She sat late at night correcting the embroidery of some truelove-knots that Margot had been making for her. A huckster had been there selling ribands from France, and showing a doll dressed as the ladies of the French King’s Court were dressing that new year. He had been talking of a monster that had been born to a pigsty on Cornhill, and lamenting that travel was become a grievous costly thing since the monasteries, with their free hostel, had been done away with. The monster had been much pondered in the city; certainly it portended wars or strange public happenings, since it had the face of a child, greyhound’s ears, a sow’s forelegs, and a dragon’s tail. But the huckster had gone to another room, and Margot was getting her supper with the Lady Mary’s serving-maids.
“Save us!” Katharine said to herself over her embroidery-frame, “here be more drunkards. If I were a Queen I would make a law that any man should be burnt on the tongue that was drunk more than seven times in the week.” But she was already on her feet, making for the door, her frame dropped to the ground. There had been a murmur of voices through the thick oak, and then shouts and objurgations.
Thomas Culpepper stood in the doorway, his sword drawn, his left hand clutching the throat of the serving man who was guarding her room.
“God help us!” Katharine said angrily; “will you ruin me?”
“Cut throats?” he muttered. “Aye, I can cut a throat with any man in Christendom or out.” He shook the man backwards and forwards to support himself. “Kat, this offal would have kept me from thee.”
Katharine said, “Hush! it is very late.”
At the sound of her voice his face began to smile.
“Oh, Kat,” he stuttered jovially, “what law should keep me from thee? Thou’rt better than my wife. Heathen to keep man and wife apart, I say, I.”
“Be still. It is very late. You will shame me,” she answered.
“Why, I would not have thee shamed, Kat of the world,” he said. He shook the man again and threw him good humouredly against the wall. “Bide thou there until I come out,” he muttered, and sought to replace his sword in the scabbard. He missed the hole and scratched his left wrist with the point. “Well, ’tis good to let blood at times,” he laughed. He wiped his hand upon his breeches.
“God help thee, thou’rt very drunk,” Katharine laughed at him. “Let me put up thy sword.”
“Nay, no woman’s hand shall touch this blade. It was my father’s.”
An old knight with a fat belly, a clipped grey beard and roguish, tranquil eyes was ambling along the gallery, swinging a small pair of cheverel gloves. Culpepper made a jovial lunge at the old man’s chest and suddenly the sword was whistling through the shadows.
The old fellow planted himself on his sturdy legs. He laughed pleasantly at the pair of them.
“An’ you had not been very drunk I could never have done that,” he said to Culpepper, “for I am passed of sixty, God help me.”
“God help thee for a gay old cock,” Culpepper said. “You could not have done it without these gloves in your fist.”
“See you, but the gloves are not cut,” the knight answered. He held them flat in his fat hands. “I learnt that twist forty years ago.”
“Well, get you to the wench the gloves are for,” Culpepper retorted. “I am not long together of this pleasant mind.” He went into Katharine’s room and propped himself against the door post.
The old man winked at Katharine.
“Bid that gallant not draw his sword in these galleries,” he said. “There is a penalty of losing an eye. I am Rochford of Bosworth Hedge.”
“Get thee to thy wench, for a Rochford,” Culpepper snarled over his shoulder. “I will have no man speak with my coz. You struck a good blow at Bosworth Hedge. But I go to Paris to cut a better throat than thine ever was, Rochford or no Rochford.”
The old man surveyed him sturdily from his head to his heels and winked once more at Katharine.
“I would I had had such manners as a stripling,” he uttered in a round and friendly voice. “I might have prospered better in love.” Going sturdily along the corridor he picked up Culpepper’s sword and set it against the wall.
Culpepper, leaning against the doorpost, was gazing with ferocious solemnity at the open clothespress in which some hanging dresses appeared like women standing. He smoothed his red beard and thrust his cap far back on his thatch of yellow hair.
“Mark you,” he addressed the clothespress harshly, “that is Rochford of Bosworth Hedge. At the end of that day they found him with seventeen body wounds and the corpses of seventeen Scotsmen round him. He is famous throughout Christendom. Yet in me you see a greater than he. I am sent to cut such a throat. But that’s a secret. Only I am a made man.”
Katharine had closed her door. She knew it would take her twenty minutes to get him into the frame of mind that he would go peaceably away.
“Thou art very pleasant tonight,” she said. “I have seldom seen thee so pleasant.”
“For joy of seeing
