Free The Fifth Queen by Ford Madox Ford

unfitting that she should walk with him, and, with his heavy and bearlike gait, swinging his immense shoulders, he preceded them up the broad path.
VI
    C ROMWELL WATCHED the King’s great back with an attentive smile. He said, ironically, that he was her ladyship’s servant.
    ‘I would ye were,’ she answered. ‘They say you love not those that I love.’
    ‘I would have you not heed what men say,’ he answered, grimly. ‘I am douce to those that be of good-will to his Highness. Those that hate me are his ill-wishers.’
    ‘Then the times are evil,’ she said, ‘for they are many.’
    She added suddenly, as if she could not keep a prudent silence:
    ‘I am for the Old Faith in the Old Way. You have hanged many dear friends of mine whose souls I pray for.’
    He looked at her attentively.
    She had a supple, long body, a fair-tinted face, fair and reddish hair, and eyes that had a glint of almond green—but her cheeks were flushed and her eyes sparkled. She was so intent upon speaking her mind that she had forgotten the pain of her arm. She thought that she must have said enough to anger this brewer’s son. But he answered only:
    ‘I think you have never been in the King’s court’—and, from his tranquil manner, she realised very suddenly that this man was not the dirt beneath her feet.
    She had never been in the King’s court; she had never, indeed, been out of the North parts. Her father had always been a very poor man, with an ancient castle and a small estate that he had nearly always neglected because it had not paid for the farming. Living men she had never respected—for they seemed to her like wild beasts when she compared them with such of the ancients as Brutus or as Seneca. She had been made love to and threatened by such men as her cousin; she had been made love to and taught Latin by her pedagogues. She was more learned than any man she had ever met—and, thinking upon the heroes of Plutarch, she found the present times despicable. She hardly owed allegiance to the King. Now she had seen him and felt his consciousness of his own power, she was less certain. But the King’s writs had hardly run in the Northern parts. Her men-folk and her mother’s people had hanged their own peasants when they thought fit. She had seen bodies swinging from tree-tops when she rode hawking. All that she had ever known of the King’s power was when the convent by their castle gates had been thrown out of doors, and then her men-folk, cursing and raging, hadsworn that it was the work of Crummock. ‘Knaves ruled about the King.’
    If knaves ruled about him, the King was not a man that one need trouble much over. Her own men-folk, she knew, had made and unmade Kings. So that, when she thought of the hosts of saints and of the blessed angels that hovered, wringing their hands and weeping above England, she had wondered a little at times why they had never unmade this King.
    But to her all these things had seemed very far away. She had nothing to do but to read books in the learned tongues, to imagine herself holding disquisitions upon the spiritual republic of Plato, to ride, to shoot with the bow, to do needlework, or to chide the maids. Her cousin had loved her passionately; it was true that once, when she had had nothing to her back, he had sold a farm to buy her a gown. But he had menaced her with his knife till she was weary, and the ways of men were troublesome to her; nevertheless she submitted to them with a patient wisdom.
    She submitted to the King; she submitted—though she hated him by repute—to Cromwell’s catechism as they followed the King at a decent interval.
    He walked beside her with his eyes on her face. He spoke of the King’s bounty in a voice that implied his own power. She was to be the Lady Mary’s woman. He had that lady especially in his good will, he saved for her household ladies of egregious gifts, presence and attainments. They received liberal honorariums, seven dresses by the