'There is even then my uncle.'
'Little good of a friend you will have of Norfolk. 'Tis a bitter apple and a very rotten plank to lean upon.'
She could not any longer miss his meaning. The King's scarlet and immense figure was already in the grey shadow of the arch under the tower. In walking, they had come near him, and while they waited he stood for a minute, gazing back down the path with boding and pathetic eyes; then he disappeared.
She looked at Cromwell and thanked him for the warning, 'quia spicula praevisa minus laedunt.'
'I would have you read it: gaudia plus laetificant,' he answered gravely.
A man with a conch-shaped horn upturned was suddenly blowing beneath the archway seven hollow and reverberating grunts of sound that drowned his voice. A clear answering whistle came from the water-gate. Cromwell stayed, listening attentively; another stood forward to blow four blasts, another six, another three. Each time the whistle answered. They were the great officers' signals for their barges that the men blew, and the whistle signified that these lay at readiness in the tideway. A bustle of men running, calling, and making pennons ready, began beyond the archway in the quadrangle.
Cromwell's face grew calm and contented; the King was sending to meet Anne of Cleves.
'Y' are well read?' he asked her slowly.
'I was brought up in the Latin tongue or ever I had the English,' she answered. 'I had a good master, one that spoke the learned language always.'
'Aye, Nicholas Udal,' Cromwell said.