men with their staves held transversely, like a barrier, kept the
road all the way from the Tower Steps to Austin Friars, and in that
Lutheran quarter of the town there was a great crowding together. Caps
were pitched high and lost for ever, and loud shouts of praise to God
went up when the Queen and her Germans passed, with boys casting
branches of holm, holly, bay and yew, the only plants that were green
in the winter season, before the feet of her mule. But the King did
not come. It was reported to the crowd that he was ill at Greenwich.

It was known very well by those that sat at dinner with her that,
after three days, he had abandoned his Queen and kept his separate
room. She sat eating alone, on high beneath the dais, heavy, silent,
placid and so fair that her eyebrows appeared to be white upon her red
forehead. She did not speak a word, having no English, and it was
considered disgusting that she wiped her fingers upon pieces of bread.

Hostile lords remarked upon all her physical imperfections, which the
King, it was known, had reported to his physicians in a writing of
many pages. Besides, she had no English, no French, no Italian; she
could not even play cards with his Highness. It was true that they had
squeezed her into English stays, but she was reported to have wept at
having to mount a horse. So she could not go a-hawking, neither could
she shoot with the bow, and her attendants--the women, bound about the
middle and spreading out above and below like bolsters, and the men,
who wore their immense scolloped hats falling over their ears even at
meal-times--excited disgust and derision by the noises they made when
they ate.

The Master Viridus had Katharine Howard in his keeping. He took her up
into a small gallery near the gilded roof of the long hall and pointed
out to her, far below, the courtiers that it was safe for her to
consort with, because they were friends of Privy Seal. His manner was
more sinister and more meaning.

'You would do well to have to do with no others,' he said.

'I am like to have to do with none at all,' Katharine answered, 'for
no mother's son cometh anigh me.'

He looked away from her. Down below she made out her cousin Surrey,
sitting with his back ostentatiously turned to a Lord Roydon, of
Cromwell's following; her uncle, plunged in his silent and malignant
gloom; and Cromwell, his face lit up and smiling, talking earnestly
with Chapuys, the Ambassador from the Emperor.