The Fifth Queen

began once more to talk of the Islands of the Blest. He was dressed all in black furs that day, so that his face appeared less pallid than when he had worn scarlet, and it seemed to her suddenly that he was a very pitiful man⁠—a man who could do nothing; and one who, as Throckmorton had said, was nothing but a doubt. There beside him, between the two of them, stood his daughter⁠—pale, straight, silent, her hands clasped before her. And her father had come to placate her. He had brought her cates to eat, or he would have beaten her into loving him. Yet Mary of England stood as rigid as a knife-blade; you could move her neither by love nor by threats. This man had sinned against this daughter; here he was brought up against an implacability. He was omnipotent in everything else; this was his Pillars of Hercules. So she exerted herself to be pleasant with him, and at one moment of the afternoon he stretched out a great hand to the cinnamon cakes and placed one in his own mouth. He sat still, and, his great jaws moving slowly, he said that he scarcely doubted that, if he himself could set sail with a great armada and many men, he should find a calm region of tranquil husbandry and a pure faith.

“It might be found,” he said; then he sighed heavily, and, looking earnestly at her, brushed the crumbs from the furs about his neck.

“One day, doubtless, your Highness shall find them,” Katharine answered, “if your Highness shall apply yourself to the task.” She was impatient with him for his sighs. Let him, if he would, abandon his kingdom and his daughter to set out upon a quest, or let him stay where he was and set to work at any other task.

“But whether your Highness shall find them beyond the Western Isles or hidden in this realm of England.⁠ ⁠…”

He shrugged his great shoulders right up till the furs on them were brushed by the feathers that fell from his bonnet.

“God, wench!” he said gloomily, “that is a question you are main happy to have time to dally with. I have wife and child, and kith and kin, and a plaguey basket of rotten apples to make cider from.”

He pulled himself out of his chair with both hands on the arms, stretched his legs as if they were cramped, and rolled towards the door.

“Why, read of this matter in old books,” he said, “and if you find the place you shall take me there.” Then he spoke bitterly to the Lady Mary, who had never moved.

“Since your eyes are mine, I bid you not spoil them,” he said. “Let this lady aid you. She has ten times more of learning than you have.” But, taking his jewelled walking-stick from beside the door, he added, “God, wench! you are my child. I have read your commentary, and I, a man who have as much of good letters as any man in Christendom, am well content to father you.”

“Did your Highness mark⁠—this book being my child⁠—which side of the paper it was written on?” his daughter asked.

Katharine Howard sighed, for it was the Lady Mary’s bitter jest that she wrote on the rough side of the paper, having been born on the wrong side of the blanket.

“Madam Howard,” she said to Katharine with a cold sneer, as of a very aged woman, “my father, who has taken many things from me to give to other women, takes now my commentary to give to you. Pray you finish it, and I will save mine eyes.”

As the King closed the door behind him she moved across to the chair and sat herself down to gaze at the coals. Katharine knelt at her feet and stretched out her hands. She was, she said, her mistress’s woman. But the Lady Mary turned obdurately the side of her face to her suppliant; only her fingers picked at her black dress.

“I am your woman,” Katharine said. “Before God and St. Anthony, the King is naught to me! Before God and the Mother of God, no man is aught to me! I swear that I am your woman. I swear that I will speak as you bid me speak, or be silent. May God do so to me if in aught I act other than may be of service to you!”

“Then you may sit motionless till the green mould is over your cheeks,” Mary answered.

But two days later, in the afternoon, Katharine Howard came upon her mistress with her jaws moving voraciously. Half of the cinnamon cates were eaten from the box on the writing-pulpit. A convulsion of rage passed over the girl’s dark figure; her eyes dilated and appeared to blaze with a hot and threatening fury.

“If I could have thy head, before God I would shorten thee by the neck!” she said. “Stay now; go not. Take thy hand from the door-latch.”

Sudden sobs shook her, and tears dropped down her furrowed and pallid cheeks. She was tormented always by a gnawing and terrible hunger that no meat and no bread might satisfy, so that, being alone with the cates in the cold spring afternoon, she had, in spite of the donor, been forced always nearer and nearer to them.

“God help me!” she said at last. “Udal is gone, and the scullion that supplied me in secret has the smallpox. How may I get me things to eat?”

“To have stayed to ask me!” Katharine cried. “What a folly was here!” For, as a daughter of the King, the Lady Mary was little more than herself; but because she was daughter to a queen that was at once a saint and martyr, Katharine was ready to spend her life in her service.

“I would stay to ask a service of any man or woman,” Mary answered, “save only that I have this great hunger.” She clutched angrily at her skirt, and so calmed herself.

“How may you