‘God knows why this man would have you write in the vulgar tongue. But so he wills it.’
Udal groaned.
‘My dinner hour is here,’ the Lady Mary said. ‘I am very hungry. Get you to your writing and take this lady to my women.’
VII
The Lady Mary’s rooms were seventeen in number; they ran the one into the other, but they could each be reached by the public corridor alongside. It was Magister Udal’s privilege, his condition being above that of serving man, to make his way through the rooms if he knew that the Lady Mary was not in one of them. These chambers were tall and gloomy; the light fell into them bluish and dismal; in one a pane was lacking in a window; in another a stool was upset before a fire that had gone out.
To traverse this cold wilderness Udal had set on his cap. He stood in front of Katharine Howard in the third room and asked:
‘You are ever of the same mind towards your magister?’
‘I was never of any mind towards you,’ she answered. Her eyes went round the room to see how Princes were housed. The arras pictured the story of the nymph Galatea; the windows bore intertwined in red glass the cyphers H and K that stood for Katharine of Aragon. ‘Your broken fortunes are mended?’ she asked indifferently.
He pulled a small book out of his pocket, ferreted among the leaves and then setting his eye near the page pointed out his beloved line:
‘Pauper sum, pateor, fateor, quod Di dant fero.’ Which had been translated: ‘I am poor, I confess; I bear it, and what the gods vouchsafe that I take’— and on the broad margin of the book had written: ‘Cicero sayeth: That one cannot sufficiently praise them that be patient having little: And Seneca: The first measure of riches is to have things necessary — and, as ensueth therefrom, to be therewith content!’
‘I will give you a text from Juvenal,’ she said, ‘to add to these: Who writes that no man is poor unless he be worthy of ridicule.’
He winced a little.
‘Nay, you are hard! The text should be read: Nothing else maketh poverty so hard to bear as that it forceth men to ridiculous shifts. . . . Quam quod ridiculos esse. . . . ’
‘Aye, magister, you are more learned even yet than I,’ she said indifferently. She made a step towards the next door but he stood in front of her holding up his thin hands.
‘You were my best pupil,’ he said, with a hungry humility as if he mocked himself. ‘Poor I am, but mated to me you should live as do the Hyperboreans, in a calm and voluptuous air.’
‘Aye, to hang myself of weariness, as they do,’ she answered.
He corrected her with the version of Pliny, but she answered only: ‘I have a great thirst upon me.’
His eyes were humorous, despairing and excited.
‘Why should a lady not love her master?’ he asked. ‘There are examples. Know you not the old rhyme:
‘“It was a lording’s daughter, the fairest one of three, Why lovéd of her master. . . . ”’
‘Ah, 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
