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The young Poins, in his scarlet and black, drew his sister into a corner of the hall in which the gentry of the Lords that were there had already dined. It was a vast place, used as a rule for hearing suitors to the Lord Privy Seal and for the audit dinners of his tenantry in London. On its whitened walls there were trophies of arms, and between the wall and the platform at the end of the hall was a small space convenient for private talk. The rest of the people there were playing round games for kissing forfeits or clustered round a magician who had brought a large ape to tell fortunes by the Sortes Virgilianæ. It fumbled about in the pages of a black-letter Æneid, and scratched its side voluptuously: taking its own time it looked at the pages attentively with a mournful parody of an aged sage, and set its finger upon a line that the fates directed.
‘Here’s a great ado about thee,’ Poins said, laughing at his sister. ‘Thy name is up in this town of London.’
He had come in the bodyguard of the Queen, and had made time to slip round to old Badge’s low house behind the wall in order to beg from his grandfather ten crowns to pay for a cloak he had lost at cards.
‘Such a cackle among these Lutherans,’ he mocked at Margot. ‘Heard you no hootings as your lady rode here behind us of the guard?’
‘I heard none, nor she deserveth none,’ Margot answered. ‘For I love her most well.’
‘Aye, she hath done a rape on thee,’ he laughed. ‘Aye, our good uncle hath printed a very secret libel upon her.’ He began to whisper: Let it not be known or a sudden vengeance might fall upon their house. It was no small matter to print unlicensed broadsides. But their moody uncle was out of all fear of consequences, so mad with rage. ‘He would have broken my back, because I tore thee from his tender keeping.’
‘Sure it was never so tender,’ Margot said. ‘When was there a day that he did not beat me?’ But he would have married her to his apprentice, a young fellow with a golden tongue, that preached every night to a secret congregation in a Cripplegate cellar.
‘Why, an thou observest my maxims,’ the boy said, sententiously, ‘I will have thee a great lady. But uncle hath printed this libel, and tongues are at work in Austin Friars.’ It was said that this was a new Papist plot. Margot was but the first that they should carry off. The Duke and Bishop Gardiner were reported to have signed papers for abducting all the Lutheran virgins in London. They were to be led from the paths of virtue into Catholic lewdnesses, and all their boys were to be abducted and sent into monasteries across the seas.
‘Thus the race of Lutherans should die out,’ he laughed. ‘Why they are hiding their maidens in pigeon-houses in Holborn. A boy called Hugh hath gone out and never come home, and it is said that masked men in black stuff gowns were seen to put him into a sack in Moorfields.’
‘Well, here be great marvels,’ Margot laughed.
He shook his red sides, and his blue eyes grew malicious and teasing:
‘Such a strumpet as thy lady,’ he uttered. ‘A Papist Howard that is known to have been loved by twenty men in Lincoln.’
Margot passed from laughter into hot anger:
‘It is a marvel God strikes not their tongues with palsy that said that,’ she said swiftly. ‘Why do you not kill some of them if you be a man?’
‘Why, be calmed,’ he said. ‘You have heard such tales before now. It is no more than saying that a woman goes not to their churches to pray.’
A young Marten Pewtress, half page, half familiar to the Earl of Surrey, came towards them calling, ‘Hal Poins.’ He had black down upon his chin and a roving eye. He wore a purple coat like a tabard, and a cap with his master’s arms upon a jewelled brooch.
‘They say there’s a Howard wench come to Court,’ he cried from a distance, ‘and thy sister in her service.’
‘We talk of her,’ Poins answered. ‘Here is my sister.’
The young Pewtress kissed the girl upon the cheek.
‘Pray, you, sweetheart, unfold,’ he said. ‘You are a pretty piece, and have a good brother that’s my friend.’
He asked all of a breath whether this lady had yet had the small-pox? whether her hair were her own? how tall she stood without high heels to her shoon? whether her breath were sweet or her language unpleasing in the Lincolnshire jargon? whether the King had sent her many presents?
Margaret Poins was a very large, fair, and credulous creature, rising twenty. Florid and slow-speaking, she had impulses of daring that covered her broad face with immense blushes. She was dressed in grey linsey-woolsey, and wore a black hood after the manner of the stricter Protestants, but she had round her neck a gilt medallion on a gold chain that Katharine Howard had given her already. She was, it was true, the daughter of a gentleman courtier, but he had been knocked on the head by rebels near Exeter just before her birth, and her mother had died soon after. She had been treated with gloomy austerity by her uncle and with sinister kindness by her grandfather, whom she dreaded. So that, coming from her Bedfordshire aunt, who had a hard cane, to this palace, where she had seen fine dresses and had already been kissed by two lords in the corridors, she was ready to aver that the Lady Katharine had a breath as sweet as the kine, a white skin which the small-pox had left unscarred, hair that reached to her ankles, and a learning and a wit unimaginable. Her own fortune was made, she believed, in serving her. Both the magister and her brother had sworn it, and, living in an age of marvels — dragons, portents from the heavens, and the romances of knight errantry — she was ready to believe it. It was true that the lady’s room had proved a cell more bare and darker than her own at home, but Katharine’s bright and careless laughter, her fair and radiant height, and her ready kisses and pleasant words, made the girl say with hot loyalty:
‘She is more fair than any in the land, and, indeed, she is the apple of the King’s eye.’ Her voice was gruff with emotion, but, suddenly becoming very aware that she was talking to a strange young gentleman who might scoff, she seemed to choke and put her hand over her mouth.
Brocades for dresses, perfumes, gloves, oranges, and even another netted purse of green silk holding gold had continued to be brought to their chamber ever since Privy Seal had signed the warrant, and, it being about the new year, these ordinary vails and perquisites of a Maid of Honour made a show. Margot believed very sincerely that these things came direct from the King’s hands, since they were formally announced as coming of his Highness’ great bounty.
She reported to young Pewtress, ‘And even now she is with the Lord Privy Seal, who brought her to Court.’
‘He will go poaching among our Howards now,’ Pewtress said. He stood considering with an air of gloom that the Norfolk servants imitated from their master, along with such sayings as that the times were very evil, and that no true man’s neck was safe on his shoulders. ‘Pray you, Sweetlips, tell no one this for a day until I have told my master. It may get me some crowns.’ He pinched her chin between his thumb and forefinger. ‘I will be your sweetheart, pretty.’
‘Nay, I am provided with a good one,’ Margot said seriously.
‘You cannot have too many in this place. Take me for when the other’s in gaol and another for when I am hung, as all good men are like to be.’ He turned away lightly and loosened one of his jewelled garters, so that his stockings should hang in slovenly folds to prove that he was a man and despised niceness
