Privy Seal: His Last Venture. Ford Ford Madox
leaned towards her earnestly.
'You know wherefore the man from Cleves is come?'
'You are, even as I have heard it said, a spy of Thomas Cromwell?' she asked in return.
He looked suddenly abashed, but she held to her question.
'I pass for Privy Seal's man,' he answered at last.
'But you have played him false,' she said. He grew pale, glanced over his shoulder, and put his finger on his lips.
'I'll wager it was for a woman,' she accused him. She wiped her lips with her apron and dropped her hands upon her lap.
'Why, keep troth to Cromwell if you can,' she said.
'I do think his sun sets,' he whispered.
'Why, I am sorry for it,' she answered. 'I have always loved him for a brewer's son. My father was a brewer.'
'Cromwell was begotten even by the devil,' Udal answered. 'He made me write a comedy in the vulgar tongue.'
'Be it as you will,' she answered. 'You shall know on which side to bite your cake better than I.'
He was still a little shaken at the thought of Privy Seal.
'If you know wherefore cometh Cleves' envoy, much it shall help me to share the knowledge,' he said at last, 'for by that I may know whether Cromwell or we do rise or fall.'
'If you have made a pact with a woman, have very great cares,' she answered dispassionately. 'Doubtless you know how the dog wags its tail; but you are always a fool with a woman.'
'This woman shall be Queen if Cromwell fall,' the magister said, 'and I shall rise with her.'
'But is no woman from Cleves' Queen there now?' she asked.
'Cicely,' he answered highly, 'you know much of capons and beeves, but there are queens that are none and do not queen it, and queans that are no queens and queen it.'
'And so 'twill be whilst men are men,' she retorted. 'But neither my first nor my second had his doxies ruling within my house, do what they might beyond the door.'
He tried to impart to her some of the adoration he had for Katharine Howard – her learning, her faith, her tallness, her wit, and the deserved empiry that she had over King Henry VIII; but she only answered:
'Why, kiss the wench all you will, but do not come to tell me how she smells!' – and to his new protests: 'Aye, you may well be right and she may well be Queen – for I know you will sacrifice your ease for no wench that shall not help you somewhere forwards.'
The magister held his hands above his head in shocked negation of this injustice – but there came from the street the thin wail of a trumpet; another joined it, and a third; the three sounds executed a triple convolution and died away one by one. Holding his thin hand out for silence and better hearing, he muttered:
'Norfolk's tucket! Then it is true that Norfolk comes to Paris.'
His wife slipped down from her seat.
'Gave I you not the ostler's gossip from Calais three days since?' she said, and went towards her roastings.
'But wherefore comes the yellow dog to Paris?' Udal persisted.
'That you may go seek,' she answered. 'But believe always what an innkeeper says of who are on the road.'
Udal too slipped down from the window-seat; he buttoned his gown down to his shins, pulled his hat over his ears and hurried through the galleried courtyard into the comfortless shadows of the street. There was no doubt that Norfolk was coming; round the tiny crack that, two houses away, served for all the space that the road had between the towering housefronts, two men in scarlet and yellow, with leopards and lions and fleurs-de-lis on their chests, walked between two in white, tabarded with the great lilies of France. They crushed round the corner, for there was scarce space for four men abreast; behind them squeezed men in purple with the Howard knot, bearing pikes, and men in mustard yellow with the eagle's wing and ship badge of the Provost of Paris. In the broader space before the arch of Udal's courtyard they stayed to wait for the horsemen to disentangle themselves from the alley; the Englishmen looked glumly at the tall housefronts; the French loosened the mouthplates of their helmets to breathe the air for a minute. Hostlers, packmen and pedlars began to fill the space behind Udal, and he heard his wife's voice calling shrilly to a cook who had run across the yard.
The crowd a little shielded him from the draught which came through the arch, and he waited with more contentment. Undoubtedly there was Norfolk upon a great yellow horse, so high that it made his bonnet almost touch the overhanging storey of the third house; behind him the white and gold litter of the provost, who, having three weeks before broken his leg at tennis-play, was still unable to sit in a saddle. The duke rode as if implacably rigid, his yellow, long face set, listening as if with a sour deafness to something that the provost from below called to him with a great, laughing voice.
The provost's litter, too, came up alongside the duke's horse in the open space, then they all moved forward at the slow processional: three steps and a halt for the trumpets to blow a tucket; three more and another tucket; the great yellow horse stepping high and casting up his head, from which flew many flakes of white foam. With its slow, regularly interrupted gait, dominated by the impassive yellow face of Norfolk, the whole band had an air of performing a solemn dance, and Udal shivered for a long time, till amidst the train of mules bearing leathern sacks, cupboards, chests and commodes, he saw come riding a familiar figure in a scholar's gown – the young pedagogue and companion of the Earl of Surrey. He was a fair, bearded youth with blue eyes, riding a restless colt that embroiled itself and plunged amongst the mules' legs. The young man leaned forward in the saddle and craned to avoid a clothes chest.
The magister called to him:
'Ho, Longstaffe!' and having caught his pleased eyes: 'Ecce quis sto in arce plenitatis. Veni atque bibe! Magister sum. Udal sum. Longstaffe ave.'
Longstaffe slipped from his horse, which he left to be rescued by whom it might from amongst the hard-angled cases.
'Assuredly,' he said, 'there is no love between that beast and me as there was betwixt his lord and Bucephalus,' and he followed Udal into the galleried courtyard, where their two gowned figures alone sought shelter from the March showers.
'News from overseas there is none,' he said. 'Privy Seal ruleth still about the King; the German astronomers have put forth a tract De Quadratura Circuli; the lost continent of Atlantis is a lost continent still – and my bones ache.'
'But your mission?' Udal asked.
The doctor, his hard blue eyes spinning with sardonic humour beneath his black beretta, said that his mission, even as Udal's had been, was to gain some crowns by setting into the learned language letters that should pass between his ambassador and the King's men of France. Udal grinned disconcertedly.
'Be certified in your mind,' he said, 'that I am not here a spy or informer of Privy Seal's.'
'Forbid it, God,' Doctor Longstaffe answered good-humouredly. None the less his jaw hardened beneath his fair beard and he answered, 'I have as yet written no letters —litteras nullas scripsi: argal nihil scio.'
'Why, ye shall drink a warmed draught and eat a drippinged soppet,' Udal said, 'and you shall tell me what in England is said of this mission.'
He led the fair doctor into the great kitchen, and felt a great stab of dislike when the young man set his arm round the hostess's waist and kissed her on the red cheeks. The young man laughed:
'Aye indeed; I am mancipium paucae lectionis set beside so learned a man as the magister.'
The hostess received him with a bridling favour, rubbing her cheek pleasantly, whilst Udal was seeking to persuade himself that, since the woman was in law no wife of his, he had no need to fear. Nevertheless rage tore him when the doctor, leaning his back against the window-side, talked to the woman. She stood between them holding a pewter flagon of mulled hypocras upon a salver of burnished pewter.
'Who I be,' he said, gazing complacently at her, 'is a poor student of good letters; how I be here