But, on the other hand, the King had his superstitious fears; only that night, pale, red-eyed and heavy, and being unable to sleep, he had sent to rouse Cromwell and had furiously rated him, calling him knave and shaking him by the shoulder, telling him for the twentieth time to find a way to make a peace with the Bishop of Rome. These were only night-fears – but, if Cleves should desert Henry and Protestantism, if all Europe should stand solid for the Pope, Henry's night-fears might eat up his day as well. Then indeed Katharine would be dangerous. So that she was indeed half foe, half friend.
It hinged all upon Cleves; for if Cleves stood friend to Protestantism the King would fear no treason; if Cleves sued for pardon to the Emperor and Rome, Henry must swing towards Katharine. Therefore, if Cleves stood firm to Protestantism and defied the Emperor, it would be safe to work at destroying Katharine; if not, he must leave her by the King to defend his very loyalty.
The Archbishop challenged him with uplifted questioning eyebrows, and he answered his gaze with:
'God help ye, goodman Bishop; it were easier for thee to deal with this maid than for me. She would take thee to her friend if thou wouldst curry with Rome.'
'Aye,' Cranmer answered. 'But would Rome have truck with me?' and he shook his head bitterly. He had been made Archbishop with no sanction from Rome.
Cromwell turned upon Wriothesley; the debonair smile was gone from his face; the friendly contempt that he had for the Archbishop was gone too; his eyes were hard, cruel and red, his lips hardened.
'Ye have done me a very evil turn,' he said. 'Ye spoke stiff-necked folly to this lady. Ye shall learn, Protestants that ye are, that if I be the flail of the monks I may be a hail, a lightning, a bolt from heaven upon Lutherans that cross the King.'
The hard malice of his glance made Wriothesley quail and flush heavily.
'I thought ye had been our friend,' he said.
'Wriothesley,' Cromwell answered, 'I tell thee, silly knave, that I be friend only to them that love the order and peace I have made, under the King's Highness, in this realm. If it be the King's will to stablish again the old faith, a hammer of iron will I be upon such as do raise their heads against it. It were better ye had never been born, it were better ye were dead and asleep, than that ye raised your heads against me.' He turned, then he swung back with the sharpness of a viper's spring.
'What help have I had of thee and thy friends? I have bolstered up Cleves and his Lutherans for ye. What have he and ye done for me and my King? Your friend the Duke of Cleves has an envoy in Paris. Have ye found for why he comes there? Ye could not. Ye have botched your errand to Paris; ye have spoken naughtily in my house to a friend of the King's that came friendlily to me.' He shook a fat finger an inch from Wriothesley's eyes. 'Have a care! I did send my visitors to smell out treason among the convents and abbeys. Wait ye till I send them to your conventicles! Ye shall not scape. Body of God! ye shall not scape.'
He placed a heavy hand upon Throckmorton's shoulder.
'I would I had sent thee to Paris,' he said. 'No envoy had come there whose papers ye had not seen. I warrant thou wouldst have ferreted them through.'
Throckmorton's eyes never moved; his mouth opened and he spoke with neither triumph nor malice:
'In very truth, Privy Seal,' he said, 'I have ferreted through enow of them to know why the envoy came to Paris.'
Cromwell kept his hands still firm upon his spy's shoulder whilst the swift thoughts ran through his mind. He scowled still upon Wriothesley.
'Sir,' he said, 'ye see how I be served. What ye could not find in Paris my man found for me in London town.' He moved his face round towards the great golden beard of his spy. 'Ye shall have the farms ye asked me for in Suffolk,' he said. 'Tell me now wherefore came the Cleves envoy to France. Will Cleves stay our ally, or will he send like a coward to his Emperor?'
'Privy Seal,' Throckmorton answered expressionlessly – he fingered his beard for a moment and felt at the medal depending upon his chest – 'Cleves will stay your friend and the King's ally.'
A great sigh went up from his three hearers at Throckmorton's lie; and impassive as he was, Throckmorton sighed too, imperceptibly beneath the mantle of his beard. He had burned his boats. But for the others the sigh was of a great contentment. With Cleves to lead the German Protestant confederation, the King felt himself strong enough to make headway against the Pope, the Emperor and France. So long as the Duke of Cleves remained a rebel against his lord the Emperor, the King would hold over Protestantism the mantle of his protection.
Cromwell broke in upon their thoughts with his swift speech.
'Sirs,' he uttered, 'then what ye will shall come to pass. Wriothesley, I pardon thee; get thee back to Paris to thy mission. Archbishop, I trow thou shalt have the head of that wench. Her cousin shall be brought here again from France.'
Lascelles, the Archbishop's spy, who kept his gaze upon Throckmorton's, saw the large man's eyes shift suddenly from one board of the floor to another.
'That man is not true,' he said to himself, and fell into a train of musing. But from the others Cromwell had secured the meed of wonder that he desired. He had closed the interview with a dramatic speech; he had given them something to talk of.
VII
He held Throckmorton in the small room that contained upon its high stand the Privy Seal of England in an embroidered purse. All red and gold, this symbol of power held the eye away from the dark-green tapestry and from the pigeon-holes filled with parchment scrolls wherefrom there depended so many seals each like a gout of blood. The room was so high that it appeared small, but there was room for Cromwell to pace about, and here, walking from wall to wall, he evolved those schemes that so fast held down the realm. He paced always, his hands behind his back, his lips moving one upon the other as if he ruminated – (His foes said that he talked thus with his familiar fiend that had the form of a bee.) – and his black cap with ear-flaps always upon his head, for he suffered much with the earache.
He walked now, up and down and up and down, saying nothing, whilst from time to time Throckmorton spoke a word or two. Throckmorton himself had his doubts – doubts as to how the time when it would be safe to let it be known that he had betrayed his master might be found to fit in with the time when his master must find that he had betrayed him. He had, as he saw it, to gain time for Katharine Howard so she might finally enslave the King's desires. That there was one weak spot in her armour he thought he knew, and that was her cousin that was said to be her lover. That Cromwell knew of her weak spot he knew too; that Cromwell through that would strike at her he knew too. All depended upon whether he could gain time so that Cromwell should be down before he could use his knowledge.
For that reason he had devised the scheme of making Cromwell feel a safety about the affairs of Cleves. Udal fortunately wrote a very swift Latin. Thus, when going to fetch Katharine to her interview with Privy Seal he had found Udal bursting with news of the Cleves embassy and with the letters of the Duke of Cleves actually copied on papers in his poke, Throckmorton had very swiftly advised with himself how to act. He had set Udal very earnestly to writing a false letter from Cleves to France – such a letter as Cleves might have written – and this false letter, in the magister's Latin, he had placed now in his master's hands, and, pacing up and down, Cromwell read from time to time from the scrap of paper.
What Cleves had written was that he was fain to make submission to the Emperor, and leave the King's alliance. What Cromwell read was this: That the high and mighty Prince, the Duke of Cleves, was firmly minded to adhere in his allegiance with the King of England: that he feared the wrath of the Emperor Charles, who was his very good suzerain and over-lord: that if by taxes and tributes he might keep away from his territory the armies of the Emperor he would be well content to pay a store of gold: that he begged his friend and uncle, King of France, to intercede betwixt himself and the Emperor to the end that the Emperor might take these taxes and tributes; for that, if the Emperor would none of this, come peace, come war, he, the high and mighty Prince, Duke of Cleves, Elector of the Empire, was minded to protect in Germany the Protestant confession and to raise against the Emperor the Princes and Electors of Almain, being Protestants. With the aid of his brother-in-law the King of England he would drive the Emperor Charles from the German lands together with the heresies of the Romish Bishop and all things that pertained to the Emperor Charles and his religion.
Cromwell had listened to the reading of this letter in silence; in silence he re-perused it himself, pacing up and down, and in between phrases of his thoughts he read passages from it and nodded his head.
That this was a very dangerous enterprise Throckmorton was assured; it was the first overt act of his that Privy Seal could discover in him as a treachery. In a month or six weeks he must know the truth; but in a month or six weeks Katharine must have so enslaved the King that all danger from Cromwell would be past. And he trusted that the security that Cromwell must feel would gar him delay striking at Katharine by means of her cousin.
Cromwell said suddenly:
'How got the magister these papers?' and Throckmorton answered that it was through the widow that kept the tavern. Cromwell said negligently:
'Let the magister be rewarded with ten crowns a quarter to his fees. Set it down in my tables'; and then like lightning came the query:
'Do ye believe of her cousin and the Lady Katharine?'
Craving a respite for thought and daring to take none for fear Cromwell should read him, Throckmorton answered:
'Ye know I think yes.'
'I have said I think no,' Cromwell answered in turn, but dispassionately as though it were a matter of the courses of stars; 'though it is very certain that her cousin is so mad with love for her that we had much ado to send him from her to Paris.' He paced three times from wall to wall and then spoke again:
'Men enow have said she was too fond with her cousin?'
With despair in his heart Throckmorton answered:
'It is the common talk in Lincolnshire where her home is. I have seen a cub in a cowherd's that was said to be her child by him.'
It was useless to speak otherwise to Privy Seal; if he did not report these things, twenty others would. But, beneath his impassive face and his great beard, despair filled him. He might swear treason against Cromwell to the King; but the King would not hear him alone, and without the King and Katharine he was a sparrow in Cromwell's hawk's talons.
'Why,' Cromwell said, 'since Cleves is true to us we will have this woman down. An he had played us false I would have kept her near the King.'
This saying, that ran so counter to Throckmorton's schemes, caused him such dismay that he cried out:
'God forgive us, why?'
Cromwell smiled at him as one who smiles from a great height, and pointed a finger.
'This is a hard fight,' he said; 'we are in some straits. I trow ye would have voiced it otherwise.' And then he voiced his own idea – that so long as Cleves was friends with him Katharine was an enemy; if Cleves fell away she was none the less an enemy, but she would, from her love of justice, bear witness to the King that Cromwell was no traitor. 'And ye shall be very certain,' he added pleasantly, 'that once men see the King so inclined, they will go to the King saying I be a traitor, with Protestants like Wriothesley ready to rise and aid me. In that pass the Lady Katharine should stay by me, in the King's ear.'
A deep and intolerable dejection overcame Throckmorton and forced from his lips the words:
'Ye reason most justly.' And again he cursed himself, for he had forced Cromwell to this reasoning and action. Yet he dared not say that his news of the Cleves embassy was false, that Cleves indeed was minded to turn traitor, and that it most would serve Privy Seal's turn to stay Katharine Howard up. He dared not say the words, yet he saw his safety crumbling, and he saw Privy Seal set to ruin both himself and Katharine Howard. For in his heart he could not believe that the woman was virtuous, since he believed that no woman was virtuous who had been given the opportunity for joyment. As a spy, he had gone nosing about in Lincolnshire where Katharine's home had been near her cousin's. He had heard many tales against her such as rustics will tell against the daughters of poor lords like Katharine's father. And these tales, before ever he had come to love her, he had set down in Privy Seal's private registers. Now they were like to undo him and her. And in truth, according to his premonitions, Cromwell spoke:
'We shall bring very quickly Thomas Culpepper, her cousin, back from France. We shall inflame his mind with jealousy of the King. We shall find a place where he shall burst upon the King and her together. We shall bring witnesses enow from Lincolnshire to swear against her.'
He crossed his hands behind his back.
'This work of fetching her cousin from Paris I will put into the hands of Viridus,' he said. 'I believe her to be virtuous, therefore do you bring many witnesses, and some that shall swear to have seen her in the act. That shall be your employment. For I tell you she hath so great a power of pleading that, being innocent, she will with difficulty be proved unchaste.'
Throckmorton's head hung upon his shoulders.
'Remember,' Privy Seal said again, 'you and Viridus shall send to find her cousin in France. Fill him with tales that his cousin plays the leman with the King. He shall burst here like a bolt from heaven. You will find him betwixt Calais and Paris town, dallying in evil places without a doubt. We sent him thither to frighten Cardinal Pole.'
'Aye,' Throckmorton said, his mind filled with other and bitter thoughts. 'He hath frightened the Cardinal from Paris by the mere renown of his violence.'
'Then let him do some frighting in our goodly town of London,' Cromwell said.
PART TWO
THE DISTANT CLOUD
I
The young Poins, once an ensign of the King's guard, habited now in grey, stood awaiting Thomas Culpepper, Katharine Howard's cousin, beneath the new gateway towards the east of Calais. Four days he had waited already and never had he dared to stir, save when the gates were closed for the night. But it had chanced that one of the gatewardens was a man from Lincolnshire – a man, once a follower of the plough, whose father had held a farm in the having of Culpepper himself.
' – But he sold 'un,' Nicholas Hogben said, 'sold 'un clear away.' He made a wry face, winked one eye, and drawing up the right corner of his mouth, displayed square, huge teeth. The young Poins making no question, he repeated twice: 'Clear away. Right clear away.'
Poins, however, could hold but one thing of a time in his head. And, by that striving, dangerous servant of Lord Privy Seal, Throckmorton, it had been firmly enjoined upon him that he must not fail to meet Thomas Culpepper and stay him upon his road to England. Throckmorton, with his great beard and cruel snake's eyes, had said: 'I hold thy head in fee. If ye would save it, meet Thomas Culpepper in Calais and give him this letter.' The letter he had in his poke. It carried with it a deed making Culpepper lieutenant of the stone barges in Calais. But he had it too, by word of mouth, that if Thomas Culpepper would not be stayed by the letter, he, Hal Poins, must stay him – with the sword, with a stab in the back, or by being stabbed himself and calling in the guard to lay Thomas Culpepper's self by the heels.
'You will enjoin upon him,' Throckmorton had said, 'how goodly a thing is the lieutenancy of stone lighters that in this letter is proffered him. You will tell him that, if a barge of stone go astray, it is yet a fair way to London, and stone fetches good money from townsmen building in Calais. If he will gainsay this you will pick a quarrel with him, as by saying he gives you the lie. In short,' Throckmorton had finished, earnestly and with a sinuous grace of gesture in his long and narrow hands, 'you will stay him.'
It was a desperate measure, yet it was the best he could compass. If Culpepper came to London, if he came to the King, Katharine's fortunes were not worth a rushlight such as were sold at twenty for a farthing. He knew, too, that Viridus had Cromwell's earnest injunctions to send a messenger that should hasten Culpepper's return; and, though he had seven hundred of Cromwell's spies that he could trust to do Privy Seal's errand, he had not one that he could trust to do his own. There was no one of them that he could trust. If he took a spy and said: 'At all costs stay Culpepper, but observe very strict secrecy from Privy Seal's men all,' the spy would very certainly let the news come to Privy Seal.
It was in this pass that the thought of the young Poins had come to him. Here was a fellow absolutely stupid. He was a brother of Katharine Howard's tiring maid who had already come near to losing his head in a former intrigue in the Court. He had, at the instigation of his sister, carried two Papist letters of Katharine Howard. And, if it was the King who pardoned him, it was Throckmorton who first had taken him prisoner; it was Throckmorton who had advised him to lie hidden in his grandfather's house for a month or two. At the time Throckmorton had had no immediate reason to give the boy this counsel. Poins had been so small a tool in the past embroilment of Katharine's letter that, had he gone straight back to his post in the yeomanry of the King's guard, no man would have noticed him. But it had always been part of the devious and great bearded man's policy – it had been part of his very nature – to play upon people's fears, to trouble them with apprehensions. It was part of the tradition that Cromwell had given all his men. He ruled England by such fears.
Thus Throckmorton had sent Poins trembling to hide in the old printer's his grandfather's house in the wilds of Austin Friars. And Throckmorton had impressed upon him that he alone had really saved him. It was in his grandfather's mean house that Poins had remained for a brace of months, grumbled at by his Protestant uncle and sneered at by his malicious Papist grandfather. And it was here that Throckmorton had found him, dressed in grey, humbled from his pride and raging for things to do.
The boy would be of little service – yet he was all that Throckmorton had. If he could hardly be expected to trick Culpepper with his tongue, he might wound him with his sword; if he could not kill him he might at least scotch him, cause a brawl in Calais town, where, because the place was an outpost, brawling was treason, and Culpepper might be had by the heels for long enough to let Cromwell fall. Therefore, in the low room with the black presses, in the very shadow of Cromwell's own walls, Throckmorton – who was given the privacy of the place by the Lutheran printer because he was Cromwell's man – large, golden-bearded and speaking in meaning whispers, with lifting of his eyebrows, had held a long conference with the lad.
His dangerous and terrifying presence seemed to dominate, for the young Poins, even the dusty archway of the Calais gate – and, even though he saw the flat, green and sunny levels of the French marshland, with the town of Ardres rising grey and turreted six miles away, the young Poins felt that he was still beneath the eyes of Throckmorton, the spy who had sought him out in his grandfather's house in Austin Friars to send him here across the seas to Calais. Up above in the archway the stonemasons who came from Lydd sang their Kentish songs as hammers clinked on chisels and the fine dust filtered through the scaffold boards. But the young Poins kept his eyes upon the dusty and winding road that threaded the dykes from Ardres, and thought only that when Thomas Culpepper came he must be stayed. He had oiled his sword that had been his father's so that it would slip smoothly from the scabbard; he had filed his dagger so that it would pierce through thin coat of mail. It was well to be armed, though he could not see why Thomas Culpepper should not stay willingly at Calais to be lieutenant of the stone lighters and steal stone to fill his pockets, since such were the privileges of the post that Throckmorton offered him.
'Mayhap, if I stay him, it will get me advancement,' he grumbled between his teeth. He was enraged in his slow, fierce way. For Throckmorton had promised him only to save his neck if he succeeded. There had been no hint of further rewards. He did not speculate upon why Thomas Culpepper was to be held in Calais; he did not speculate upon why he should wish to come to England; but again and again he muttered between his teeth, 'A curst business! a curst business!'
In the mysterious embroilment in which formerly he had taken part, his sister had told him that he was carrying letters between the King and Kat Howard. Yes; his large, slow sister had promised him great advancement for carrying certain letters. And still, in spite of the fact that he had been told it was a treason, he believed that the letters he had carried for Kat Howard were love letters to the King. Nevertheless, for his services he had received no advancement; he had, on the contrary, been bidden to leave his comrades of the guard and to hide himself. Throckmorton had bidden him do this. And instead of advancement, he had received kicks, curses, cords on his wrists, an interview with the Lord Privy Seal that still in the remembrance set him shivering, and this chance, offered him by Throckmorton, that if he stayed Thomas Culpepper he might save his neck.
'Why, then,' he grumbled to himself, 'is it treason to carry the King's letters to a wench? Helping the King is no treason. I should be advanced, not threatened with a halter. Letters between the King and Kat Howard!' He even attempted to himself a clumsy joke, polishing it and repolishing it till it came out: 'A King may write to a Kat. A Kat may write to a King. But my neck's in danger!'
Beside him, whitened by the dust that fell from above, the gatewarden wandered in speech round his grievance.
'You ask me, young lad, if I know Tom Culpepper. Well I know Tom Culpepper. Y' ask me if he have passed this way going for England. Well I know he have not. For if Tom Culpepper, squire that was of Durford and Maintree and Sallowford that was my father's farm – if so be Tom Culpepper had passed this way, I had spat in the dust behind him as he passed.'
He made his wry face, winked his eye and showed his teeth once more. 'Spat in the dust – I should ha' spat in the dust,' he remarked again. 'Or maybe I'd have cast my hat on high wi' "Huzzay, Squahre Tom!" according as the mood I was in,' he said. He winked again and waited.
'For sure,' he affirmed after a pause, 'that will move 'ee to ask why I du spit in the dust or for why – the thing being contrary – I'd ha' cast up my cap.'
The young Poins pulled an onion from his poke.
'If you are so main sure he have not passed the gate,' he said, 'I may take my ease.' He sat him down against the gate wall where the April sun fell warm through the arch of shadows. He stripped the outer peel from the onion and bit into it. 'Good, warming eating,' he said, 'when your stomach's astir from the sea.'
'Young lad,' the gatewarden said, 'I'm as fain to swear my mother bore me – though God forbid I should swear who my father was, woman being woman – as that Thomas Culpepper have not passed this way. For why: I'd have cast my hat on high or spat on the ground. And such things done mark other things that have passed in the mind of a man. And I have done no such thing.'
But because the young Poins sat always silent with his eyes on the road to Ardres and slept – being privileged because he was yeoman of the King's guard – always in the little stone guard cell of the gateway at nights; because, in fact, the young man's whole faculties were set upon seeing that Thomas Culpepper did not pass unseen through the gate, it was four days before the gatewarden contrived to get himself asked why he would have spat in the dust or cast his hat on high. It was, as it were, a point of honour that he should be asked for all the information that he gave; and he thirsted to tell his tale.
His tale had it that he had been ruined by a wench who had thrown her shoe over the mill and married a horse-smith, after having many times tickled the rough chin of Nicholas Hogben. Therefore, he had it that all women were to be humbled and held down – for all women were traitors, praters, liars, worms and vermin. (He made a great play of words between wermen, meaning worms, and wermin and wummin.) He had been ruined by this woman who had tickled him under the chin – that being an ingratiating act, fit to bewitch and muddle a man, like as if she had promised him marriage. And then she had married a horse-smith! So he was ready and willing, and prayed every night that God would send him the chance, to ruin and hold down every woman who walked the earth or lay in a bed.
But he had been ruined, too, by Thomas Culpepper, who had sold Durford and Maintree and Sallowford – which last was Hogben's father's farm. For why? Selling the farm had let in a Lincoln lawyer, and the Lincoln lawyer had set the farm to sheep, which last had turned old Hogben, the father, out from his furrows to die in a ditch – there being no room for farmers and for sheep upon one land. It had sent old Hogben, the father, to die in a ditch; it had sent his daughters to the stews and his sons to the road for sturdy beggars. So that, but for Wallop's band passing that way when Hogben was grinning through the rope beneath Lincoln town tree – but for the fact that men were needed for Wallop's work in Calais, by the holy blood of Hailes! Hogben would have been rating the angel's head in Paradise.
But there had been great call for men to man the walls there in Calais, so Wallop's ancient had written his name down on the list, beneath the gallows tree, and had taken him away from the Sheriff of Lincoln's man.
'So here a be,' he drawled, 'cutting little holes in my pikehead.'
''Tis a folly,' the young Poins said.
'Sir,' the Lincolnshire man answered, 'you say 'tis a folly to make small holes in a pikehead. But for me 'tis the greatest of ornaments. Give you, it weakens the pikehead; but 'tis a gradely ornament.'
'Ornaments be folly,' the young Poins reiterated.
'Sir,' the Lincolnshire man answered again, 'there is the goodliest folly that ever was. For if I weaken my eyes and tire my wrists with small tappers and little files, and if I weaken the steel with small holes, each hole represents a woman I have known undone and cast down in her pride by a man. Here be sixty-and-four holes round and firm in a pattern. Sixty-and-four women I have known undone.'
He paused and surveyed, winking and moving the scroll that the little holes made in the tough steel of his axehead. Where a perforation was not quite round, he touched it with his file.
'Hum! ha!' he gloated. 'In the centre of the head is the master hole of all, planned out for being cut. But not yet cut! Mark you, 'tis not yet cut. That is for the woman I hate most of all women. She is not yet cast down that I have heard tell on, though some have said "Aye," some "Nay." Tell me, have you heard yet of a Kat Howard in the stews?'
'There is a Kat Howard is like to be – ' the young Poins began. But his slow cunning was aroused before he had the sentence out. Who could tell what trick was this?
'Like to be what?' the Lincolnshire man badgered him. 'Like to be what? To be what?'
'Nay, I know not,' Poins answered.
'Like to be what?' Hogben persisted.
'I know no Kat Howard,' Poins muttered sulkily. For he knew well that the Lady Katharine's name was up in the taverns along of Thomas Culpepper. And this Lincolnshire cow-dog was a knave too of Thomas's; therefore the one Kat Howard who was like to be the King's wench and the other Kat Howard known to Hogben might well be one and the same.
'Nay; if you will not, neither even will I,' Hogben said. 'You shall have no more of my tale.'
Poins kept his blue eyes along the road. Far away, with an odd leap, waving its arms abroad and coming by fits and starts, as a hare gambols along a path – a figure was tiny to see, coming from Ardres way towards Calais. It passed a load of hay on an ox-cart, and Poins could see the peasants beside it scatter, leap the dyke and fly to stand panting in the fields. The figure was clenching its fists; then it fell to kicking the oxen; when they had overset the cart into the dyke, it came dancing along with the same hare's gait.
'That is too like the repute of Thomas Culpepper to be other than Thomas Culpepper,' the young Poins said. 'I will go meet him.'
He started to his feet, loosed the sword in its scabbard; but the Lincolnshire man had his halberd across the gateway.
'Pass! Shew thy pass!' he said vindictively.
'I go but to meet him,' Poins snarled.
'A good lie; thou goest not,' Hogben answered. 'No Englishman goes into the French lands without a pass from the lord controller. An thou keepest a shut head I can e'en keep a shut gate.'
None the less he must needs talk or stifle.
'Thee, with thy Kat Howard,' he snarled. 'Would 'ee have me think thy Kat was my kitten whose name stunk in our nostrils?'
He shook his finger in Poins' face.
'Here be three of us know Kat Howard,' he said. 'For I know her, since for her I must leave home and take the road. And he knoweth her over well or over ill, since, to buy her a gown, he sold the three farms, Maintree, Durford and Sallowford – which last was my father's farm. And thee knowest her. Thee knowest her. To no good, I'se awarned. For thou stoppedst in thy speech like a colt before a wood snake. God bring down all women, I pray!'