grandfather, standing high on the oak chest, so that his bonnet
brushed the beams of the dark ceiling, quavered at her:
'Would she not bring down this Crummock, whose wall hath formed a dam
so that my land-space is now a stream and my house-floor a frog pond?'
She answered, 'Aye, grandfer,' and went on with her mopping.
'Did she not go with a man to a cellar of the Rogues' Sanctuary after
Winchester's feast?' Neighbour Ned barked at her. 'Such are they that
would bring down our Lord!'
'Did she not even so with her cousin before he went to Calais?' her
uncle asked.
Margot answered seriously:
'Nay, uncle, no night but what she hath slept in these arms of mine
that you see.'
'Aye, you are her creature,' Neighbour Ned groaned.
'Foul thing,' the printer shouted. 'Eyes are upon thee and upon her.
It was the worst day's work that ever she did when she took thee to
her arms. For I swear to God that her name shall be accursed in the
land. I swear to God....'
He choked in his throat. His companions muttered Harlot; Strumpet;
Spouse of the Fiend. And suddenly the printer shouted:
'See you; Udal is her go-between with the King, and he shall receive
thee as his price. He conveyeth her to his Highness, she hath paid him
with thy virtue. Foul wench, be these words not true?'
She leaned upon her mop handle and said:
'Why, uncle, it is a foul bird that 'files his own nest.'
He shook his immense fist in her face.
'Shame shall out in the communion of the godly, be it whose kin it
will.'
'Why, I wish the communion of the godly joy in its hot tales,' she
answered. 'As for me, speak you with the magister when he comes from
France. As for my mistress, three times she hath seen the King since
Winchester's feast was three months agone. She in no wise affected his
Highness till she had heard his Highness confute the errors of Dr
Barnes in the small closet. When she came away therefrom she said that
his Highness was like a god for his knowledge of God's law. If you
want better tales than that go to a wench from the stairs to make them
for you.'
'Aye,' said their neighbour, 'three times hath she been with the King.
And the price of the first time was the warrant that took thee to pay
Udal for his connivance. And the price of the second was that the
King's Highness should confute our sacred Barnes in the conclave. And
the price of the third was that the Lord Cromwell should dine with the
Bishop of Winchester and righteousness sit with its head in ashes.'
'Why, have it as thou wilt, Neighbour Ned,' she answered. 'In my life
of twenty years thou hast brought me twenty sugar cates. God forbid
that I should stay thy willing lips over a sweet morsel.'
In the gloomy and spiritless silence that fell upon them all--since no
man there much believed the things that were alleged, but all very
thoroughly believed that evil days were stored up against them--the
bursting open of the door made so great a sound that the speechless
German tilted backward with his chair and lay on the ground, before
any of them knew what was the cause. The black figure of a boy shut
out the grey light and the torrents of rain. His head was bare, his
frieze clothes dripped and sagged upon his skin: he waved his clenched
fist half at the sky and half at Margot's face and screamed:
'I ha' carried letters for thee, 'twixt thy mistress and the King! I
ha' carried letters. I ... ha' ... been gaoled for it.'
'O fool,' Margot's deep voice uttered, unmoved, 'the letters went not
between those two. And thou art free; come in from the rain.'
He staggered across the prostrate German.
'I ha' lost my advancement,' he sobbed. 'Where shall I go? Twenty
hours I have hidden in the reeds by the riverside. I shall be taken
again.'
'There is no hot pursuit for thee then,' Margot said, 'for in all the
twenty hours no man hath sought thee here.' She had the heavy
immobility of an elemental force. No fright could move her till she
saw the cause for fright. 'I will fetch thee a dram of strong waters.'
He passed his hand across his wet forehead.
'Thy mistress is taken,' he cried. 'I saw Privy Seal's pikes go to her
doorway.'
'Now God be praised,' the printer cried out, and caught at the boy's
wrist. 'Tell your tale!' and he shook him on his legs.
'Me, too, Privy Seal had taken--but I 'scaped free,' he gasped. 'These
twain had promised me advancement for braving their screeds. And I ha'
lost it.'
'Gossips all,' the Neighbour Ned barked out, 'to your feet and let us
sing: "A fortress fast is God the Lord." The harlot of the world is
down.'