'Let me have the maid in wedlock,' Udal grunted between two bites. 'Better women have looked favourably upon me. I had a pupil in the North——'
'She was a Howard, and the Howards are all whores,' the printer said, over the letter. 'Your Doctor Wernken writes like an Anabaptist.'
'They are even as the rest of womenkind,' Udal laughed, 'but far quicker with their learning.'
A boy rising twenty, in a grey cloak that showed only his bright red stockings and broad-toed red shoes, rattled the back door and slammed it to. He pulled off his cap and shook it.
'It snows,' he said buoyantly, and then knelt before his grandfather. The old man touched his grandson's cropped fair head.
'Benedicite, grandson Hal Poins,' he muttered, and relapsed into his gaze at the fire.
The young man bent his knee to his uncle and bowed low to the magister. Being about the court, he had for Udal's learning and office a reverence that neither the printer nor his grandfather could share. He unfastened his grey cloak at the neck and cast it into a corner after his hat. His figure flashed out, lithe, young, a blaze of scarlet with a crowned rose embroidered upon a chest rendered enormous by much wadding. He was serving his apprenticeship as ensign in the gentlemen of the King's guard, and because his dead father had been beloved by the Duke of Norfolk it was said that his full ensigncy was near. He begged his grandfather's leave to come near the fire, and stood with his legs apart.
'The new Queen's come to Rochester,' he said; 'I am here with the guard to take the heralds to Greenwich Palace.'
The printer looked at him unfavourably from the corner of his dark and gloomy eyes.
'You come to suck up more money,' he said moodily. 'There is none in this house.'