The Fifth Queen Crowned Part 11

'In the day of Caesar it was simple to do well,' the Queen said.

'Why, I do not believe it,' Cicely answered her.

'Cousin! Cousin!' The old Lady Rochford warned her that this was the Queen, not her old playmate.

'But now,' the Queen said, 'with such a coming together and a concourse of peoples about us; with such holes and corners in a great Court----'

She paused and sighed.

'Well, if I may not speak my mind,' Cicely Rochford said to the old lady, 'what good am I?'

'I did even what I might to keep this lamb Margot from the teeth of that wolf Magister,' the Queen said. 'I take shame to myself that I did no more. I will do a penance for it. But still I think that these be degenerate days.'

'Oh, Queen of dreams and fancies,' Cicely Rochford said. 'I am very certain that in the days of your n.o.ble Romans it was as it is now. Tell me, if you can, that in all your readings of hic and hoc you lit not upon such basenesses? You will not lay your hand upon your heart and say that never a man of Rome bartered his sister for the hope of advancement, or that never a learned doctor was a corrupter of youth? I have seen the like in the plays of Plautus that here have been played at Court.'

'Why,' the Queen said, 'the days of Plautus were days degenerated and fallen already from the ancient n.o.bleness.'

'You should have Queened it before Goodman Adam fell,' Cicely Rochford mocked her. 'If you go back before Plautus, go back all the way.'

She shrugged her shoulders up to her ears and uttered a little sound like '_Pfui!_' Then she said quickly--

'Give me leave to be gone, your Highness, that I may not grow over familiar like the boy with the pikestaff, for if it do not gall you it shall wring the withers of this my old husband's cousin!'

The old Lady Rochford, who was always thinking of what had been said two speeches ago, because she was so slow-witted, raised her gouty hands in the air and opened her mouth. But the Queen smiled faintly at Cicely.

'When I ask you to mince matters in my little room you shall do it. It was Lucius the Praetor that went always accompanied by a carping Stoic to keep him from being puffed up, and it was a good custom.'

'Before Heaven,' Cicely Rochford said in the midst of her curtsey at the door, 'shall I have the office of such a one as Diogenes who derided Alexander the Emperor? Then must my old husband live with me in a tub!'

'Pray you,' the Queen said after her through the door, 'look you around and spy me out a maid to be my tiring-woman and ward my spinsters. For nowadays I see few maids to choose from.'

When she was gone the old Lady Rochford timorously berated the Queen.

She would have her be more distant with knights' wives and the like. For it was fitting for a Queen to be feared and deemed awful.

'I had rather be loved and deemed pitiful,' Katharine answered. 'For I was once such a one--no more--than she or thou, or very little more.

Before the people I bear myself proudly for my lord his high honour. But I do lead a very cloistered life, and have leisure to reflect upon for what a little s.p.a.ce authority endureth, and how that friendship and true love between friends are things that bear the weather better.' She did not say her Latin text, for the old lady had no Latin.

VI

In the underground cell, above the red and gold table that afternoon, Lascelles wrought at a fair copy of the King's letter to the Pope, amended as it had been by Udal's hand. The Archbishop had come into the room reading a book as he came from his prayers, and sate him down in his chair at the tablehead without glancing at his gentleman.

'Prithee, your Grace,' Lascelles said, 'suffer me to carry this letter mine own self to the Queen.'

The Archbishop looked up at him; his mournful eyes started wide; he leaned forward.

'Art thou Lascelles?' he asked.

'Aye, Lascelles I am,' the gentleman answered; 'but I have cut off my beard.'

The Archbishop was very weak and startled; he fell into an anger.

'Is this a time for vanities?' he said. 'Will you be after the wenches?

You look a foolish boy! I do not like this prank.'

Lascelles put up his hand to stroke his vanished beard. His risible lips writhed in a foxy smile; his chin was fuller than you would have expected, round and sensuous with a dimple in the peak of it.

'Please it, your Grace,' he said, 'this is no vanity, but a scheme that I will try.'

'What scheme? What scheme?' the Archbishop said. 'Here have been too many schemes.' He was very shaken and afraid, because this world was beyond his control.

'Please it, your Grace,' Lascelles answered, 'ask me not what this scheme is.'

The Archbishop shook his head and pursed his lips feebly.

'Please it, your Grace,' Lascelles urged, 'if this scheme miscarry, your Grace shall hear no more of it. If this scheme succeed I trow it shall help some things forward that your Grace would much have forwarded.

Please it, your Grace, to ask me no more, and to send me with this letter to the Queen's Highness.'

The Archbishop opened his nerveless hands before him; they were pale and wrinkled as if they had been much soddened in water. Since the King had bidden him compose that letter to the Pope of Rome, his hands had grown so. Lascelles wrote on at the new draft of the letter, his lips following the motions of his pen. Still writing, and with his eyes down, he said--

'The Queen's Highness will put from her her tirewoman in a week from now.'

The Archbishop moved his fingers as who should say--

'What is that to me!' His eyes gazed into the s.p.a.ce above his book that lay before him on the table.

'This Margot Poins is a niece of the master-printer Badge, a Lutheran, of the Austin Friars.' Lascelles pursued his writing for a line further.

Then he added--

'This putting away and the occasion of it shall make a great noise in the town of London. It will be said amongst the Lutherans that the Queen is answerable therefor. It will be said that the Queen hath a very lewd Court and companionship.'

The Archbishop muttered wearily--

'It hath been said already.'

'But not,' Lascelles said, 'since she came to be Queen.'

The Archbishop directed upon him his hang-dog eyes, and his voice was the voice of a man that would not be disturbed from woeful musings.

'What use?' he said bitterly; and then again, 'What use?'

Lascelles wrote on sedulously. He used his sandarach to the end of the page, blew off the sand, eyed the sheet sideways, laid it down, and set another on his writing-board.

'Why,' he brought out quietly, 'it may be brought to the King's Highness' ears.'

'What way?' the Archbishop said heavily, as if the thing were impossible. His gentleman answered--

'This way and that!' The King's Highness had a trick of wandering about among his faithful lieges unbeknown; foreign amba.s.sadors wrote abroad such rumours which might be re-reported from the foreign by the King's servants.

'Such a report,' Lascelles said, 'hath gone up already to London town by a swift carrier.'