The Queen looked over her shoulder and caught the glint of his red heel as it went past the doorpost.
“In our north parts,” she said, and she was glad that Lascelles had fled, “the seasons come ever tardily.”
“Well, your Grace has not delayed to blossom,” Mary said.
It was part of her humour when she was in a taunting mood to call the Queen always “your Grace” or “your Majesty” at every turn of the phrase.
Katharine looked at the pink intently. Her face had no expression, she was determined at once to have a cheerful patience and not to show it in her face.
The little Prince stole his hand into hers.
“Wherefore did my father—rex pater meus—pummel the man in the long cloak?” he asked.
“You knew it then?” Katharine asked of her stepdaughter.
“I knew it not,” the Lady Mary answered.
“I saw it from this window, but my sister would not look,” the Prince said.
The Queen was going to shut, with her own hand, the door, the little boy trotting behind her, but, purple-clothed and huge, the King was there.
“Well, I will not be shut out in mine own castle,” he said pleasantly.
In those, the quiet days of his realm when most things were going well, his face beneath his beard had taken a rounder and a smoother outline. He moved with motions less hasty than those he had had two years before, and when he had cast a task off it was done with and went out of his mind, so that he appeared a very busy man with, between whiles, the leisure to saunter.
“In a half hour,” he said, “I go north to meet the King o’ Scots. I would I had not the long journey to make but could stay with ye. It is pleasant here; the air is livening.” He caught his little son by the armpits and hoisted him on to his purple shoulders. “Hey, princekin,” he said, “what news ha’ you o’ the day?”
The little Edward pulled his father’s bonnet off that he might the better see the huge brows and the little eyes.
“I told my sister that you did pummel a man in a long gown. What is even ‘long gown’ in the learned tongue?” He played daintily and languidly with the hair of the King’s temples, and when the King had said that he might call it “doctorum toga,” he added, “But my sister would not come to look.”
“Well, thy sister is a monstrous learned wench,” the King said with a heavy benignity. “She could not leave her book.”
The Lady Mary stood rigid, with a mock humility. She had her hands clasped before her, the folds of her black skirt fell stiffly just to the ground. She pursed her lips and strove with herself to speak, for she was minded to exhibit disdain, but her black mood was too strong for her.
“I did not read in my book, because I could not,” she said numbly. “Your son disturbed my reading. But I did not come to look, because I would not.”
With one arm round the boy’s little waist as he sat on high, and one hand on the little feet, the King looked at his daughter in a sudden hot rage; for to speak contemptuously of his son was a thing that filled him with anger and surprise. He opened his mouth to shout. Katharine Howard was gently turning a brass sphere with the constellations upon it that stood upon the table. She moved her fair face round towards the King and set her finger upon her lips. He shrugged his shoulders, prince and all moving up together, and his face took on the expression, half abashed and half resigned, of a man who is reminded by his womankind that he is near to a passionate folly.
Katharine by that time had schooled him how to act when Mary was in that humour, and he let out no word.
“I do not like that this Prince should play in my room,” the Lady Mary pursued him relentlessly, and he was so well lessoned that he answered only—
“Ye must fight that cock with Kat. It is Kat that sends him, not I.”
Nevertheless he was too masterful a man to keep his silence altogether; he was, besides, so content upon the whole that he was sure he could hold his temper in check, and the better to take breath for a long speech, he took the little boy from his shoulder and planted his feet abroad on the carpet.
“See now, Moll,” he said, “make friends!” and he stretched out a large hand. She shrugged her shoulders half invisibly.
“I will kneel down to the King of this country and to the Supreme Head of the Church as it is here set up by law. What more would you have of me?”
“See now, Moll!” he said.
He fingered the medal upon his chest and cast about for words.
“Let us have peace in this realm,” he said. “We are very near it.”
She raised her eyelids with a tiny contempt.
“It hangs much around you,” he went on. “Listen! I will tell ye the whole matter.”
Slowly and sagaciously he disentangled all his coil of policies. His letter to the Holy Father was all drafted and ready to be put into fine words. But, before he sent it, he must be sure of peace abroad. It was like this—
“Ye know,” he said, “though great wrangles have been in the past betwixt him and thee and mine own self, how my heart has ever been well inclined to my nephew, thy cousin the Emperor. There are in Christendom now only he and France that are anyways strong to stand against me or to invade me. But France I ha’ never loved, and him much.”
“Ye are grown gentle then,” Mary said, “and forgiving in your old age, for ye know I ha’ plotted against you with my cousin and my cousin with me.”
“It is a very ancient tale,” the King said. “Forget
