offer good counsel. But be you very careful that you come not against me. You should not escape, but may burrow underground sooner than that. Your Aristotle should not help you, nor Lucretius, nor Lucan, nor Silius Italicus. Diodorus Siculus hath no maxim that should help you against me; but, like Diodorus the Dialectician, you should die of shame. Seneca shall help you if you but dally with that fool thought who sayeth: “Quaeris quo jaceas post obitum loco? Quo non nata jacent.” Aye, thou shalt die and lie in an unknown grave as thou hadst never been born.’
She went, her knees trembling half with fear and half with rage, for it was impossible to imagine anything more threatening or more arrogant than his soft, cruel voice, that seemed to sound for long after in her ears, saying, ‘I have you at my mercy; see you do as I have bidden you.’
Watching the door that closed upon her, Viridus said, with a negligent amusement:
‘That fool Udal hath set it all about that your lordship designed her for the recreation of his Highness.’
‘Why,’ Cromwell answered, with his motionless smile of contempt for his fellow men, ‘it is well to offer bribes to fools and threats to knaves.’
The Chancellor bleated, with amazed adulation, ‘Marvel that your lordship should give so much care to such a worthless rag!’
‘An I had never put my heart into trifles, I had never stood here,’ Cromwell snarled at him. ‘Would that my knaves would ever come to learn that!’ He spoke again to Viridus: ‘See that this wench come never near his Highness. I like not her complexion.’
‘Well, we may clap her up at any moment,’ his man answered.
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