unspeakable!’ she said. ‘You bring me examples in the vulgar tongue!’
‘I babble for joy at seeing you and for grief at your harsh words,’ he answered.
She stood waiting with a sort of haughty submissiveness.
‘I would you would delay your wooing. I have been on the road since dawn with neither bit nor sup.’
He protested that he had starved more hideously than Tantalus since he had seen her last.
She gave him indifferently her cheek to kiss.
‘For pity’s sake take me where I may rest,’ she said, ‘I have a maimed arm.’
* * * * *
He uttered her panegyric, after a model of Tibullus, to the Lady Rochford and the seven maids of honour under that lady’s charge. He was set upon Katharine’s enjoyment, and he invented a lie that the King had commanded a dress to be found for her to attend at the revels that night. The maids were already dressing themselves. Two of them were fairheaded, and four neither fair nor dark; but one was dark as night, and dressed all in black with a white coif, so that she resembled a magpie. Some were curling each other’s hair and others tightening stay-laces with little wheels set in their companions’ backs. Their bare shoulders were blue with the cold of the great room, and their dresses lay in heaps upon sheets that were spread about the clean floor — brocades sewn with pearls, velvets that were inlaid with filagree work, indoor furs and coifs of fine lawn that were delicately edged with black thread.
The high sounds of their laughter had reached through the door, but a dead silence fell. The dark girl with a very long bust that raked back like a pigeon’s, and with dark and sparkling eyes, tittered derisively at the magister and went on slowly rubbing a perfumed ointment into the skin of her throat and shoulders.
‘Shall he bring his ragged doxies here too?’ she laughed. ‘What a taradiddle is this of Cophetua and a beggar wench.’ The other maids all tittered derisively at Udal.
The Lady Rochford, warming her back close before the fire, said helplessly, ‘I have no dresses beyond what you see.’ She was already attired in a bountiful wine-coloured velvet that was embroidered with silver wire into entwined monograms of the initials of her name. Her hood of purple made, above her ample brows, a castellated pattern resembling the gate of a drawbridge. She, being the mistress of that household, and compassionately loved by the ladies because she was so helpless, timorous, and unable to control them, they had combined to comb and perfume her and to lace her stomacher before setting about their own clothing. White-haired and with a wrinkled face, she appeared, under her rich clothes, like some will-less and pallid captive that had been gorgeously bedizened to grace a conqueror’s triumph. She was cousin to the late Queen Anne Boleyn, and the terror of her own escape, when the Queen and so many of her house had been swept away, seemed still to remain in the drawing-in of her eyes. In the mien of the youngest girls there, there could be seen a strained tenseness of lids and lips as though, in the midst of laughter, they were hearkening for distant sounds or the rustle of listeners behind the tapestry. And where a small door came into one wall they had pulled down the arras from in front of it, so that no one should enter unobserved. Lady Rochford addressed herself to Katharine with limp gestures of protest:
‘God knows I would help you to a gown, but we have no more than we are granted; here are seven ladies and seven dresses. Where can another be got? The King’s Highness knoweth little of ladies’ gowns or he had never ordered one against to-night. Each of those hath taken the women seven weeks to sew.’
Udal said with a touch of anger, since it enraged him to have to invent further, as if the one lie about the King were not enough: ‘The Lord Privy Seal commanded very strictly this thing to be done. He is this lady’s very diligent protector. Have a care how you disoblige her.’
The ladies rustled their slight clothing at that name, turned their backs, and looked at Katharine above their shoulders. The Lady Rochford recoiled so far that her skirts were in danger from the fire in the great hearth; her woebegone, flaccid face was suddenly drawn at the mention of Cromwell, and she appeared about to kneel at Katharine’s feet. She looked round at the figures of the girls.
‘One of these can stay if your ladyship will wear her dress,’ she flustered. ‘But who is tall enow? Cicely is too long in the shank. Bess’s shoulders are too broad. Alack! God help me! I will do what I can’— and she waved her hands disconsolately.
Cold, fatigue, and her maimed arm made Katharine waver on her feet. This white-haired woman’s panic seemed to her grotesque and disgusting.
‘Why, the magister lies,’ she said. ‘I am no such friend of Privy Seal’s.’
Swift and wicked glances passed among the girls; the dark one threw back her head and laughed discordantly, like a magpie. She came with a deft and hopping step and gazed at Katharine with her head on one side.
‘Old Crummock will want our teeth next to make him a new set. He may have my head, tell him. I have no need for it, it aches so since he killed my men-folk.’
Lady Rochford shuddered as if she had been struck.
‘Beseech you,’ she said weakly to Katharine. ‘Cicely Elliott is sometimes distraught. Believe not that we speak like this among ourselves.’ Her eyes wandered in a flustered and piteous way over her girls and she whimpered, ‘Jane Gaskell, stand back to back with this lady.’
Katharine Howard cried out, ‘Keep your gowns for your backs and your tongues still. Woe betide the girl who calls me a gossip of Privy Seal.’
Cicely Elliott cast her dark head back and uttered one of her discordant laughs at the ceiling, and a girl, hiding behind the others, called out, ‘What a fine ——!’
Katharine cried, ‘It is all lies that this fool magister utters. I will go to no masques nor revels.’ She turned upon Lady Rochford, her face pallid, her lips open: ‘Give me water,’ she said harshly. ‘I will get me back to my pig-sties.’
Lady Rochford wrung her hands and protested that her ladyship should not repeat that they were always thus. Privy Seal should not visit it upon them.
The magister blinked upon the riot that his muddling had raised. He called out, ‘Be quiet. Be quiet. This lady is sick!’ and stretched out his hands to hold Katharine on her feet.
Cicely Elliott cried, ‘God send all Crummock’s informers always sick.’
‘Thou dastard!’ Katharine screamed aloud. She tried to speak but she choked; she grasped Udal’s hand as if to wring from him the denial of his foolish lies, but a sharp and numbing pain shot up her maimed wrist to her shoulders and leaped across her forehead.
‘Thou filthy spy,’ the dark girl laughed wildly into her agonised face. ‘If there had never been any like thee all the dear men of my house had still breathed.’
Katharine sprang wildly towards her tormentor, but a black sheet seemed to drop across her eyes. She fell right down and screamed as her elbow struck the floor.
Part Two
The House of Eyes
I
A grave and bearded man was found to cup her. He gave her a potion composed of the juice of nightshade and an infusion of churchyard moss. Her eyes grew dilated and she had evil dreams. She lay in a small chamber that was quite bare and had a broken window, and the magister ran from room to room begging for quilts to cover her.
It was nobody’s affair. The Lord Privy Seal, her uncle, the Catholics, and the King were still perturbed