'I think that if a woman come to be Queen it is odds that she will live chastely, how lewd soever she ha' been aforetime.'
Lady Rochford set her fingers in between Katharine's, but when she drew them back with the strings upon them, they wavered, lost their straightness, knotted and then resolved themselves into a single loop as in a swift wind a cloud dies away beneath the eyes of the beholder.
'Why, 'tis pity,' Katharine said.
All the lords and all the ladies were now upon the terrace above. The old lady had the string in her broad lap. Suddenly she bent forward, her eyes opened.
'She was the enemy of your Church,' she said. 'But this I will tell you: upon occasions when men swore she had been with other men o' nights, the Queen was in my bed with me!'
Katharine nodded silently.
'Who was I that I dare speak?' the old woman sobbed; and Katharine nodded again.
Lady Rochford rubbed together her fat hands as she were ringing them.
'Before God,' she moaned, 'and by the blessed blood of Hailes that cured ever my pains, if a soul know a soul I knew Anne. If she was a woman like other women before she wedded the King, she was minded to be chaste after. Madam Howard,'—and she rocked her fat body to and fro upon the seat—'they came to me from both sides, your Papists and her heretics; they threatened me to keep silence of what I knew. I was to keep silence. I name no names. But they came o' both sides, Papists and heretics; though she was middling true to the heretics they could not be true to her.'
Katharine answered her own thoughts with: