Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 145
He muttered: ‘Think you Privy Seal knoweth not the King’s taste? I tell you he hath seen an inclination in him towards you. This is a plot, but I have sounded it!’
She let him talk, and asked, with a malice too fine for him to discern:
‘I should not shun the King’s presence for my soul’s sake?’
‘God forbid,’ he answered. ‘I may use thee to bring down Privy Seal.’
He picked up a piece of bark from a faggot beside the fire and rolled it between his fingers. She stood looking at him intently, her lips a little parted, tall, graceful and submissive.
‘You are more fair-skinned than any his Highness has favoured before,’ he said in a meditative voice. ‘Yet Cromwell knows the King’s tastes better than any man.’ He sank down into her tall-backed chair and suddenly tossed the piece of bark into the fire. ‘I would have you walk across the floor, elevating your arms as you were the goddess Flora.’
She tripped towards the door, held her arms above her head, turned her long body to right and left, bent very low in a courtesy to him, and let her hands fall restfully into her lap. The firelight shone upon the folds of her dress and in the white lining of her hood. He looked at her, leaning over the arm of the chair, his blue eyes hard with the strenuous rage of his new project.
‘You could take a part in an Italian interlude? A masque?’
‘I have a better memory of the French or Latin,’ she answered.
‘You do not turn pale? Your knees knock not together?’
‘I think I blush most,’ she said seriously.
He answered, ‘You will be the better of a little colour,’ and began muffling his face with his cloak.
‘See you, then,’ his harsh voice commanded. ‘You shall see their Highnesses at Privy Seal’s house on the Saturday; but they shall see you at mine on the Tuesday. If you are good enough to serve the turn of Privy Seal, you may be good enough to serve mine. The King listens sometimes to the promptings of his women. I will teach you how you may bring this man down and set me in his place.’
She reflected for a moment. ‘I would well serve you,’ she said. ‘But I do not believe this fable of the King, and I have no memory of Italian.’ She talked of being the Lady Mary’s servant, or that she must get her lady’s leave.
His brows grew heavy, his eyes threatening and alarming beneath their heavy lids.
‘Be you faithful to me,’ he thundered. Even his thin and delicate hands seemed to menace her. ‘Retain your obedience to your Faith. Your duty is to that, and to no earthly lady before that.’
Her eyes were cast down, her lips did not move. He said, harshly, ‘It will go ill with you if it become known to Cromwell I have visited you. Keep this matter secret as you love your liberty. I will send you the words you shall say by a private bearer. After, maybe, his Highness shall safeguard you, I admonishing him. But the Lady Mary shall bid you obey me in all things.’
He opened the door and put his head out cautiously. Suddenly he drew it back and said in Latin, ‘Here is a spy.’ He did not flinch, but advanced into the corridor, keeping his back to the servitor whom already Master Viridus had sent to keep her door. Gardiner fumbled in his robes and pulled out his missal. He turned the pages over, and, speaking in a feigned and squeaky voice, once more indicated to her prayers against the visitations of fiends. Reading them aloud, he interspersed the Latin of the missal with the phrases, ‘You may pray to God he have not seen my face. Be you very silent and secret, or you are undone. I could in no wise save you from Cromwell unless the King becomes your protector.’ He finished in the vulgar tongue. ‘I pray my prayers with you may have availed to give you relief. But a simple priest as myself is of small skill in these visitations. You should have sent to some great Churchman or one of the worshipful bishops.’
‘Good Father Henry, I thank you,’ she answered, having entered into his artifice. He went away, feigning to limp on his right knee, and keeping his face from the spy.
At the corner of the corridor Margot Poins, an immense blonde and gentle figure in Lutheran grey, stood back in the hangings. The Magister Udal leant over her, supporting himself with one hand against the wall above her head and one leg crossed beneath his gown.
‘Come you into my room,’ Katharine said to the girl; and to the magister, ‘Avoid, man of books. I will have no maid of mine undone by thee.’
‘Venio honoris causa,’ he said pertly, and Margot uttered, ‘He seeks me in wedlock,’ in a gruff, uncontrolled voice of a great young girl’s confusion, and immense blushes covered her large cheeks.
Katharine laughed; she was sorely afraid of the serving man behind her, for that he was a spy set there by Viridus she was very sure, and she was casting about in her mind for a device that should let her tell whether or no he had known the bishop. The squeaky voice and the feigned limp seemed to her stratagems ignoble and futile on the part of a great Churchman, and his mania of plots and counter-plottings had depressed and wearied her, for she expected the great to be wise. But she played her part for him as it was her duty. She spoke to the girl with her scarlet cheeks.
‘Believe thou the magister after he hath ta’en thee afore a priest. He hath sought me and two score others in the cause of honour. Get you in, sweetheart.’
She pushed the girl in at the door. The serving man sat on his stool; his shock of yellow hair had never known a comb, but he had a decent suit of a purplish wool-cloth. He had his eyes dully on the ground.
‘As you value your servitorship, let no man come into my room when I be out,’ Katharine said to him. ‘Saving only the Father Henry that was here now.’
The man raised expressionless blue eyes to her face.
‘I know not his favours,’ he said in a peasant’s mutter. ‘Maybe I should know him if I saw him again. I am main good at knowing people.’
‘Why, he is from the Sheeres,’ Katharine added, still playing, though she was certain that the man knew Gardiner. ‘You shall know him by his voice and his limp.’
He answered, ‘Maybe,’ and dropped his eyes to the ground. She sent him to fetch her some candles, and shut the door upon him.
II
The Queen came to the revels given in her honour by the Lord Privy Seal. Cromwell had three hundred servants dressed in new liveries: pikemen with their staves held transversely, like a barrier, kept the road all the way from the Tower Steps to Austin Friars, and in that Lutheran quarter of the town there was a great crowding together. Caps were pitched high and lost for ever, and loud shouts of praise to God went up when the Queen and her Germans passed, with boys casting branches of holm, holly, bay and yew, the only plants that were green in the winter season, before the feet of her mule. But the King did not come. It was reported to the crowd that he was ill at Greenwich.
It was known very well by those that sat at dinner with her that, after three days, he had abandoned his Queen and kept his separate room. She sat eating alone, on high beneath the dais, heavy, silent, placid and so fair that her eyebrows appeared to be white upon her red forehead. She did not speak a word, having no English, and it was considered disgusting that she wiped her fingers upon pieces of bread.
Hostile lords remarked upon all her physical imperfections, which the King, it was known, had reported to his physicians in a writing of many pages. Besides, she had no English, no French, no Italian; she could not even play cards with his Highness. It was true that they had squeezed her into English stays, but she was reported to have wept at having to mount a horse. So she could not go a-hawking, neither could she shoot with the bow, and her attendants — the women, bound about the middle and spreading out above and below like bolsters, and the men, who wore their immense scolloped hats falling over their ears even at meal-times — excited disgust and derision by the noises they made when they ate.
The Master Viridus had Katharine Howard in his keeping. He took her up into a small gallery near the gilded roof of the long hall and pointed out to her, far below, the courtiers that it was safe for her to consort with, because they were friends of Privy Seal. His manner was more sinister and more meaning.
‘You would do well to have to do with no others,’ he said.
‘I am like to have to do with none at all,’ Katharine answered, ‘for no mother’s son cometh anigh me.’
He looked away from her. Down below she made out her cousin Surrey, sitting with his back ostentatiously turned to a Lord Roydon, of Cromwell’s following; her uncle, plunged in his silent and malignant gloom; and Cromwell, his face lit up and smiling, talking earnestly with Chapuys, the Ambassador from the Emperor.
‘Eleven hundred dishes shall be served this day,’ Viridus proclaimed, seeming to warn her. ‘There can no other lord find so many plates of parcel gilt.’ His level and cold voice penetrated through all the ascending din of voices, of knives, of tuckets of trumpets that announced the courses of meat and of the three men’s songs that introduced the sweet jellies which only Privy Seal, it was said, could direct to be prepared.
‘Other lordings all,’ Viridus continued with his sermon, ‘ha’ ruined themselves seeking in vain to vie with my lord. Most of those you see are broken men, whose favour would be worth naught to you.’
Tables were ranged down each side of the great hall, the men sitting on the right, each wearing upon his shoulder a red rose made of silk since no flowers were to be had. The women, sitting upon the left, had white favours in their caps. In the wide space between these tables were two bears; chained to tall gilt posts, they rolled on their hams and growled at each other. From time to time the serving men who went up and down in the middle let fall great dishes containing craspisces, cranes, swans or boars. These meats were kicked contemptuously aside for the bears to fight over, and their places supplied immediately with new. Other serving men broke priceless bottles of Venetian glass against the corners of tables, and let the costly Rhenish wines run about their feet.
This, the Master Viridus said, was intended to point out the wealth of their lord and his zealousness to entertain his Sovereigns.
‘It would serve the purpose as well to give them twice as much fare,’ Katharine said.
‘They could never contain it,’ Viridus answered gravely, ‘so great is the bounty of my lord.’
Throckmorton, the spy, enormous, bearded and with the half-lion badge of the Privy Seal hanging round his neck from a gilt chain, walked up and down behind the guests, bearing the wand of a major-domo, affecting to direct the servers when to fill goblets and listening at tables where much wine had been served. Once he looked up at the gallery, and his scrutinising and defiant brown eyes remained for a long time upon Katharine’s face, as if he too were appraising her beauty.
‘I would not drink much wine with that man listening at my back. He came from my country, and was such a foul villain that mothers fright their children with his name,’ Katharine said.
Viridus moved his lips quickly one upon another, and suddenly directed her to observe the new Queen’s head-dress, broad and stiffened with a wire of gold, upon which large pearls had been sewn.
‘Many ladies will now get themselves such headdresses,’ he said.
‘That will I never,’ she answered. It appeared atrocious and Flemish-clumsy, spreading out and overshadowing the Queen’s heavy face. Their English hoods with the tails down made the head sleek and comely; or, with the tails folded up and pinned square like flat caps they could give to the face a gallant or a pensive expression.
‘Why, I could never get me in at the door of the confessional with such a spreading cloth.’
Viridus had his chin on the rail of the gallery; he gazed down below with his snaky eyes. She could not tell whether he were old or young.
‘You would more prudently abandon the confessing,’ he said, without looking at her. ‘My lord is minded that ladies who look to him should wear such.’
‘That is to be a bond-slave,’ Katharine cried indignantly. He looked round.
‘Here is a great magnificence,’ he uttered, moving his hand towards the hall. ‘My Lord Privy Seal hath a mighty power.’
‘Not power enow to make me a laughing-stock for the men.’
‘Why, this is a free land,’ he answered. ‘You may rot in a ditch if you will, or worse if treasonable actions be brought home to you.’
Down below, wild men dressed in the skins of wolves, hares and stags ran round the tethered bears bearing torches of sweet wood, and a heavy and languorous smoke, like incense, mounted up to the gallery. Viridus’ unveiled threat made the necessity for submission come once more into her mind. Other wild men were leading in a lion, immense and lean as if it were a fawn-coloured ass. It roared and pulled at the golden chains by which the knot of men held it. Many ladies shrieked out, but the men dragged the lion into the open space before the dais where the Queen sat unmoved and stolid.
‘Would your master have me dip my fingers in the dish and wipe them on bread-manchets as the Queen does?’ Katharine asked in a serious expostulation.
‘It were an excellent action,’ Viridus answered.
There was a brazen flare of trumpets so that the smoke swirled among the rafters. Men with brass helmets and shields of brass were below in the hall.
‘They are costumed as the ancient Romans,’ Katharine said, lost in other thoughts.
Suddenly she saw that whilst all the other eyes were upon the lion, Throckmorton’s glare was again upon her face. He appeared to shake his head and to bow his immense and bearded form. It brought into her mind the dangerous visit of Bishop Gardiner. Suddenly he dropped his eyes.
‘You see some friends,’ Viridus’ voice asked beside her.
‘Nay, I have no friends here,’ Katharine answered.
She could not tell that the bearded spy’s eyes were not merely amorous in their intention, for such looks she was used to, and he was a very vile man.
‘In short,’ Viridus spoke, ‘it were an excellent action to act in all things as the Queen does. For fashions are a matter of fashion. It is all one whether you wipe your fingers on bread-manchets or on napkins. But when a fashion becometh general its strangeness departeth and it is esteemed fit for a King’s Court. Thus you may earn your bread: this is your duteous work. Observe the king of the beasts. See how it shall do its duty before the Queen, and mark the lesson.’ His voice penetrated, low and level, through all the din from below. Yet the men dressed like gladiators advanced towards the dais where the Queen sat eating unmoved. The lion before her growled frightfully, and dragged its keepers towards the men in brass. They drew their short swords and beat upon their shields crying: ‘We be Roman traitors that war upon this land.’ Then it appeared that among them in their crowd they had a large mannikin, dressed like themselves in brass and running upon wheels.
The ladies pressed the tables with their hands, making as if to rise in terror. But the mannikin toppling forward fell before the lion with a hollow sound of brass. The lean beast, springing at its throat, tore it to reach the highly smelling flesh that was concealed within the tunic, and the Romans fled, casting away their shields and swords. One of them had a red forked beard and wide-open blue eyes. He brought into Katharine’s mind the remembrance of her cousin. She wondered where he could be, and imagined him with that short sword, cutting his way to her side.
‘That sight is allegorically to show,’ Viridus was commenting beside her, ‘how the high valour of Britain shall defend from all foes this noble Queen.’
The lion having reached its meat lay down upon it.
Katharine remembered that Bishop Gardiner said that her cousin must be begone. She tried to say to Viridus: ‘Sir, I would fain obey you in these things, but I have a cousin that shall much hinder me.’
But the applause of the people below drowned her voice and Viridus continued talking.
Let it be true that the Queen, being alone, showed amongst their English fineries and nicenesses a gross and repulsive strangeness. But if their ladies put on her manners she should no longer be alone, and it would appear to the King and to all men that her example was both commended and emulated. It was a matter of kingcraft, and so the Lord Privy Seal was minded and determined.
‘Then I will even get myself such a hat and tear my capons apart with my fingers,’ Katharine said.
‘You had much the wiser,’ he answered.
The hall was now full of wild men, nymphs in white gowns, men bearing aspergers with which to scatter perfumes, and merry andrews, so that the floor could no longer be seen. A party of lords had overset a table in their efforts to get to the nymphs. The Queen was schooled to go out behind the arras, and the ladies, laughing, calling to each other and to the men at the other tables, and pinning up their hoods, filed out after her.
‘I shall do my best to please your master and mine,’ Katharine said. ‘But he must even help me, or I can be no example to emulate, but one at whom the finger of scorn is likely to be pointed.’
Viridus paused before he led his charge from the gallery. His pale-blue eyes were more placable.
‘You shall be well seconded. But have a care. Dally with no traitors. Speak fairly of your master’s friends.’ He touched her above the left breast with a claw-like finger. ‘The Italian writes: “Whoso mocketh my love mocketh also mine own self.”’
‘I mock none,’ Katharine said. ‘But I have a cousin to be provided for that neither you nor I shall mock with much safety if he be sober enough to stand.’
He listened to her with his hand upon the door of the gallery: his air was attentive and aroused. She related very simply how Culpepper had besieged her door—’He came to London to help me on my way and to seek fortune in some war. I would that a place might be found for him, for here he is like to ruin both himself and me.’
‘We have need of good swordsmen for an errand,’ he said, in an absorbed voice.
‘There was never a better than Tom,’ Katharine said. ‘He hath cut a score of throats. Your lord would have sent him to Calais.’
He muttered:
‘Why, there are places other than Calais where a man may make a fortune.’
