Privy Seal

The Magister Udal sat in the room of his inn in Paris, where customarily the King of France lodged such envoys as came at his expense. He had been sent there to Latinise the letters that passed between Sir Thomas Wyatt and the King’s Ministers of France, for he was esteemed the most learned man in these islands. He had groaned much at being sent there, for he must leave in England so many loves⁠—the great, blonde Margot Poins, that was maid to Katharine Howard; the tall, swaying Katharine Howard herself; Judge Cantre’s wife that had fed him well; and two other women, with all of whom he had succeeded easily or succeeded in no wise at all. But the mission was so well paid⁠—with as many crowns the day as he had had groats for teaching the Lady Mary of England⁠—that fain he had been to go. Moreover, it was by way of being a favour of Privy Seal’s. The magister had written for him a play in English; the rich post was the reward⁠—and it was an ill thing, a thing the magister dreaded, to refuse the favours of Privy Seal. He consoled himself with the thought that the writing of letters in Latin might wash from his mouth the savour of the play he had written in the vulgar tongue.

But his work in Paris was ended⁠—for with the flight of Cardinal Pole, who had left Paris precipitately upon news that the King of England had sent a drunken roisterer

There was a great jangle, light fell into the dusky room through the doorhole, and he found himself beneath the eyes of many scullions with spits, cooks with carving forks, and kitchenmaids with sharpened distaffs of steel.

“Now I will be wed this night,” she laughed.

He moved to the end of the couch and blinked at her in the strong light.

“I will be wed this night,” she said again, and rearranged her headdress, revealing, as her sleeves fell open, her white, plump arms.

“Why, no!” he answered irresolutely.

She said in French to her aids:

“Come near him with the spits!”

They moved towards him, a white-clad body with their pointed things glittering in the light of torches. He sprang behind the great table against the window and seized the heavy-leaden sandarach. The French scullions knew, tho’ he had no French, that he would cleave one of their skulls, and they stood, a knot of seven⁠—four men and three maids⁠—in blue hoods, in the centre of the room.

“By Mars and by Apollo!” he said, “I was minded to wed with thee if I could no other way. But now, like Phaeton, I will cast myself from the window and die, or like the wretches thrown from the rock, called Tarpeian. I was minded to a folly: now I am minded rather for death.”

“How nobly thy tongue doth wag, husband,” she said, and cried in French for the rogues to be gone. When the door closed upon the lights she said in the comfortable gloom: “I dote upon thy words.

The finger still upon her plump lips, she led him to a small door behind the chimney stack. They climbed up through cobwebs, ham, flitches of smoked beef, and darkness, and the reek of wood-smoke, until they came, high up, to a storeroom in the slope of a mansard roof. Light filtered dimly between the tiles, and many bales and sacks lay upon the raftered floor like huge monsters in a huge, dim cave.

“Hearken! make no sound,” she whispered, and in the intense gloom they heard a sullen, stertorous, intermittent rumble.

“The envoy sleeps,” she said. She set her eye to a knothole in the planked wall. “ ’A sleeps!” she whispered. “My pigling made a great thirst in him. Much wine he drank. Set your eye to the knothole.”

With his face glued against the rough wood, the magister could see in the large room a great fair man, in a great blue chair behind a littered table. His head hung forward, shewed only a pink bald spot in the thin hair, and brilliant red ears. A slow rumble of snoring came for a long minute, then ceased for as long.

From behind Udal’s back came a crash, and he started back to see the large woman, who had overturned a chest.

“That is to test how he sleeps,” she said. “See if he have moved.” The man, plain to see through the knothole, had stirred no muscle; again the heavy rumble of the snore came to them.

And set up a chantry of priests to pray the child grow sturdy. It was thus my cousin Surrey’s life was saved that was erst a weakling.”

“Be Queen,” he said suddenly. “Marry me. I came here to ask it.”

Her lips parted; she left her hand in his. The expected words had come.

“I have thought on it,” she said. “I knew ye could not long hold to child and sire as ye sware ye would.”

“Kat,” he said, “ye shall do my will. I ha’ news from France. Ye gave me good rede. I ha’ news from Cleves: the Cleves woman shall no more be queen of mine. Thee I will have.”

She raised herself from the bench and turned in the entrance of the arbour to look at him.

“Give me leave to walk on the path,” she said. “I have thought on this⁠—for I was sure I gave you good advice, and well I knew Cleves would sever from ye.” She faltered: “I ha’ thought on it. But ’tis different to think on it and to ha’ the thing in your face.”

He uttered, “Make haste,” and she walked down the path. He saw her, tall, fair, swaying a little in the wind, raise her face to the skies; her long fingers made the sign of the cross, her hood fell back. Her lips moved; the fringes of her lashes came down over her blue eyes, and she seemed to wrestle with her hands.

The Queen sat in her painted gallery at Richmond, and all around her her maids sewed and span. The gallery was long; along the panels that faced the windows were angels painted in red and blue and gold, and in the three centre squares St. George, whose face was the face of the King’s Highness, in one issued from a yellow city upon a green plain; in one with a cherry-coloured lance slew a green dragon from whose mouth issued orange-coloured flames; and in one carried away, that he might wed her in a rose-coloured tower on a hillside, a princess in a black gown with hair painted of real gold.

Whilst the maids sewed in silence the Queen sat still upon a stool. Light-skinned, not very stout, with a smooth oval face, she had laid her folded hands on the gold and pearl embroidery of her lap and gazed away into the distance, thinking. She sat so still that not even the lawn tips of her wide hood with its invisible, minute sewings of white, quivered. Her gown was of cloth of gold, but since her being in England she had learned to wear a train, and in its folds on the ground slept a small Italian greyhound. About her neck she had a partelet set with green jewels and with pearls. Her maids sewed; the spinning-wheels ate away the braided flax from the spindles, and the sunlight poured down through the high windows.