Free The Fifth Queen by Ford Madox Ford Page A

year, vails, presents, perfumes from the King’s own still-rooms, and a parcel-gilt chain at the New Year. The Lady Rochford, who ruled over these ladies, was kind, courteous, free in her graces as in the liberties she allowed the ladies under her easy charge.
    He enlarged upon this picture as if it were a bribe that he alone could offer or withhold. And something at once cautious and priestly in his tone let her quick intuition know that he was both warning her and sounding her, to see how far hermutinous spirit would carry her. Once he said, ‘There must be tranquillity in the kingdom. The times are very evil!’
    She had felt very quickly that insults to this man would be a useless folly. He could not even feel them, and she kept her eyes on the ground and listened to him.
    He went on sounding her. It was part of his profession of kingcraft to know the secret hearts of every person with whom he spoke.
    ‘And your goodly cousin?’ He paused. The King had commanded that a place should be found for him. ‘Should he be best at Calais? There shall be blows struck there.’
    She knew very well that he was trying to discover how much she loved her cousin, and she answered in a low voice, ‘I would have him stay here. He is the sole friend I have in this place.’
    Cromwell said, with a hidden and encouraging meaning, her cousin was not her only friend there.
    ‘Aye, but your lordship is not so old a friend as he.’
    ‘Not me. Call me your good servant.’
    ‘There is even then my uncle.’
    ‘Little good of a friend you will have of Norfolk. ’Tis a bitter apple and a very rotten plank to lean upon.’
    She could not any longer miss his meaning. The King’s scarlet and immense figure was already in the grey shadow of the arch under the tower. In walking, they had come near him, and while they waited he stood for a minute, gazing back down the path with boding and pathetic eyes; then he disappeared.
    She looked at Cromwell and thanked him for the warning,
‘quia spicula praevisa minus laedunt.’
    ‘I would have you read it:
gaudia plus laetificant
,’ he answered gravely.
    A man with a conch-shaped horn upturned was suddenly blowing beneath the archway seven hollow and reverberating grunts of sound that drowned his voice. A clear answering whistle came from the water-gate. Cromwell stayed, listeningattentively; another stood forward to blow four blasts, another six, another three. Each time the whistle answered. They were the great officers’ signals for their barges that the men blew, and the whistle signified that these lay at readiness in the tideway. A bustle of men running, calling, and making pennons ready, began beyond the archway in the quadrangle.
    Cromwell’s face grew calm and contented; the King was sending to meet Anne of Cleves.
    ‘Y’ are well read?’ he asked her slowly.
    ‘I was brought up in the Latin tongue or ever I had the English,’ she answered. ‘I had a good master, one that spoke the learned language always.’
    ‘Aye, Nicholas Udal,’ Cromwell said.
    ‘You know all men in the land,’ she said, with fear and surprise.
    ‘I had him to master for the Lady Mary, since he is well disposed.’
    ‘ ’Tis an arrant knave tho’ the best of pedagogues,’ she answered. ‘He was cast out of his mastership at Eton for being a rogue.’
    ‘For that, the worshipful your father had him to master,’ he said ironically.
    ‘No, for that he was a ruined man, and taught for his victuals. We welly starved at home, my sisters and I.’
    He said slowly:
    ‘The better need that you should grow beloved here.’
    Standing there, before the bushes where no ears could overhear, he put to her more questions. She had some Greek, more than a little French, she could judge a good song, she could turn a verse in Latin or the vulgar tongue. She professed to be able to ride well, to be conversant with the terms of venery, to shoot with the bow, and to have studied the Fathers of the Church.
    ‘These