Thus for long the Queen was sad; the little Prince very sick; and the King ate no food, but sat gazing at the victuals, though the Queen cooked some messes for him with her own hand.
One Sunday after evensong, at which Cranmer himself had read prayers, the King came nearly merrily to his supper.
“Ho, chuck,” he said, “you have your enemies. Here hath been Cranmer weeping to me with a parcel of tales writ on paper.”
He offered it to her to read, but she would not; for, she said, she knew well that she had many enemies, only, very safely she could trust her fame in her Lord’s hands.
“Why, you may,” he said, and sat him down at the table to eat, with the paper stuck in his belt. “Body o’ God!” he said. “If it had been any but Cranmer he had eaten bread in Hell this night. ’A wept and trembled! Body o’ God! Body o’ God!”
And that night he was more merry before the fire than he had been for many weeks. He had in the music to play a song of his own writing, and afterwards he swore that next day he would ride to London, and then at his council send that which she would have sent to Rome.
“For, for sure,” he said, “there is no peace in this world for me save when I hear you pray. And how shall you pray well for me save in the old form and fashion?”
He lolled back in his chair and gazed at her.
“Why,” he said, “it is a proof of the great mercy of the Saviour that He sent you on earth in so fair a guise. For if you had not been so fair, assuredly I had not noticed you. Then would my soul have gone straightway to Hell.”
And he called that the letter to Rome might be brought to him, and read it over in the firelight. He set it in his belt alongside the other paper, that next day when he came to London he might lay it in the hands of Sir Thomas Carter, that should carry it to Rome.
The Queen said: “Praise God!”
For though she was not set to believe that next day that letter would be sent, or for many days more, yet it seemed to her that by little and little she was winning him to her will.
II
Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, had builded him a new tennis court in where his stables had been before poverty had caused him to sell the major part of his horseflesh. He called to him the Duke of Norfolk, who was of the Papist cause, and Sir Henry Wriothesley who was always betwixt and between, according as the cat jumped, to see this new building of his that was made of a roofed-in quadrangle where the stable doors were bricked up or barred to make the grille.
But though Norfolk and Wriothesley came very early in the afternoon, while it was yet light, to his house, they wasted most of the daylight hours in talking of things indifferent before they went to their inspection of this court. They stood talking in a long gallery beneath very high windows, and there were several chaplains and young priests and young gentlemen with them, and most of the talk was of a bear-baiting that there should be in Smithfield come Saturday. Sir Henry Wriothesley matched seven of his dogs against the seven best of the Duke’s, that they should the longer hold to the bear once they were on him, and most of the young gentlemen wagered for Sir Henry’s dogs that he had bred from a mastiff out of Portugal.
But when this talk had mostly died down, and when already twilight had long fallen, the Bishop said—
“Come, let us visit this new tennis place of mine. I think I shall show you somewhat that you have not before seen.”
He bade, however, his gentlemen and priests to stay where they were, for they had all many times seen the court or building. When he led the way, prelatical and black, for the Duke and Wriothesley, into the lower corridors of his house, the priests and young gentlemen bowed behind his back, one at the other.
In the courtyard there were four hounds of a heavy and stocky breed that came bounding and baying all round them, so that it was only by vigilance that Gardiner could save Wriothesley’s shins, for he was a man that all dogs and children hated.
“Sirs,” the Bishop said, “these dogs that ye see and hear will let no man but me—not even my grooms or stablemen—pass this yard. I have bred them to that so I may be secret when I will.”
He set the key in the door that was in the bottom wall of the court.
“There is no other door here save that which goes into the stable where the grille is. There I have a door to enter and fetch out the balls that pass there.”
In the court itself it was absolute blackness.
“I trow we may talk very well without lights,” he said. “Come into this far corner.”
Yet, though there was no fear of being overheard, each of these three stole almost on tiptoe and held his breath, and in the dark and shadowy place they made a more dark and more shadowy patch with their heads all close together.
Suddenly it was as if
