The young Poins pulled an onion from his poke.
“If you are so main sure he have not passed the gate,” he said, “I may take my ease.” He sat him down against the gate wall where the April sun fell warm through the arch of shadows. He stripped the outer peel from the onion and bit into it. “Good, warming eating,” he said, “when your stomach’s astir from the sea.”
“Young lad,” the gatewarden said, “I’m as fain to swear my mother bore me—though God forbid I should swear who my father was, woman being woman—as that Thomas Culpepper have not passed this way. For why: I’d have cast my hat on high or spat on the ground. And such things done mark other things that have passed in the mind of a man. And I have done no such thing.”
But because the young Poins sat always silent with his eyes on the road to Ardres and slept—being privileged because he was yeoman of the King’s guard—always in the little stone guard cell of the gateway at nights; because, in fact, the young man’s whole faculties were set upon seeing that Thomas Culpepper did not pass unseen through the gate, it was four days before the gatewarden contrived to get himself asked why he would have spat in the dust or cast his hat on high. It was, as it were, a point of honour that he should be asked for all the information that he gave; and he thirsted to tell his tale.
His tale had it that he had been ruined by a wench who had thrown her shoe over the mill and married a horse-smith, after having many times tickled the rough chin of Nicholas Hogben. Therefore, he had it that all women were to be humbled and held down—for all women were traitors, praters, liars, worms and vermin. (He made a great play of words between wermen, meaning worms, and wermin and wummin.) He had been ruined by this woman who had tickled him under the chin—that being an ingratiating act, fit to bewitch and muddle a man, like as if she had promised him marriage. And then she had married a horse-smith! So he was ready and willing, and prayed every night that God would send him the chance, to ruin and hold down every woman who walked the earth or lay in a bed.
But he had been ruined, too, by Thomas Culpepper, who had sold Durford and Maintree and Sallowford—which last was Hogben’s father’s farm. For why? Selling the farm had let in a Lincoln lawyer, and the Lincoln lawyer had set the farm to sheep, which last had turned old Hogben, the father, out from his furrows to die in a ditch—there being no room for farmers and for sheep upon one land. It had sent old Hogben, the father, to die in a ditch; it had sent his daughters to the stews and his sons to the road for sturdy beggars. So that, but for Wallop’s band passing that way when Hogben was grinning through the rope beneath Lincoln town tree—but for the fact that men were needed for Wallop’s work in Calais, by the holy blood of Hailes! Hogben would have been rating the angel’s head in Paradise.
But there had been great call for men to man the walls there in Calais, so Wallop’s ancient had written his name down on the list, beneath the gallows tree, and had taken him away from the Sheriff of Lincoln’s man.
“So here a be,” he drawled, “cutting little holes in my pikehead.”
“ ’Tis a folly,” the young Poins said.
“Sir,” the Lincolnshire man answered, “you say ’tis a folly to make small holes in a pikehead. But for me ’tis the greatest of ornaments. Give you, it weakens the pikehead; but ’tis a gradely ornament.”
“Ornaments be folly,” the young Poins reiterated.
“Sir,” the Lincolnshire man answered again, “there is the goodliest folly that ever was. For if I weaken my eyes and tire my wrists with small tappers and little files, and if I weaken the steel with small holes, each hole represents a woman I have known undone and cast down in her pride by a man. Here be sixty-and-four holes round and firm in a pattern. Sixty-and-four women I have known undone.”
He paused and surveyed, winking and moving the scroll that the little holes made in the tough steel of his axehead. Where a perforation was not quite round, he touched it with his file.
“Hum! ha!” he gloated. “In the centre of the head is the master hole of all, planned out for being cut. But not yet cut! Mark you, ’tis not yet cut. That is for the woman I hate most of all women. She is not yet cast down that I have heard tell on, though some have said ‘Aye,’ some ‘Nay.’ Tell me, have you heard yet of a Kat Howard in the stews?”
“There is a Kat Howard is like to be—” the young Poins began. But his slow cunning was aroused before he had the sentence out. Who could tell what trick was this?
“Like to be what?” the Lincolnshire man badgered him. “Like to be what? To be what?”
“Nay, I know not,” Poins answered.
“Like to be what?” Hogben persisted.
“I know no Kat Howard,” Poins muttered sulkily. For he knew well that the Lady Katharine’s name was up in the taverns along of Thomas Culpepper. And this Lincolnshire cow-dog was a knave too of Thomas’s; therefore the one Kat Howard who was like to be the King’s wench and the other Kat Howard known to Hogben might well be one and the same.
“Nay; if you will not, neither even will I,” Hogben said. “You shall have no more of my tale.”
Poins kept his blue eyes along the road. Far away, with an odd leap, waving its arms abroad and coming by fits and starts, as a hare gambols along a path—a figure was tiny to see, coming from Ardres way towards
