“We shall bring very quickly Thomas Culpepper, her cousin, back from France. We shall inflame his mind with jealousy of the King. We shall find a place where he shall burst upon the King and her together. We shall bring witnesses enow from Lincolnshire to swear against her.”
He crossed his hands behind his back.
“This work of fetching her cousin from Paris I will put into the hands of Viridus,” he said. “I believe her to be virtuous, therefore do you bring many witnesses, and some that shall swear to have seen her in the act. That shall be your employment. For I tell you she hath so great a power of pleading that, being innocent, she will with difficulty be proved unchaste.”
Throckmorton’s head hung upon his shoulders.
“Remember,” Privy Seal said again, “you and Viridus shall send to find her cousin in France. Fill him with tales that his cousin plays the leman with the King. He shall burst here like a bolt from heaven. You will find him betwixt Calais and Paris town, dallying in evil places without a doubt. We sent him thither to frighten Cardinal Pole.”
“Aye,” Throckmorton said, his mind filled with other and bitter thoughts. “He hath frightened the Cardinal from Paris by the mere renown of his violence.”
“Then let him do some frighting in our goodly town of London,” Cromwell said.
Part II
The Distant Cloud
I
The young Poins, once an ensign of the King’s guard, habited now in grey, stood awaiting Thomas Culpepper, Katharine Howard’s cousin, beneath the new gateway towards the east of Calais. Four days he had waited already and never had he dared to stir, save when the gates were closed for the night. But it had chanced that one of the gatewardens was a man from Lincolnshire—a man, once a follower of the plough, whose father had held a farm in the having of Culpepper himself.
“⸺But he sold ’un,” Nicholas Hogben said, “sold ’un clear away.” He made a wry face, winked one eye, and drawing up the right corner of his mouth, displayed square, huge teeth. The young Poins making no question, he repeated twice: “Clear away. Right clear away.”
Poins, however, could hold but one thing of a time in his head. And, by that striving, dangerous servant of Lord Privy Seal, Throckmorton, it had been firmly enjoined upon him that he must not fail to meet Thomas Culpepper and stay him upon his road to England. Throckmorton, with his great beard and cruel snake’s eyes, had said: “I hold thy head in fee. If ye would save it, meet Thomas Culpepper in Calais and give him this letter.” The letter he had in his poke. It carried with it a deed making Culpepper lieutenant of the stone barges in Calais. But he had it too, by word of mouth, that if Thomas Culpepper would not be stayed by the letter, he, Hal Poins, must stay him—with the sword, with a stab in the back, or by being stabbed himself and calling in the guard to lay Thomas Culpepper’s self by the heels.
“You will enjoin upon him,” Throckmorton had said, “how goodly a thing is the lieutenancy of stone lighters that in this letter is proffered him. You will tell him that, if a barge of stone go astray, it is yet a fair way to London, and stone fetches good money from townsmen building in Calais. If he will gainsay this you will pick a quarrel with him, as by saying he gives you the lie. In short,” Throckmorton had finished, earnestly and with a sinuous grace of gesture in his long and narrow hands, “you will stay him.”
It was a desperate measure, yet it was the best he could compass. If Culpepper came to London, if he came to the King, Katharine’s fortunes were not worth a rushlight such as were sold at twenty for a farthing. He knew, too, that Viridus had Cromwell’s earnest injunctions to send a messenger that should hasten Culpepper’s return; and, though he had seven hundred of Cromwell’s spies that he could trust to do Privy Seal’s errand, he had not one that he could trust to do his own. There was no one of them that he could trust. If he took a spy and said: “At all costs stay Culpepper, but observe very strict secrecy from Privy Seal’s men all,” the spy would very certainly let the news come to Privy Seal.
It was in this pass that the thought of the young Poins had come to him. Here was a fellow absolutely stupid. He was a brother of Katharine Howard’s tiring maid who had already come near to losing his head in a former intrigue in the Court. He had, at the instigation of his sister, carried two Papist letters of Katharine Howard. And, if it was the King who pardoned him, it was Throckmorton who first had taken him prisoner; it was Throckmorton who had advised him to lie hidden in his grandfather’s house for a month or two. At the time Throckmorton had had no immediate reason to
