A Princely Knave

by Philip Lindsay

  More often did she find that she was seeking Perkin and that her heart began to beat with pleasurable pain when she was near him. And often also she caught herself staring at him, forgetting that she was staring, and that when she drifted dose and brushed against his hand her own hand and arm tingled exquisitely. And that was dearly absurd. She knew the fellow for a liar and a coward, unworthy of her love’s bounty. Again and again, as though to fret the wound to her vanity, she reminded herself of his baseness and his low-birth; yet twist though she did with anger at his temerity in having married her from her great estate, that did not stop the blood mounting her throat when she saw that he had noticed her. Even what the women might say, how they might snigger, meant little to her compared to the need to have him return to amorous servitude. And the women did notice her. Sharp eyes were on every look and movement. Perkin might stay blind to her feelings, but they, the devil snatch them in their shrewdness, immediately noticed the agitation of her bosom, the trembling of her hands and under-lip, and the brightening of her eyes in his presence. And she began to be no longer ashamed that they should see.

  Even the king spoke of it, slyly. “When we return to Westminster,” he said, “or to some roomier palace, we must see that amorous wives are no longer parted from their husbands.”

  Blushing, eyes lowered, she stood before him, feeling like a little girl about to be whipped.

  Even Cardinal Morton, whom she hated, spoke of it, blessing her with upraised fingers when she curtsied, and saying: “As the apostle wrote: ‘ ’Tis better to marry than to burn,’ my child; and hell will be the portion for wives who, even though long separated from their husbands, fret themselves into sin.”

  And the queen noticed it, telling her one night in bed: “Be more cautious, my bud. Once they suspect that you are friends with your husband, you will be watched.”

  “What am I to do, your grace?” sobbed Katherine. “I was not trained to the gay science. In Scotland I had not the same freedom as here and I learned to -smother my feelings. I am unskilled in what to these ladies seems natural and have no arts with which to tempt a man to speaking …”

  “What!” cried the queen. “Are you not friends again?”

  “Alas,” she wailed, “alas, no! He takes no heed of me and modesty forbids my speaking first.”

  “I thought all was in readiness. I schemed to help you, friends in London await you, a boat is ready to come at our call … and all the time it was for nothing!”

  “Nay, please, your grace; I swear it, I will speak to him again.”

  “One would think your husband a cruel man that you fear him so. Did he beat you, my child?”

  “God forgive me, no,” she sobbed, feeling strangely ashamed. “It is I who have been cruel to him. I have tried to be kind but I can’t, I can’t … There must be something evil in me, for I can’t be kind …”

  Tenderly, the queen drew her close and kissed her, brushing back the long damp hair from her face with gentle fingers, like a mother; while, sobbing, Katherine clung to her, whimpering. Not since childhood had she wept in this abandoned fashion. Always had she gulped down any threat of tears, save when she had been alone and in frantic hatred of life; but now the tears came fast, and they eased her. Shaking and choking, she held the queen as though she feared to lose a friend, finding comfort in her kisses and sympathetic whispering.

  “Mother of God,” sighed the queen, “who would be a woman!”

  That confession of her cruelty towards Perkin seemed to cleanse Katherine, leaving her weak yet strangely contented. For the first time in her life had she unbared her heart. To her confessor she had never-deliberately lied, while calmly relating every sin she could recall that he might keep accounting for her entrance into heaven or purgatory, she had told him purely facts, monotonous peccadilloes with small significance because she had never explained the spirit that inspired them. For the first time, and to another woman, she showed herself a woman uncertain of her path, revealing all her emotional perplexities and telling of the quarrel in her heart between the desire for love and her fear of love; of her craving for happiness to be offered freely and of the lock on her will that withheld her from blissful abandonment even when most she longed for it.

  “You must be bold and care not a fig what others say,” urged the queen. “And who would have thought that you lacked boldness! You used rather to frighten me, so self-possessed you seemed, so self-assured of your own righteousness … and all the while, inside, you were afraid!”’

  “Nay, your grace, not afraid. I am afraid of nothing. It is not fear … I can’t explain; but no matter how I might try to be gentle and loving, always my heart fails me and I can’t tell whether I love or hate or despise him that he could marry a woman on a lie and embrace her when he must feel her flinch from him.”

  “I sometimes wonder if all marriages are not like that. What woman has choice of husband, alack? yet most seem happy in their bonds and look with eyes of love at their husbands. Perhaps they are good liars, and that’s all.”

  “I could be happy, if I let myself …” Frowning, her head on the queen’s breast and hearing the steady beating of her heart, Katherine tried to explain her feelings and found no words that suited them. “It is,” she whispered, “I suppose, that I can’t really love a man who’s frightened of me.”

  “Yet you were angry when he kissed you with no by your leave?”

  “Yea … he should not have kissed me with all those people watching.”

  “No doubt, sweetheart, his love for you was so great he could not think of courtesy; and that’s no weakness for a woman to despise.”

  Fumble amongst her thoughts though she did, Katherine could not find the words she needed. The queen was right. No woman should be angry because a man’s love was too great to remain bound in courtesy; she should have accepted his kiss as an act of homage and as proof of her beauty’s power. Nor should she despise a man because he was tongue-tied with adoration of her. But of what use were arguments, however sensible, against feelings one could not control but which shifted one from here to there at the tug of saint or devil, inexplicable, maddening, and beyond resistance?

  Few women had ever prayed for strength against temptation with such fervour as Katherine prayed for weakness. Prepared to be subservient when next they met, even to essay some of the coaxing looks and gestures which these other women fluttered at their loves, she would loiter close.to Perkin; then, at the last moment when about to clear her throat and speak to him, she would feel the betraying blood burn her cheeks and her legs tremble, so that in self-defence her eyes turned cold and her brows rose scornfully at him. Too long had she rejected men for her now to attempt the common tricks of stirring him through jealousy to action. She had none of her sex’s ease in billing and cooing; and close to tears, she would find herself again alone, neglected for lesser women who knew how to speak the language of love with all their members.

  “Not yet?” the queen would ask with curling lip.

  Not yet. Each day that passed was a day wasted. Nevertheless, there was to Katherine delectable pain in this delay, a titillation in postponement; only at night, when hopes of ever catching him alone seemed empty, did gloom return with anger at his cowardice. There was, she tried to argue, every reason for her to be cautious. As the queen warned her, the king’s spies were everywhere and most of these ladies were doubtless in his pay; therefore she must make no move to have them suspect any conspiracy. The known antagonism between her and Perkin was her protection, for were it to be disregarded, the truth might soon be smoked. These were women long skilled in intrigue who would be more difficult to hoodwink than any man; and some of them did suspect, and the king also suspected … she could read it in his eyes and jeering smile … that a fondness for her husband had kindled in her under his neglect.

  But she could not dally for ever. Squirming before the queen’s sad glances, she swore that at the next opportunity she wo
uld not palter. She was no unbroken maid to hug a dream in bed. She was a woman, a wife, and fantasies should have been in the past with her maidenhood.

  Thus she. swore and yet she faltered whenever she encountered Perkin; until at last, fearing she would never catch him alone, she scribbled a note which she kept hidden in her hand that she might slip it to him and not be seen. Even with a pen, however, she found it impossible to be honest. It would not be safe, she argued, to write lovingly lest enemy eyes chance on it. Therefore she wrote simply and briefly, saying that she wished to talk with him and that on the first warm morning she would see him before noon near the tilting-ground.

  He was there next day at noon, strolling over the sanded ground, and a few yards behind him walked a yeoman with an ill-assumed air of having arrived by chance. Katherine paused to give her heart time to grow less violent in its beat, while she looked at her husband, herself as yet unseen. She had half-believed that he would not come to the meeting and was not certain whether she were relieved or frightened that he had obeyed her. When in the crowded passage in the palace she had pressed the note into his hand while hurrying by, she had not dared turn to see whether he had dropped it or had thrown it away. He must have read it; and now, she told herself sternly, she would show him a loving countenance.

  When she saw that he spied her, she frowned because she blushed, and she felt very awkward having to walk slowly over the grass towards him while all the while he stared at her and did not smile or move to greet her.

  “Sir,” she whispered when, after what seemed eternities, she had reached the tilt-yard and stood with downcast eyes before him, “sir, we parted in anger at our last meeting yet there was much to be discussed, if you still have the mind to leave this place.”

  “Alone?” he asked, insolently smiling at her.

  The accursed red again darkened her cheeks while anger rose hot in her throat that he should try a second time to press her to unwomanly admissions. “I told you,” she said, trying to speak quietly, “a wife must go where her husband goes.”

  “Must?” he repeated. “I have had a bellyful of ‘musts’, lady. You have been like a stone martyr round my neck, dragging me down to misery, always looking as though you blamed me for marrying you, as though I were some rogue who’d forced you against your will. To go back to that life … never again. I have been through it once, and a scorched man is a fool if he turns back to the fire. You have made me your fool too long. Better this purgatory apart from you than hell beside you.”

  There was no need for her to summon tears. Unbidden, they came and she blinked them back. He was right in what he said; and she was glad that he was angry at her treatment. Had he whined for a kiss, she would have scorned him; but now that he spoke with defiance, the words were not so heavy on her tongue when she answered him.

  She said, and she did not look away from him: “Everything is different now. I used not to know what to believe of you. Between us there is no longer any doubt, and, God willing, we should be happy in the future, I pray.”

  “Pah! even now when I move towards you, you step back.” He laughed fiercely. “A good beginning to a happy marriage! Nay, nay, lady, I warn you — I am your fool no longer. Once I had my dreams and they were all of you. They could not be easily built again.”

  “Dreams were our enemy,” she said. “I am glad to be done with them.”

  “And I am a dead man without them,” he said, “a man of clay like any other. When first we met you were a dream to me. I thought you a goddess and almost feared to touch you lest you bruised. But you soon killed all that. That is why I am now ambitionless and content to remain as idle as a cat.”

  “If, as you say,” she whispered, “I was once like a dream to you, had I been like that, as you thought me, doubtless I’d have been content to be mooned at. But I.am a woman of too solid flesh who needed stronger nourishment.”

  “What!” he laughed, “you would blame me for it!”

  “For the love of God,” she said, “why must we always quarrel? If you will come away as I suggest, there will be years ahead in which we can wrangle, should we wish it; but we must make haste. Everything’s arranged. On Wednesday night there is no moon. Can you steal out?”

  “First, madam,” he said, glaring into her eyes, “I must hear you tell me that you love me.”

  “Fool,” she gasped, “fool.” Again were her cheeks red, again she felt her bosom rise with anger; and she looked away, vexed yet faintly pleased at his persistence.

  “Come, Kate,” he urged her in a merry voice, “if you would be a true wife, say that you love me; only three words but they’d be music on your tongue. You have been cruel to keep silent.”

  “I — -I can’t say it … You shouldn’t tease me so … I told you once, and you were … you made mock of me before everybody.”

  “I swear it,” he said, “I’ll not kiss you again. But you must tell me. Tell me to my face.”

  “Then,” she said and licked her lips, stepping back that he might not catch her hands, “then … I … I love you, sir. O, do not look at me like that!”

  She turned away and heard him catch his breath and she could feel the tears behind her eyes. The admission had not shamed her as she had believed that it would shame her. With the words, she felt a buoyancy as though her shoes were shod with bladders while happiness made her heart light. It seemed that previously the birds in the garden had been hushed and now were singing, that all the world had been silent as though expectant, listening for her to speak and set all moving again, and at her confession, nature reawoke and was glad, as she was glad. And when she peeped at Perkin, with joy she saw the happiness on his face and suddenly she felt quite small beside him because to her he seemed to have grown larger in his pride of triumph.

  “Be ready,” she whispered, rosy-cheeked, “Wednesday … I’ll tell more later … You must come by that gate there when all’s asleep … towards midnight …”

  “I am yours,” he cried, “always all yours, my love; and will do whatever you bid me do.”

  “Farewell,” she whispered, “until then, farewell”; and looking shyly up, she smiled at him, seeming a child again, excited with new-found happiness and ready to dance. He thought, nay, he hoped that she would kiss him; but, no … a pout, that kiss of the air, a friendly wrinkling of the corners of the eyes and towards the tip of the nose … Then she was hurrying away while trying to walk sedately.

  He raised his clasped hands, the knuckles pressed to his lips, as though in prayer, but it was to hide the smile and to tap back the shout he could feel in his throat. Then quickly, not being able to keep still, he swung round and felt a sudden coldness as though he had stepped out of warm to icy air when he noticed how very close that damned yeoman was at his heels. Dully, the fellow stared into the sky, and yawned as though pretending to be alone, but Perkin knew him for a cunning knave.

  “You have been listening!” he cried.

  “I?” said the fellow, impertinently grinning. “I have a wife of my own, God help me, sir, and she prates fast enough to cure me of wanting to listen to other men’s wives. I am sorry if I offended, but I never thought that there were ever secrets between married folk.”

  What had the rascal heard? had he heard anything? They had talked mostly in whispers, save when at moments excitement had driven off caution.;. Even then, it could not matter because there was nothing said that might not have been innocent … nothing … surely there had been nothing? …

  Yet the feeling of coldness remained after he had turned back to the palace and he went over in his mind every word that they had said. It was his own fear, his fear of losing this hew happiness, which frightened him. The fellow could have heard nothing important …

  Nothing important, he prayed.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  SLOW TIME TO PASS

  NOT since childhood had Katherine been so happy. Her happiness infected even the queen and all
her women noticed it. The king, no doubt, also noticed it — he missed little — on the rare occasions when he entered the queen’s lodgings; if so, to Katherine’s relief, he made no mention of it. Nor did he question the queen, even when they were alone together. He, too, these days seemed happier and smiled more often. But in her own joy, Katherine took little heed of others. A minute not spent dreaming of Perkin and their future together in Burgundy was a minute wasted, and she was miserly with such dreams, hating to be disturbed while she gloated on them with an inward eye. That admission to him that she loved him, as she had hoped, had seemingly freed her from evasions. No longer did she recall the words with that instinctive quiver with which previously she had recalled any unguarded moment of self-truth. Blissfully she remembered his joy, the wonder in his eyes, that had recompensed her for whatever mortification the confession might have caused her pride. A second longer, had she waited, she’d have been in his arms. Spiritually unarmoured, her defences down, she could not then have resisted had he embraced her even in the open. And good-bye would that have meant to any pretence of estrangement between them and the king would have had them watched more closely. Instead, she found she was given more freedom than before, the king often conducting the queen to watch the jousts or the archery and even setting her on a horse to follow him to the hunt. On such occasions could men and women meet and chatter without comment and often did Katherine manage to find herself alone with Perkin.

  Growing reckless because within a few days she would be free to love and be loved forever, she was now the one who sought for dark places where hurriedly they might kiss and fondle. Not that she could invite him boldly. Always first had the gesture to come from him; he had first to touch her and to begin to kiss; then could she relax into a mingling of dream and reality, answering his mouth without restraint, although often she blushed and watched lest others watch them, ready to run out of his arms at the whisper of someone approaching.