for all you mock me now.'
He turned his head to see Magister Udal entering the door furtively and with eyes that leered round the room. Both the Badges fell into sudden, and as if guilty, silence.
'Domus parva, quies magna,' the magister tittered, and swept across the rushes in his furs to rub his hands before the fire. 'When shall I teach your Margot the learned tongues?'
'When the sun sets in the East,' the printer muttered.
Udal sent to him over his shoulder, as words of consolation:
'The new Queen is come to Rochester.'
The printer heaved an immense sigh:
'God be praised!'
Udal snickered, still over his shoulder:
'You see, neither have the men of the Old Faith put venom in her food, nor have the Emperor's galleys taken her between Calais and Sandwich.'
'Yet she comes ten days late.'
'Oh moody and suspicious artificer. Afflavit deus! The wind hath blown dead against Calais shore this ten days.'
The old man pulled his long white nose:
'In my day we could pray to St Leonard for a fair wind.'
He was too old to care whether the magister reported his words to Thomas Cromwell, the terrible Lord Privy Seal, and too sardonic to keep silence for long about the inferiority of his present day.
'When shall I teach the fair Margot the learned tongue?' Udal asked again.
'When wolves teach conies how to play on pipes,' the master printer snarled from his chest.
'The Lord Privy Seal never stood higher,' Udal said. 'The match with the Cleves Lady hath gained him great honour.'
'God cement it!' the printer said fervently.
The old man pulled at his nose and gazed at nothing.
'I am tired with this chatter of the woman from Cleves,' he croaked, like a malevolent raven. 'An Anne she is, and a Lutheran. I mind we had an Anne and a Lutheran for Queen before. She played the whore and lost her head.'
'Where's your niece Margot?' Udal asked the printer.
'You owe me nine crowns,' the old man said.
'I will give your Margot ten crowns' worth of lessons in Latin.'
'Hold and enough,' the printer muttered heavily. 'Tags from Seneca in a wench's mouth are rose garlands on a cow's horns.'
'The best ladies in the land learn of me,' Udal answered.
'Aye, but my niece shall keep her virtue intact.'
'You defame the Lady Mary of England,' Udal snickered.
The old man said vigorously, 'God save her highness, and send us her for Queen. Have you begged her to get me redress in the matter of that wall?'
'Why, Providence was kind to her when it sent her me for her master,' Udal said. 'I never had apter pupil saving only one.'
'Shall Thomas Cromwell redress?' the old man asked.
'If good learning can make a good queen, trust me to render her one,' Udal avoided the question. 'But alas! being declared bastard – for very excellent reasons – she may not – '
'You owe me nine crowns,' old Badge threatened him. He picked irritably at the fur on his gown and gazed at the carved leg of the table. 'If you will not induce Privy Seal to pull down his wall I will set the tipstaves on you.'
Master Udal laughed. 'I will give thy daughter ten crowns' worth of lessons in the learned tongues.'
'You will receive another broken crown, 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
