'If you will bid me do naught but serve you, I will do naught else,' she said.
'I will neither bid thee nor aid thee,' Mary answered. 'The Bishop of Winchester claims thy service. Serve him as thou wilt.'
'I would serve my mistress in serving him,' Katharine said. 'He is a man I love little.'
Mary pulled suddenly from her bodice a piece of crumpled parchment that had been torn across. She thrust it into Katharine's free hand.
'Such letters I have had written me by my father's men,' she said. 'If this bishop should come to be my father's man I would take no service from him.'
Katharine read on the crumpled parchment such words as:
'Be you dutiful ...
I will not protect ...
You shall be ruined utterly ...
You had better creep underground ...
Therefore humble you ...'
'It was Thomas Cromwell wrote that,' the Lady Mary cried. 'My father's man!'
'But if this brewer's son be brought down?' Katharine pleaded.
'Why, I tore his letter across for it is filthy,' Mary said, 'and I keep the halves of his letter that I may remember. If he be brought down, who shall bring his master down that let him write so?'