“Why, thy gentility shall survive it,” Throckmorton said. “But an it will not have more beating to its back, ye shall tell me where ye left T. Culpepper.”
“At Greenwich,” said the young Poins, and vomited forth curses. The old woman came from her pots to peer at the plasters on his skull, and then returned to the fire gibbering and wailing that she was not in that house plasters for to make.
“Knave,” Throckmorton said, “an ye will not tell me your tale swiftly ye shall right now to the Tower. It is life and death to a leaden counter an I find not Culpepper ere nightfall.”
The young Poins stretched forth his arm and groaned.
“Part is bruises and part is sickness of the waves,” he muttered; “but if I make not shift to slit his weazand ere nightfall, pox take all my advancement forever. I will tell my weary tale.”
Throckmorton paused, held his head down, fingered his beard, and said:
“When left ye him at Greenwich?”
“This day at dawn,” Poins answered, and cursed again.
“Drunk or sober?”
“Drunk as a channel codfish.”
The old woman came, a sheaf of jackknives in her arms, muttering along the table.
“Get you to bed,” she croaked. “I will not ha’ warmed new sheets for thee, and thee not use them. Get thee to bed.”
Throckmorton pushed her back, and caught the boy by the jacket near the throat.
“Ye shall tell me the tale as we go,” he said, and punctuated his words by shakes. “But, oaf that I trusted to do a man’s work, ye swing beneath a tree this night an we find not the man ye failed to stay.”
The young Poins—he panted out the story as he trotted, woefully keeping pace to Throckmorton’s great strides between the hedges—had stuck to Culpepper as to his shadow, in Calais town. At each turn he had showed the warrant to be master of the lighters; he had handed over the gold that Throckmorton had given him. But Culpepper had turned a deaf ear to him, and, setting up a violent friendship with the Lincolnshire gatewarden over pots of beer in a brewhouse, had insisted on buying Hogben out of his company and taking him over the sea to be witness of his wedding with Katharine Howard. Dogged, and thrusting his word and his papers in at every turn, the young Poins had pursued them aboard a ship bound for the Thames.
This story came out in jerks and with divagations, but it was evident to Throckmorton that the young man had stuck to his task with a dogged obtuseness enough to have given offence to a dozen Culpeppers. He had begged him, in the inn, to take the lieutenancy of the Calais lighters; he had trotted at Culpepper’s elbow in the winding streets; he had stood in his very path on the gangway to the ship that was to take them to Greenwich. At every step he had pulled out of his poke the commission for the lieutenancy—so that Throckmorton had in his mind, by the time they sat in the stern of the swift barge, the image of Culpepper as a savage bulldog pursued along streets and up ship-sides by a gambolling bear cub that pulled at his ears and danced before him. And he could credit Culpepper only with a saturnine and drunken good humour at having very successfully driven Cardinal Pole out of Paris. That was the only way in which he could account for the fact that Culpepper had not spitted the boy at the first onslaught. But for the sheer ill-luck of his sword’s having been stolen, he might have done it, and been laid by the heels for six months in Calais. For Calais being a frontier town of the English realm, it was an offence very serious there for English to draw sword upon English, however molested.
It was that upon which Throckmorton had counted; and he cursed the day when Culpepper had entered the thieves’ hut outside Ardres. But for that Culpepper must have drawn upon the boy; he must have been lying then in irons in Calais holdfast. As it was, there was this long chase. God knew whether they would find him in Greenwich; God knew where they would find him. He had gone to Greenwich, doubtless, because when he had left England the Court had been in Greenwich, and he expected there to find his cousin Kat. He would fly to Hampton as soon as he knew she was at Hampton; but how soon would he know it? By Poins’ account, he was too drunk to stand, and had been carried ashore on the back of his Lincolnshire henchman. Therefore he might be lying in the streets of Greenwich—and Greenwich was a small place. But different men carried their liquor so differently, and Culpepper might go ashore too drunk to stand and yet reach Hampton sober enow to be like a raging bear by eventide.
That above all things Throckmorton dreaded. For that evening Katharine would be come back from the interview with Anne of Cleves at Windsor; and whether she had succeeded or not with her quest, the King was certain to be with her in her room—to rejoice on the one hand, or violently to plead his cause on the other. And Throckmorton knew his King well enough—he knew, that is to say, his private image of his King well enough—to be assured that a meeting between
