Whilst he shouted with delight, Culpepper felt a man catch at his leg. He kicked his foot loose, but his hand on the bridle was clutched. There was a fair man at his horse’s shoulder that bore Privy Seal’s lion badge upon his chest. His face was upturned, and in the clamour he spoke indistinguishable words. Culpepper struck towards the mouth with his fist; the man shrank back, but stood, nevertheless, close still in the crowd. When the silence fell again, Culpepper could hear amongst the swift chopping of the axes the words—
“I rede ye ride swiftly to Hampton. I am the Lord Cromwell’s man.”
Culpepper brought his excited mind from the thought of the burning and the joy of the day, with its crowd and its odour of men, and sunshine and tumult.
“Ye say? swine,” he shouted. “Come aside!” He caught at the man’s collar and kicked his horse and pulled at its jaws till it drew them out of the thin crowd to a street’s opening.
“Sir,” the man said—he had a goodly cloth suit of dark green that spoke to his being of weight in some household—“ye are like to lose your farms at Bromley an ye hasten not to Master Viridus, who holdeth the deedings to you.”
Culpepper uttered an inarticulate roar and smote his patient horse on the side of the head for two minutes of fierce blows, digging with his heels into the girthings.
“Sir,” the man said again, “some lord will have these lands an ye come not to Hampton ere six of the clock. I know not the way of it that be a servant. But Master Viridus sent me with this message.”
Already a thin swirl of blue smoke was ascending past the friar’s figure to the bright sky; it caressed the beam of the gallows and Culpepper’s bloodshot eye pursued it upwards.
“Before God!” he muttered, “I was set to see this burning. Ye have seen many; I never a one.” A new spasm of rage caught him: he dragged at his horse’s head, and shouting, “Gallop! gallop!” set off into the dark streets, his crony behind his back.
In the Poultry he knocked over a man in a red coat that had a gold chain about his neck; on the Chepe he jumped his horse across a pigman’s booth—it brought down Hogben, horse and pike; three drunken men were fighting in Paternoster Street—Culpepper charged above their bodies; but very shortly he came through Temple Bar and was in the marshes and fields. Well out between the hedgerows he was aware that one galloped behind him. He drew a violent rein where the Cow Brook crossed the deep muddied road and looked back.
“Sir,” he called, “this night I will hold a mouse on a chain above a coal fire. So I will see a burning, and my cousin Kat shall see it with me.” He spurred on again.
By the time he was come to Brentford four men, habited like the first, rode behind him. When he stayed to let his horse drink from the river opposite Richmond Hill, he was aware that across the stream a pageant with sweet music marched a little beyond the further bank. He could see the tops of pikes and pennons amid the tree trunks.
He muttered that such a pageant he would very soon make for himself; for, filled with the elation of his new magnificence, since Privy Seal was his friend and Viridus was earnest to do him favour, he imagined that no captain nor lord in that land soon should overpass him. For that any lord should desire his new lands troubled him little; only he hastened to cut that lord’s throat and to kiss his cousin Kat.
It was a quarter before six when he drew rein in the green yard that lay before the King’s arch in Hampton. There befell the strangest scuffle there; flaring for a moment and gone out like the gunpowder they sometimes lit in saucers for sport. A man called Lascelles came slowly from under the arch to meet him, and then, running over the green grass from the little side door, came the young Poins in red breeches, pulling off a red coat that he had had but half the time to don and tugging at his sword whose hilt was caught in the sleeve hole. Even as he issued, Lascelles, walking slowly, began to run and to call. Four other men of Privy Seal’s ran from under the arch, and the four men that had followed behind him so far, closed their horses round his. The boy had his sword out and his coat gave as he ran. Lascelles closed near him on the grass, stretched out a foot to trip, and the boy lay sprawling, his hands stretched out, his sword three yards before him. The four men that had run from the arch had him up upon his feet and held his arms when Culpepper had ridden the hundred yards from the gate to them.
“Why,” said Culpepper, gazing upon the boy’s face, “it was thee wouldst have my farms.” He spat in the boy’s face and rode complacently under the archway where were many men of Privy Seal’s in the side chambers and on the steps that ran steeply to the King’s new hall.
“I do conceive now,” Culpepper, in descending from his horse, spoke to Lascelles, “wherefore that knave would have had me stay in Calais and be warder of barges. ’A would have my lands here.”
Word was given him that he must without delay go to the Sieur Viridus, and in a high good humour he followed the lead of Lascelles through the rabbit warren of small and new passages of the palace. In them it was already nearly dark.
It was in that way that, landing at the barge stage, a little stiff with the cold
