Something invisible and harsh touched his cheek. It might have been snow or hail. He turned his thin cunning face to the clouds, and they threatened a downpour. They raced along, like scarves of vapour, so low that you might have thought of touching them if you stood on tiptoe.
If he went to Westminster Hall to find Judge Combers, he would get his belly well filled, but his back wet to the bone. At the corner of the next hedge was the wicket gate of old Master Grocer Badge. There the magister would find at least a piece of bread, some salt and warmed mead. Judge Combers’ wife was easy and bounteous: but old John Badge’s daughter was a fair and dainty morsel.
He licked his full lips, leered to one side, muttered, “A curse on all lords’ porters,” and made for John Badge’s wicket. Badge’s dwelling had been part of the monastery’s curing house. It had some good rooms and two low storeys—but the tall garden wall of the Lord Privy Seal had been built against its side windows. It had been done without word or warning. Suddenly workmen had pulled down old Badge’s pigeon house, set it up twenty yards further in, marked out a line and set up this high wall that pressed so hard against the house end that there was barely room for a man to squeeze between. The wall ran for half a mile, and had swallowed the ground of twenty small householders. But never a word of complaint had reached the ears of the Privy Seal other than through his spies. It was, however, old Badge’s ceaseless grief. He had talked of it without interlude for two years.
The Badges’ room—their houseplace—was fair sized, but so low ceiled that it appeared long, dark and mysterious in the winter light There was a tall press of dark wood with a face minutely carved and fretted to represent the portal of Amiens Cathedral, and a long black table, littered with large sheets of printed matter in heavy black type, that diffused into the cold room a faint smell of ink. The old man sat quavering in the ingle. The light of the low fire glimmered on his silver hair, on his black square cap two generations old; and, in his old eyes that had seen three generations of changes, it twinkled starrily as if they were spinning round. In the cock forward of his shaven chin, and the settling down of his head into his shoulders, there was a suggestion of sinister and sardonic malice. He was muttering at his son:
“A stiff neck that knows no bending, God shall break one day.”
His son, square, dark, with his sleeves rolled up showing immense muscles developed at the levers of his presses, bent his black beard and frowned his heavy brows above his printings.
“Doubtless God shall break His engine when its work is done,” he muttered.
“You call Privy Seal God’s engine?” the old man quavered ironically. “Thomas Cromwell is a brewer’s drunken son. I know them that have seen him in the stocks at Putney not thirty years ago.”
The printer set two proofs side by side on the table and frowningly compared them, shaking his head.
“He is the flail of the monks,” he said abstractedly. “They would have burned me and thousands more but for him.”
“Aye, and he has put up a fine wall where my arbour stood.”
The printer took a chalk from behind his ear and made a score down his page.
“A wall,” he muttered; “my Lord Privy Seal hath set up a wall against priestcraft all round these kingdoms—”
“Therefore you would have him welcome to forty feet of my garden?” the old man drawled. “He pulls down other folks’ crucifixes and sets up his own walls with other folks’ blood for mortar.”
The printer said darkly:
“Papists’ blood.”
The old man pulled his nose and glanced down.
“We were all Papists in my day. I have made the pilgrimage to Compostella, for all you mock me now.”
He turned his head to see Magister Udal entering the door furtively and with eyes that leered round the room. Both the Badges fell into sudden, and as if guilty, silence.
“Domus parva, quies magna,” the magister tittered, and swept across the rushes in his furs to rub his hands before the fire. “When shall I teach your Margot the learned tongues?”
“When the sun sets in the East,” the printer muttered.
Udal sent to him over his shoulder, as words of consolation:
“The new Queen is come to Rochester.”
The printer heaved an immense sigh:
“God be praised!”
Udal snickered, still over his shoulder:
“You see, neither have the men of the Old Faith put venom in her food, nor have the Emperor’s galleys taken her between Calais and Sandwich.”
“Yet she comes ten days late.”
“Oh moody and suspicious artificer. Afflavit deus! The wind hath blown dead against Calais shore this ten days.”
The old man pulled his long white nose:
“In my day we could pray to St. Leonard for a fair wind.”
He was too old to care whether the magister reported his words to Thomas Cromwell, the terrible Lord Privy Seal, and too sardonic to keep silence for long about the inferiority of his present day.
“When shall I teach the fair Margot the learned tongue?” Udal asked again.
“When wolves teach conies how to play on pipes,” the master printer snarled from his chest.
“The Lord Privy Seal never stood higher,” Udal said. “The match with the Cleves Lady hath gained him great honour.”
“God cement it!” the printer said fervently.
The old man pulled at his nose and gazed at nothing.
“I am tired with this chatter of the woman from Cleves,” he croaked, like a malevolent raven. “An Anne she is, and a Lutheran. I mind we had an Anne and a Lutheran for Queen before. She played the whore and lost her head.”
“Where’s your niece Margot?” Udal asked the printer.
“You owe me nine crowns,” the old man said.
“I
