g for
certain a capon in Paris town.'

He tapped his long nose. 'Nevertheless, for your stake you have cast
down a very little: three nights of bed and board against the chaining
me up.'

'Husband,' she answered. 'More than that you shall have.'

He wriggled a little beneath his furs.

'Husband is an ill name,'he commented. 'It smarts.'

'But it fills the belly.'

'Aye,'he said. 'Therefore I am minded to bide here and take with the
sourness the sweet of it.'

She laughed a little, and, with a great knife, cut a large manchet
from the loaf between them.

'Nay,' she said, 'to-morrow my army with their spits and forks shall
drive thee from the door.'

He grinned with his lips. She was fair and fat beneath her hood, but
she was resolute. 'I have it in me greatly to advance you,' she said.

A boy brought her a trencher filled with chopped things, and a man in
a blue jerkin came to her side bearing a middling pig, seared to a
pale clear pinkness. The boy held the slit stomach carefully apart,
and she lined it with slices of bread, dropping into the hollow
chives, nutmegs, lumps of salt, the buds of bergamot, and marigold
seeds with their acrid perfume, and balls of honied suet. She bound
round it a fair linen cloth that she stitched with a great bone
needle.

'Oh ingenuous countenance,' the magister mused above the pig's mild
face. 'Is it not even the spit of the Cleves envoy's? And the Cleves
envoy shall eat this adorable monster. Oh, cruel anthropophagist!'

She resigned her burden to the spit and gave the loaf to the boy,
wiped her fingers upon her apron, and said:

'That pig shall help thee far upon thy road.'

'Goes it into my wallet?' he asked joyfully.

She answered: 'Nay; into the Cleves envoy's weam.'

'You speak in hard riddles,' he uttered.

'Nay,' she laughed, 'a baby could unriddle it.' She looked at him for
a moment to enjoy her triumph of mystery. 'Husband mine, a pig thus
stuffed is good eating for Cleves men. I have not kept a hostel for
twelve years for envoys and secretaries without learning what each
eats with pleasure. And long have I thought that if I wed a man it
should be such a man as could thrive by learning of envoys' secrets.'

He leaned towards her earnestly.

'You know wherefore the man from Cleves is come?'

'You are, even as I have heard it said, a spy of Thomas Cromwell?' she
asked in return.

He looked suddenly abashed, but she held to her question.

'I pass for