“If it were anything else but Chancellor she might not come, and I would wed Margot Poins more willingly than any other. But—God knows I do not willingly make this avowal, but am in a corner, sicut vulpis in lucubris, like a fox in the coils—this Paris woman is my wife.”
Henry gave a great shout of laughter, but slowly Margot Poins fell across the Queen’s knees. She uttered no sound, but lay there motionless. The sight affected Udal to an epileptic fury.
“Jove be propitious to me!” he stuttered out. “I know not what I can do.” He began to tear the fur of his cloak and toss it over the battlements. “The woman is my wife—wed by a friar. If this were a Protestant realm now—or if I pleaded pre-contract—and God knows I ha’ promised marriage to twenty women before I, in an evil day, married one—eheu!—to this one—”
He began to sob and to wring his thin hands.
“Quod faciam? Me miser! Utinam. Utinam—”
He recovered a little coherence.
“If this were a Protestant land ye might say this wedding was no wedding, for that a friar did it; but I know ye will not suffer that—” His eyes appealed piteously to the Queen.
“Why, then,” he said, “it is not upon my head that I do not wed this wench. You be my witness that I would wed; it gores my heart to see her look so pale. It tears my vitals to see any woman look pale. As Lucretius says, ‘Better the sunshine of smiles—’ ”
A little outputting of impatient breath from Katharine made him stop.
“It is you, your Grace,” he said, “that make me thus tied. If you would let us be Protestant, or, again, if I could plead pre-contract to void this Paris marriage it would let me wed with this wench—eheu—eheu. Her brother will break my bones—”
He began to cry out so lamentably, invoking Pluto to bear him to the underworld, that the King roared out upon him—
“Why, get you gone, fool.”
The Magister threw himself suddenly upon his knees, his hands clasped, his gown drooping over them down to his wrists. He turned his face to the Queen.
“Before God,” he said, “before high and omnipotent Jove, I swear that when I made this marriage I thought it was no marriage!” He reflected for a breath and added, at the recollection of the cook’s spits that had been turned against him when he had by woman’s guile been forced into marriage with the widow in Paris, “I was driven into it by force, with sharp points at my throat. Is that not enow to void a marriage? Is that not enow? Is that not enow?”
Katharine looked out over the great levels of the view. Her face was rigid, and she swallowed in her throat, her eye being glazed and hard. The King took his cue from a glance at her face.
“Get you gone, Goodman Rogue Magister,” he said, and he adopted a canonical tone that went heavily with his rustic pose. “A marriage made and consummated and properly blessed by holy friar there is no undoing. You are learned enough to know that. Rogue that you be, I am very glad that you are trapped by this marriage. Well I know that you have dangled too much with petticoats, to the great scandal of this my Court. Now you have lost your preferment, and I am glad of it. Another and a better than thou shall be the Queen’s Chancellor, for another and a better than thou shall wed this wench. We will get her such a goodly husband—”
A low, melancholy wail from Margot Poins’ agonised face—a sound such as might have been made by an ox in pain—brought him to a stop. It wrung the Magister, who could not bear to see a woman pained, up to a pitch of ecstatic courage.
“Quid fecit Caesar,” he stuttered; “what Caesar hath done, Caesar can do again. It was not till very lately since this canon of wedding and consummating and blessing by a holy friar hath been derided and contemned in this realm. And so it might be again—”
Katharine Howard cried out, “Ah!” Her features grew rigid and as ashen as cold steel. And, at her cry, the King—who could less bear than Udal to hear a woman in pain—the King sprang up from his chair. It was as amazing to all them as to hunters it is to see a great wild bull charge with a monstrous velocity. Udal was rigid with fear, and the King had him by the throat. He shook him backwards and forwards so that his book fell upon the Queen’s feet, bursting out of his ragged gown, and his cap, flying from his opened hand, fell down over the battlement into an elm top. The King guttered out unintelligible sounds of fury from his vast chest and, planted on his huge feet, he swung the Magister round him till, backwards and staggering, the eyes growing fixed in his brown and rigid face, he was pushed, jerking at each step of the King, out of sight behind the green silk curtains.
The Queen sat motionless in her purple velvet. She twisted one hand into the chain of the medallion about her throat, and one hand lay open and pale by her side. Margot Poins knelt at her side, her face hidden in the Queen’s lap, her two arms stretched out beyond her grey coifed head. For a minute she was silent. Then great sobs shook her so that Katharine swayed upon her seat. From her hidden face there came muffled and indistinguishable words, and at last Katharine said dully—
“What, child? What, child?”
Margot moved her face sideways so that her mouth was towards Katharine.
“You can unmake it! You can unmake the marriage,” she brought out in huge sobs.
Katharine said—
“No! No!”
“You unmade a King’s marriage,” Margot wailed.
Katharine said—
“No! No!” She started and uttered the words loudly;
