in the great hearth; her woebegone, flaccid face was suddenly drawn at the mention of Cromwell, and she appeared about to kneel at Katharine’s feet. She looked round at the figures of the girls.
‘One of these can stay if your ladyship will wear her dress,’ she flustered. ‘But who is tall enow? Cicely is too long in the shank. Bess’s shoulders are too broad. Alack! God help me! I will do what I can’— and she waved her hands disconsolately.
Cold, fatigue, and her maimed arm made Katharine waver on her feet. This white-haired woman’s panic seemed to her grotesque and disgusting.
‘Why, the magister lies,’ she said. ‘I am no such friend of Privy Seal’s.’
Swift and wicked glances passed among the girls; the dark one threw back her head and laughed discordantly, like a magpie. She came with a deft and hopping step and gazed at Katharine with her head on one side.
‘Old Crummock will want our teeth next to make him a new set. He may have my head, tell him. I have no need for it, it aches so since he killed my men-folk.’
Lady Rochford shuddered as if she had been struck.
‘Beseech you,’ she said weakly to Katharine. ‘Cicely Elliott is sometimes distraught. Believe not that we speak like this among ourselves.’ Her eyes wandered in a flustered and piteous way over her girls and she whimpered, ‘Jane Gaskell, stand back to back with this lady.’
Katharine Howard cried out, ‘Keep your gowns for your backs and your tongues still. Woe betide the girl who calls me a gossip of Privy Seal.’
Cicely Elliott cast her dark head back and uttered one of her discordant laughs at the ceiling, and a girl, hiding behind the others, called out, ‘What a fine ——!’
Katharine cried, ‘It is all lies that this fool magister utters. I will go to no masques nor revels.’ She turned upon Lady Rochford, her face pallid, her lips open: ‘Give me water,’ she said harshly. ‘I will get me back to my pig-sties.’
Lady Rochford wrung her hands and protested that her ladyship should not repeat that they were always thus. Privy Seal should not visit it upon them.
The magister blinked upon the riot that his muddling had raised. He called out, ‘Be quiet. Be quiet. This lady is sick!’ and stretched out his hands to hold Katharine on her feet.
Cicely Elliott cried, ‘God send all Crummock’s informers always sick.’
‘Thou dastard!’ Katharine screamed aloud. She tried to speak but she choked; she grasped Udal’s hand as if to wring from him the denial of his foolish lies, but a sharp and numbing pain shot up her maimed wrist to her shoulders and leaped across her forehead.
‘Thou filthy spy,’ the dark girl laughed wildly into her agonised face. ‘If there had never been any like thee all the dear men of my house had still breathed.’
Katharine sprang wildly towards her tormentor, but a black sheet seemed to drop across her eyes. She fell right down and screamed as her elbow struck the floor.
Part Two
The House of Eyes
I
A grave and bearded man was found to cup her. He gave her a potion composed of the juice of nightshade and an infusion of churchyard moss. Her eyes grew dilated and she had evil dreams. She lay in a small chamber that was quite bare and had a broken window, and the magister ran from room to room begging for quilts to cover her.
It was nobody’s affair. The Lord Privy Seal, her uncle, the Catholics, and the King were still perturbed about Anne of Cleves, and there were no warrants signed for Katharine’s housing or food. All the palace was trembling with confusion, for, when the Queen had been upon the point of setting out from Rochester, the King was said to have been overcome by a new spasm of disgust: she was put by again.
The young Earl of Surrey, a cousin of Katharine’s, gave Udal contemptuously a couple of crowns towards her nourishment. Udal applied them to bribing Throckmorton, the spy who had been with Privy Seal upon the barge, to inscribe on his lord’s tablets the words: ‘Katharine Howard to be provided for.’ Udal made up his courage sufficiently to speak to the Duke, whom he met in a corridor. The Duke was jaundiced against his niece, because her cousin Culpepper had fallen upon Sir Christopher Aske, the Duke’s captain who had kept the postern. It had needed seven men to master him, and this great tumult had arisen in the King’s own courtyard. Nevertheless, the Duke sent his astrologer to cast Katharine’s horoscope. He signed, too, an order that some girl be found to attend on her.
Udal filled in the girl’s name as Margot Poins, the granddaughter of old Badge, of Austin Friars. Even among these clamours his tooth watered for her, and he gave the order to young Poins to execute. The young man rode off into Bedfordshire, where his sister had been sent out of the way to the house of their aunt. He presented the order as in the nature of a writ from the Duke, and amongst Lutherans in London a heavy growl of rage went up — against Norfolk, against the Papists of the Privy Council, and, above all, against Katharine Howard, whom they called the New Harlot.
Katharine, having taken much nightshade juice, was raving upon her bed. The leech became convinced that she was possessed by a demon, because the pupils of her eyes were as large as silver groats, and her hands picked at the coverlets. He ordered that thirteen priests should say an exorcism at the door of her room, and that the potion of nightshade — since it might inconvenience without dislodging the fiend inhabiting her slender body — should be discontinued.
Udal sought for priests, but having no money, he was disregarded by them. He ran to the chaplain of the Bishop of Winchester. For the clergy upheld or ordained by Archbishop Cranmer were held to be less efficacious in matters of witchcraft and possession. Just then Cromwell had triumphed, and Anne of Cleves was upon the water coming to the palace.
Bishop Gardiner’s chaplain, a fat man, with beady and guileless eyes sunk in under an immense forehead, imagined that Udal’s visit was a pretext for overhearing the words of rage and discomfiture that in that Papist centre might be let drop about the new Queen. For Udal, because Privy Seal had set him with the Lady Mary, passed amongst the Papists for one of Cromwell’s informants, and it amused his sardonic and fantastic nature to affect mysterious denials, which made the fiction the more firmly believed and gave to Udal himself a certain hated prestige. The chaplain answered that in the present turmoil no such body as thirteen clergymen could be found.
‘But the lady shall be torn in pieces,’ Udal shrieked. Panic had overcome him. Who knew that the fiend, having torn his Katharine asunder, might not enter into the body of his Margot, who was already at her bedside? His lips quivered with terror, his eyes smiled furiously, he wrung his hands. He swore he would penetrate to the King’s Highness’ self. Udal was a man who stuck at nothing to gain a point. He had heard from Katharine that the King had spoken graciously to her, and he swore once more that she was the apple of the King’s eye, as well as a beloved disciple of Privy Seal’s.
‘Be sure,’ he foamed, ‘they shall be avenged on a Gardiner and his crew if you let her die.’
