Lady Rochford sighed gently and hung her head.
“My cousin Anne, that was a sinful Queen, God rest her soul …” she began.
Sir Nicholas listened to her no more.
“See you,” he whispered to Katharine. “Peradventure it is best that Cicely have gone. Being a madcap, her comings and goings are heeded by no man, and it is true that she resorteth daily to the Bishop of Winchester, to plague his priests.”
“I would not speak so, being a man,” Katharine said.
He smiled at her and patted her shoulder.
“Why, I have struck good blows in my time,” he said.
“And have learned worldly wisdom,” Katharine retorted.
“I would not risk my neck on grounds where I am but ill acquainted,” he answered soberly. He was all will to please her. The King, he said, was coming on the Wednesday, after the Bishop of Winchester’s, to see three new stallions walk in their manage-steps. “I pray that you will come with Cicely Elliott to watch from the little window in the stables. These great creatures are a noble sight. I bred them myself to it.” His mild brown eyes were bright with enthusiasm and cordiality.
Suddenly there was a great silence in the room, and the Lady Mary raised her head. The burly figure of Throckmorton, the spy, was in the doorway. Katharine shuddered at the sight of him, for, in her Lincolnshire house, where he was accounted more hateful than Judas who betrayed the Lord, she had seen him beat the nuns when the convents had been turned out of doors, and he had brought to death his own brother, who had had a small estate near her father’s house. The smile upon his face made her feel sick. He stroked his long, golden-brown beard, glanced swiftly round the room, and advanced to the mistress’s chair, swinging his great shoulders. He made a leg and pulled off his cap, and at that there was a rustle of astonishment, for it had been held treasonable to cap the Lady Mary. Her eyes regarded him fixedly, with a granite cold and hardness, and he seemed to have at once a grin of power and a shrinking motion of currying favour. He said that Privy Seal begged her leave that her maid Katharine Howard might go to him soon after one o’clock. The Lady Mary neither spoke nor moved, but the old knight shrank away from Katharine, and affected to be talking in the ear of Lady Rochford, who went on winding her wool. Throckmorton turned on his heels and swung away, his eyes on the floor, but with a grin on his evil face.
He left a sudden whisper behind him, and then the silence fell once more. Katharine stood, a tall figure, holding out the hands on which the wool was as if she were praying to some invisible deity or welcoming some invisible lover. Some heads were raised to look at her, but they fell again; the old knight shuffled nearer her to whisper hoarsely from his moustachioed lips:
“Your serving man hath reported. Pray God we come safe out of this!” Then he went out of the room. Lady Rochford sighed deeply, for no apparent reason.
After a time the Lady Mary raised her head and made a minute, cold beckoning to Katharine. Her dry finger pointed to a word in her book of Plautus.
“Tell me what you know of this,” she commanded.
The play was the Menechmi, and the phrase ran, “Nimis autem bene ora commetavi. …” It was difficult for Katharine to bring her mind down to this text, for she had been wondering if indeed her time were at an end before it had begun. She said:
“I have never loved this play very well,” to excuse herself.
“Then you are out of the fashion,” Mary said coldly, “for this Menechmi is prized here above all the rest, and shall be played at Winchester’s before his Highness.”
Katharine bowed her head submissively, and read the words again.
“I remember me,” she said, “I had this play in a manuscript where your commetavi read commentavi.”
Mary kept her eyes upon the girl’s face, and said:
“Signifying?”
“Why, it signifies,” Katharine said, “that Messenio did well mark a face. If you read commetavi it should mean that he scratched it with his nails so that it resembled a harrowed field; if commentavi, that he bethumped it with his fist so that bruises came out like the stops on a fair writing.”
“It is true that you are a good Latinist,” Mary said expressionlessly. “Bring me my inkhorn to that window. I will write down your commentavi.”
Katharine lifted the inkhorn from its hole in the arm of the chair and gracefully followed the stiff and rigid figure into the embrasure of a distant window.
Mary bent her head over the book that she held in her hand, and writing in the margin, she uttered:
“Pity that such an excellent Latinist should meddle in matters that nothing concern her.”
Katharine held the inkhorn carefully, as if it had been a precious vase.
“If you will bid me do naught but serve you, I will do naught else,” she said.
“I will neither bid thee nor aid thee,” Mary answered. “The Bishop of Winchester claims thy service. Serve him as thou wilt.”
“I would serve my mistress in serving him,” Katharine said. “He is a man I love little.”
Mary pulled suddenly from her bodice a piece of crumpled parchment that had been torn across. She thrust it into Katharine’s free hand.
“Such letters I have had written me by my father’s men,” she said. “If this bishop should come to be my father’s man I would take no service from him.”
Katharine read on the crumpled parchment such words as:
“Be you dutiful …
I will not protect …
You shall be ruined utterly …
You had better creep underground …
Therefore humble you …”
“It was Thomas Cromwell wrote that,” the Lady Mary cried.
