'Why, then,' he grumbled to himself, 'is it treason to carry the King's letters to a wench? Helping the King is no treason. I should be advanced, not threatened with a halter. Letters between the King and Kat Howard!' He even attempted to himself a clumsy joke, polishing it and repolishing it till it came out: 'A King may write to a Kat. A Kat may write to a King. But my neck's in danger!'
Beside him, whitened by the dust that fell from above, the gatewarden wandered in speech round his grievance.
'You ask me, young lad, if I know Tom Culpepper. Well I know Tom Culpepper. Y' ask me if he have passed this way going for England. Well I know he have not. For if Tom Culpepper, squire that was of Durford and Maintree and Sallowford that was my father's farm—if so be Tom Culpepper had passed this way, I had spat in the dust behind him as he passed.'
He made his wry face, winked his eye and showed his teeth once more. 'Spat in the dust—I should ha' spat in the dust,' he remarked again. 'Or maybe I'd have cast my hat on high wi' "Huzzay, Squahre Tom!" according as the mood I was in,' he said. He winked again and waited.
'For sure,' he affirmed after a pause, 'that will move 'ee to ask why I du spit in the dust or for why—the thing being contrary—I'd ha' cast up my cap.'
The young Poins pulled an onion from his poke.
'If you are so main sure he have not passed the gate,' he said, 'I may take my ease.' He sat him down against the gate wall where the April sun fell warm through the arch of shadows. He stripped the outer peel from the onion and bit into it. 'Good, warming eating,' he said, 'when your stomach's astir from the sea.'
'Young lad,' the gatewarden said, 'I'm as fain to swear my mother bore me—though God forbid I should swear who my father was, woman being woman—as that Thomas Culpepper have not passed this way. For why: I'd have cast my hat on high or spat on the ground. And such things done mark other things that have passed in the mind of a man. And I have done no such thing.'
But because the young Poins sat always silent with his eyes on the road to Ardres and slept—being privileged because he was yeoman of the King's guard—always in the little stone guard cell of the gateway at nights; because, in fact, the young man's whole faculties were set upon seeing that Thomas Culpepper did not pass unseen through the gate, it was four days before the gatewarden contrived to get himself asked why he would have spat in the dust or cast his hat on high. It was, as it were, a point of honour that he should be asked for all the information that he gave; and he thirsted to tell his tale.
His tale had it that he had been ruined by a wench who had thrown her shoe over the mill and married a horse-smith, after having many times tickled the rough chin of Nicholas Hogben. Therefore, he had it that all women were to be humbled and held down—for all women were traitors, praters, liars, worms and vermin. (He made a great play of words between wermen, meaning worms, and wermin and wummin.) He had been ruined by this woman who had tickled him under the chin—that being an ingratiating act, fit to bewitch and muddle a man, like as if she had promised him marriage. And then she had married a horse-smith! So he was ready and willing, and prayed every night that God would send him the chance, to ruin and hold down every woman who walked the earth or lay in a bed.