magister,’ the younger John said moodily. ‘Have you not scars enow by your wenching?’
Udal pushed back the furs at his collar. ‘Master Printer John Badge the Younger,’ he flickered, ‘if you break my crown I will break your chapel. You shall never have license to print another libel. Give me your niece in wedlock?’
The old man said querulously, ‘Here’s a wantipole without ten crowns would marry a wench with three beds and seven hundred florins!’
Udal laughed. ‘Call her to bring me meat and drink,’ he said. ‘Large words ill fill an empty stomach.’
The younger John went negligently to the great Flemish press. He opened the face and revealed on its dark shelves a patty of cold fish and a black jack. With heavy movements and a solemn face he moved these things, with a knife and napkins, on to the broad black table.
The old man pulled his nose again and grinned.
‘Margot’s in her chamber,’ he chuckled. ‘As you came up the wicket way I sent my John to turn the key upon her. It’s there at his girdle.’ It clinked indeed among rules, T-squares and callipers at each footstep of the heavy printer between press and table.
Magister Udal stretched his thin hands towards it. ‘I will give you the printing of the Lady Mary’s commentary of Plautus for that key,’ he said.
The printer murmured ‘Eat,’ and set a great pewter salt-cellar, carved like a Flemish pikeman, a foot high, heavily upon the cloth.
Udal had the appetite of a wolf. He pulled off his cap the better to let his jaws work.
‘Here’s a letter from the Doctor Wernken of Augsburg,’ he said. ‘You may see how the Lutherans fare in Germany.’
The printer took the letter and read it, standing, frowning and heavy. Magister Udal ate; the old man fingered his furs and, leaning far back in his mended chair, gazed at nothing.
‘Let me have the maid in wedlock,’ Udal grunted between two bites. ‘Better women have looked favourably upon me. I had a pupil in the North ——’
‘She was a Howard, and the Howards are all whores,’ the printer said, over the letter. ‘Your Doctor Wernken writes like an Anabaptist.’
‘They are even as the rest of womenkind,’ Udal laughed, ‘but far quicker with their learning.’
A boy rising twenty, in a grey cloak that showed only his bright red stockings and broad-toed red shoes, rattled the back door and slammed it to. He pulled off his cap and shook it.
‘It snows,’ he said buoyantly, and then knelt before his grandfather. The old man touched his grandson’s cropped fair head.
‘Benedicite, grandson Hal Poins,’ he muttered, and relapsed into his gaze at the fire.
The young man bent his knee to his uncle and bowed low to the magister. Being about the court, he had for Udal’s learning and office a reverence that neither the printer nor his grandfather could share. He unfastened his grey cloak at the neck and cast it into a corner after his hat. His figure flashed out, lithe, young, a blaze of scarlet with a crowned rose embroidered upon a chest rendered enormous by much wadding. He was serving his apprenticeship as ensign in the gentlemen of the King’s guard, and because his dead father had been beloved by the Duke of Norfolk it was said that his full ensigncy was near. He begged his grandfather’s leave to come near the fire, and stood with his legs apart.
‘The new Queen’s come to Rochester,’ he said; ‘I am here with the guard to take the heralds to Greenwich Palace.’
The printer looked at him unfavourably from the corner of his dark and gloomy eyes.
‘You come to suck up more money,’ he said moodily. ‘There is none in this house.’
‘As Mary is my protectress!’ the boy laughed, ‘there is!’ He stuck his hands into his breeches pocket and pulled out a big fistful of crowns that he had won over-night at dice, and a long and thin Flemish chain of gold. ‘I have enow to last me till the thaw,’ he said. ‘I came to beg my grandfather’s blessing on the first day of the year.’
‘Dicing . . . Wenching . . . ’ the printer muttered.
‘If I ask thee for no blessing,’ the young man said, ‘it’s because, uncle, thou’rt a Lutheran that can convey none. Where’s Margot? This chain’s for her.’
‘The fair Margot’s locked in her chamber,’ Udal snickered.
‘Why-som-ever then? Hath she stolen a tart?’
‘Nay, but I would have her in wedlock.’
‘Thou — you — your magistership?’ the boy laughed incredulously. The printer caught in his tone his courtier’s contempt for the artificer’s home, and his courtier’s reverence for the magister’s learning.
‘Keep thy sister from beneath this fox’s tooth,’ he said. ‘The likes of him mate not with the like of us.’
‘The like of thee, uncle?’ the boy retorted, with a good-humoured insolence. ‘My father was a gentleman.’
‘Who married my sister for her small money, and died leaving thee and thy sister to starve.’
‘Nay, I starve not,’ the boy said. ‘And Margot’s a plump faggot.’
‘A very Cynthia among willow-trees,’ the magister said.
‘Why, your magistership shall have her,’ the boy said. ‘I am her lawful guardian.’
His grandfather laughed as men laugh to see a colt kick up its heels in a meadow.
But the printer waved his bare arm furiously at the magister.
‘Get thee gone out of this decent house.’ His eyes rolled, and his clenched fist was as large as a ham. ‘Here you come not a-wenching.’
‘Moody man,’ the magister said, ‘your brains are addled with suspicions.’
The young man swelled his scarlet breast still more consequentially. ‘This is no house of thine, uncle, but my grandfar’s.’
‘Young ass’s colt!’ the printer fulminated. ‘Would’st have thy sister undone by this Latin mouth-mincer?’
Udal grinned at him, and licked his lips. The printer snarled:
‘Know’st thou not, young ass, that this man was thrown out of his mastership at Eton for his foul living?’
Udal was suddenly on his feet with the long pasty-knife held back among the furs of his gown.
‘Ignoble . . . ’ he began, but he lost his words in his trembling rage. The printer snatched at his long measuring stick.
‘Down knife,’ he grunted, for his fury, too, made his throat catch.
‘Have a care, nunkey,’ the young man laughed at the pair of them. ‘They teach knife-thrusts in his Italian books.’
‘I will have thy printer’s licence revoked, ignoble man,’ the magister said, grinning hideously. ‘Thou, a Lutheran, to turn upon me who was undone by Papist lies! They said I lived foully; they said I stole the silver cellars. . . . ’
He turned upon the old man, stretching out the hand that held the knife in a passionate gesture:
‘Your Papists said that,’ he appealed. ‘But not a one of them believed it, though you dub me Lutheran. . . . See you, do I not govern now the chief Papist of you all? Would that be if they believed me filthy in my living. Have I not governed in the house of the Howards, the lord of it being absent? Would that have been if they had believed it of me? . . . And then. . . . ’ He turned again upon the printer. ‘For the sake of your men . . . for the sake of the New Learning, which God prosper, I was cast down.’
The printer grunted surlily:
”Tis