The Fifth Queen Crowned
some of these men he lent to Mary Hall. But it had been prophesied by a
wise woman in those parts that no land that had been taken from the
monks would prosper. And, because all the jurats, bailiffs, and
water-wardens had been hanged either on the one part or the other and no
more had been appointed, at about that time the sewers began to clog up,
the lands to swamp, murrain and fluke to strike the beasts and the
sheep, and night mists to blight the grain and the fruit blossoms. So
that even Throckmorton had little good of his wealth and lands.
Thus one morning to Mary Hall, who stood before her door feeding her
geese and ducks, there came a little boy running to say that men-at-arms
stood on the other side of the dyke that was very swollen and grey and
broad. And they shouted that they came from the Queen's Highness, and
would have a boat sent to ferry them over.
The colour came into Mary Hall's pale face, for even there she had heard
that her former bedfellow was come to be Queen. And at times even she
had thought to write to the Queen to help her in her misery. But always
she had been afraid, because she thought that the Queen might remember
her only as one that had wronged her childish innocence. For she
remembered that the maids' dormitory at the old Duchess's had been no
cloister of pure nuns. So that, at best, she was afraid, and she sent
her yard-worker and a shepherd a great way round to fetch the larger
boat of two to ferry over the Queen's men. Then she went indoors to redd
up the houseplace and to attire herself.
To the old farmstead, that was made of wood hung over here and there
with tilework with a base of bricks, she had added a houseplace for the
old folk to sit all day. It was built of wattles that had had clay cast
over them, and was whitened on the outside and thatched nearly down to
the ground like any squatter's hut; it had cupboards of wood nearly all
round it, and beneath the cupboards were lockers worn smooth with men
sitting upon them, after the Dutch fashion--for there in Lincolnshire
they had much traffic with the Dutch. There was a great table made of
one slab of a huge oak from near Boston. Here they all ate. And above
the ingle was another slab of oak from the same tree. Her little old
step-mother sat in a stuff chair covered with a sheep-skin; she sat
there night and day, shivering with the shaking palsy. At times she let
out of her an eldritch shriek, very like the call of a hedgehog; but she
never spoke, and she was fed with a spoon by a little misbegotten son of
Edward Hall's. The old step-father sat always opposite her; he had no
use of his legs, and his head was always stiffly screwed round towards
the door as if he were peering, but that was the rheumatism. To atone
for his wife's dumbness, he chattered incessantly whenever anyone was on
that floor; but because he spoke always in Lincolnshire, Mary Hall could
scarce understand him, and indeed she had long ceased to listen. He
spoke of forgotten floods and ploughings, ancient fairs, the boundaries
of fields long since flooded over, of a visit to Boston that King Edward
IV had made, and of how he, for his fair speech and old lineage, had
been chosen of all the Radigund's men to present into the King's hands
three silver horseshoes. Behind his back was a great dresser with railed
shelves, having upon them a little pewter ware and many wooden bowls for
the hinds' feeding. A door on the right side, painted black, went down
into the cellar beneath the old house. Another door, of bars of iron
with huge locks from the old monastery, went into the old house where
slept the maids and the hinds. This was always open by day but locked in
the dark hours. For the hinds were accounted brutish lumps that went
savage at night, like wild beasts, so that, if they spared the master's
throat, which was unlikely, it was certain that they would little spare
the salted meat, the dried fish, the mead, metheglin, and cyder that
their poor cellar afforded. The floor was of stamped clay, wet and
sweating but covered with rushes, so that the place had a mouldering
smell. Behind the heavy door there were huge bolts and crossbars against
robbers: the raftered ceiling was so low that it touched her hair when
she walked across the floor. The windows had no glass but were filled
with a thin reddish sheep-skin like parchment. Before the stairway was a
wicket gate to keep the dogs--of whom there were many, large and fierce,
to protect them alike from robbers and the hinds--to keep the dogs from
going into the upper room.
Each time that Mary Hall came into this home of hers her heart sank
lower; for each day the corner posts gave sideways a little more, the
cupboard bulged, the doors were loth to close or open. And more and more
the fields outside were inundated, the lands grew sour, the sheep would
not eat or died of the fluke.
'And surely,' she would cry out at times, 'God created me for other
guesswork than this!'
At nights she was afraid, and shivered at the thought of the fens and
the black and trackless worlds all round her; and the ravens croaked,
night-hawks screamed, the dog-foxes cried out, and the flames danced
over the swampy grounds. Her mirror was broken on the night that they
hanged her husband: she had never had another but the water in her
buckets, so that she could not tell whether she had much aged or whether
she were still brown-haired and pink-cheeked, and she had forgotten how
to laugh, and was sure that there were crow's-feet about her eyelids.
Her best gown was all damp and mouldy in the attic that was her bower.
She made it meet as best she could, and indeed she had had so little fat
living, sitting at the head of her table with a whip for unruly hinds
and louts before her--so little fat living that she could well get into
her wedding-gown of yellow cramosyn. She smoothed her hair back into her
cord hood that for so long had not come out of its press. She washed her
face in a bucket of water: that and the press and her bed with grey
woollen curtains were all the furnishing her room had. The straw of the
roof caught in her hood when she moved, and she heard her old
father-in-law cackling to the serving-maids through the cracks of the
floor.
When she came down there were approaching, across the field before the
door, six men in scarlet and one in black, having all the six halberds
and swords, and one a little banner, but the man in black had a sword
only. Their horses were tethered in a clump on the farther side of the
dyke. Within the room the serving-maids were throwing knives and pewter
dishes with a great din on to the table slab. They dropped
drinking-horns and the salt-cellar itself all of a heap into the rushes.
The grandfather was cackling from his chair; a hen and its chickens ran
screaming between the maids' feet. Then Lascelles came in at the
doorway.
III
The Sieur Lascelles looked round him in that dim cave.
'Ho!' he said, 'this place stinks,' and he pulled from his pocket a
dried and shrivelled orange-peel purse stuffed with cloves and ginger.
'Ho!' he said to the cornet that was come behind him with the Queen's
horsemen. 'Come not in here. This will breed a plague amongst your men!'
and he added--
'Did I not tell you my sister was ill-housed?'
'Well, I was not prepared against this,' the cornet said. He was a man
with a grizzling beard that had little patience away from the Court,
where he had a bottle that he loved and a crony or two that he played
all day at chequers with, except when the Queen rode out; then he was of
her train. He did not come over the sill, but spoke sharply to his men.
'Ungird not here,' he said. 'We will go farther.' For some of them were
for setting their pikes against the mud wall and casting their swords
and heavy bottle-belts on to the table before the door. The old man in
the armchair began suddenly to prattle to them all--of a horse-thief
that had been dismembered and then hanged in pieces thirty years
before. The cornet looked at him for a moment and said--
'Sir, you are this woman's father-in-law, I do think. Have you aught to
report against her?' He bent in at the door, holding his nose. The old
man babbled of one Pease-Cod Noll that had no history to speak of but a
swivel eye.
'Well,' the grizzled cornet said, 'I shall get little sense here.' He
turned upon Mary Hall.
'Mistress,' he said, 'I have a letter here from the Queen's High Grace,'
and, whilst he fumbled in his belt to find a little wallet that held the
letter, he spoke on: 'But I misdoubt you cannot read. Therefore I shall
tell you the Queen's High Grace commandeth you to come into her
service--or not, as the report of your character shall be. But at any
rate you shall come to the castle.'
Mary Hall could find no words for men of condition, so long she had been
out of the places where such are found. She swallowed in her throat and
held her breast over her heart.
'Where is the village here?' the cornet said, 'or what justice is there
that can write you a character under his seal?'
She made out to say that there was no village, all the neighbourhood
having been hanged. A half-mile from there there was the house of Sir
Nicholas Throckmorton, a justice. From the house-end he might see it, or
he might have a hind to guide him. But he would have no guide; he would
have no man nor maid nor child to go from there to the justice's house.
He set one soldier to guard the back door and one the front, that none
came out nor went beyond the dyke-end.
'Neither shall you go, Sir Lascelles,' he said.
'Well, give me leave with my sister to walk this knoll,' Lascelles said
good-humouredly. 'We shall not corrupt the grass blades to bear false
witness of my sister's chastity.'
'Ay, you may walk upon this mound,' the cornet answered. Having got out
the packet of the Queen's letter, he girded up his belt again.
'You will get you ready to ride with me,' he said to Mary Hall. 'For I
will not be in these marshes after nightfall, but will sleep at
Shrimpton Inn.'
He looked around him and added--
'I will have three of your geese to take with us,' he said. 'Kill me
them presently.'
Lascelles looked after him as he strode away round the house with the
long paces of a stiff horseman.
'Before God,' he laughed, 'that is one way to have information about a
quean. Now are we prisoners whilst he inquires after your character.'
'Oh, alack!' Mary Hall said, and she cast up her hands.
'Well, we are prisoners till he come again,' her brother said
good-humouredly. 'But this is a foul hole. Come out into the sunlight.'
She said--
'If you are with them, they cannot come to take me prisoner.'
He looked her full in the eyes with his own that twinkled inscrutably.
He said very slowly--
'Were your mar-locks and prinking-prankings so very evil at the old
Duchess's?'
She grew white: she shrank away as if he had threatened her with his
fist.
'The Queen's Highness was such a child,' she said. 'She cannot remember.
I have lived very godly since.'
'I will do what I can to save you,' he said. 'Let me hear about it, as,
being prisoners, we may never come off.'
'You!' she cried out. 'You who stole my wedding portion!'
He laughed deviously.
'Why, I have laid it up so well for you that you may wed a knight now if
you do my bidding. I was ever against your wedding Hall.'
'You lie!' she said. 'You gar'd me do it.'
The maids were peeping out of the cellar, whither they had fled.
'Come upon the grass,' he said. 'I will not be heard to say more than
this: that you and I stand and fall together like good sister and goodly
brother.'
Their faces differed only in that hers was afraid and his smiling as he
thought of new lies to tell her. Her face in her hood, pale beneath its