“Upon your life you dare not call me traitor!” and Norfolk had fallen back abashed.
Then the chamber had seemed to fill with an awful gloom and darkness; men showed only like shadows against the window lights; the constable of the Tower had come in with the warrants, and in that gloom the earth had appeared to tremble and quake beneath the Archbishop’s feet.
He crossed himself at the recollection, and, coming out of his stupor, saw that Lascelles was finishing his writings. And he was glad that he was here now and not there then.
“Prithee, your Grace,” the gentleman’s soft voice said, “let me bear, myself, this letter to the Queen.”
The Archbishop shivered frostily in his robes.
“I will have no more Cromwell tricks,” he said. “I have said it”; and he affected an obdurate tone.
“Then, indeed, all is lost,” Lascelles answered; “for this Queen is very resolved.”
The Archbishop cast his eyes up to the cold stone ceiling above him. He crossed himself.
“You are a very devil,” he said, and panic came into his eyes, so that he turned them all round him as if he sought an issue at which to run out.
“The Papist lords in this castle met on Saturday night,” Lascelles said; “their meeting was very secret, and Norfolk was their head. But I have heard it said that not one of them was for the Queen.”
The Archbishop shrank within himself.
“I am not minded to hear this,” he said.
“Not one of them was for the Queen altogether; for she will render all lands and goods back to the Church, and there is no one of them but is rich with the lands and goods of the Church. That they that followed Cromwell are not for the Queen well your Grace knoweth,” his gentleman continued.
“I will not hear this; this is treason,” the Archbishop muttered.
“So that who standeth for the Queen?” Lascelles whispered. “Only a few of the baser sort that have no lands to lose.”
“The King,” the Archbishop cried out in a terrible voice; “the King standeth for her!”
He sprang up in his chair and then sank down again, covering his mouth with his hands, as if he would have intercepted the uttered words. For who knew who listened at what doors in these days. He whispered horribly—
“What a folly is this. Who shall move the King? Will reports of his ambassadors that Cleves, or Charles, or Francis miscall the Queen? You know they will not, for the King is aware of how these princes batten on carrion. Will broad sheets of the Lutheran? You know they will not, for the King is aware of how those coggers come by their tales. Will the King go abroad among the people any more to hear what they say? You know he will not. For he is grown too old, and his fireside is made too sweet—”
He wavered, and he could not work himself up with a longer show of anger.
“Prithee,” Lascelles said, “let me bear this letter myself to the Queen.” His voice was patient and calm.
The Archbishop lay back, impotent, in his chair. His arms were along the arms of it: he had dropped his book upon the table. His long gown was draped all over him down to his feet; his head remained motionless; his eyes did not wink, and gazed at despair; his hands drooped, open and impotent.
Suddenly he moved one of them a very little.
VII
It was the Queen’s habit to go every night, when the business of the day was done, to pray, along with the Lady Mary, in the small chapel that was in the roof of the castle. To vespers she went with all the Court to the big chapel in the courtyard that the King had builded especially for her. But to this little chapel, that was of Edward IV’s time, small and round-arched, all stone and dark and bare, she went with the Lady Mary alone. Her ladies and her doorguards they left at the stair foot, on a level with the sleeping rooms of the poorer sort, but up the little stairway they climbed by themselves, in darkness, to pray privately for the conversion of England. For this little place was so small and so forgotten that it had never been desecrated by Privy Seal’s men. It had had no vessels worth the taking, and only very old vestments and a few ill-painted pictures on the stone walls that were half hidden in the dust.
Katharine had found this little place when, on her first day at Pontefract, she had gone a-wandering over the castle with the King. For she was curious to know how men had lived in the old times; to see their rooms and to mark what old things were there still in use. And she had climbed thus high because she was minded to gaze upon the huge expanse of country and of moors that from the upper leads of the castle was to be seen. But this little chapel had seemed to her to be all the more sacred because it had been
