The Lady Mary dropped the parchment on to the floor at her side.
“I rede you do as this knight wills,” she said; “for, amidst the little sticklers of spies that are here, this knight, this emperor of spies, moves as a pillow of shadow. He stalks amongst them as, in the night, the dread and awful lion of Numidia. He shall be to you more a corslet of proof than all the virtue that your life may borrow from the precepts of Diana. We, that are royal and sit in high places, have our feet in such mire.”
“Now before God on His throne,” Katharine Howard said, “if you be of royal blood, I will teach you a lesson. For hear me—”
“No, I will hear thee no more,” the Lady Mary answered; “I will teach thee. For thou art not the only one in this land to be proud. I will show thee such a pride as shall make thee blush.”
She stood up and came slowly down the steps of the dais. She squared back her shoulders and folded her hands before her; she erected her head, and her eyes were dark. When she was come to where the Queen sat, she kneeled down.
“I acknowledge thee to be my mother,” she said, “that have married the King, my father. I pray you that you do take me by the hand and set me in that seat that you did raise for me. I pray you that you do style me a princess, royal again in this land. And I pray you to lesson me and teach me that which you would have me do as well as that which it befits me to do. Take me by the hand.”
“Nay, it is my lord that should do this,” the Queen whispered. Before that she had started to her feet; her face had a flush of joy; her eyes shone with her transparent faith. She brushed back a strand of hair from her brow; she folded her hands on her breasts and raised her glance upwards to seek the dwelling-place of Almighty God and the saints in their glorious array.
“It is my lord should do this!” she said again.
“Speak no more words,” the Lady Mary said. “I have heard enow of thy pleadings. You have heard me say that.”
She continued upon her knees.
“It is thou or none!” she said. “It is thou or none shall witness this my humiliation and my pride. Take me by the hand. My patience will not last forever.”
The Queen set her hand between the girl’s. She raised her to her feet.
When the Lady Mary stood high and shadowy, in black, with her white face beneath that dais, she looked down upon the Queen.
“Now, hear me!” she said. “In this I have been humble to you; but I have been most proud. For I have in my veins a greater blood than thine or the King’s, my father’s. For, inasmuch as Tudor blood is above Howard’s, so my mother’s, that was royal of Spain, is above Tudor’s. And this it is to be royal—
“I have had you, a Queen, kneel before me. It is royal to receive petitions—more royal still it is to grant them. And in this, further, I am more proud. For, hearing you say that you had prayed the King for Cromwell’s life, I thought, this is a virtue-mad Queen. She shall most likely fall!—Prudence biddeth me not to be of her party. But shall I, who am royal, be prudent? Shall I, who am of the house of Aragon, be more afraid than thou, a Howard?
“I tell you—No! If you will be undone for the sake of virtue, blindly, and like a fool, unknowing the consequences, I, Mary of Aragon and England, will make alliance with thee, knowing that the alliance is dangerous. And, since it is more valiant to go to a doom knowingly than blindfold, so I do show myself more valiant than thou. For well I know—since I saw my mother die—that virtue is a thing profitless, and impracticable in this world. But you—you think it shall set up temporal monarchies and rule peoples. Therefore, what you do you do for profit. I do it for none.”
“Now, by the Mother of God,” Katharine Howard said, “this is the gladdest day of my life.”
“Pray you,” Mary said, “get you gone from my sight and hearing, for I endure ill the appearance and sound of joy. And, Queen, again I bid you beware of calling any day fortunate till its close. For, before midnight you may be ruined utterly. I have known more Queens than thou. Thou art the fifth I have known.”
She added—
“For the rest, what you will I will do: submission to the King and such cozening as he will ask of me. God keep you, for you stand in need of it.”
At supper that night there sat all such knights and lordlings as ate at the King’s expense in the great hall that was in the midmost of the castle, looking on to the courtyard. There were not such a many of them, maybe forty; from the keeper of the Queen’s records, the Lord d’Espahn, who sat at the table head, down to the lowest of all, the young Poins, who sat far below the saltcellar. The greater lords of the Queen’s household, like the Lord Dacre of the North, did not eat at this common table, or only when the Queen herself there ate, which she did at midday when there was a feast.
Nevertheless, this eating was conducted with gravity, the Lord d’Espahn keeping a vigilant eye down the table, which was laid with a fair white cloth. It cost a man a fine to be drunk before the white meats were eaten—unless, indeed, a man came drunk to the board—and the saltcellar of state stood a-midmost of the cloth. It was of silver from Holland, and represented a globe of the earth, opened at the
