ad
insisted on buying Hogben out of his company and taking him over the
sea to be witness of his wedding with Katharine Howard. Dogged, and
thrusting his word and his papers in at every turn, the young Poins
had pursued them aboard a ship bound for the Thames.

This story came out in jerks and with divagations, but it was evident
to Throckmorton that the young man had stuck to his task with a dogged
obtuseness enough to have given offence to a dozen Culpeppers. He had
begged him, in the inn, to take the lieutenancy of the Calais
lighters; he had trotted at Culpepper's elbow in the winding streets;
he had stood in his very path on the gangway to the ship that was to
take them to Greenwich. At every step he had pulled out of his poke
the commission for the lieutenancy--so that Throckmorton had in his
mind, by the time they sat in the stern of the swift barge, the image
of Culpepper as a savage bulldog pursued along streets and up
ship-sides by a gambolling bear cub that pulled at his ears and
danced before him. And he could credit Culpepper only with a saturnine
and drunken good humour at having very successfully driven Cardinal
Pole out of Paris. That was the only way in which he could account for
the fact that Culpepper had not spitted the boy at the first
onslaught. But for the sheer ill-luck of his sword's having been
stolen, he might have done it, and been laid by the heels for six
months in Calais. For Calais being a frontier town of the English
realm, it was an offence very serious there for English to draw sword
upon English, however molested.

It was that upon which Throckmorton had counted; and he cursed the day
when Culpepper had entered the thieves' hut outside Ardres. But for
that Culpepper must have drawn upon the boy; he must have been lying
then in irons in Calais holdfast. As it was, there was this long
chase. God knew whether they would find him in Greenwich; God knew
where they would find him. He had gone to Greenwich, doubtless,
because when he had left England the Court had been in Greenwich, and
he expected there to find his cousin Kat. He would fly to Hampton as
soon as he knew she was at Hampton; but how soon would he know it? By
Poins' account, he was too drunk to stand, and had been carried ashore
on the back of his Lincolnshire henchman. Therefore he might be lying
in the streets of Greenwich--and Greenwich was a small place. But
different men carried their liquor so differently, and Culpepper