The Fifth Queen Series

  ‘Anan?’

  ‘Please you let me stay,’ the girl said; but Katharine answered—

  ‘I would commune with my own thoughts.’

  ‘Please you hear me,’ the girl said, and she was very earnest; but the Queen answered—

  ‘Why, no! If you have any boon to ask of me, you know very well that to-morrow at eleven is the hour for asking. Now, I will sit still with the silence. Bring me my chair to the table. The Lady Rochford shall put out my lights when I be abed.’

  The girl stood up and rolled, with a trick of appeal, her eyes to the old Lady Rochford. This lady, all in grey too, but with a great white hood because she was a widow, sat back upon the foot of the great bed. Her face was perturbed, but it had been always perturbed since her cousin, the Queen Anne Boleyn, had fallen by the axe. She put a gouty and swollen finger to her lips, and the girl shrugged her shoulders with a passion of despair, for she was very hot-tempered, and it was as if mutinously that she fetched the Queen her chair and set it behind her where she stood before the mirror taking off her breast jewel from its chain. And again the girl shrugged her shoulders. Then she went to the little wall-door that corkscrewed down into the courtyard through the thick of the wall. Immediately after she was gone they heard the lockguard that awaited her without set on the great padlock without the door. Then his feet clanked down the stairway, he being heavily loaded with weighty keys. It was the doors along the corridor that the young Poins guarded, and these were never opened once the Queen was in her room, save by the King. The Lady Rochford slept in the anteroom upon a truckle-bed, and the great withdrawing-room was empty.

  It was very still in the Queen’s room and most shadowy, except before the mirror where the candle flames streamed upwards. The pillars of the great bed were twisted out of dark wood; the hangings of bed and walls were all of a dark blue arras, and the bedspread was of a dark red velvet worked in gold with pomegranates and pomegranate leaves. Only the pillows and the turnover of the sheets were of white linen-lawn, and the bed curtains nearly hid them with shadows. Where the Queen sat there was light like that of an altar in a dim chapel, for the room was so huge.

  She sat before her glass, silently taking off her golden things. She took the jewel off the chain round her neck and laid it in a casket of gold and ivory. She took the rings off her fingers and hung them on the lance of a little knight in silver. She took off her waist where it hung to a brooch of feridets, her pomander of enamel and gold; she opened it and marked the time by the watch studded with sable diamonds that it held.

  ‘Past eleven,’ she said, ‘if my watch goes right.’

  ‘Indeed it is past eleven,’ the Lady Rochford sighed behind her.

  The Queen sat forward in her chair, looking deep into the shadows of her mirror. A great relaxation was in all her limbs, for she was very tired, so that though she was minded to let down her hair she did not begin to undo her coif, and though she desired to think, she had no thoughts. From far away there came a muffled sound as if a door had been roughly closed, and the Lady Rochford shot out a little sound between a scream and a sigh.

  ‘Why, you are very affrighted,’ the Queen said. ‘One would think you feared robbers; but my guards are too good.’

  She began to unloosen from her hood her jewel, which was a rose fashioned out of pink shell work set with huge dew-drops of diamonds and crowned with a little crown of gold.

  ‘God knows,’ she said, ‘I ha’ trinkets enow for robbers. It takes me too long to undo them. I would the King did not so load me.’

  ‘Your Highness is too humble for a Queen,’ the old Lady Rochford grumbled. ‘Let me aid you, since the maid is gone. I would not have you speak your maids so humbly. My Cousin Anne that was the Queen—’

  She came stiffly and heavily forward from the bed with her hands out to discoif her lady; but the Queen turned her head, caught at her fat hand, put it against her cheek and fondled it.

  ‘I would have your Highness feared by all,’ the old lady said.

  ‘I would have myself by all beloved,’ Katharine answered. ‘What, am I to play the Queen and Highness to such serving-maids as I was once the fellow and companion to?’

  ‘Your Highness should not have sent the wench away,’ the old woman said.

  ‘Well, you have taken on a very sour voice,’ the Queen said. ‘I will study to pleasure you more. Get you now back and rest you, for I know you stand uneasily, and you shall not uncoif me.’

  She began to unpin her coif, laying the golden pins in the silver candle-dishes. When her hair was thus set free of a covering, though it was smoothly braided and parted over her forehead, yet it was lightly rebellious, so that little mists of it caught the light, golden and rejoiceful. Her face was serious, her nose a little peaked, her lips rested lightly together, and her blue eyes steadily challenged their counterparts in the mirror with an assured and gentle glance.

  ‘Why,’ she said, ‘I believe you have the right of it—but for a queen I must be the same make of queen that I am as a woman. A queen gracious rather than a queen regnant; a queen to grant petitions rather than one to brush aside the petitioners.’

  She stopped and mused.

  ‘Yet,’ she said, ‘you will do me the justice to say that in the open and in the light of day, when men are by or the King’s presence demands it, I do ape as well as I may the painted queens of galleries and the stately ladies that are to be seen in pictured books.’

  ‘I would not have had you send away the maid,’ the old Lady Rochford said.

  ‘God help me,’ the Queen answered. ‘I stayed her petition till the morrow. Is that not queening it enough?’

  The Lady Rochford suddenly wrung her hands.

  ‘I had rather,’ she said, ‘you had heard her and let her stay. Here there are not people enough to guard you. You should have many scores of people. This is a dreary place.’

  ‘Heaven help me,’ the Queen said. ‘If I were such a queen as to be affrighted, you would affright me. Tell me of your cousin that was a sinful queen.’

  The Lady Rochford raised her hands lamentably and bleated out—

  ‘Ah God, not to-night!’

  ‘You have been ready enough on other nights,’ the Queen said. And, indeed, it was so much the practice of this lady to talk always of her cousin, whose death had affrighted her, that often the Queen had begged her to cease. But to-night she was willing to hear, for she felt afraid of no omens, and, being joyful, was full of pity for the dead unfortunate. She began with slow, long motions to withdraw the great pins from her hair. The deep silence settled down again, and she hummed the melancholy and stately tune that goes with the words—

  ‘When all the little hills are hid in snow,

  And all the small brown birds by frost are slain,

  And sad and slow

  The silly sheep do go,

  All seeking shelter to and fro—

  Come once again

  To these familiar, silent, misty lands—’

  And—

  ‘Aye,’ she said; ‘to these ancient and familiar lands of the dear saints, please God, when the winter snows are upon them, once again shall come the feet of God’s messenger, for this is the joyfullest day this land hath known since my namesake was cast down and died.’

  Suddenly there were muffled cries from beyond the thick door in the corridor, and on the door itself resounding blows. The Lady Rochford gave out great shrieks, more than her feeble body could have been deemed to hold.

  ‘Body of God!’ the Queen said, ‘what is this?’

  ‘Your cousin!’ the Lady Rochford cried out. She came running to the Queen, who, in standing up, had overset her heavy chair, and, falling to her knees, she babbled out—‘Your cousin! Oh, let it not all come again. Call your guard. Let it not all come again’; and she clawed into the Queen’s skirt, uttering incomprehensible clamours.

  ‘What? What? What?’ Katharine said.

  ‘He was with the Archbishop. Your cousin with the Archbish
op. I heard it. I sent to stay him if it were so’; and the old woman’s teeth crackled within her jaws. ‘O God, it is come again!’ she cried.

  The door flung open heavily, but slowly, because it was so heavy. And, in the archway, whilst a great scream from the old woman wailed out down the corridors, Katharine was aware of a man in scarlet, locked in a struggle with a raging swirl of green manhood. The man in scarlet fell back, and then, crying out, ran away. The man in green, his bonnet off, his red hair sticking all up, his face pallid, and his eyes staring like those of a sleep-walker, entered the room. In his right hand he had a dagger. He walked very slowly.

  The Queen thought fast: the old Lady Rochford had her mouth open; her eyes were upon the dagger in Culpepper’s hand.

  ‘I seek the Queen,’ he said, but his eyes were lacklustre; they fell upon Katharine’s face as if they had no recognition, or could not see. She turned her body round to the old Lady Rochford, bending from the hips so as not to move her feet. She set her fingers upon her lips.

  ‘I seek—I seek—’ he said, and always he came closer to her. His eyes were upon her face, and the lids moved.

  ‘I seek the Queen,’ he said, and beneath his husky voice there were bass notes of quivering anger, as if, just as he had been by chance calmed by throwing down the guard, so by chance his anger might arise again.

  The Queen never moved, but stood up full and fair; one strand of her hair, loosened, fell low over her left ear. When he was so close to her that his protruded hips touched her skirt, she stole her hand slowly round him till it closed upon his wrist above the dagger. His mouth opened, his eyes distended.

  ‘I seek—’ he said, and then—‘Kat!’ as if the touch of her cool and firm fingers rather than the sight of her had told to his bruised senses who she was.

  ‘Get you gone!’ she said. ‘Give me your dagger.’ She uttered each word roundly and fully as if she were pondering the next move over a chequer-board.

  ‘Well, I will kill the Queen,’ he said. ‘How may I do it without my knife?’

  ‘Get you gone!’ she said again. ‘I will direct you to the Queen.’

  He passed the back of his left hand wearily over his brow.

  ‘Well, I have found thee, Kat!’ he said.

  She answered: ‘Aye!’ and her fingers twined round his on the hilt of the dagger, so that his were loosening.

  Then the old Lady Rochford screamed out—

  ‘Ha! God’s mercy! Guards, swords, come!’ The furious blood came into Culpepper’s face at the sound. His hand he tore from Katharine’s, and with the dagger raised on high he ran back from her and then forward towards the Lady Rochford. With an old trick of fence, that she had learned when she was a child, Katharine Howard set out her foot before him, and, with the speed of his momentum, he pitched over forward. He fell upon his face so that his forehead was upon the Lady Rochford’s right foot. His dagger he still grasped, but he lay prone with the drink and the fever.

  ‘Now, by God in His mercy,’ Katharine said to her, ‘as I am the Queen I charge you—’

  ‘Take his knife and stab him to the heart!’ the Lady Rochford cried out. ‘This will slay us two.’

  ‘I charge you that you listen to me,’ the Queen said, ‘or, by God, I will have you in chains!’

  ‘I will call your many,’ the Lady Rochford cried out, for terror had stopped up the way from her ears to her brain, and she made towards the door. But Katharine set her hand to the old woman’s shoulder.

  ‘Call no man,’ she commanded. ‘This is a device of mine enemies to have men see this of me.’

  ‘I will not stay here to be slain,’ the old woman said.

  ‘Then mine own self will slay you,’ the Queen answered. Culpepper moved in his stupor. ‘Before Heaven,’ the Queen said, ‘stay you there, and he shall not again stand up.’

  ‘I will go call—’ the old woman besought her, and again Culpepper moved. The Queen stood right up against her; her breast heaved, her face was rigid. Suddenly she turned and ran to the door. That key she wrenched round and out, and then to the other door beside it, and that key too she wrenched round and out.

  ‘I will not stay alone with my cousin,’ she said, ‘for that is what mine enemies would have. And this I vow, that if again you squeak I will have you tried as being an abettor of this treason.’ She went and knelt down at her cousin’s head; she moved his face round till it was upon her lap.

  ‘Poor Tom,’ she said; he opened his eyes and muttered stupid words.

  She looked again at Lady Rochford.

  ‘All this is nothing,’ she said, ‘if you will hide in the shadow of the bed and keep still. I have seen my cousin a hundred times thus muddied with drink, and do not fear him. He shall not stand up till he is ready to go through the door; but I will not be alone with him and tend him.’

  The Lady Rochford waddled and quaked like a jelly to the shadow of the bed curtains. She pulled back the curtain over the window, and, as if the contact with the world without would help her, threw back the casement. Below, in the black night, a row of torches shook and trembled, like little planets, in the distance.

  Katharine Howard held her cousin’s head upon her knees. She had seen him thus a hundred times and had no fear of him. For thus in his cups, and fevered as he was with ague that he had had since a child, he was always amenable to her voice though all else in the world enraged him. So that, if she could keep the Lady Rochford still, she might well win him out through the door at which he came in.

  And, first, when he moved to come to his knees, she whispered—

  ‘Lie down, lie down,’ and he set one elbow on to the carpet and lay over on his side, then on his back. She took his head again on to her lap, and with soft motions reached to take the dagger from his hand. He yielded it up and gazed upwards into her face.

  ‘Kat!’ he said, and she answered—

  ‘Aye!’

  There came from very far the sound of a horn.

  ‘When you can stand,’ she said, ‘you must get you gone.’

  ‘I have sold farms to get you gowns,’ he answered.

  ‘And then we came to Court,’ she said, ‘to grow great.’

  He passed his left hand once more over his eyes with a gesture of ineffable weariness, but his other arm that was extended, she knelt upon.

  ‘Now we are great,’ she said.

  He muttered, ‘I wooed thee in an apple orchard. Let us go back to Lincolnshire.’

  ‘Why, we will talk of it in the morning,’ she said. ‘It is very late.’

  Her brain throbbed with the pulsing blood. She was set to get him gone before the young Poins could call men to her door. It was maddeningly strange to think that none hitherto had come. Maybe Culpepper had struck him dead with his knife, or he lay without fainting. This black enigma, calling for haste that she dare not show, filled all the shadows of that shadowy room.

  ‘It is very late,’ she said, ‘you must get you gone. It was compacted between us that ever you would get you gone early.’

  ‘Aye, I would not have thee shamed,’ he said. He spoke upwards, slowly and luxuriously, his head so softly pillowed, his eyes gazing at the ceiling. He had never been so easy in two years past. ‘I remember that was the occasion of our pact. I did wooe thee in an apple orchard to the grunting of hogs.’

  ‘Get you gone,’ she said; ‘buy me a favour against the morning.’

  ‘Why,’ he said, ‘I am a very rich lord. I have lands in Kent now. I will buy thee such a gown … such a gown … The hogs grunted … There is a song about it … Let me go to buy thy gown. Aye, now, presently. I remember a great many things. As thus … there is a song of a lady loved a swine. Honey, said she, and hunc, said he.’

  Whilst she listened a great many thoughts came into her mind—of their youth at home, where indeed, to the grunting of hogs, he had wooed her when she came out from conning her Plautus with the Magister. And at the same time it troubled her to consider where the young Poins had bestowed h
imself. Maybe he was dead; maybe he lay in a faint.

  ‘It was in our pact,’ she said to Culpepper, ‘that you should get you gone ever when I would have it.’

  ‘Aye, sure, it was in our pact,’ he said.

  He closed his eyes as if he would fall asleep, being very weary and come to his desired haven. Above his closed eyes Katharine threw the key of her antechamber on to the bed. She pointed with her hand to that door that the Lady Rochford should undo. If she could get her cousin through that door—and now he was in the mood—if she could but get him through there and out at the door beyond the Big Room into the corridor, before her guard came back …

  But the Lady Rochford was leaning far out beyond the window-sill and did not see her gesture.

  Culpepper muttered—

  ‘Ah; well; aye; even so—’ And from the window came a scream that tore the air—

  ‘The King! the King!’

  And immediately it was as if the life of a demon had possessed Culpepper in all his limbs.

  ‘Merciful God!’ the Queen cried out. ‘I am patient.’

  Culpepper had writhed from her till he sat up, but she hollowed her hand around his throat. His head she forced back till she held it upon the floor, and whilst he writhed with his legs she knelt upon his chest with one knee. He screamed out words like: ‘Bawd,’ and ‘Ilcock,’ and ‘Hecate,’ and the Lady Rochford screamed—

  ‘The King comes! the King comes!’

  Then Katharine said within herself—

  ‘Is it this to be a Queen?’

  She set both her hands upon his neck and pressed down the whole weight of her frame, till the voice died in his throat. His body stirred beneath her knee, convulsively, so that it was as if she rode a horse. His eyes, as slowly he strangled, glared hideously at the ceiling, from which the carven face of a Queen looked down into them. At last he lay still, and Katharine Howard rose up.

  She ran at the old woman—

  ‘God forgive me if I have killed my cousin,’ she said. ‘I am certain that now He will forgive me if I slay thee.’ And she had Culpepper’s dagger in her hand.