Transcriber's Note.
This is the First book of the trilogy, The Fifth Queen, by Ford Madox Ford. The other books are The Privy Seal and The Fifth Queen Crowned.
| part one | |
| The Coming, | 11 |
| part two | |
| The House of Eyes, | 71 |
| part three | |
| The King Moves, | 179 |
Magister Nicholas Udal, the Lady Mary's pedagogue, was very hungry andvery cold. He stood undecided in the mud of a lane in the AustinFriars. The quickset hedges on either side were only waist high anddid not shelter him. The little houses all round him of white daubwith grey corner beams had been part of the old friars' stables andoffices. All that neighbourhood was a maze of dwellings and gardens,with the hedges dry, the orchard trees bare with frost, the arbourswintry and deserted. This congregation of small cottages was like apatch of common that squatters had taken; the great house of the LordPrivy Seal, who had pulled down the monastery to make room for it, wasa central mass. Its gilded vanes were in the shape of men at arms, andtore the ragged clouds with the banners on their lances. Nicholas Udallooked at the roof and cursed the porter of it.
'He could have given me a cup of hypocras,' he said, and muttered, asa man to whom Latin is more familiar than the vulgar tongue, ahexameter about 'pocula plena.'
He had reached London before nine in one of the King's barges thatcame from Greenwich to take musicians back that night at four. He hadbreakfasted with the Lady Mary's women at six off warm small beer andfresh meat, but it was eleven already, and he had spent all his moneyupon good letters.
He muttered: 'Pauper sum, pateor, fateor, quod Di dant fero,' but itdid not warm him.
The magister had been put in the Lady Mary's household by the LordPrivy Seal, and he had a piece of news as to the Lady's means oftreasonable correspondence with the Emperor her uncle. He had imaginedthat the news—which would hurt no one because it was imaginary—mightbe worth some crowns to him. But the Lord Privy Seal and all hissecretaries had gone to Greenwich before it was light, and there wasnothing there for the magister.
'You might have known as much, a learned man,' the porter had snarledat him. 'Isn't the new Queen at Rochester? Would our lord bide here?Didn't your magistership pass his barge on the river?'
'Nay, it was still dark,' the magister answered. The porter sniffedand slammed to the grating in the wicket. Being of the Old Faith hehated those Lutherans—or those men of the New Learning—that itpleased his master to employ.
Udal hesitated before the closed door; he hesitated in the lane beyondthe corner of the house. Perhaps there would be no barges at thesteps—no King's barges. The men of the Earl Marshal's service, beingPapists, would pelt him with mud if he asked for a passage;