“I offer you a present of great price; I can solve your perplexities.” Katharine breathed between her teeth and said nothing. “But if you draw a knife,” the voice went on, “I will set you loose; there are as good as Madam Howard.” On the door there came the sound of soft thuds. “That is your maid, Margot Poins,” the voice said. “You had better bid her begone. This is a very evil gully; she will be strangled.”
Katharine called:
“Go and fetch someone to break down this door.”
The voice commented:
“In the City she will find none to enter this gully; it is a sanctuary of outlaws.”
There was the faintest glimmer of a casement square, high up before Katharine; violence and carryings off were things familiar to her imagination. A hundred men might have desired her whilst she stood on high in the masque. She said hotly:
“If you will hold me here for a ransom, you will find none to pay it.”
She heard the soft hiss of a laugh, and the voice:
“I would myself pay more than other men, but I would have no man see us together.”
She shrank into herself, and held to the wall for comfort. She heard a click, and in the light of a shower of brilliant sparks was the phantom of a man’s beard and dim walls; one tiny red glow remained in the tinder, like an illuminant in a black nothingness. He seemed to hold it about breast-high and to pause.
“You had best be rid of Margot Poins,” the musing voice came out of the thick air. “Send her back to her mother’s people: she gets you no friends.”
Katharine wondered if she might strike about eighteen inches above the tiny spark: or if in these impenetrable shadows there were a very tall man.
“Your Margot’s folk miscall you in shameful terms. I would be your servant; but it is distasteful to a proper man to serve one that hath about her an atmosphere of lewdness.”
Katharine cursed at him to relieve the agony of her fear.
The voice answered composedly:
“One greater than the devil is my master. But it is good hearing that you are loyal to them that serve you: so you shall be loyal to me, for I will serve you well.”
The spark in the tinder moved upwards; the man began to blow on it; in the dim glimmer there appeared red lips, a hairy moustache, a straight nose, gleaming eyes that looked across the flame, a high narrow forehead, and the gleam of a jewel in a black cap. This glowing and dusky face appeared to hang in the air. Katharine shrank with despair and loathing: she had seen enough to know the man. She made a swift step towards it, her arm drawn back; but the glow of the box moved to one side, the ashes faded: there was already nothing before she could strike.
“You see I am Throckmorton: a goodly knight,” the voice said, laughing.
This man came from Lincolnshire, near her own home. He had been the brother of a gentleman who had a very small property, and he had had one sister. God alone knew for what crime his father had cursed Throckmorton and left his patrimony to the monks at Ely—but his sister had hanged herself. Throckmorton had disappeared.
In that black darkness she had seemed to feel his gloating over her helplessness, and his laughing over all the villainies of his hateful past. He was so loathsome to her that merely to be near him had made her tremble when, the day before, he had fawned over her and shown her the side door to Privy Seal’s room. Now the sound of his breathing took away all her power to breathe. She panted:
“Infamous dog, I will have you shortened by the head for this rape.”
“It is true I am a fool to play cat and mouse,” he answered. “But I was ever thus from a child: I have played silly pranks: listen to gravity. I bring you here because I would speak to you where no ear dare come to listen: this is a sanctuary of night robbers.” His voice took on fantastically and grotesquely the nasal tones of Doctors of Logic when they discuss abstract theses: “I am a bold man to dare come here; but some of these are in my pay. Nevertheless I am a bold man, though indeed the step from life into death is so short and so easily passed that a man is a fool to fear it. Nevertheless some do fear it; therefore, as men go, I am bold; tho’, since I set much store in the intervention of the saints on my behalf, may be I am not so bold. Yet I am a good man, or the saints would not protect me. On the other hand, I am fain to do their work for them: so may be, they would protect me whether I were virtuous or no. Maybe they would not, however: for it is a point still disputed as to whether a saint might use an evil tool to do good work. But, in short, I am here to tell you what Privy Seal would have of you.”
“God help the pair of you,” Katharine said. “Have ye descended to cellar work now?”
“Madam Howard,” the voice came, “for what manner of man do you take me? I am a very proper man that do love virtue. There are few such philosophers as I since I came out of Italy.”
It was certain to her now that Privy Seal, having seen her thick with the Bishop of Winchester, had delivered her into the hands of this vulture. “If you have
