The Fifth Queen

Magister Nicholas Udal, the Lady Mary’s pedagogue, was very hungry and very cold. He stood undecided in the mud of a lane in the Austin Friars. The quickset hedges on either side were only waist high and did not shelter him. The little houses all round him of white daub with grey corner beams had been part of the old friars’ stables and offices. All that neighbourhood was a maze of dwellings and gardens, with the hedges dry, the orchard trees bare with frost, the arbours wintry and deserted. This congregation of small cottages was like a patch of common that squatters had taken; the great house of the Lord Privy Seal, who had pulled down the monastery to make room for it, was a central mass. Its gilded vanes were in the shape of men at arms, and tore the ragged clouds with the banners on their lances. Nicholas Udal looked at the roof and cursed the porter of it.

“He could have given me a cup of hypocras,” he said, and muttered, as a man to whom Latin is more familiar than the vulgar tongue, a hexameter about “pocula plena.”

He had reached London before nine in one of the King’s barges that came from Greenwich to take musicians back that night at four. He had breakfasted with the Lady Mary’s women at six off warm small beer and fresh meat, but it was eleven already, and he had spent all his money upon good letters.

Men struck out at all and sundry. A woman, covered to the face in a fur hood and riding a grey mule, was hit on the arm by the quarterstaff of a Protestant butcher from the Crays, because she wore a crucifix round her neck. She covered her face and shrieked lamentably. A man in green at the mule’s head, on the other side, sprang like a wild cat under the beast’s neck. His face blazed white, his teeth shone like a dog’s, he screamed and struck his dagger through the butcher’s throat.

His motions were those of a mad beast; he stabbed the mule in the shoulder to force it to plunge in the direction of the soldiers who kept the little gate, before in the throng the butcher had reached the ground. The woman was flogging at the mule with her reins. “I have killed ’un,” he shrieked.

He dived under the pikes of the soldiers and gripped the captain by both shoulders. “We be the cousins of the Duke of Norfolk,” he cried. His square red beard trembled beneath his pallid face, and suddenly he became speechless with rage.

Hands were already pulling the woman from her saddle, but the guards held their pikes transversely against the faces of the nearest, crushing in noses and sending sudden streaks of blood from jaws. The uproar was like a hurricane and the woman’s body, on high, swayed into the little space that the soldiers held. She was crying with the pain of her arm that she held with her other hand.

She uncovered her face and sat looking at the ground. Her furs were all grey, she had had none new for four years, and they were tight to her young body that had grown into them. The roses embroidered on her glove had come unstitched, and, against the steely grey of the river, her face in its whiteness had the tint of mother of pearl and an expression of engrossed and grievous absence.

“I have fared on foul ways this journey,” she said.

“Thy father’s barns we will build again,” the King answered. “You shall have twice the sheep to your dower. Show me your eyes.”

“I had not thought to have seen the King so stern,” she answered.

Culpepper caught at the mule’s bridle.

“Y’ are mad,” he muttered. “Let us begone.”

“Nay, in my day,” the King answered, “y’ad found me more than kind.”

She raised her eyes to his face, steadfast, enquiring and unconcerned. He bent his great bulk downwards and kissed her upon the temple.

“Save us!” Katharine said to herself over her embroidery-frame, “here be more drunkards. If I were a Queen I would make a law that any man should be burnt on the tongue that was drunk more than seven times in the week.” But she was already on her feet, making for the door, her frame dropped to the ground. There had been a murmur of voices through the thick oak, and then shouts and objurgations.

Thomas Culpepper stood in the doorway, his sword drawn, his left hand clutching the throat of the serving man who was guarding her room.

“God help us!” Katharine said angrily; “will you ruin me?”

“Cut throats?” he muttered. “Aye, I can cut a throat with any man in Christendom or out.” He shook the man backwards and forwards to support himself. “Kat, this offal would have kept me from thee.”

Katharine said, “Hush! it is very late.”

At the sound of her voice his face began to smile.

“Oh, Kat,” he stuttered jovially, “what law should keep me from thee? Thou’rt better than my wife. Heathen to keep man and wife apart, I say, I.”

“Be still. It is very late. You will shame me,” she answered.

“Why, I would not have thee shamed, Kat of the world,” he said. He shook the man again and threw him good humouredly against the wall. “Bide thou there until I come out,” he muttered, and sought to replace his sword in the scabbard. He missed the hole and scratched his left wrist with the point. “Well, ’tis good to let blood at times,” he laughed. He wiped his hand upon his breeches.

“God help thee, thou’rt very drunk,” Katharine laughed at him. “Let me put up thy sword.”

There was a swishing repeated three times and three thuds and twists of white on heads and shoulders just before her. Undistinguishable yells of mockery dwindled down from high above, and a rushlight shone at an immense elevation illuminating a faint square of casement that might have been in the heavens. Three apprentices had thrown down paper bags of powdered chalk. The men who had been struck, and several others who had been maltreated on former nights, or who resented this continual ’prentice scandal, began a frightful outcry at the door of the house. More bags came bursting down and foul water; the yells and battlecries rolled, in the narrow space under the house-fronts that nearly kissed each other high overhead, and the crowd, brought to a standstill, swayed and pushed against the walls. Katharine lost her hold of the old knight’s sleeve, and she could see no single thing. She felt round her in the blackness for his arm, but a heavy man stumbled against her. Suddenly his hand was under her arm, drawing her a little; his voice seemed to say: “Down this gully is a way about.”

In the passage it was blacker than the mouth of hell, and her eyes still seemed to have in them the dazzle of light and triumph she had just left. There was a frightful stench of garbage; and it appeared to be a vault, because the outcry of the men besieging the door volleyed and echoed the more thunderously.