said moodily. 'Have you not scars enow by your wenching?'

Udal pushed back the furs at his collar. 'Master Printer John Badge
the Younger,' he flickered, 'if you break my crown I will break your
chapel. You shall never have license to print another libel. Give me
your niece in wedlock?'

The old man said querulously, 'Here's a wantipole without ten crowns
would marry a wench with three beds and seven hundred florins!'

Udal laughed. 'Call her to bring me meat and drink,' he said. 'Large
words ill fill an empty stomach.'

The younger John went negligently to the great Flemish press. He
opened the face and revealed on its dark shelves a patty of cold fish
and a black jack. With heavy movements and a solemn face he moved
these things, with a knife and napkins, on to the broad black table.

The old man pulled his nose again and grinned.

'Margot's in her chamber,' he chuckled. 'As you came up the wicket way
I sent my John to turn the key upon her. It's there at his girdle.' It
clinked indeed among rules, T-squares and callipers at each footstep
of the heavy printer between press and table.

Magister Udal stretched his thin hands towards it. 'I will give you
the printing of the Lady Mary's commentary of Plautus for that key,'
he said.

The printer murmured 'Eat,' and set a great pewter salt-cellar, carved
like a Flemish pikeman, a foot high, heavily upon the cloth.

Udal had the appetite of a wolf. He pulled off his cap the better to
let his jaws work.

'Here's a letter from the Doctor Wernken of Augsburg,' he said. 'You
may see how the Lutherans fare in Germany.'

The printer took the letter and read it, standing, frowning and heavy.
Magister Udal ate; the old man fingered his furs and, leaning far back
in his mended chair, gazed at nothing.

'Let me have the maid in wedlock,' Udal grunted between two bites.
'Better women have looked favourably upon me. I had a pupil in the
North----'

'She was a Howard, and the Howards are all whores,' the printer said,
over the letter. 'Your Doctor Wernken writes like an Anabaptist.'

'They are even as the rest of womenkind,' Udal laughed, 'but far
quicker with their learning.'

A boy rising twenty, in a grey cloak that showed only his bright red
stockings and broad-toed red shoes, rattled the back door and slammed
it to. He pulled off his cap and shook it.

'It snows,' he said buoyantly, and then knelt before his grandfather.
The old man touched his grandson's cropp