The Fifth Queen

by Ford Madox Ford

  ‘Never will I unsay,’ she said. ‘For it is right that such a King as thou should be punished, and I do believe this: that there can no agony come upon you such as shall come if you do believe me false to you.’

  The coloured sunlight fell upon his face just down to the chin; his eyes glared horribly. She confronted him, being in the shadow. High up above them, painted and moulded angels soared on the roof with golden wings. He clutched at his throat.

  ‘I do not believe it,’ he cried out.

  ‘Then,’ she said, ‘I believe that it shall be only a second greater agony to you: for you shall have done me to death believing me guiltless.’

  A great motion of despair went over his whole body.

  ‘Kat!’ he said; ‘Body of God, Kat! I would not have you done to death. I have saved your life from your enemies.’

  She made him no answer, and he protested desperately—

  ‘All this afternoon I have wrestled with a woman to make her say that you are older than your age, and precontracted to a cousin of yours. I have made her say it at last, so your life is saved.’

  She turned half to go from him, but he ran round in front of her.

  ‘Your life is saved!’ he said desperately, ‘for if you were pre-contracted to Dearham your marriage with me is void. And if your marriage with me is void, though it be proved against you that you were false to me, yet it is not treason, for you are not my wife.’

  Again she moved to circumvent him, and again he came before her.

  ‘Speak!’ he said, ‘speak!’ But she folded her lips close. He cast his arms abroad in a passion of despair. ‘You shall be put away into a castle where you shall have such state as never empress had yet. All your will I will do. Always I will live near you in secret fashion.’

  ‘I will not be your leman,’ she said.

  ‘But once you offered it!’ he answered.

  ‘Then you appeared in the guise of a king!’ she said.

  He withered beneath her tone.

  ‘All you would have you shall have,’ he said. ‘I will call in a messenger and here and now send the letter that you wot of to Rome.’

  ‘Your Highness,’ she said, ‘I would not have the Church brought back to this land by one deemed an adult’ress. Assuredly, it should not prosper.’

  Again he sought to stay her going, holding out his arms to enfold her. She stepped back.

  ‘Your Highness,’ she said, ‘I will speak some last words. And, as you know me well, you know that these irrevocably shall be my last to you!’

  He cried—‘Delay till you hear—’

  ‘There shall be no delay,’ she said; ‘I will not hear.’ She smoothed a strand of hair that had fallen over her forehead in a gesture that she always had when she was deep in thoughts.

  ‘This is what I would say,’ she uttered. And she began to speak levelly—

  ‘Very truly you say when you say that once I made offer to be your leman. But it was when I was a young girl, mazed with reading of books in the learned tongue, and seeing all men as if they were men of those days. So you appeared to me such a man as was Pompey the Great, or as was Marius, or as was Sylla. For each of these great men erred; yet they erred greatly as rulers that would rule. Or rather I did see you such a one as was Cæsar Julius, who, as you well wot, crossed a Rubicon and set out upon a high endeavour. But you—never will you cross any Rubicon; always you blow hot in the evening and cold at dawn. Neither do you, as I had dreamed you did, rule in this your realm. For, even as a crow that just now I watched, you are blown hither and thither by every gust that blows. Now the wind of gossips blows so that you must have my life. And, before God, I am glad of it.’

  ‘Before God!’ he cried out, ‘I would save you!’

  ‘Aye,’ she answered sadly, ‘to-day you would save me; tomorrow a foul speech of one mine enemy shall gird you again to slay me. On the morrow you will repent, and on the morrow of that again you will repent of that. So you will balance and trim. If to-day you send a messenger to Rome, to-morrow you will send another, hastening by a shorter route, to stay him. And this I tell you, that I am not one to let my name be bandied for many days in the mouths of men. I had rather be called a sinner, adjudged and dead and forgotten. So I am glad that I am cast to die.’

  ‘You shall not die!’ the King cried. ‘Body of God, you shall not die! I cannot live lacking thee. Kat— Kat—’

  ‘Aye,’ she said, ‘I must die, for you are not such a one as can stay in the wind. Thus I tell you it will fall about that for many days you will waver, but one day you will cry out—Let her die this day! On the morrow of that day you will repent you, but, being dead, I shall be no more to be recalled to life. Why, man, with this confession of mine, heard by grooms and mayors of cities and the like, how shall you dare to save me? You know you shall not.

  ‘And so, now I am cast for death, and I am very glad of it. For, if I had not so ensured and made it fated, I might later have wavered. For I am a weak woman, and strong men have taken dishonourable means to escape death when it came near. Now I am assured of death, and know that no means of yours can save me, nor no prayers nor yielding of mine. I came to you for that you might give this realm again to God. Now I see you will not—for not ever will you do it if it must abate you a jot of your sovereignty, and you never will do it without that abatement. So it is in vain that I have sinned.

  ‘For I trow that I sinned in taking the crown from the woman that was late your wife. I would not have it, but you would, and I yielded. Yet it was a sin. Then I did a sin that good might ensue, and again I do it, and I hope that this sin that brings me down shall counterbalance that other that set me up. For well I know that to make this confession is a sin; but whether the one shall balance the other only the angels that are at the gates of Paradise shall assure me.

  ‘In some sort I have done it for your Highness’ sake—or, at least, that your Highness may profit in your fame thereby. For, though all that do know me will scarcely believe in it, the most part of men shall needs judge me by the reports that are set about. In the commonalty, and the princes of foreign courts, one may believe you justified of my blood, and, for this event, even to posterity your name shall be spared. I shall become such a little dust as will not fill a cup. Yet, at least, I shall not sully, in the eyes of men to come, your record.

  ‘And that I am glad of; for this world is no place for me who am mazed by too much reading in old books. At first I would not believe it, though many have told me it was so. I was of the opinion that in the end right must win through. I think now that it never shall—or not for many ages—till our Saviour again come upon this earth with a great glory. But all this is a mystery of the great goodness of God and the temptations that do beset us poor mortality.

  ‘So now I go! I think that you will not any more seek to hinder me, for you have heard how set I am on this course. I think, if I have done little good, I have done little harm, for I have sought to injure no man—though through me you have wracked some of my poor servants and slain my poor simple cousin. But that is between you and God. If I must weep for them yet, though I was the occasion of their deaths and tortures, I cannot much lay it to my account.

  ‘If, by being reputed your leman, as you would have it, I could again set up the Church of God, willingly I would do it. But I see that there is not one man—save maybe some poor simple souls—that would have this done. Each man is set to save his skin and his goods—and you are such a weathercock that I should never blow you to a firm quarter. For what am I set against all this nation?

  ‘If you should say that our wedding was no wedding because of the pre-contract to my cousin Dearham that you have feigned was made—why, I might live as your reputed leman in a secret place. But it is not very certain that even at that I should live very long. For, if I lived, I must work upon you to do the right. And, if that I did, not very long should I live before mine enemies again did come about me and to you. And so I must die. And now I see that you are not s
uch a man as I would live with willingly to preserve my life.

  ‘I speak not to reprove you what I have spoken, but to make you see that as I am so I am. You are as God made you, setting you for His own purposes a weak man in very evil and turbulent times. As a man is born so a man lives; as is his strength so the strain breaks him or he resists the strain. If I have wounded you with these my words, I do ask your pardon. Much of this long speech I have thought upon when I was despondent this long time past. But much of it has come to my lips whilst I spake, and, maybe, it is harsh and rash in the wording. That I would not have, but I may not help myself. I would have you wounded by the things as they are, and by what of conscience you have, in your passions and your prides. And this, I will add, that I die a Queen, but I would rather have died the wife of my cousin Culpepper or of any other simple lout that loved me as he did, without regard, without thought, and without falter. He sold farms to buy me bread. You would not imperil a little alliance with a little King o’ Scots to save my life. And this I tell you, that I will spend the last hours of the days that I have to live in considering of this simple man and of his love, and in praying for his soul, for I hear you have slain him! And for the rest, I commend you to your friends!’

  The King had staggered back against the long table; his jaw fell open; his head leaned down upon his chest. In all that long speech—the longest she had ever made save when she was shown for Queen—she had not once raised or lowered her voice, nor once dropped her eyes. But she had remembered the lessons of speaking that had been given her by her master Udal, in the aforetime, away in Lincolnshire, where there was an orchard with green boughs, and below it a pig-pound where the hogs grunted.

  She went slowly down over the great stone flags of the great hall. It was very gloomy now, and her figure in black velvet was like a small shadow, dark and liquid, amongst shadows that fell softly and like draperies from the roof. Up there it was all dark already, for the light came downwards from the windows. She went slowly, walking as she had been schooled to walk.

  ‘God!’ Henry cried out; ‘you have not played false with Culpepper?’ His voice echoed all round the hall.

  The Queen’s white face and her folded hands showed as she turned—

  ‘Aye, there the shoe pinches!’ she said. ‘Think upon it. Most times you shall not believe it, for you know me. But I have made confession of it before your Council. So it may be true. For I hope some truth cometh to the fore even in Councils.’

  Near the doorway it was all shadow, and soundlessly she faded away among them. The hinge of the door creaked; through it there came the sound of the pikestaves of her guard upon the stone of the steps. The sound whispered round amidst the statues of old knights and kings that stood upon corbels between the windows. It whispered amongst the invisible carvings of the roof. Then it died away.

  The King made no sound. Suddenly he cast his hat upon the paving.

  WAS EXECUTED

  ON TOWER HILL, THE 13TH OF FEBRUARY,

  IN THE 33RD YEAR OF THE REIGN OF

  MDXLI–II

  ALSO BY FORD MADOX FORD

  THE GOOD SOLDIER

  At a fashionable German spa town, two wealthy couples—one British, the other American—meet for their yearly assignation. As their story moves back and forth in time between 1902 and 1914, the fragile surface propriety of the pre-World War I society in which these four characters live is ruptured—revealing deceit, hatred, infidelity, and betrayal. The “good soldier” is Edward Ashburnham, who, as an adherent to the moral code of the English upper class, is nonetheless consumed by a passion for women younger than his wife—a stoic but fallible figure in what his American friend, John Dowell, calls “the saddest story I ever heard.”

  Fiction/Literature

  VINTAGE CLASSICS

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