The Fifth Queen Crowned
have lost your preferment, and I am glad of it. Another and a better
than thou shall be the Queen's Chancellor, for another and a better than
thou shall wed this wench. We will get her such a goodly husband----'
A low, melancholy wail from Margot Poins' agonised face--a sound such as
might have been made by an ox in pain--brought him to a stop. It wrung
the Magister, who could not bear to see a woman pained, up to a pitch of
ecstatic courage.
'_Quid fecit Caesar_,' he stuttered; 'what Caesar hath done, Caesar can do
again. It was not till very lately since this canon of wedding and
consummating and blessing by a holy friar hath been derided and
contemned in this realm. And so it might be again----'
Katharine Howard cried out, 'Ah!' Her features grew rigid and as ashen
as cold steel. And, at her cry, the King--who could less bear than Udal
to hear a woman in pain--the King sprang up from his chair. It was as
amazing to all them as to hunters it is to see a great wild bull charge
with a monstrous velocity. Udal was rigid with fear, and the King had
him by the throat. He shook him backwards and forwards so that his book
fell upon the Queen's feet, bursting out of his ragged gown, and his
cap, flying from his opened hand, fell down over the battlement into an
elm top. The King guttered out unintelligible sounds of fury from his
vast chest and, planted on his huge feet, he swung the Magister round
him till, backwards and staggering, the eyes growing fixed in his brown
and rigid face, he was pushed, jerking at each step of the King, out of
sight behind the green silk curtains.
The Queen sat motionless in her purple velvet. She twisted one hand into
the chain of the medallion about her throat, and one hand lay open and
pale by her side. Margot Poins knelt at her side, her face hidden in the
Queen's lap, her two arms stretched out beyond her grey coifed head. For
a minute she was silent. Then great sobs shook her so that Katharine
swayed upon her seat. From her hidden face there came muffled and
indistinguishable words, and at last Katharine said dully--
'What, child? What, child?'
Margot moved her face sideways so that her mouth was towards Katharine.
'You can unmake it! You can unmake the marriage,' she brought out in
huge sobs.
Katharine said--
'No! No!'
'You unmade a King's marriage,' Margot wailed.
Katharine said--
'No! No!' She started and uttered the words loudly; she added pitifully,
'You do not understand! You do not understand!'
It was the more pitiful in that Margot understood very well. She hid her
face again and only sobbed heavily and at long intervals, and then with
many sobs at once. The Queen laid her white hand upon the girl's head.
Her other still played with the chain.
'Christ be piteous to me,' she said. 'I think it had been better if I
had never married the King.'
Margot uttered an indistinguishable sound.
'I think it had been better,' the Queen said; 'though I had jeoparded my
immortal part.'
Margot moved her head up to cry out in her turn--
'No! No! You may not say it!'
Then she dropped her face again. When she heard the King coming back and
breathing heavily, she stood up, and with huge tears on her red and
crumpled face she looked out upon the fields as if she had never seen
them before. An immense sob shook her. The King stamped his foot with
rage, and then, because he was soft-hearted to them that he saw in
sorrow, he put his hand upon her shoulder.
'Sha't have a better mate,' he uttered. 'Sha't be a knight's dame!
There! there!' and he fondled her great back with his hand. Her eyes
screwed tightly up, she opened her mouth wide, but no words came out,
and suddenly she shook her head as if she had been an enraged child. Her
loud cries, shaken out of her with her tears, died away as she went
across the terrace, a loud one and then a little echo, a loud one and
then two more.
'Before God!' the King said, 'that knave shall eat ten years of prison
bread.'
His wife looked still over the wooded enclosures, the little stone
walls, and the copses. A small cloud had come before the sun, and its
shadow was moving leisurely across the ridge where stood the roofless
abbey.
'The maid shall have the best man I can give her,' the King said.
'Why, no good man would wed her!' Katharine answered dully.
Henry said--
'Anan?' Then he fingered the dagger on the chain before his chest.
'Why,' he added slowly, 'then the Magister shall die by the rope. It is
an offence that can be quitted with death. It is time such a thing were
done.'
Katharine's dull silence spurred him; he shrugged his shoulders and
heaved a deep breath out.
'Why,' he said, 'a man can be found to wed the wench.'
She moved one hand and uttered--
'I would not wed her to such a man!' as if it were a matter that was not
much in her thoughts.
'Then she may go into a nunnery,' the King said; 'for before three
months are out we will have many nunneries in this realm.'
She looked upon him a little absently, but she smiled at him to give him
pleasure. She was thinking that she wished she had not wedded him; but
she smiled because, things being as they were, she thought that she had
all the authorities of the noble Greeks and Romans to bid her do what a
good wife should.
He laughed at her griefs, thinking that they were all about Margot
Poins. He uttered jolly grossnesses; he said that she little knew the
way of courts if she thought that a man, and a very good man, might not
be found to wed the wench.
She was troubled that he could not better read what was upon her mind,
for she was thinking that her having consented to his making null his
marriage with the Princess of Cleves that he might wed her would render
her work always the more difficult. It would render her more the target
for evil tongues, it would set a sterner and a more stubborn opposition
against her task of restoring the Kingdom of God within that realm.
Henry said--
'Ye hannot guessed what my secret was? What have I done for thee this
day?'
She still looked away over the lands. She made her face smile--
'Nay, I know not. Ha' ye brought me the musk I love well?'
He shook his head.
'It is more than that!' he said.
She still smiled--
'Ha' ye--ha' ye--made make for me a new crown?'
She feared a little that that was what he had done. For he had been
urgent with her, many months, to be crowned. It was his way to love
these things. And her heart was a little gladder when he shook his head
once again and uttered--
'It is more than that!'
She dreaded his having made ready in secret a great pageant in her
honour, for she was afraid of all aggrandisements, and thought still it
had been better that she had remained his sweet friend ever and not the
Queen. For in that way she would have had as much empire over him, and
there would have been much less clamour against her--much less clamour
against the Church of her Saviour.
She forced her mind to run upon all the things that she could wish for.
When she said it must be that he had ordered for her enough French
taffetas to make twelve gowns, he laughed and said that he had said that
it was more than a crown. When she guessed that he had made ready such a
huge cavalcade that she might with great comfort and safety ride with
him into Scotland, he laughed, contented that she should think of going
with him upon that long journey. He stood looking at her, his little
eyes blinking, his face full of pride and joy, and suddenly he uttered--
'The Church of God is come back again.' He touched his cap at the sacred
name. 'I ha' made submission to the Pope.'
He looked her full in the face to get all the delight he might from her
looks and her movements.
Her blue eyes grew large; she leaned forward in her chair; her mouth
opened a little; her sleeves fell down to the ground. 'Now am I indeed
crowned!' she said, and closed her eyes. '_Benedicta sit mater dei!_'
she uttered, and her hand went over her heart place; '_deo clamavi nocte
atque die._'
She was silent again, and she leaned more forward.
'_Sit benedicta dies haec; sit benedicta hora haec benedictaque,
saeculum saeculum, castra haec._'
She looked out upon the great view: she aspired the air.
'_Ad colles_,' she breathed, '_levavi oculos meos; unde venit salvatio
nostra!_'
'Body of God,' Henry said, 'all things grow plain. All things grow
plain. This is the best day that ever I knew.'
IV
The Lady Mary of England sat alone in a fair room with little arched
windows that gave high up on to the terrace. It was the best room that
ever she had had since her mother, the Queen Katharine of Aragon, had
been divorced.
Dressed in black she sat writing at a large table before one window. Her
paper was fitted on to a wooden pulpit that rose before her; one book
stood open upon it, three others lay open too upon the red and blue and
green pattern of the Saracen rug that covered her table. At her right
hand was a three-tiered inkstand of pewter, set about with the white
feathers of pens; and the snakelike pattern of the table-rug serpentined
in and out beneath seals of parcel gilt, a platter of bread, a sandarach
of pewter, books bound in wooden covers and locked with chains, books in
red velvet covers, sewn with silver wire and tied with ribbons. It ran
beneath a huge globe of the world, blue and pink, that had a golden pin
in it to mark the city of Rome. There were little wooden racks stuck
full with written papers and parchments along the wainscoting between
the arched windows, but all the hangings of the other walls were of
tinted and dyed silks, not any with dark colours, because Katharine
Howard had deemed that that room with its deep windows in the thick
walls would be otherwise dark. The room was ten paces deep by twenty
long, and the wood of the floor was polished. Against the wall, behind
the Lady Mary's back, there stood a high chair upon a platform. Upon the
platform a carpet began that ran up the wall and, overhead, depended
from the gilded rafters of the ceiling so that it formed a dais and a
canopy.
The Lady Mary sat grimly amongst all these things as if none of them
belonged to her. She looked in her book, she made a note upon her
paper, she stretched out her hand and took a piece of bread, putting it
in her mouth, swallowing it quickly, writing again, and then once more
eating, for the great and ceaseless hunger that afflicted her gnawed
always at her vitals.
A little boy with a fair poll was reaching on tiptoe to smell at a pink
that depended from a vase of very thin glass standing in the deep
window. The shield of the coloured pane cast a little patch of red and
purple on to his callow head. He was dressed all in purple, very square,
and with little chains and medallions, and a little dagger with a golden
sheath was about his neck. In one hand he had a piece of paper, in the
other a pencil. The Lady Mary wrote; the child moved on tiptoe, with a
sedulous expression of silence about his lips, near to her elbow. He
watched her writing for a long time with attentive eyes.
Once he said, 'Sister, I----' but she paid him no heed.
After a time she looked coldly at his face and then he moved along the
table, fingered the globe very gently, touched the books and returned to
her side. He stood with his little legs wide apart. Then he sighed, then
he said--
'Sister, the Queen did bid me ask you a question.'
She looked round upon him.
'This was the Queen's question,' he said bravely:
'"_Cur_--why--_nunquam_--never--_rides_--dost thou
smile--_cum_--when--_ego, frater tuus_--I, thy little
brother--_ludo_--play--_in camera tua_--in thy chamber?"'
'Little Prince,' she said, 'art not afeared of me?'
'Aye, am I,' he answered.