“I cry you mercy, Mistress, but I humbly guess not so. Mine uncle, as I have known him, hath been alway an honest and honourable man, that should think shame to do a mean deed. That he had holpen my cousins thus to act could I not believe without it were proven.”
“Then thy cousin, Mistress Winkfield?”
“Alexandra? I said not so much of her.”
“Phyllis, my Lady Foljambe must know this.”
“I am afeard, Mistress, she must. Mistress, I must in mine honesty confess to you that these few days I have wist my cousin had called her by the name of Neville; but in good sooth, I wist not if I ought to speak or no, till your word this even seemed to show me that I must. My cousins have been somewhat unfriends to me, and I held me back lest I should be reckoned to revenge myself.” Perrote took in the situation at a glance. “Poor child!” she said. “It is well thou hast spoken. I dare guess, thou sawest not that mischief might come thereof.”
“In good sooth, Mistress, that did I not until this even. I never thought of no such a thing.”
“Verily, I can scarce marvel, for such a thing was hardly heard of afore. To deceive a noble lady! to ’present herself as of gentle blood, when she came but of a trading stock! ’Tis horrible! I can scarce think of worser deed, without she had striven to deceive the priest himself in confession.”
The act of Ricarda Altham was far more shocking in the eyes of a lady in the fourteenth century than in the nineteenth. The falsehood she had told was the same in both cases; or rather, it would weigh more heavily now than then. But the nature of the deception—that what they would have termed “a beggarly tradesman’s brat” should, by deceiving a lady of family, have forced herself on terms of comparative equality into the society of ladies—was horrible in the extreme to their eclectic souls. Tradesmen, in those days, were barely supposed, by the upper classes, to have either morals or manners, except an awe of superior people, which was expected to act as a wholesome barrier against cheating their aristocratic customers. In point of fact, the aristocratic customers were cheated much oftener than they supposed, on the one side, and some of the “beggarly tradesfolk” were men of much higher intellect and principle than they imagined, on the other. Brains were held to be a prerogative of gentle blood, extra intelligence in the lower classes being almost an impertinence. The only exception to this rule lay with the Church. She was allowed to develop a brain in whom she would. The sacredness of her tonsure protected the man who wore it, permitting him to exhibit as much (or as little) of manners, intellect, and morals, as he might think proper.
Perrote’s undressing on that evening was attended with numerous shakes of the head, and sudden ejaculations of mingled astonishment and horror.
“And that Agatha!” was one of the ejaculations.