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, g