Privy Seal: His Last Venture

'I sold three farms to buy her a gown,' he said.

'Aye!' Nick Hogben answered. 'So thou saidst in Stamford town three years gone by. And thou saidst more and the manner of it. But betwixt the buying the gowns and the more of it lie many things. As this: Did she take the gown of thee? Or as this: Having taken the gown of thee, did she pay thee in the kind payment should be made in?'

Culpepper looked up at him with a sharp snarl.

'For – ' and Nick Hogben shook his head sagaciously, 'Stamford town believed the more and the manner of it, and Kat Howard's name is up in the town of Stamford. But I have not yet chiselled out the great piece that shall come from my pike when certain sure I am that Kat Howard is down under a man's foot.'

Culpepper rose suddenly to his feet and wagged a finger at Hogben.

'Now I am minded to wed Kat Howard!' he said. 'Therefore I will say I lied then. But as for what you shall think, consider that I had her alone many days and nights; consider that though she be over learned in the Latin tongues that set a woman against joyment, I have a proper person and a strong wrist, a pleasant tongue but a hot and virulent purpose. Consider that she welly starved in her father, the Lord Edmund's, house and I had pies and gowns for her. Consider these things and make a hole or no hole as thou wilt – '

Nicholas Hogben considered with his eyes on the ground; he scratched his head with a black finger.

'I can make nowt out,' he said. 'But I will curse thee for a lily-livered hoggit an thou marry Kat Howard.'

'Why, I am minded to marry her,' Culpepper answered, 'over here in France,' and he stretched a hand towards the long white road where in the distance the French peasants were driving lean beasts for a true Englishman's provender in Calais. 'Over here in France. Body of God! – Body of God! – ' He wavered, being still fevered. 'In England it had been otherwise. But here, shivering across plains and seas – why, I will wed with her.'

'Talkest like a Blind God Boy,' Hogben said sarcastically. 'How knowest she be thine to take?' He pointed at the young Poins. 'Here be another hath had doings with a Kat Howard, though I cannot well discern if she be thine or whose.'

Culpepper sprang, a flash of green, straight at the callow boy. But Poins had sprung too, back and to the left, and his oiled sword was from its scabbard and warring in the air.

'Holy Sepulchre! I will spit thee – Holy Sepulchre! I will spit thee!' he cried.

'Ass!' Culpepper answered. 'In God's time I will break thy back across my knee. But God's time is not yet.'

He poured out a flood of questions about the Kat Howard Poins had seen.

'Squahre Thomas,' Nicholas Hogben interrupted him maliciously, 'that young man of Kent saith e'ennow: "Kat Howard is like to – " and then he chokes upon his words. Now even what make of thing is it that Kat Howard is like to do or be done by?'

With his sword whiffling before him the young Poins could think rapidly – nay, upon any matter that concerned his advancement he could think rapidly always.

'Goodman Thomas Culpepper,' he said in a high voice, 'the mistress Katharine Howard I spoke of is thin and dark and small, and married to Edward Howard of Biggleswade. She is like to die of a quinsy.'

For well he knew that his advancement depended on his keeping Thomas Culpepper on the hither side of the water; and if it muddled his brain to have been so usefully mishandled for carrying letters betwixt the King's Grace and the Lady Katharine Howard, he knew enough of a jealous man to know that that was no news to keep Thomas Culpepper in Calais.

Culpepper's animation dropped like the light of a torch that is dowsed.

'Put up thy pot skewer,' he said; 'my Kat is tall and fairish and unwed. Ha' ye not seen her with the Lady Mary of England's women?'

The young Poins, zealous to be rid of the matter, answered fervently:

'Never. She is not talked of in the Court.'

'That is the best hearing,' Thomas Culpepper said. 'I do absolve thee of five kicks for being the messenger of that.'

III

They were a-walking in the little garden below the windows of the late Cardinal's house at Hampton; the April sun shone, for May came on apace, and in that sheltered spot the light lay warm and no breezes came. They took great pleasure there beneath the windows. One girl kept three golden balls flying in the air, whilst three others and two lords sought to distract her by inducing her little hound to bark shrilly below her hands up at the flying balls that caught in them the light of the sun, the blue of the sky, and the red and grey of the warm palace walls. Down the nut walk, where the trees that the dead Cardinal had set were already fifteen years old and dark with young green leaves as bright as little flowers, they had set up archery targets. Cicely Elliott, in black and white, flashing like a magpie in the alleys, ran races with the Earl of Surrey beneath the blinking eyes of her old knight; the Lady Mary, herself habited all in black, moved like a dark shadow upon a dial between the little beds upon paths of red brick between box hedges as high as your ankles. She spoke to none save once when she asked the name of a flower. But laughter went up, and it seemed as if, in this first day out of doors, all the Court opened its lungs to drink the new air; and they were making plans for May Day already.

They asked, too, a riddle: 'An a nutshell from Candlemas loved a merry bud in March, how should it come to pleasure and content?' and men who had the answer looked wise and shook their sides at guessing faces.

In a bower at the south end of the small garden Katharine Howard sat to play cat's-cradle with the old lady of Rochford. This foolish game and this foolish old woman, with her unceasing tales of the Queen Anne Boleyn – who had been her cousin – gave to Katharine a great feeling of ease. With her troubled eyes and weary expression, her occasional groans as the rheumatism gnawed at her joints, the old lady minded her of the mother she had so seldom seen. She had always been somewhere away, all through Katharine's young years, planning and helping her father to advancement that never came, and hopeless to control her wild children. Thus Katharine had come to love this poor old woman and consorted much with her, for she was utterly bewildered to control the Lady Mary's maids that were beneath her care.

Katharine held out her hands, parallel, as if she were praying, with the strand of blue wool and silver cord criss-cross and diagonal betwixt her fingers. The old lady bent above them, silent and puzzled, to get the key to the strings. Twice she protruded her gouty fingers, with swollen ends; and twice she drew them back to stroke her brows.

'I mind,' she said suddenly, 'that I played cat's-cradle with my cousin Anne, that was a sinful queen.' She bent again and puzzled about the strings. 'In those days I had a great skill, I mind. We revised it to the eleventh change many times before her death.' Again she leant forward and again back. 'I did come near my death, too,' she added.

Katharine's eyes had been gazing past her; suddenly she asked:

'Was Anne Boleyn loved after she grew to be Queen?'

The old woman's face took on a palsied and haunted look.

'God help you!' she said; 'do you ask that?' and she glanced round her furtively in an agony of apprehension. Something had drawn all the gay gowns and embroidered stomachers towards the higher terrace. They were all alone in the arbour.

'Why,' Katharine said, 'so many innocent creatures have been done to death since Cromwell came, that, though she was lewd before and a heretic all her days, I think doubts may be.'

The old lady pressed her hand upon her bosom where her heart beat.

'Madam Howard,' she said, 'for my life I know not the truth of the matter. There was much trickery; God knoweth the truth.'

Katharine mused for a moment above the cat's-cradle on her fingers. Near the joint at the end of the little one there was a small mole.

'Take you the fifth and third strings,' she said. 'The king string holds your wrist,' and whilst the old face was still intent upon the problem she said:

'I think that if a woman come to be Queen it is odds that she will live chastely, how lewd soever she ha' been aforetime.'

Lady Rochford set her fingers in between Katharine's, but when she drew them back with the strings upon them, they wavered, lost their straightness, knotted and then resolved themselves into a single loop as in a swift wind a cloud dies away beneath the eyes of the beholder.

'Why, 'tis pity,' Katharine said.

All the lords and all the ladies were now upon the terrace above. The old lady had the string in her broad lap. Suddenly she bent forward, her eyes opened.

'She was the enemy of your Church,' she said. 'But this I will tell you: upon occasions when men swore she had been with other men o' nights, the Queen was in my bed with me!'

Katharine nodded silently.

'Who was I that I dare speak?' the old woman sobbed; and Katharine nodded again.

Lady Rochford rubbed together her fat hands as she were ringing them.

'Before God,' she moaned, 'and by the blessed blood of Hailes that cured ever my pains, if a soul know a soul I knew Anne. If she was a woman like other women before she wedded the King, she was minded to be chaste after. Madam Howard,' – and she rocked her fat body to and fro upon the seat – 'they came to me from both sides, your Papists and her heretics; they threatened me to keep silence of what I knew. I was to keep silence. I name no names. But they came o' both sides, Papists and heretics; though she was middling true to the heretics they could not be true to her.'

Katharine answered her own thoughts with:

'Ay; but my cause is the good cause. Men shall be true to it.'

The old lady leaned forward and stroked her hands.