“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 counterplottings 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 forever, 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 mealtimes—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
