es of the village where seamen new landed sat
to drink. But, having found the sergeant of void palaces asleep in a
small cell at the house end, he learned that two men, speaking
Lincolnshire, had been there two hours agone, questing for Master
Viridus and swearing that they had rid France of the devil and were to
be made great lords for it. The sergeant, an old, corpulent Spaniard
who had been in England forty years, having come with the dead Queen
Katharine and been given this honourable post because the queen had
loved him, folded his fat hands across his round stomach as he sat on
the floor, his legs stretched out, his head against the hangings.

'I might not make out if they were lords or what manner of cavaliers,'
he said. 'They sought some woman whom they would not name, and ran
through a score of empty rooms. God knows whither they went.'

He pulled his nightcap further over his head, nodded at Throckmorton,
and resumed his meditations.

There was no finding them in the still and empty corridors of the
palace; but at the gateway he heard that the two men had clamoured to
know where they might purchase raw shinbone of beef, and had been
directed to the house of a widow Emden. There Throckmorton found
their tracks, for the sacking that covered the window-holes was burst
outwards, beef-bones lay on the road before the door, and, within, the
widow, black, begrimed and very drunk, lay inverted on the clay of the
floor, her head beneath the three legs of the chopping block, so that
she was as if in a pillory, but too fuddled to do more than wave her
legs. A prentice who crouched, with a broken head, in a corner of the
filthy room, said that a man from Lincolnshire, all in Lincoln green,
with a red beard, had wrought this ruin of beef-bones that he had cast
through the windows, and had then comforted the screaming widow with
much strong drink from a black bottle. They had wanted raw beef to
make them valiant against some wedding, and they threw the beef-bones
through the sacking because they said the place stunk villainously.
They seemed, these two, to have visited every hovel in the damp and
squalid village that lay before the palace gates. They had kicked beds
of straw over the floors, thrown crocks at the pigs, melted pewter
plates in the fires.

For pure joy at being afoot and ashore in England again, they had cast
coins into all the houses and hovels of mud; they had brought out cans
and casks from the alehouse