girl laughed at her.
‘Your letter is in my sleeve. No hands shall touch it before mine deliver it to him it is written to. Get you to our mistress. I thank you for an errand I may laugh over; laughter here is not over mirthful.’
She stood side face to Katharine, her mouth puckered up into her smile, her eyes roguish, her hands clasped behind her back.
‘Why, you see Cicely Elliott,’ she said, ‘whose folk all died after the Marquis of Exeter’s rising, who has neither kith nor kin, nor house nor home. I had a man loved me passing well. He is dead with the rest; so I pass my time in pranks because the hours are heavy. To-day the prank is on thy side; take it as a gift the gods send, for tomorrow I may play thee one, since thou art soft, and fair, and tender. That is why they call me here the Magpie. My old knight will tell you I have tweaked his nose now and again, but I will not have him shortened by the head for thy sake.’
‘Why, you are very bitter,’ Katharine said.
The girl answered, ‘If your head ached as mine does now and again when I remember my men who are dead; if your head ached as mine does. . . . ’ She stopped and gave a peal of laughter. ‘Why, child, your face is like a startled moon. You have not stayed days enough here to have met many like me; but if you tarry here for long you will laugh much as I laugh, or you will have grown blind long since with weeping.’
Katharine said, ‘Poor child, poor child!’
But the girl cried out, ‘Get you gone, I say! In the Lady Mary’s room you shall find my old knight babbling with the maidens. Send him to me, for my head aches scurvily, and he shall dip his handkerchief in vinegar and set it upon my forehead.’
‘Let me comb thy hair,’ Katharine said; ‘my hand is sovereign against a headache.’
‘No, get you gone,’ the girl said harshly; ‘I will have men of war to do these errands for me.’
Katharine answered, ‘Sit thee down. Thou wilt take my letter; I must ease thy pains.’
‘As like as not I shall scratch thy pink face,’ Cicely said. ‘At these times I cannot bear the touch of a woman. It was a woman made my father run with the Marquis of Exeter.’
‘Sweetheart,’ Katharine said softly, ‘I could hold both thy wrists with my two fingers. I am stronger than most men.’
‘Why, no!’ the girl cried; ‘I may not sit still. Get you gone. I will run upon your errand. If you had knelt to as many men as I have you could not sit still either. And not one of my men was pardoned.’
She ran from the room with a sidelong step like a magpie’s, and her laugh rang out discordantly from the corridor.
The Lady Mary sat reading her Plautus in her large painted gallery, with all her maids about her sewing, some at a dress for her, some winding silk for their own uses. The old knight stood holding his sturdy hands apart between a rope of wool that his namesake Lady Rochford was making into balls. Other gentlemen were beside some of the maids, toying with their silks or whispering in their ears. No one much marked Katharine Howard.
She glided to her lady and kissed the dry hand that lay in the lap motionless. Mary raised her eyes from her book, looked for a leisurely time at the girl’s face, and then began again to read. Old Rochford winked pleasantly at her, and, after she had saluted his cousin, he begged her to hold the wool in his stead, for his hands, which were used to sword and shield, were very cold, and his legs, inured to the saddle, brooked standing very ill.
‘Cicely Elliott hath a headache,’ Katharine said; ‘she bade me send you to her.’
He waited before her, helping her to adjust the wool on to her white hands, and she uttered, in a low voice:
‘She hath taken my letter for me.’
He said, ‘Why, what a’ the plague’s name . . . ’ and stood fingering his peaked little beard in a gentle perplexity.
Lady Rochford pulled at her wool and gave a hissing sigh of pain, for the joint of her wrist was swollen.
‘It has always been easterly winds in January since the Holy Blood of Hailes was lost,’ she sighed. ‘In its day I could get me some ease in the wrist by touching the phial that held it.’ She shivered with discomfort, and smiled distractedly upon Katharine. Her large and buxom face was mild, and she seemed upon the point of shedding tears.
‘Why, if you will put your wool round a stool, I will wind it for you,’ Katharine said, because the gentle helplessness of the large woman filled her with compassion, as if this were her old, mild mother.
Lady Rochford shook her head disconsolately.
‘Then I must do something else, and my bones would ache more. But I would you would make my cousin Rochford ask the Archbishop where they have hidden the Sacred Blood of Hailes, that I may touch it and be cured.’
The old knight frowned very slightly.
‘I have told thee to wrap thy fist in lamb’s-wool,’ he said. ‘A hundred times I have told thee. It is very dangerous to meddle with these old saints and phials that are done away with.’
Lady Rochford sighed gently and hung her head.
‘My cousin Anne, that was a sinful Queen, God rest her soul . . . ’ she began.
Sir Nicholas listened to her no more.
‘See you,’ he whispered to Katharine. ‘Peradventure it is best that Cicely have gone. Being a madcap, her comings and goings are heeded by no man, and it is true that she resorteth daily to the Bishop of Winchester, to plague his priests.’
‘I would not speak so, being a man,’ Katharine said.
He smiled at her and patted her shoulder.
‘Why, I have struck good blows in my time,’ he said.
‘And have learned worldly wisdom,’ Katharine retorted.
‘I would not risk my neck on grounds where I am but ill acquainted,’ he answered soberly. He was all will to please her. The King, he said, was coming on the Wednesday, after the Bishop of Winchester’s, to see three new stallions walk in their manage-steps. ‘I pray that you will come with Cicely Elliott to watch from the little window in the stables. These great creatures are a noble sight. I bred them myself to it.’ His mild brown eyes were bright with enthusiasm and cordiality.
Suddenly there was a great silence in the room, and the Lady Mary raised her head. The burly figure of Throckmorton, the spy, was in the doorway. Katharine shuddered at the sight of him, for, in her Lincolnshire house, where he was accounted more hateful than Judas who betrayed the Lord, she had seen him beat the nuns when the convents had been turned out of doors, and he had brought to death his own brother, who had had a small estate near her father’s house. The smile upon his face made her feel sick. He stroked his long, golden-brown beard, glanced swiftly round the room, and advanced to the mistress’s chair, swinging his great shoulders. He made a leg and pulled off his cap, and at that there was a rustle of astonishment, for it had been held treasonable to cap the Lady Mary. Her eyes regarded him fixedly, with a granite cold and hardness, and he seemed to have at once a grin of power and a shrinking motion of currying favour. He said that Privy Seal begged her leave that her maid Katharine Howard might go to him soon after one o’clock. The Lady Mary neither spoke nor moved, but the old knight shrank away from Katharine, and affected to be talking in the ear of Lady Rochford, who went on winding her wool. Throckmorton turned on his heels and swung away, his eyes on the floor, but with a grin on his evil face.
He left a sudden whisper behind him, and then the silence fell once more. Katharine stood, a tall figure, holding out the hands on which the wool was as if she were praying to some invisible deity or welcoming some invisible lover. Some heads were raised to look at her, but they fell again; the old knight shuffled nearer her to whisper hoarsely from his moustachioed lips:
‘Your serving man hath reported. Pray God we come safe out of this!’ Then he went out of the