III
The Sieur Lascelles looked round him in that dim cave.
“Ho!” he said, “this place stinks,” and he pulled from his pocket a dried and shrivelled orange-peel purse stuffed with cloves and ginger. “Ho!” he said to the cornet that was come behind him with the Queen’s horsemen. “Come not in here. This will breed a plague amongst your men!” and he added—
“Did I not tell you my sister was ill-housed?”
“Well, I was not prepared against this,” the cornet said. He was a man with a grizzling beard that had little patience away from the Court, where he had a bottle that he loved and a crony or two that he played all day at chequers with, except when the Queen rode out; then he was of her train. He did not come over the sill, but spoke sharply to his men.
“Ungird not here,” he said. “We will go farther.” For some of them were for setting their pikes against the mud wall and casting their swords and heavy bottle-belts on to the table before the door. The old man in the armchair began suddenly to prattle to them all—of a horse-thief that had been dismembered and then hanged in pieces thirty years before. The cornet looked at him for a moment and said—
“Sir, you are this woman’s father-in-law, I do think. Have you aught to report against her?” He bent in at the door, holding his nose. The old man babbled of one Pease-Cod Noll that had no history to speak of but a swivel eye.
“Well,” the grizzled cornet said, “I shall get little sense here.” He turned upon Mary Hall.
“Mistress,” he said, “I have a letter here from the Queen’s High Grace,” and, whilst he fumbled in his belt to find a little wallet that held the letter, he spoke on: “But I misdoubt you cannot read. Therefore I shall tell you the Queen’s High Grace commandeth you to come into her service—or not, as the report of your character shall be. But at any rate you shall come to the castle.”
Mary Hall could find no words for men of condition, so long she had been out of the places where such are found. She swallowed in her throat and held her breast over her heart.
“Where is the village here?” the cornet said, “or what justice is there that can write you a character under his seal?”
She made out to say that there was no village, all the neighbourhood having been hanged. A half-mile from there there was the house of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, a justice. From the house-end he might see it, or he might have a hind to guide him. But he would have no guide; he would have no man nor maid nor child to go from there to the justice’s house. He set one soldier to guard the back door and one the front, that none came out nor went beyond the dyke-end.
“Neither shall you go, Sir Lascelles,” he said.
“Well, give me leave with my sister to walk this knoll,” Lascelles said good-humouredly. “We shall not corrupt the grass blades to bear false witness of my sister’s chastity.”
“Ay, you may walk upon this mound,” the cornet answered. Having got out the packet of the Queen’s letter, he girded up his belt again.
“You will get you ready to ride with me,” he said to Mary Hall. “For I will not be in these marshes after nightfall, but will sleep at Shrimpton Inn.”
He looked around him and added—
“I will have three of your geese to take with us,” he said. “Kill me them presently.”
Lascelles looked after him as he strode away round the house with the long paces of a stiff horseman.
“Before God,” he laughed, “that is one way to have information about a quean. Now are we prisoners whilst he inquires after your character.”
“Oh, alack!” Mary Hall said, and she cast up her hands.
“Well, we are prisoners till he come again,” her brother said good-humouredly. “But this is a foul hole. Come out into the sunlight.”
She said—
“If you are with them, they cannot come to take me prisoner.”
He looked her full in the eyes with his own that twinkled inscrutably. He said very slowly—
“Were your mar-locks and prinking-prankings so very evil at the old Duchess’s?”
She grew white: she shrank away as if he had threatened her with his fist.
“The Queen’s Highness was such a child,” she said. “She cannot remember. I have lived very godly since.”
“I will do what I can to save you,” he said. “Let me hear about it, as, being prisoners, we may never come off.”
“You!” she cried out. “You who stole my wedding portion!”
He laughed deviously.
“Why, I have laid it up so well for you that you may wed a knight now if you do my bidding. I was ever against your wedding Hall.”
“You lie!” she said. “You gar’d me do it.”
The maids were peeping out of the cellar, whither they had fled.
“Come upon the grass,” he said. “I will not be heard to say more than this: that you and I stand and fall together like good sister and goodly brother.”
Their faces differed only in that hers was afraid and his smiling as he thought of new lies to tell her. Her face in her hood, pale beneath its weathering, approached the colour of his that shewed the pink and white of indoors. She came very slowly near him, for she was dazed. But when she was almost at the sill he caught her hand and drew it beneath his elbow.
“Tell me truly,” she said, “shall I see the Court or a prison? … But you cannot speak truth, nor ever could when we were tiny twins. God help me: last Sunday I had the mind to wed my yardman. I would become such a liar as thou to come away from here.”
“Sister,” he said, “this I tell you
