When the Magister came to her, she had with her in the little room the Lady Rochford and the Lady Cicely Rochford that had married the old knight when she was Cicely Elliott. Udal had light chains on his wrists and on his ankles, and the Queen sent her guards to await him at her outer door. The Lady Cicely set back her head and laughed at the ceiling.
“Why, here are the bonds of holy matrimony!” she said to his chains. “I ha’ never seen them so plain before.”
The Magister had straws on his cloak, and he limped a little, being stiff with the damp of his cell.
“Ave, Regina!” he said. “Moriturus te saluto!” He sought to kneel, but he could not bend his joints; he smiled with a humorous and rueful countenance at his own plight.
The Queen said she had brought him there to read the Latin of her letter. He ducked his brown, lean head.
“Ha,” he said, “sine cane pastor—without his dog, as Lucretius hath it, the shepherd watches in vain. Wolves—videlicet, errors—shall creep into your marshalled words.”
Katharine kept to him a cold face and, a little abashed, he muttered under his breath—
“I ha’ played with many maids, but this is the worst pickle that ever I was in.”
He took her parchment and read, but, because she was the Queen, he would not say aloud that he found solecisms in her words.
“Give me,” he said, “your best pen, and let me sit upon a stool!”
He sat down upon the stool, set the writing on his knee, and groaned with his stiffness. He took up his task, but when those ladies began to talk—the Lady Cicely principally about a hawk that her old knight had training for the Queen, a white sea hawk from Norway—he winced and hissed a little because they disturbed him.
“Misery!” he said; “I remember the days when no mouse dared creak if I sat to my task in the learned tongues.”
The Queen then remembered very well how she had been a little girl with the Magister for tutor in her father’s great and bare house. It was after Udal had been turned out of his mastership at Eton. He had been in vile humour in most of those days, and had beaten her very often and fiercely with his bundle of twigs. It was only afterwards that he had called her his best pupil.
Remembering these things, she dropped her voice and sat still, thinking. Cicely Elliott, who could not keep still, blew a feather into the air and caught it again and again. The old Lady Rochford, her joints swollen with rheumatism, played with her beads in her lap. From time to time she sighed heavily and, whilst the Magister wrote, he sighed after her. Katharine would not send her ladies away, because she would not be alone with him to have him plague her with entreaties. She would not go herself, because it would have been to show him too much honour then, though a few days before she would have gone willingly because his vocation and his knowledge of the learned tongues made him a man that it was right to respect.
But when she read what he had written for her, his lean, brown face turning eagerly and with a ferreting motion from place to place on the parchment, she was filled with pity and with admiration for the man’s talent. It was as if Seneca were writing to his master, or Pliny to the Emperor Trajan. And, being a very tender woman at bottom—
“Magister,” she said, “though you have wrought me the greatest grief I think ye could, by so injuring one I like well, yet this is to me so great a service that I will entreat the King to remit some of your pains.”
He stumbled up from his stool and this time managed to kneel.
“Oh, Queen,” he said, “Doctissima fuisti; you were the best pupil that ever I had—” She tried to silence him with a motion of her hand. But he twined his lean hands together with the little chains hanging from them. “I call this to your pitiful mind,” he brought out, “not because I would have you grateful, but to make you mindful of what I suffer—non quia grata sed ut clemens sis. For, for advancement I have no stomach, since by advancing me you will advance my wife from Paris, and for liberty I have no use since you may never make me free of her. Leave me to rot in my cell, but, if it be but the tractate of Diodorus Siculus, a very dull piece, let me be given some book in a learned tongue. I faint, I starve, I die for lack of good letters. I that no day in my life have passed—nulla die sine—no day without reading five hours in goodly books since I was six and breeched. Bethink you, you that love learning—”
“Now tell me,” Cicely Elliott cried out, “which would you rather in your cell—the Letters of Cicero or a kitchen wench?”
The Queen bade her hold her peace, and to the Magister she uttered—
“Books I will have sent you, for I think it well that you should be so well employed. And, for your future, I will have you set
