As they left the room to go to the audience with Cromwell, Katharine, squaring the frills of her hood behind her back, could hear Margot Poins grumbling to the magister:
“After these long days ye ha’ time for five minutes to hold my hand,” and the magister, perturbed and fumbling in his bosom, muttered:
“Nay, I have no minutes now. I must write much in Latin ere thy mistress return.”
VI
“By God,” Wriothesley said when she entered the long gallery where the men were. “This is a fair woman!”
She had command of her features, and her eyes were upon the ground; it was a part of a woman’s upbringing to walk well, and her masters had so taught her when she had lived with her grandmother, the old duchess. Not the tips of her shoes shewed beneath the zigzag folds of her russet-brown underskirt; the tips of her scarlet sleeves netted with gold touched the waxed wood of the floor; her hood fell behind to the ground, and her fair hair was golden where the sunlight fell on it with a last, watery ray.
Upon Privy Seal she raised her eyes; she bent her knees so that her gown spread out all around her when she curtsied, and, having arranged it with a slow hand, she came to her height again, rustling as if she rose from a wave.
“Sir,” she said, “I come to pray you to right a great wrong done by your servants.”
“By God!” Wriothesley said, “she speaks high words.”
“Madam Howard,” Cromwell answered—and his eyes graciously dwelt upon her tall form. She had clasped her hands before her lap and looked into his face. “Madam Howard, you are more learned in the better letters than I; but I would have you call to memory one Pancrates, of whom telleth Lucian. Being in a desert or elsewhere, this magician could turn sticks, stocks and stakes into servants that did his will. Mark you, they did his will—no more and no less.”
“Sir,” Katharine said, “ye have better servants than ever had Pancrates. They do more than your behests.”
Cromwell bent his back, stretched aside his white hand and smiled still.
“Ye trow truth,” he said. “Yet ye do me wrong; for had I the servants of Pancrates, assuredly he should hear no groans of injustice from men of good will.”
“It is too good hearing,” Katharine said gravely. “This is my tale—”
Once before she had trembled in this man’s presence, and still she had a catching in the throat as her eyes measured his face. She was mad to do right and to right wrongs, yet in his presence the doing of the right, the righting of wrongs, seemed less easy than when she stood before any other man. “Sir,” she uttered, “I have thought ye have done ill afore now. I am nowise certain that ye thought your ill-doing an evil. I beseech you for a patient hearing.”
But, though she told her story well—and it was an old story that she had learned by heart—she could not be rid of the feeling that this was a less easy matter than it had seemed to her, to call Cromwell accursed. She had a moving tale of wrongs done by Cromwell’s servant, Dr. Barnes, a visitor of a church in Lincolnshire near where her home had been. For the lands had been taken from a little priory upon an excuse that the nuns lived a lewd life; and so well had she known the nuns, going in and out of the convent every weekday, that well she knew the falseness of Cromwell’s servant’s tale.
“Sir,” she said to Cromwell, “mine own foster-sister had the veil there; mine own mother’s sister was there the abbess.” She stretched out a hand. “Sir, they dwelled there simply and godly, withdrawn from the world; succouring the poor; weaving of fine linens, for much flax grew upon those lands by there; and praying God and the saints that blessings fall upon this land.”
Wriothesley spoke to her slowly and heavily:
“Such little abbeys ate up the substance of this land in the old days. Well have we prospered since they were done away who ate up the fatness of this realm. Now husbandmen till their idle soil and cattle are in their buildings.”
“Gentleman whose name I know not,” she turned upon him, “more wealth and prosperity God granted us in answer to their prayers than could be won by all the husbandmen of Arcadia and all the kine of Cacus. God standeth above all men’s labours.” But Cromwell’s servants had sworn away the lands of the small abbey, and now the abbess and her nuns lay in gaol accused—and falsely—of having secreted an image of Saint Hugh to pray against the King’s fortunes.
“Before God,” she said, “and as Christ is my Saviour, I saw and make deposition that these poor simple women did no such thing but loved the King as he had been their good father. I have seen them at their prayers. Before God, I say to you that they were as folk astonished and dismayed; knowing so little of the world that ne one ne other knew whence came the word that had bared them to the skies. I have seen them—I.”
“Where went they?” Wriothesley said; “what worked they?”
“Gentleman,” she answered; “being cast out of their houses and their veils, they knew nowhither to go; homes they had none; they lived with their own hinds in hovels, like frightened lambs, the saints their pastors being driven from their folds.”
“Aye,” Wriothesley said grimly, “they cumbered the ground; they did meet in knots for mutinies.”
“God had appointed them the duty of prayer,” Katharine answered him. “They met and prayed in sheds and lodges of the house that had been theirs, poor ghosts revisiting and bewailing their earthly homes. I have prayed with them.”
“Ye have done a treason in that day,” Wriothesley answered.
“I have done the best that ever I did for this land,” she met
