'Pity that such an excellent Latinist should meddle in matters that
nothing concern her.'

Katharine held the inkhorn carefully, as if it had been a precious
vase.

'If you will bid me do naught but serve you, I will do naught else,'
she said.

'I will neither bid thee nor aid thee,' Mary answered. 'The Bishop of
Winchester claims thy service. Serve him as thou wilt.'

'I would serve my mistress in serving him,' Katharine said. 'He is a
man I love little.'

Mary pulled suddenly from her bodice a piece of crumpled parchment
that had been torn across. She thrust it into Katharine's free hand.

'Such letters I have had written me by my father's men,' she said. 'If
this bishop should come to be my father's man I would take no service
from him.'

Katharine read on the crumpled parchment such words as:

'Be you dutiful ...
I will not protect ...
You shall be ruined utterly ...
You had better creep underground ...
Therefore humble you ...'

'It was Thomas Cromwell wrote that,' the Lady Mary cried. 'My father's
man!'

'But if this brewer's son be brought down?' Katharine pleaded.

'Why, I tore his letter across for it is filthy,' Mary said, 'and I
keep the halves of his letter that I may remember. If he be brought
down, who shall bring his master down that let him write so?'

Katharine said:

'If this tempter of the Devil's brood were brought down there should
ensue so great an atonement from his sorrowful master whom he
deludes....'

Mary uttered a 'Tush!' of scorn and impatience. 'This is the babbling
of a child. My father is no holy innocent as you and your like feign
to believe.'

'Nevertheless I love you most well,' Katharine pleaded.

Mary snapped her book to. Her cold tone came back over her heat as the
grey clouds of a bitter day shut down again upon a dangerous flicker
of lightning.

'Do as you will,' she said, 'only if your head fall I will stir no
finger to aid you. Or, if by these plottings my father could be got to
send me his men upon their knees and bearing crowns, I would turn my
back upon them and say no word.'

'Well, my plottings are like to end full soon,' Katharine said. 'Privy
Seal hath sent for me upon no pleasant errand.'

Mary said: 'God help you!' with a frigid unconcern, and walked back to
her chair.

VI

Cromwell kept as a rule his private courts either in his house at
Austin Friars, or in a larger one that he had near the Rolls. But,
when the