The Fifth Queen Crowned Part 30

'Tell these lords what you would have of us?'

'We would have these promises,' the voice said; 'first, of you, my Lord Duke, that if by our endeavours your brother's child be brought to a trial for unchast.i.ty you will in no wise aid her at that trial with your voice or your encouragement.'

'A trial!' and 'Unchast.i.ty!' the Duke said. 'This is a winter madness.

Ye know that my niece--St Kevin curse her for it--is as chaste as the snow.'

'So was your other niece, Anne Boleyn, for all you knew, yet you dogged her to death,' Gardiner said. 'Then you plotted with Papists; now it is the turn of the Lutherans. It is all one, so we are rid of this pest.'

'Well, I will promise it,' the Duke said. 'Ye knew I would. It was not worth while to ask me.'

'Secondly,' the voice said, 'of you, my Lord Duke, we would have this service: that you should swear your niece is a much older woman than she looks. Say, for instance, that she was in truth not the eleventh but the second child of your brother Edmund. Say that, out of vanity, to make herself seem more forward with the learned tongues when she was a child, she would call herself her younger sister that died in childbed.'

'But wherefore?' the Duke said.

'Why,' Gardiner answered, 'this is a very subtle scheme of this gentleman's devising. He will prove against her certain lewdnesses when she was a child in your mother's house. If then she was a child of ten or so, knowing not evil from good, this might not undo her. But if you can make her seem then eighteen or twenty it will be enough to hang her.'

Norfolk reflected.

'Well, I will say I heard that of her age,' he said; 'but ye had best get nurses and women to swear to these things.'

'We have them now,' the voice said. 'And it will suffice if your Grace will say that you heard these things of old of your brother. For your Grace will judge this woman.'

'Very willingly I will,' Norfolk said; 'for if I do not soon, she will utterly undo both me and all my friends.'

He reflected again.

'Those things will I do and more yet, if you will.'

'Why, that will suffice,' the voice said. It took a new tone in the darkness.

'Now for you, Sir Henry Wriothesley,' it said. 'These simple things you shall promise. Firstly, since you have the ear of the Mayor of London you shall advise him in no way to hinder certain meetings of Lutherans that I shall tell you of later. And, though it is your province so to do, you shall in no wise hinder a certain master printer from printing what broadsides and libels he will against the Queen. For it is essential, if this project is to grow and flourish, that it shall be spread abroad that the Queen did bewitch the King to her will on that night at Pontefract that you remember, when she had her cousin in her bedroom. So broadsides shall be made alleging that by sorcery she induced the King to countenance his own shame. And we have witnesses to swear that it was by appointment, not by chance, that she met with Culpepper upon the moorside. But all that we will have of you is that you will promise these two things--that the Lutherans may hold certain meetings and the broadsides be printed.'

'Those I will promise,' came in Wriothesley's buried voice.

'Then I will no more of you,' the other's words came. They heard his hands feeling along the wall till he came to the door by which he had entered. The Bishop followed him, to let him out by a little door he had had opened for that one night, into the street.

When he came back to the other two and unfolded to them what was the scheme of the Archbishop's man, they agreed that it was a very good plan. Then they fell to considering whether it should not serve their turn to betray this plan at once to the Queen. But they agreed that, if they preserved the Queen, they would be utterly ruined, as they were like to be now, whereas, if it succeeded, they would be much the better off. And, even if it failed, they lost nothing, for it would not readily be believed that they had aided Lutherans, and there were no letters or writings.

So they agreed to abide honourably by their promises--and very certain they were that if clamour enough could be raised against the Queen, the King would be bound into putting her away, though it were against his will.

III

In the Master Printer Badge's house--and he was the uncle of Margot and of the young Poins--there was a great and solemn dissertation towards.

For word had been brought that certain strangers come on an emba.s.sy from the Duke of Cleves were minded to hear how the citizens of London--or at any rate those of them that held German doctrines--bore themselves towards Schmalkaldnerism and the doctrines of Luther.

It was understood that these strangers were of very high degree--of a degree so high that they might scarce be spoken to by the meaner sort.

And for many days messengers had been going between the house of the Archbishop at Lambeth and that of the Master Printer, to school him how this meeting must be conducted.

His old father was by that time dead--having died shortly after his granddaughter Margot had been put away from the Queen's Court--so that the house-place was clear. And of all the old furnishings none remained.

There were presses all round the wall, and lockers for men to sit upon.

The table had been cleared away into the printer's chapel; a lectern stood a-midmost of the room, and before the hearth-place, in the very ingle, there was set the great chair in which aforetimes the old man had sat so long.

Early that evening, though already it was dusk, the body of citizens were a.s.sembled. Most of them had haggard faces, for the times were evil for men of their persuasion, and nearly all of them were draped in black after the German fashion among Lutherans of that day. They ranged themselves on the lockers along the wall, and with set faces, in a funereal row, they awaited the coming of this great stranger. There were no Germans amongst them, for so, it was given out, he would have it--either because he would not be known by name or for some other reason.

The Master Printer, in the pride of his craft, wore his ap.r.o.n. He stood in the centre of the room facing the hearth-place; his huge arms were bare--for bare-armed he always worked--his black beard was knotted into little curls, his face was so broad that you hardly remarked that his nose was hooked like an owl's beak. And about the man there was an air of sombreness and mystery. He had certain papers on his lectern, and several sheets of the great Bible that he was then printing by the Archbishop's license and command. They sang all together and with loud voices the canticle called 'A Refuge fast is G.o.d the Lord.'

Then, with huge gestures of his hands, he uttered the words--

'This is the very word of G.o.d,' and began to read from the pages of his Bible. He read first the story of David and Saul, his great voice trembling with ecstasy.

'This David is our King,' he said. 'This Saul that he slew is the Beast of Rome. The Solomon that cometh after shall be the gracious princeling that ye wot of, for already he is wise beyond his years and beyond most grown men.'

The citizens around the walls cried 'Amen.' And because the strangers tarried to come, he called to his journeymen that stood in the inner doorway to bring him the sheets of the Bible whereon he had printed the story of Ehud and Eglon.

'This king that ye shall hear of as being slain,' he cried out, 'is that foul bird the Kaiser Carl, that harries the faithful in Almain. This good man that shall slay him is some German lord. Who he shall be we know not yet; maybe it shall be this very stranger that to-night shall sit to hear us.'

His brethren muttered a low, deep, and uniform prayer that soon, soon the Lord should send them this boon.

But he had not got beyond the eleventh verse of this history before there came from without a sound of trumpets, and through the windows the light of torches and the scarlet of the guard that, it was said, the King had sent to do honour to this stranger.

'Come in, be ye who ye may!' the printer cried to the knockers at his door.

There entered the hugest masked man that they ever had seen. All in black he was, and horrifying and portentous he strode in. His sleeves and shoulders were ballooned after the German fashion, his sword clanked on the tiles. He was a vision of black, for his mask that appeared as big as another man's garment covered all his face, though they could see he had a grey beard when sitting down. He gazed at the fire askance.

He said--his voice was heavy and husky--

'_Gruesset Gott_,' and those of the citizens that had painfully attained to so much of that tongue answered him with--

'_Lobet den Herr im Himmels Reich!_'

He had with him one older man that wore a half-mask, and was trembling and clean-shaven, and one younger, that was English, to act as interpreter when it was needed. He was clean-shaven, too, and in the English habit he appeared thin and tenuous. They said he was a gentleman of the Archbishop's, and that his name was Lascelles.

He opened the meeting with saying that these great strangers were come from beyond the seas, and would hear answers to certain questions. He took a paper from his pouch and said that, in order that he might stick to the points that these strangers would know of, he had written down those questions on that paper.

'How say ye, masters?' he finished. 'Will ye give answers to these questions truly, and of your knowledge?'

'Aye will we,' the printer said, 'for to that end we are gathered here.

Is it not so, my masters?'

And the a.s.sembly answered--

'Aye, so it is.'

Lascelles read from his paper:

'How is it with this realm of England?'