She was still silent—shaken into thinking of the past she had had with her cousin when she had been very poor in Lincolnshire; she had had leisure to read good letters there, and the time to think of them. Now she had not held a book for four days on end.
“You are in a very great danger of your cousin,” Throckmorton was repeating. “Yet I will stay his coming.”
“Knight,” she said, “this is a folly. If guards be needed to keep me from his knife, the King shall give me guards.”
“His knife!” Throckmorton raised his hands in mock surprise. “His knife is a very little thing.”
“Ye would not say it an ye had come anear him when he was crossed,” she said. “I, who am passing brave, fear his knife more than aught else in this world.”
“Oh, incorrigible woman,” he cried, “thinking ever of straight things and clear doings. It is not the knife of your cousin, but the devious policy of Privy Seal that calleth for fear.”
“Why, or ever Privy Seal bind Tom to his policy he shall bind iron bars to make a coil.”
He looked at her with lifted eyebrows, and then scratched with his finger nail a tiny speck of mud from his shoe-point, balancing himself back against the chimney piece and crossing his red legs above the knees.
“Madam Howard,” he said, “Privy Seal is minded to use thy cousin for a battering-ram.” She was hardly minded to listen to him, and he uttered stealthily, as if he were sure of moving her: “Thy cousin shall breach a way to the ears of the King—for thy ill fame to enter in.”
She leaned forward a little.
“Tell me of my ill fame,” she said; and at that moment Margot Poins, her handmaid, placid still, large, fair and florid, came in to bring her mistress an embroidery frame of oak wood painted with red stripes. At Throckmorton’s glance askance at the cow-like girl, Katharine said: “Ye may speak afore Margot Poins. I ha’ heard tales of her bringing.”
Margot kneeled at Katharine’s feet to stretch a white linen cloth over the frame on the floor.
“Privy Seal planneth thus,” Throckmorton answered Katharine’s challenge. He spoke low and level, hoping to see her twinge at every new phrase. “The King hath put from him every tale of thee; it is not easy to bring him tales of those he loves, but very dangerous. But Cromwell planneth to bring hither thy cousin and to keep him privily till one day cometh the King to be alone with thee in thy bower or his. Then, having removed all lets, shall Cromwell gird this cousin to spring in upon thee and the King, screaming out and with his sword drawn.” Still Katharine did not move, but leaned along her table of yellow wood. “It is not the sword ye shall fear,” he said slowly, “but what cometh after. For, for sure, Privy Seal holdeth, then shall be the time to bring witnesses against thee to the hearing of the King. And Privy Seal hath witnesses.”
“He would have witnesses,” Katharine answered.
“There be those that will swear—”
“Aye,” she caught him up, speaking very calmly. “There be those that will swear they ha’ seen me with a dozen men. With my cousin, with Nick Ardham, with one and another of the hinds. Why, he will bring a hind to swear I ha’ loved him. And he will bring a bastard child or twain—” She paused, and he paused too.
At last he said: “Anan?”
“Ye might do it against Godiva of Coventry, against the blessed Katharine or against Caesar’s helpmeet in those days,” Katharine said. “Margot here can match all thy witnesses from the city of London—men that never were in Lincolnshire.”
Margot’s face flushed with a tide of exasperation, and, sitting motionless, she uttered deeply:
“My uncle the printer hath a man will swear he saw ye walk with a fiend having horns and a tail.” And indeed these things were believed among the Lutherans that flocked still to Margot’s uncle’s printing room. “My uncle hath printed this,” she muttered, and fumbled hotly in her bosom. She drew out a sheet with coarse black letters upon it and cast it across the floor with a flushed disdain at Throckmorton’s feet. It bore the heading: “Newes from Lincoln,” Throckmorton kicked with his toe the white scroll and scrutinised Katharine’s face dispassionately with his foxy eyes that jumped between his lids like little beetles of blue. He thrust his cap back upon his head and laughed.
“Before God!” he said; “ye are the joyfullest play that ever I heard. And how will Madam Howard act when the King heareth these things?”
Katharine opened her lips with surprise.
“For a subtile man ye are strangely blinded,” she said; “there is one plain way.”
“To deny it and call the saints to witness!” he laughed.
“Even that,” she answered. “I pray the saints to give me the place and time.”
“Ha’ ye seen the King in a jealous rage?” he asked.
“Subtile man,” she answered, “the King knows his world.”
“Aye,” he answered, “knoweth that women be never chaste.”
Katharine bent to pick up her sewing.
“Sir,” she said, “if the King will not have faith in me I will wed no King.”
His jaw fell. “Ye have so much madness?” he asked.
She stretched towards him the hand that held her sewing now.
“I swear to you,” she said—“and ye know me well—I seek a way to bring these rumours to the King’s ears.”
He said nothing, revolving these things in his mind.
“Goodly servant,” she began, and he knew from the round and silvery sound she drew from her throat that she was minded to make one of the long speeches that appalled and delighted him with their childish logic and wild honour. “If it were not that my cousin would run his head into danger I would will that he came to the King. Sir, ye are a wise man,
