Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 156
‘Then get you sent to the King of France, through the channel that you wot of, the message I have given you to convey.’ He kept his back to her and spoke as if to the distant door.
‘Why must I mull in these matters?’ she asked him piteously, ‘or why must poor Tom? God help him, he found me bread when you had left me to starve.’ It came to her as pitiful that her cousin, swaggering and unconscious, at a great distance, should be undone because these men quarrelled near her. He moved stiffly round again — he was so bolstered over with clothes against the cold.
‘It is not you that must meddle here,’ he said. ‘It is your mistress. Only she will be believed by those you wot of.’
‘Speak you yourself,’ she said.
He scowled hatefully.
‘Who of the French would believe me,’ he snarled. He had been so made a tool of by Privy Seal in times past that he had lost all hope of credence.
‘If I may come to it, I will do it,’ she said suddenly.
After all, it seemed to her, this action might bring about the downfall of Privy Seal — and she desired his downfall. It would be a folly to refuse her aid merely because her uncle was a craven man or Throckmorton a knave. It was a true thing that she was to ask the Lady Mary to say — that if France and Spain should molest England together the Cleves alliance must stand for good — and with it Privy Seal.
‘But, a’ God’s name, let poor Tom be,’ she added.
He stood perfectly motionless for a moment, shrugged his shoulders straight up and down, stood motionless for another moment, and then held out his hand. She touched it with her lips.
There was a certain cate, or small cake, made of a paste sweetened with honey and flavoured with cinnamon, that Katharine Howard very much loved. She had never tasted them till one day the King had come to visit his daughter, bearing with his own hands a great box of them. He had had the receipt from Thomas Cromwell, who had had it of a Jew in Italy. Mary so much disaffected her father that, taking them from his hands with one knee nearly upon the ground, she had said that her birth ill-fitted her to eat these princely viands, and she had placed them on a ledge of her writing-pulpit. Heaving a heavy sigh, he glanced at her book and said that he would not have her spoil her eyes with too much of study; let her bid Lady Katharine to read and write for her.
‘She will have greater need of her eyes than ever I of mine,’ Mary answered with her passionless voice.
‘I will not have you spoil your eyes,’ he said heavily, and she gave him back the reply:
‘My eyes are your Highness’.’
He made with his shoulders a slow movement of exasperation, and, turning to Katharine Howard, he began once more to talk of the Islands of the Blest. He was dressed all in black furs that day, so that his face appeared less pallid than when he had worn scarlet, and it seemed to her suddenly that he was a very pitiful man — a man who could do nothing; and one who, as Throckmorton had said, was nothing but a doubt. There beside him, between the two of them, stood his daughter — pale, straight, silent, her hands clasped before her. And her father had come to placate her. He had brought her cates to eat, or he would have beaten her into loving him. Yet Mary of England stood as rigid as a knife-blade; you could move her neither by love nor by threats. This man had sinned against this daughter; here he was brought up against an implacability. He was omnipotent in everything else; this was his Pillars of Hercules. So she exerted herself to be pleasant with him, and at one moment of the afternoon he stretched out a great hand to the cinnamon cakes and placed one in his own mouth. He sat still, and, his great jaws moving slowly, he said that he scarcely doubted that, if he himself could set sail with a great armada and many men, he should find a calm region of tranquil husbandry and a pure faith.
‘It might be found,’ he said; then he sighed heavily, and, looking earnestly at her, brushed the crumbs from the furs about his neck.
‘One day, doubtless, your Highness shall find them,’ Katharine answered, ‘if your Highness shall apply yourself to the task.’ She was impatient with him for his sighs. Let him, if he would, abandon his kingdom and his daughter to set out upon a quest, or let him stay where he was and set to work at any other task.
‘But whether your Highness shall find them beyond the Western Isles or hidden in this realm of England....’
He shrugged his great shoulders right up till the furs on them were brushed by the feathers that fell from his bonnet.
‘God, wench!’ he said gloomily, ‘that is a question you are main happy to have time to dally with. I have wife and child, and kith and kin, and a plaguey basket of rotten apples to make cider from.’
He pulled himself out of his chair with both hands on the arms, stretched his legs as if they were cramped, and rolled towards the door.
‘Why, read of this matter in old books,’ he said, ‘and if you find the place you shall take me there.’ Then he spoke bitterly to the Lady Mary, who had never moved.
‘Since your eyes are mine, I bid you not spoil them,’ he said. ‘Let this lady aid you. She has ten times more of learning than you have.’ But, taking his jewelled walking-stick from beside the door, he added, ‘God, wench! you are my child. I have read your commentary, and I, a man who have as much of good letters as any man in Christendom, am well content to father you.’
‘Did your Highness mark — this book being my child — which side of the paper it was written on?’ his daughter asked.
Katharine Howard sighed, for it was the Lady Mary’s bitter jest that she wrote on the rough side of the paper, having been born on the wrong side of the blanket.
‘Madam Howard,’ she said to Katharine with a cold sneer, as of a very aged woman, ‘my father, who has taken many things from me to give to other women, takes now my commentary to give to you. Pray you finish it, and I will save mine eyes.’
As the King closed the door behind him she moved across to the chair and sat herself down to gaze at the coals. Katharine knelt at her feet and stretched out her hands. She was, she said, her mistress’s woman. But the Lady Mary turned obdurately the side of her face to her suppliant; only her fingers picked at her black dress.
‘I am your woman,’ Katharine said. ‘Before God and St Anthony, the King is naught to me! Before God and the Mother of God, no man is aught to me! I swear that I am your woman. I swear that I will speak as you bid me speak, or be silent. May God do so to me if in aught I act other than may be of service to you!’
‘Then you may sit motionless till the green mould is over your cheeks,’ Mary answered.
But two days later, in the afternoon, Katharine Howard came upon her mistress with her jaws moving voraciously. Half of the cinnamon cates were eaten from the box on the writing-pulpit. A convulsion of rage passed over the girl’s dark figure; her eyes dilated and appeared to blaze with a hot and threatening fury.
‘If I could have thy head, before God I would shorten thee by the neck!’ she said. ‘Stay now; go not. Take thy hand from the door-latch.’
Sudden sobs shook her, and tears dropped down her furrowed and pallid cheeks. She was tormented always by a gnawing and terrible hunger that no meat and no bread might satisfy, so that, being alone with the cates in the cold spring afternoon, she had, in spite of the donor, been forced always nearer and nearer to them.
‘God help me!’ she said at last. ‘Udal is gone, and the scullion that supplied me in secret has the small-pox. How may I get me things to eat?’
‘To have stayed to ask me!’ Katharine cried. ‘What a folly was here!’ For, as a daughter of the King, the Lady Mary was little more than herself; but because she was daughter to a queen that was at once a saint and martyr, Katharine was ready to spend her life in her service.
‘I would stay to ask a service of any man or woman,’ Mary answered, ‘save only that I have this great hunger.’ She clutched angrily at her skirt, and so calmed herself.
‘How may you help me?’ she asked grimly. ‘There are many that would put poison in my food. My mother was poisoned.’
‘I would eat myself of all the food that I bring you,’ said Katharine.
‘And if thou wast poisoned, I must get me another, and yet another after that. You know who it is that would have me away.’
At that hint of the presence of Cromwell, Katharine grew more serious.
‘I will save of my own food,’ she answered simply.
‘Till your bones stick through your skin!’ Mary sneered. ‘See you, do you know one man you could trust?’
The shadow fell the more deeply upon Katharine, because her cousin — as she remembered every day — the one man that she could trust, was in Calais town.
‘I know of two women,’ she said; ‘my maid Margot and Cicely Elliott.’
Mary of England reflected for a long time. Her eyes sunk deep in her head, grey and baleful, had the look of her father’s.
‘Cicely Elliott is too well known for my woman,’ she said. ‘Thy maid Margot is a great lump, too. Hath she no lover?’
The magister was in Paris.
‘But a brother she hath,’ Katharine said; ‘one set upon advancement.’
Mary said moodily:
‘Advancement, then, may be in this. God knoweth his own good time. But you might tell him; or it were better you should bid her tell him.... In short words, and fur ... wait.’
She had a certain snake-like eagerness and vehemence in her motions. She opened swiftly an aumbry in which there stood a tankard of milk. She took a clean pen, and then turned upon Katharine.
‘Before thou goest upon this errand,’ she said, ‘I would have thee know that, for thee, there may be a traitor’s death in this — and some glory in Heaven.’
‘You write to the Empress,’ Katharine cried.
‘I write to a man,’ the Lady Mary said. ‘Might you speak with clear eyes to my father if you knew more than that?’
‘I do not believe that you would bring your father down,’ Katharine said.
‘Why, you have a very comfortable habit of belief,’ Mary sneered at her. ‘In two words! Will you carry this treasonable letter or no?’
‘God help me,’ Katharine cried.
‘Well, God help you,’ her mistress jeered. ‘Two nights agone you swore to be my woman and no other man’s. Here you are in a taking. Think upon it.’
She dipped her white pen in the milk and began to write upon a great sheet of paper, holding her head aslant to see the shine of the fluid.
Katharine fought a battle within herself. Here was treason to the King — but that was a little thing to her. Yet the King was a father whom she would bring back to this daughter, and the traitor was a daughter whom she was sworn to serve and pledged to bring back to this father. If then she conveyed this letter....
‘Tell me,’ she asked of the intent figure above the paper, ‘when, if ever, this plot shall burst?’
‘Madam Howard,’ the other answered, ‘I heard thee not.’
‘I say I will convey your Highness’ letter if the plot shall not burst for many days. If it be to come soon I will forswear myself and be no longer your woman.’
‘Why, what a pax is here?’ her mistress faced round on her. ‘What muddles thy clear head? I doubt, knowing the craven kings that are of my party, no plot shall burst for ten years. And so?’
‘Before then thou mayest be brought back to thy father,’ Katharine said.
Mary of England burst into a hoarse laughter.
‘As God’s my life,’ she cried, ‘that may well be. And you may find a chaste whore before either.’
Whilst she was finishing her letter, Katharine Howard prayed that Mary the Mother of Mercy might soften the hatred of this daughter, even as, of old times, she had turned the heart of Lucius the Syracusan. Then there should be an end to plotting and this letter might work no ill.
Having waved the sheet of paper in the air to dry it, Mary crumpled it into a ball.
‘See you,’ she said, ‘if this miscarry I run a scant risk. For, if this be a treason, this treason is well enough known already to them you wot of. They might have had my head this six years on one shift or another had they so dared. So to me it matters little. — But for thee — and for thy maid Margot and this maid’s brother and his house and his father and his leman — death may fall on ye all if this ball of paper miscarry.’
Katharine made no answer and her mistress spoke on.
‘Take now this paper ball, give it to thy maid Margot, bid thy maid Margot bear it to her brother Ned.’ Her brother Ned should place it in his sleeve and walk with it to Herring Lane at Hampton. There, over against the house of the Sieur Chapuys, who was the Emperor’s ambassador to this Christian nation — over against that house there was a cookshop to which resorted the servants of the ambassador. Passing it by, Katharine’s maid’s brother should thrust his hand in at the door and cry ‘a pox on all stinking Kaiserliks and Papists,’ — and he should cast the paper at that cook’s head. Then out would come master cook to his door and claim reparation. And for reparation Margot’s brother Ned should buy such viands as the cook should offer him. These viands he was to bring, as a good brother should, to his hungry sister, and these viands his sister should take to her room — which was Katharine’s room. ‘And, of an evening,’ she finished, ‘I shall come to thy room to commune with thee of the writers that be dead and yet beloved. Hast thou the lesson by heart? I will say it again.’
III
It was in that way, however sorely against her liking, that Katharine Howard came into a plot. It subdued her, it seemed to age her, it was as if she had parted with some virtue. When again she spoke with the King, who came to loll in his daughter’s armed chair one day out of every week, it troubled her to find that she could speak to him with her old tranquillity. She was ashamed at feeling no shame, since all the while these letters were passing behind his back. Once even he had been talking to her of how they nailed pear trees against the walls in her Lincolnshire home.
‘Our garden man would say ...’ she began a sentence. Her eye fell upon one of these very crumpled balls of paper. It lay upon the table and it confused her to think that it appeared like an apple. ‘Would say ... would say ...’ she faltered.
He looked at her with enquiring eyes, round in his great head.
‘It is too late,’ she finished.
‘Even too late for what?’ he asked.
‘Too late in the year to set the trees back,’ she answered and her fit of nervousness had passed. ‘For there is a fluid in trees that runneth upward in the spring of the year to greet the blessed sun.’
‘Why, what a wise lady is this!’ he said, half earnest. ‘I would I had such an adviser as thou hast,’ he continued to his daughter.
He frowned for a moment, remembering that, being who he was, he should stand in need of no advice.
‘See you,’ he said to Katharine. ‘You have spoken of many things and wisely, after a woman’s fashion of book-learning. Now I am minded that you should hear me speak upon the Word of God which is a man’s matter and a King’s. This day sennight I am to have brought to my closet a heretic, Dr Barnes. If ye will ye may hear me confound him with goodly doctrines.’
He raised both his eyebrows heavily and looked first at the Lady Mary.
‘You, I am minded, shall hear a word of true doctrine.’
And to Katharine, ‘I would hear how you think that I can manage a disputation. For the fellow is the sturdiest rogue with a yard of tongue to wag.’
Katharine maintained a duteous silence; the Lady Mary stood with her hands clasped before her. Upon Katharine he smiled suddenly and heavily.
‘I grow too old to be a match for thee in the learning of this world. Thy tongue has outstripped me since I am become stale.... But hear me in the other make of talk.’
‘I ask no better,’ Katharine said.
‘Therefore,’ he finished, ‘I am minded that you, Mog, and your ladies all, do move your residences from here to my house at Hampton. This is an old and dark place; there you shall be better honoured.’
He lay back in his chair and was pleased with the care that he took of his daughter. Katharine glided intently across the smooth bare floor and took the ball of paper in her hand. His eyes followed her and he moved his head round after her movements, heavily, and without any motion of his great body. He was in a comfortable mood, having slept well the night before, and having conversed agreeably in the bosom of a family where pleasant conversation was a rare thing. For the Lady Mary had forborne to utter biting speeches, since her eyes too had been upon that ball of paper. The King did not stay for many minutes after Katharine had gone.
She was excited, troubled and amused — and, indeed, the passing of those letters held her thoughts in those few days. Thus it was easy to give the paper to her maid Margot, and easy to give Margot the directions. But she knew very well by what shift Margot persuaded her scarlet-clothed springald of a brother to take the ball and to throw it into the cookshop. For the young Poins was set upon advancement, and Margot, buxom, substantial and honest-faced, stood before him and said: ‘Here is your chance for advancement made ...’ if he could carry these missives very secretly.
‘For, brother Poins,’ she said, ‘thou knowest these great folks reward greatly — and these things pass between folks very great. If I tell thee no names it is because thou canst see more through a stone wall than common folk.’
So the young Poins cocked his bonnet more jauntily, and, setting out up river to Hampton, changed his scarlet clothes for a grey coat and puritan hose, and in the dark did his errand very well. He carried a large poke in which he put the larded capons and the round loaves that the cook sold to him. Later, following a reed path along the river, he came swiftly down to Isleworth with his bag on a cord and, in the darkness from beneath the walls, he slung bag and cord in at Katharine Howard’s open window. For several times this happened before the Lady Mary’s court was moved to Hampton. At first, Katharine had her tremors to put up with — and it was only when, each evening, with a thump and swish, the bag, sweeping out of the darkness, sped across her floor — it was only then that Katharine’s heart ceased from pulsing with a flutter. All the while the letters were out of her own hands she moved on tiptoe, as if she were a hunter intent on surprising a coy quarry. Nevertheless, it was impossible for her to believe that this was a dangerous game; it was impossible to believe that the heavy, unsuspicious and benevolent man who tried clumsily to gain his daughter’s love with bribes of cakes and kerchiefs — that this man could be roused to order her to her death because she conveyed from one place to another a ball of paper. It was more like a game of passing a ring from hand to hand behind the players’ backs, for kisses for forfeits if the ring were caught. Nevertheless, this was treason-felony; yet it was furthering the dear cause of the saints.
