The Fifth Queen quotes

“Hold and enough,” the printer muttered heavily.

“Tags from Seneca in a wench’s mouth are rose garlands on a cow’s horns.”

“The best ladies in the land learn of me,” Udal answered.

Udal laughed. “Call her to bring me meat and drink,” he said.

“Large words ill fill an empty stomach.”

The younger John went negligently to the great Flemish press. He opened the face and revealed on its dark shelves a patty of cold fish and a black jack.

He began to eat, dipping pieces of bread into the golden saltcellar. The face of a queen looked down just above his head with her eyes wide open as if she were amazed, thrusting her head from a cloud.

“Why, I have outlived three queens,”

he said to himself, and his round face resignedly despised his world and his times. He had forgotten what anxiety felt like because the world was so peopled with blunderers and timid fools full of hatred.

“There is no man in England can love him.” His distracted eyes fell upon the woman on the mule.

“Happy he whom a King never saw and who never saw King,”

he muttered.

“Aye, for my sake,” the King said angrily. He burst into a sudden invective:

“Thou hast murdered a many men⁠ ⁠… for my sake. Thou hast found out plots that were no plots: old men hate me, old mothers, wives, maidens, harlots.⁠ ⁠… Why, if I be damned at the end thou shalt escape, for what thou didst thou didst for my sake? Shall it be that?” He breathed heavily. “My sins are thy glory.”

They reached the long wall of the gatehouse and turned mechanically.

“That I attest to of old,” Udal commented. “But I shall be shamed before all learned doctors, if I write in the vulgar tongue.”

“Silence is ever best for me!” the Lady Mary answered her deadly. “I live in the shadows that I love.”

“That, full surely, shall be reversed,” Katharine said loyally.

“Your Most Reverence does ill to doubt me,” Katharine said submissively. “I am of a true house.”

“No house is true save where it finds its account,”

he answered moodily. He could not believe that she spoke the truth—for he was unable to believe that any man could speak the truth—but it was true she was poorly housed, raggedly dressed and hidden up in a corner. Nevertheless, these might be artifices.

“Men shall make us cry, in the end, steel our hearts how we will,”

she said to Margot Poins, who found her weeping with her head down upon the table above a piece of paper.

“He hath heard little to harm me.”

“It is what a man swears he hath heard that shall harm one,”

the old knight answered. “I meddle in no matters of statecraft, but I am sent to you by certain ladies; one shall wed me and I am her servant; one bears my name and wedded a good cousin of mine, now dead for his treasons.”

The Chancellor bleated, with amazed adulation, “Marvel that your lordship should give so much care to such a worthless rag!”

“An I had never put my heart into trifles, I had never stood here,”

Cromwell snarled at him. “Would that my knaves would ever come to learn that!” He spoke again to Viridus: “See that this wench come never near his Highness. I like not her complexion.”

“Thus poor Gilmaw died?” Katharine asked. “What a foul world this is!”

“Time it was cleansed,” he answered.

He let his words rankle for a time, then he said softly: “Privy Seal’s words before his armoury were as treasonable as Gilmaw’s on the market road.”

He said softly:

“It is a folly to be too proud to fight the world with the world’s weapons.”

The heavy darkness seemed to thrill with her silence. He could tell neither whether she were pondering his words nor whether she still scorned him. He could not even hear her breathing.

The old man shook his iron fist at the sky, and his face was full of rage and shame in the watery sunlight that penetrated into his open helmet.

“Poor old sinful man!”

Cicely said with a note of concern deep in her throat. A knave in grey ran to pick up the lance, but the knight sat, his head hanging on his chest, like one mortally stricken riding from a battlefield.

his eyelids went up, in haughty incredulity, so that the whites showed all round the dark pupils. He could not turn far enough to see her without moving his feet, and appearing to disdain so much trouble he addressed the old man heavily:

“Three times I dropped my pen, writing one letter yesterday,” he said; “if you had my troubles you might groan of growing old.”

But the old man was too shaken with the disgrace to ride any more, and Henry added testily:

“Why, yes,” she answered. “I am as God made me.”

“So are all Christians,” he retorted. “But some of us strive to improve on the pattern.”

She made an impatient movement with her hands, and he seemed to force himself to come to a point. “It may be that you will never hear me speak again,” he said quickly. “Both for you and for me these times are full of danger.

From now on, for many months, I shall not be seen to frequent you. For I have known such matters of old. A great net is cast: many fish—smaller than I be, who am a proper man—are taken up.”

“It is good hearing that you will no more frequent me,” Katharine said.

He nodded his great head.

“Shame shall out in the communion of the godly, be it whose kin it will.”

“Why, I wish the communion of the godly joy in its hot tales,”

she answered. “As for me, speak you with the magister when he comes from France. As for my mistress, three times she hath seen the King since Winchester’s feast was three months agone.

“I do not believe that you would bring your father down,” Katharine said.

“Why, you have a very comfortable habit of belief,”

Mary sneered at her. “In two words! Will you carry this treasonable letter or no?”

“It is to me, in the end, that Privy Seal owes amends,” Gardiner said rancorously. “Since it was at me that this man, by Cromwell’s orders, did hurl his foul words at Paul’s Cross.”

“Why, it is true that thou art more sound in doctrine than is Privy Seal. What wouldst thou have?”

Gardiner made an immense gesture, as if he would have embraced the whole world.

“Oh, la, la,” the Lady Mary laughed.

“A Howard is as good as any man,”

Katharine said. Her ingenuous face flushed, and she moved her hand to her throat. “God help me: it is true that I swore to be your woman.

the ideal of a still and worthy surrender was part of her blood. Here was the end of her cord; she must fold her hands. She folded her hands. After all, she thought, what was death?

“It is to pass from the hardly known to the hardly unknown.”

She quoted Lucretius. It was very dark all around her: the noises of distant outcries reached her dimly.