‘The new Queen’s come to Rochester,’ he said; ‘I am here with the guard to take the heralds to Greenwich Palace.’
The printer looked at him unfavourably from the corner of his dark and gloomy eyes.
‘You come to suck up more money,’ he said moodily. ‘There is none in this house.’
‘As Mary is my protectress!’ the boy laughed, ‘there is!’ He stuck his hands into his breeches pocket and pulled out a big fistful of crowns that he had won over-night at dice, and a long and thin Flemish chain of gold. ‘I have enow to last me till the thaw,’ he said. ‘I came to beg my grandfather’s blessing on the first day of the year.’
‘Dicing.… Wenching …’ the printer muttered.
‘If I ask thee for no blessing,’ the young man said, ‘it’s because, uncle, thou’rt a Lutheran that can convey none. Where’s Margot? This chain’s for her.’
‘The fair Margot’s locked in her chamber,’ Udal snickered.
‘Why-som-ever then? Hath she stolen a tart?’
‘Nay, but I would have her in wedlock.’
‘Thou—you—your magistership?’ the boy laughed incredulously. The printer caught in his tone his courtier’s contempt for the artificer’s home, and his courtier’s reverence for the magister’s learning.
‘Keep thy sister from beneath this fox’s tooth,’ he said. ‘The likes of him mate not with the like of us.’
‘The like of thee, uncle?’ the boy retorted, with a good-humoured insolence. ‘My father was a gentleman.’
‘Who married my sister for her small money, and died leaving thee and thy sister to starve.’
‘Nay, I starve not,’ the boy said. ‘And Margot’s a plump faggot.’
‘A very Cynthia among willow-trees,’ the magister said.
‘Why, your magistership shall have her,’ the boy said. ‘I am her lawful guardian.’
His grandfather laughed as men laugh to see a colt kick up its heels in a meadow.
But the printer waved his bare arm furiously at the magister.
‘Get thee gone out of this decent house.’ His eyes rolled, and his clenched fist was as large as a ham. ‘Here you come not a-wenching.’
‘Moody man,’ the magister said, ‘your brains are addled with suspicions.’
The young man swelled his scarlet breast still more consequentially. ‘This is no house of thine, uncle, but my grandfar’s.’
‘Young ass’s colt!’ the printer fulminated. ‘Would’st have thy sister undone by this Latin mouth-mincer?’
Udal grinned at him, and licked his lips. The printer snarled:
‘Know’st thou not, young ass, that this man was thrown out of his mastership at Eton for his foul living?’
Udal was suddenly on his feet with the long pasty-knife held back among the furs of his gown.
‘Ignoble …’ he began, but he lost his words in his trembling rage. The printer snatched at his long measuring stick.
‘Down knife,’ he grunted, for his fury, too, made his throat catch.
‘Have a care, nunkey,’ the young man laughed at the pair of them. ‘They teach knife-thrusts in his Italian books.’
‘I will have thy printer’s licence revoked, ignoble man,’ the magister said, grinning hideously. ‘Thou, a Lutheran, to turn upon me who was undone by Papist lies! They said I lived foully; they said I stole the silver cellars.…’
He turned upon the old man, stretching out the hand that held the knife in a passionate gesture:
‘Your Papists said that,’ he appealed. ‘But not a one of them believed it, though you dub me Lutheran.… See you, do I not govern now the chief Papist of you all? Would that be if they believed me filthy in my living. Have I not governed in the house of the Howards, the lord of it being absent? Would that have been if they had believed it of me? … And then.…’ He turned again upon the printer. ‘For the sake of your men.… for the sake of the New Learning, which God prosper, I was cast down.’
The printer grunted surlily:
‘ ’Tis known no wench is safe from thy amorousness. How many husbands have broken thy pate?’
The magister threw the knife on to the table and rose, frostily rustling in his gown.
‘I shall bring thee down, ignoble man,’ he said.
‘If thou hast the power to do that,’ the old man asked suddenly, ‘wherefore canst not get me redress in the matter of my wall?’
The magister answered angrily:
‘Privy Seal hath swallowed thy land: he shall not disgorge. But this man he shall swallow. Know you not that you may make a jack swallow, but no man shall make him give back; I, nor thou, nor the devil’s self?’
‘Oh, a God’s name bring not Flail Crummock into this household,’ the young man cut in. ‘Would you undo us all?’
‘Ignoble, ignoble, to twit a man with that Eton villainy,’ the magister answered.
‘A God’s name bring not Privy Seal into the quarrel,’ the young man repeated. ‘None of us of the Old Faith believe that lie.’
‘Keep thy tongue off Cromwell’s name, young fool,’ his grandfather said. ‘We know not what walls have ears.’
The young man went pale: the printer himself went pale, remembering suddenly that the magister was a spy of Cromwell’s; all three of them had their eyes upon Udal; only the old man, with his carelessness of his great age, grinned with curiosity as if the matter were a play that did not concern him. The magister was making for the door with the books beneath his arm and a torturing smile round his lips. The boy, with a deep oath, ran out after him, a scarlet flash in the darkening room.
Old Badge pulled at his nose and grinned maliciously at the fire beside him.
‘That is thy deliverer: that is thy flail of the monks,’ he croaked at his son. The printer gazed moodily at the fire.
‘Nay, it is but one of his servants,’ he answered mechanically.
‘And such servants go up and down this realm of England and ride us with iron bridles.’ The old man laughed dryly and bitterly. ‘His servant? See how we are held—we dare not shut our doors upon him since he is Cromwell’s servant, yet if he come in he shall ruin us, take our money that we dare not refuse, deflower our virgins … What then is left to us between this setter up of walls and his servants?’
The printer, fingering the T-square in his belt, said, slowly, ‘I think this man loves too well that books should be printed in the Latin tongue to ruin any printer of them upon a private quarrel. Else I would get me across the seas.’
‘He loves any wench much better,’ the old man answered maliciously. ‘Hearken!’
Through the wall there came a scuffling sound, thumps, and the noise of things falling. The wall there touched on the one that Cromwell had set up, so that there was bare room for a man to creep between.
‘Body of God,’ the printer said, ‘is he eavesdropping now?’
‘Nay, this is courtship,’ the old man answered. His head leaned forward with a birdlike intentness; he listened with one hand held out as if to still any sound in the room. They heard footsteps from the floor above, a laugh and voices. ‘Now Margot talks to him from her window.’
The printer had a motion of convulsed rage:
‘I will break that knave’s spine across my knee.’
‘Nay, let be,’ the old man said. ‘I command thee, who am thy father, to let the matter be.’
‘Would you have him …’ the printer began with a snarl.
‘I would not have my house burnt down because this Cromwell’s spy’s body should be found upon our hands.… To-morrow the wench shall be sent to her aunt Wardle in Bedfordshire—aye, and she shall be soundly beaten to teach her to love virtue.’
The young man opened the house door and came in, shivering in his scarlet because he had run out without his cloak.
‘A pretty medley you have made,’ he said to his uncle, ‘but I have calmed him. Wherefore should not this magister marry Margot?’ He made again for the fire. ‘Are we to smell always of ink?’
He looked disdainfully at his uncle’s proofs, and began to speak with a boy’s seriousness and ingenuous confidence. They would tell his uncle at Court that if good print be the body of a book, good learning is even the soul of it. At Court he would learn that it is thought this magister shall rise high. There good learning is much prized. Their Lord the King had been seen to talk and laugh with this magister. ‘For our gracious lord loveth good letters. He is in such matters skilled beyond all others in the realm.’
The old man listened to his grandson, smiling maliciously and with pride; the printer shrugged his shoulders bitterly; the muffled sounds and the voices through the house-end continued, and the boy talked on, laying down the law valiantly and with a cheerful voice.… He would gain advancement at Court through his sister’s marriage with the magister.
Going back to the palace at Greenwich along with the magister, in the barge that was taking the heralds to the King’s marriage with Anne of Cleves, the young Poins was importunate with Udal to advance him in his knowledge of the Italian tongue. He thought that in the books of the Sieur Macchiavelli upon armies and the bearing of arms there were unfolded many secret passes with the rapier and the stiletto. But Udal laughed good-humouredly. He had, he said, little skill in the Italian tongue, for it was but a bastard of classical begettings. And for instruction in the books of the Sieur Macchiavelli, let young Poins go to a man who had studied them word by word—to the Lord Privy Seal, Thomas Cromwell.
They both dropped their voices at the name, and, another gentleman of the guard beginning to talk of rich men who had fallen low by the block, the stake, and gaming, Udal mentioned that that day he had seen a strange sight.
‘There was in the Northern parts, where I governed in his absence the Lord Edmund Howard’s children, a certain Thomas Culpepper. Main rich he was, with many pastures and many thousands of sheep. A cousin of my lady’s he was, for ever roaring about the house. A swaggerer he was, that down there went more richly dressed than earls here.’
That day Udal had seen this Culpepper alone, without any servants, dressed in uncostly green, and dragging at the bridle of a mule, on which sat a doxy dressed in ancient and ragged furs. So did men fall in these difficult days.
‘How came he in London town?’ the Norroy King-at-Arms asked.
‘Nay, I stayed not to ask him,’ Udal answered. He sighed a little. ‘Yet then, in my Lord Edmund’s house I had my best pupil of all, and fain was I to have news of her.… But he was a braggart; I liked him not, and would not stay to speak with him.’
‘I’ll warrant you had dealings with some wench he favoured, and you feared a drubbing, magister,’ Norroy accused him.
The long cabin of the state barge was ablaze with the scarlet and black of the guards, and with the gold and scarlet of the heralds. Magister Udal sighed.
‘You had good, easy days in Lord Edmund’s house?’ Norroy asked.
II
THE LORD PRIVY SEAL was beneath a tall cresset in the stern of his barge, looking across the night and the winter river. They were rowing from Rochester to the palace at Greenwich, where the Court was awaiting Anne of Cleves. The flare of the King’s barge a quarter of a mile ahead moved in a glowing patch of lights and their reflections, as though it were some portent creeping in a blaze across the sky. There was nothing else visible in the world but the darkness and a dusky tinge of red where a wave caught the flare of light further out.
He stood invisible behind the lights of his cabin; and the thud of oars, the voluble noises of the water, and the crackling of the cresset overhead had, too, the quality of impersonal and supernatural phenomena. His voice said harshly:
‘It is very cold; bring me my greatest cloak.’
Throckmorton, the one of Cromwell’s seven hundred spies who at that time was his most constant companion, was hidden in the deep shadow beside the cabin-door. His bearded and heavy form obscured the light for a moment as he hurried to fetch the cloak. But merely to be the Lord Cromwell’s gown-bearer was in those days a thing you would run after; and an old man in a flat cap—the Chancellor of the Augmentations, who had been listening intently at the door—was already hurrying out with a heavy cloak of fur. Cromwell let it be hung about his shoulders.
The Chancellor shivered and said, ‘We should be within a quarter-hour of Greenwich.’
‘Get you in if you be cold,’ Cromwell answered. But the Chancellor was quivering with the desire to talk to his master. He had seen the heavy King rush stumbling down the stairs of the Cleves woman’s lodging at Rochester, and the sight had been for him terrible and prodigious. It was Cromwell who had made him Chancellor of the Augmentations—who had even invented the office to deal with the land taken from the Abbeys—and he was so much the creature of this Lord Privy Seal that it seemed as if the earth was shivering all the while for the fall of this minister, and that he himself was within an inch of the ruin, execration, and death that would come for them all once Cromwell were down.
Throckmorton, a giant man with an immense golden beard, issued again from the cabin, and the Privy Seal’s voice came leisurely and cold:
‘What said Lord Cassilis of this? And the fellow Knighton? I saw them at the stairs.’
Privy Seal had such eyes that it was delicate work lying to him. But Throckmorton brought out heavily:
‘Cassilis, that this Lady Anne should never be Queen.’
‘Aye, but she must,’ the Chancellor bleated. He had been bribed by two of the Cleves lords to get them lands in Kent when the Queen should be in power. Cromwell’s silence made Throckmorton continue against his will:
‘Knighton, that the Queen’s breath should turn the King’s stomach against you! Dr. Miley, the Lutheran preacher, that by this evening’s work the Kingdom of God on earth was set trembling, the King having the nature of a lecher …’
He tried to hold back. After all, it came into his mind, this man was nearly down. Any one of the men upon whom he now spied might come to be his master very soon. But Cromwell’s voice said, ‘And then?’ and he made up his mind to implicate none but the Scotch lord, who was at once harmless and unliable to be harmed.
‘Lord Cassilis,’ he brought out, ‘said again that your lordship’s head should fall ere January goes out.’
He seemed to feel the great man’s sneer through the darkness, and was coldly angry with himself for having invented no better lie. For if this invisible and threatening phantom that hid itself among these shadows outlasted January he might yet outlast some of them. He wondered which of Cromwell’s innumerable ill-wishers it might best serve him to serve. But for the Chancellor of the Augmentations the heavy silence of calamity, like the waiting at a bedside for death to come, seemed to fall upon them. He imagined that the Privy Seal hid himself in that shadow in order to conceal a pale face and shaking knees. But Cromwell’s voice came harsh and peremptory to Throckmorton:
‘What men be abroad at this night season? Ask my helmsmen.’
Two torchlights, far away to the right, wavered shaking trails in the water that, thus revealed, shewed agitated and chopped by small waves. The Chancellor’s white beard shook with the cold, with fear of Cromwell, and with curiosity to know how the man looked and felt. He ventured at last in a faint and bleating voice:
What did his lordship think of this matter? Surely the King should espouse this lady and the Lutheran cause.
Cromwell answered with inscrutable arrogance:
‘Why, your cause is valuable. But this is a great matter. Get you in if you be cold.’
Throckmorton appeared noiselessly at his elbow, whilst the Chancellor was mumbling: ‘God forbid I should be called Lutheran.’
The torches, Throckmorton said, were those of fishers who caught eels off the mud with worms upon needles.
‘Such night work favours treason,’ Cromwell muttered. ‘Write in my notebook, “The Council to prohibit the fishing of eels by night.” ’
‘What a nose he hath for treasons,’ the Chancellor whispered to Throckmo
rton as they rustled together into the cabin. Throckmorton’s face was gloomy and pensive. The Privy Seal had chosen none of his informations for noting down. Assuredly the time was near for him to find another master.
The barge swung round a reach, and the lights of the palace of Greenwich were like a flight of dim or bright squares in mid air, far ahead. The King’s barge was already illuminating the crenellated arch at the top of the river steps. A burst of torches flared out to meet it and disappeared. The Court was then at Greenwich, nearly all the lords, the bishops and the several councils lying in the Palace to await the coming of Anne of Cleves on the morrow. She had reached Rochester that evening after some days’ delay at Calais, for the winter seas. The King had gone that night to inspect her, having been given to believe that she was soberly fair and of bountiful charms. His courteous visit had been in secret and in disguise; therefore there were no torchmen in the gardens, and darkness lay between the river steps and the great central gateway. But a bonfire, erected by the guards to warm themselves in the courtyard, as it leapt up or subsided before the wind, shewed that tall tower pale and high or vanishing into the night with its carved stone garlands, its stone men at arms, its lions, roses, leopards, and naked boys. The living houses ran away from the foot of the tower, till the wings, coming towards the river, vanished continually into shadows. They were low by comparison, gabled with false fronts over each set of rooms and, in the glass of their small-paned windows, the reflection of the fire gleamed capriciously from unexpected shadows. This palace was called Placentia by the King because it was pleasant to live in.
Cromwell mounted the steps with a slow gait and an arrogant figure. Under the river arch eight of his gentlemen waited upon him, and in the garden the torches of his men shewed black yew trees cut like peacocks, clipped hedges like walls with archways above the broad and tiled paths, and fountains that gleamed and trickled as if secretly in the heavy and bitter night.