The Fifth Queen Crowned
was a pity, since the Queen had made the Court orderly, and servants
were little beaten. But some said that like sire was like child, and
that great disorders there were in the Court, but quiet ones, and the
Queen the centre. But these were mostly the cleaners of dishes and the
women that swept rooms and spread new rushes. Upon the whole, the cooks
blessed the Queen, along with all them that had to do with feeding and
the kitchens. They thanked God for her because she had brought back the
old fasts. For, as they argued, your fast brings honours to cooks,
since, after a meagre day, your lord cometh to his trencher with a
better appetite, and then is your cook commended. The Archbishop's cooks
were the hottest in this contention, for they had the most reason to
know. The stablemen, palfreniers, and falconers' mates were, most part
of them, politicians more than the others, and these wondered to have
seen, through their peep-holes and door-cracks, the Queen's cousin go
away with these lords that were of the contrary party. Some said that T.
Culpepper was her emissary to win them over to her interests, and some,
that always cousins, uncles, and kin were the bitterest foes a Queen
had, as witness the case of Queen Anne Boleyn and the Yellow Dog of
Norfolk who had worked to ruin her. And some said it was marvellous that
there they could sit or stand and talk of such things--for a year or so
ago all the Court was spies, so that the haymen mistrusted them that
forked down the straw, and meat-servers them with the wine. But now each
man could talk as he would, and it made greatly for fellowship when a
man could sit against a wall, unbutton in the warm nights, and say what
he listed.
The light of the great fires grew dull in the line of kitchen windows;
sweethearting couples came in through the great gateway from the
grass-slopes beneath the castle walls. There was a little bustle when
four horsemen rode in to say that the King's Highness was but nine miles
from the castle, and torchmen must be there to light him in towards
midnight. But the Queen should not be told for her greater pleasure and
surprise. Then all these servingmen stood up and shook themselves, and
said--'To bed.' For, on the morrow, with the King back, there would
surely be great doings and hard work. And to mews and kennels and huts,
in the straw and beds of rushes, these men betook themselves. The young
lords came back laughing from Widow Amnot's at the castle foot; there
was not any light to be seen save one in all that courtyard full of
windows. The King's torchmen slumbered in the guard-room where they
awaited his approach. Darkness, silence, and deep shadow lay everywhere,
though overhead the sky was pale with moonlight, and, from high in the
air, the thin and silvery tones of the watchman's horn on the roof
filtered down at the quarter hours. A drowsy bell marked the hours, and
the cries and drillings of the night birds vibrated from very high.
V
Coming very late to her bedroom the Queen found awaiting her her
tiring-maid, Mary Trelyon, whom she had advanced into the post that
Margot Poins had held, and the old Lady Rochford.
'Why,' she said to her maid, 'when you have unlaced me you may go, or
you will not love my service that keeps you so late.'
Mary Trelyon cast her eyes on the ground, and said that it was such
pleasure to attend her mistress, that not willingly would she give up
that discoiffing, undoing of hair, and all the rest, for long she had
desired to have the handling of these precious things and costly
garments.
'No, you shall get you gone,' the Queen said, 'for I will not have you,
sweetheart, be red-lidded in the morning with this long watching, for
to-morrow the King comes, and I will have him see my women comely and
fair, though in your love you will not care for yourselves.'
Standing before her mirror, where there burned in silver dishes four
tall candles with perfumed wicks, Katharine offered her back to the
loosening fingers of this girl.
'I would not have you to think,' she said, 'that I am always thus late
and a gadabout. But this day'--the Queen's eyes sparkled, and her cheeks
were red with exaltation--'this day and this night are one that shall be
marked with red stones in the calendar of England, and late have I
travailed so to make them be.'
The girl was very black-avised, and her face beneath her grey hood--for
the Queen's maids were all in grey, with crowned roses, the device that
the King had given her at their wedding, worked in red silk on each
shoulder--her face beneath her grey hood was the clear shape of the thin
end of an egg. She worked at the unlacing of the Queen's gown, so that
she at last must kneel down to it.
Having finished, she remained upon her knees, but she twisted her
fingers in her skirt as if she were bashful, yet her face was perturbed
with red flushes on the dark cheeks.
The Queen, feeling that she knelt there upon her loosened gown and did
not get her gone, said--
'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 dewdrops 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--