"That Coton was not the place for you!" exclaimed my lady scornfully. "He is a sort of connection of yours, is he not? Oh, I know. And he thinks he has a kind of reversionary interest in the property! With you and your father out of the way, and only your girl cousin left, his interest is much more likely to come to hand. Do you see?"
I recalled what Martin Luther had said about the cuckoo. But I have since thought that probably they both wronged Stephen Gardiner in this. He was not a man of petty mind, and his estate was equal to his high place. I think it more likely that his motive in removing me from Coton was chiefly the desire to use my services abroad, in conjunction perhaps with some remoter and darker plan for eventually devoting the Cludde property to the Church. Such an act of piety would have been possible had Sir Anthony died leaving his daughter unmarried, and would certainly have earned for the Chancellor Queen Mary's lasting favor. I think it the more likely to have been in his mind because his inability to persuade the gentry to such acts of restitution--King Harry had much enriched us--was always a sore point with the Queen, and more than once exposed him to her resentment.
"The strangest thing of all," the Duchess continued with alacrity, "seems to me to be this: that if he had not meddled with you, he would not have had his plans in regard to us thwarted. If he had not driven you from home, you would never have helped me to escape from London, nor been with us to foil his agents."
"A higher power than the Chancellor arranged that!" said Master Bertie emphatically.
"Well, at any rate, I am glad that you are you!" the Duchess answered, rising gayly. "A Cludde? Why, one feels at home again. And yet," she continued, her lips trembling suddenly, and her eyes filling with tears as she looked at me, "there was never house raised yet on nobler deed than yours."
"Go! go! go!" cried her husband, seeing my embarrassment. "Go and look to that foolish girl!"
"I will! Yet stop!" cried my lady, pausing when she was half way across the floor, and returning, "I was forgetting that I have another letter to open. It is very odd that this letter was never opened before," she continued, producing that which had lain in my haversack. "It has had several narrow escapes. But this time I vow I will see inside it. You give me leave?"
"Oh, yes," I said, smiling. "I wash my hands of it. Whoever the Mistress Clarence to whom it is addressed may be, it is enough that her name is Clarence! We have suffered too much at his hands."
"I open it, then!" my lady cried dramatically. I nodded. She took her husband's dagger and cut the green silk which bound the packet, and opened and read.
Only a few words. Then she stopped, and looking off the paper, shivered. "I do not understand this," she murmured. "What does it mean?"