The Concubine

by Norah Lofts

  The rest of what Emma had said slid through her mind almost unremarked. She had seen the King often enough; huge and handsome, in every way just a little more than life-size; the most powerful monarch in the world, the best knight in a tourney, the most skillful handler of the lute, the best—or almost the best—maker of songs. There was no visible sign of the Queen having lost influence over him, but possibly Emma knew best about that. She herself had been too much engrossed in her own love affair to give much heed to other people.

  She thought—Fourteen years; if Harry and I had been allowed to marry, would our marriage have been outworn in fourteen years? It seemed impossible to imagine, as impossible as imagining snow and ice on the hottest summer day. No. Ours would have lasted, because it was a love match. The King and Queen had been thrust together by an arranged marriage, just as Harry and Mary Talbot were being thrust together.

  And so, here she was, thinking the same thoughts, over and over, driving herself mad. It was as though her mind had been locked in a little stone cell, without door or window, and with nothing to do except go round and round.

  She lifted the cup and drank, forgetting for once to be careful of something the concealing of which had become almost second nature; and suddenly she was aware that Emma was regarding it. Instead of whisking it away out of sight as she always did on those rare occasions when she had exposed it, she spread it out against the firelight; her slender, long-fingered left hand with its hateful deformity. Growing out from the little finger, near the nail, was another tiny fingertip.

  “Yes,” she said, “you see aright. And you should cross yourself, Emma. People do, if they glimpse it. They call it a witch mark.”

  “I’m not superstitious,” Emma said. As soon as the words were spoken she wished them back, or wished that they hadn’t sounded so abrupt and final. She had cultivated that way of speech; the fewest words, the least revealing, but she shouldn’t just at this moment have clipped a subject off so short. While the girl talked she wasn’t brooding; and she should have kept her talking until supper came; then maybe she would have eaten with some appetite.

  With an obvious air of beginning again, she said, “It’s always seemed to me that if those who’re called witches could do a half of what they’re said to do, they could do more for themselves. But they’re always poor and ugly and old, and if their neighbors turn against them, they let themselves be taken and ducked, or swum, or pricked, as helpless as sheep.”

  “You speak as though you had known a number.”

  “There’s one in every village, and I had country jobs until about eleven years ago. In the country, until a cow dies or somebody has a bad accident, people take the whole business as natural. In fact country children play at being witches the same way they play at being married and keeping house.”

  “Do they? I was a country child, too. I lived here, most of the time, after my mother died; but I hardly ever played games. I had a governess, a Frenchwoman, named Simonette, and with her it was lessons, lessons all the time. She was a very serious woman. I’ve been grateful to her, since. In France it made things easier for me, and once, when the other English maids of honor were sent home, I was allowed to stay because, speaking both tongues, I was useful.”

  Was that good or bad? If I’d come home sooner I might not have met Harry at all; or I might have met him sooner and perhaps the Cardinal might not have noticed…All her past life, back to the lessons with Simonette, seemed like a path leading straight to this stony cell out of which she could not break, where her thoughts went round and round. She made another effort.

  “Did you ever play at being a witch, Emma?”

  “Well, I never had much time for play, either. My father had a little farm then and my mother was always busy and wanted all the help she could get. And even when there was time…” Emma heard herself making this confidential statement with some surprise, for it was something that she had always kept to herself, for you never knew who might listen and play a trick that they might think funny but which would be too loathsome to contemplate…“I never could abide frogs or toads,” she said. “So I never could play properly. But I have gone so far as to give our yard dog a secret name, “Owd Scrat” I used to call him, when we were alone; and I’ve well-wished people with a bit of cherry blossom, and I’ve pricked more than one name on a laurel leaf with a thorn. And nobody a bit the better or worse and the dog no more heedful of me, in fact less than he was of my father who called him “Nip” and lammed into him if he didn’t do what he was bid.”

  Round and round inside the small stony cell; this time, if I were a witch, or even playing at being one, I know what I’d wish, good and ill. God’s life, if I could just have power for five minutes…

  You see, she said, addressing herself, there is no escape; your thoughts always come back to the same point, as a mariner’s compass always comes back to the North. I can’t even sit and talk about my serving woman’s childhood games without relating them to me and my situation.

  She made another attempt to break through.

  “You say you’ve pricked names on laurel leaves, Emma. How? Could you write when you were young?”

  “Not then. I’ve learned since. Maybe,” the slow, dry self-derogatory humor of her breed brought a smile to Emma’s craggy face. “Maybe that’s why nobody was ever the worse for our pranks. We just named the leaf and pricked along the veins, and then kept it next our skin till it was cooked, as we called it. When it was cooked all the prick-holes were brown. Then we buried it and said, “Within nine days, as this leaf rots, so will you,” and we said the name of the person we meant. Once, I remember, we did it to try to get our own back on a man who’d closed a footpath and made us trudge all the way round, another two miles, to get to church.”

  “And what happened to him?”

  “He was knighted,” Emma said, and the smile showed again. “And if that wouldn’t cure you of being superstitious, what would. Young children at one end, old women in second childhood at the other; and that, mistress, to my mind, is all it is.”

  But the truth was that Emma Arnett’s lack of superstition, like her tendency to silence, her sense of responsibility, and the unspoken disapproval of which Lady Lucia Bryant had been aware, stemmed from causes far removed from childish games. Emma’s first job in London had been as nursemaid to a family named Hunne. Richard Hunne was a prosperous merchant tailor who, because of his dealings with the Netherlands, where new ideas were rife, was what a hundred years earlier would have been called a Lollard. He was anticlerical; he read the New Testament. He was “a new man” of a very different kind from Thomas Wolsey and Thomas Boleyn and hundreds of others, who were new where their own importance was concerned, and everywhere else strongly conservative. Amongst his other advanced ideas, Richard Hunne held that in an ideal society everyone should be capable of reading the Bible; and finding, in his new nurse-girl, a woman of some intelligence, who admitted to a desire to read and write, he had taken pains to teach her. Before Emma’s studies were very far advanced, the child whose birth had been her occasion for joining the household had died, and over his funeral his father had decided to make what he called “a test case.” The officiating priest had claimed the coffin cover, a good one, worth four shillings, and Richard Hunne, to whom the value of the cover meant less than nothing, had refused to give it up. It was, he said, just one more example of how priests acted as extortioners; in this case the cover didn’t matter, but what of a poor family, where a dead child might be wrapped in the best, perhaps the only, blanket, or a cloak?

  There’d been a lot of fuss and argument, some of which ordinary people like Emma could understand, some of which was far beyond their comprehension. The priest had sued Master Hunne and then Master Hunne had turned about and claimed that the priest, in suing him, had been acting for a foreign power—to wit, the Pope of Rome. The word “praemunire” had been tossed about. But Richard Hunne had been taken off to jail, and there found hanged. It was said that h
e had committed suicide because he feared trial for heresy. That, no one believed; he had gone out of his way to invite trial; and the most sinister feature of the case was that the jailer had run away as soon as he knew that there was to be an inquest. A great many people, and especially, of course, his family, believed that Richard Hunne had been murdered, was a martyr.

  Emma Arnett, busy with her upward climb, had entered the Bryant household, and was, within a year, to achieve her ambition of being personal maid to a great lady. But she had never forgotten Master Hunne, or his teachings, not just the mastering of the reading and writing, but his general attitude toward things. When she said, “I’m not superstitious,” she meant a great deal more than that she could regard a deformed little finger without horror; she meant that she did not believe that at Walsingham one could see the milk of the Virgin Mary, still liquid after more than fifteen hundred years, or that at Canterbury St. Thomas’s bones still had shreds of bleeding flesh attached to them, or that you could go to the tomb of St. Edmund at St. Edmundsbury and in return for a sizable gift be cured of the lame leg or crooked back which had hitherto crippled you. Master Hunne had denounced all this as nonsense; and she, without knowing it, had already been in a state of mind open to conversion. There were in England many thousands like her, sound, hard, practical people who felt that something had gone wrong; who could, however obscurely, sense the gulf between Jesus of Nazareth who had owned nothing, whose only mount had been an unbroken donkey, and His self-styled heirs and servants; Thomas Wolsey for example, who rode like a prince, who, though professedly celibate, had a son and a daughter, at whose table every day nine hundred idle or sycophantic persons ate their fill.

  Anne said, “Nonsense it may be, but everyone isn’t sensible, and they look askance at me if they see my finger. That is why my gowns are made with trailing sleeves, which several ladies, I have noted, are beginning to copy.”

  She spoke from the surface of her mind for Emma’s last words had set something astir. Young children at one end, old women at the other, playing…but suppose someone in neither category, someone in the prime of life, someone actuated by the deepest hatred, someone who bore not merely one but two of the supposed signs…She touched with a finger of her right hand the heavy gold and enamel necklet which hid the dark, protuberant mole on her neck. Suppose…

  Of course, it was all nonsense, and the idea that she could injure the Cardinal in any way, by means natural or supernatural, was really as absurd as the idea that she could destroy his great palace of York House with her embroidery tools. Quite, quite absurd but wonderful to think about. It was as though a ray of light had been let into the little stone prison where her thoughts went round and round; a sinister light, concentrated upon a laurel leaf upon whose glossy green surface the brown-edged holes spelled out the name of Thomas Wolsey.

  II

  Whereas the King for some years past had noticed in reading the Bible the severe penalty inflicted by God on those who married the relicts of their brothers, he began to be troubled in his conscience.

  Letters and papers of the reign of Henry VIII

  YORK HOUSE. OCTOBER 1523

  THE CARDINAL’S PLUMP, WELL-CARED-FOR HANDS tidied the papers as he said, “Your Grace may safely leave it all to me.” They were the words which had first endeared him to the King and during the past thirteen years he had repeated them uncountable times. Henry had always hated paperwork and any kind of administrative detail, mainly because he lacked patience: he was fully as able as his minister, his mind, if it lacked Wolsey’s subtlety, having a greater capacity for assessing a situation at a glance. He found it tedious to be obliged to explain to slower-witted persons, to persuade those who didn’t immediately see eye to eye with him. Wolsey had a passion for detail, a talent for explanation, an outstanding gift for persuasion. They made an almost perfect team. The King said, “It would be as well if…” “I would like…” “We should…” and the Cardinal said, “Your Grace may safely leave it all to me.” For thirteen years the association between them had been as close, as smooth working as the association between a man’s mind and his hands and feet. And this way of working had another advantage besides setting the King free of the routine which in a few years had turned his father from a knight-errant into a furrow-browed, round-shouldered bookkeeper; it didn’t merely give him time to hunt and dance and make music; it provided him with a scapegoat. When, as sometimes happened, the thing that Henry thought it would be well, I would like, we should, went wrong, all the blame fell upon Wolsey. Even when an expeditionary force, years ago, had first been defeated, and then mutinied and come home, the fiasco had been called “Wolsey’s War.” Beyond all question Thomas Wolsey had been very useful to Henry Tudor and he had been commensurately rewarded.

  How, Henry asked himself, is he going to take this? And instead of, as usual, rising and making off as soon as the Cardinal had said the releasing words, he settled himself more firmly in his chair.

  “There is,” he said, “another matter.”

  The Cardinal gave a little inward groan. Once upon a time, as several people could testify, he had had such control of his body, as well as of his mind, that he could sit for twelve hours on end at a table, working away, undisturbed by the necessity to relieve his bladder. But those days were over and gone; he was fifty-one years old. He’d been in some discomfort for the last ten minutes, within a few more he would be in misery.

  And the strange thing was that although he could have explained his need to retire to anyone else, he couldn’t do so to Henry. There were a number of reasons. They were close, very close, but the King after all was the Lord’s anointed and one didn’t, to one’s Sovereign Lord, mention a physical function. And there was always the fear—common he supposed to all employed persons—of revealing any weakness which might be regarded as a sign of age. A fine thing it would be, wouldn’t it, if the King left York House this afternoon thinking to himself, Wolsey is getting so old that he can no longer hold his water.

  But it would be equally bad if he went away thinking that Wolsey had been hurried, or inattentive to this other matter.

  He rose to his feet.

  “If your Grace will honor me, I have a very special wine; from Burgundy, and this moment ripe. I saw to its laying away and I would like to point it out to my butler, so that there is no mistake.”

  On almost any other day Henry would have made some light-hearted remark about the advisability of labeling one’s wine, of having a butler one could trust; or he might have asked, in the voice which he did now and then use to Wolsey, the reminding, the calling-to-heel voice, who it was who had sent a gift of special wine to the servant and not to the master. But this afternoon he had other, more heavy matters on his mind and merely said,

  “I shall be glad to sample it with you, Thomas.”

  He was almost glad to have a moment or two alone, to shake off the memory of the state affairs which had been under discussion and to remember the cogent arguments, the telling phrases which had formed in his mind during a series of wakeful nights. Of Wolsey, as Wolsey, he was entirely sure; he was Thomas; he was My Lord of York; he was Chancellor, Ambassador, Privy Councillor and trusted friend; but, and this must never be overlooked, he was also a Prince of the Church, and Papal Legate; as such he owed some allegiance elsewhere, and there was no doubt that the subject about to be mentioned could lead to a conflict of allegiances. Still, the subject must be broached.

  Wolsey rustled back into the room, followed by a page who poured the wine into gold cups, richly chased and studded with jewels, presented them, kneeling, and withdrew.

  Henry sipped appreciatively.

  “As you promised, a sound, ripe wine. When next your friend is in a giving mood I should be a not-unwilling recipient.”

  “Your Grace, I was only waiting your word of approval before sending it to you.” It was, like many of his statements, a lie only by its timing. He was lavishly generous—not only to those who could in turn be generous
to him—he liked giving; and beyond all he liked to give to his master.

  “I would accept, with thanks,” Henry said, graciously. “But we’ll leave it in your cellar. For one thing a move would hardly improve it; for another, to drink it will sweeten our discussion. And as you will hear, by the time this business is fully threshed out, we shall be down to the dregs.”

  It was unusual, out of character for him to beat thus about the bush. As a rule, both in giving an order and in stating a wish, he was brisk and forthright. Wolsey felt that this was one of those times when a direct question—ordinarily impermissible—might be welcome, so he said,

  “And the business is, Your Grace?”

  “Let formalities rest, Thomas. This is a talk between men.”

  And still he hadn’t said what it concerned. A little glumly Wolsey made a guess. Something he knows will not please me; most likely another and more serious attempt to get his only son, Bessie Blount’s bastard, recognized as heir presumptive. Completely unfeasible; the English would never accept it, and it would break up the Princess Mary’s betrothal to the Emperor. He has agreed to marry the future Queen of England, not a dispossessed girl whose base-born brother sits on the throne.

  “It is,” Henry said, forcing himself to frankness, “a matter of my conscience.”

  They were words which were presently to echo and reecho around the known world; loaded, dangerous words which were to bring down many seemingly unassailable institutions and ruin many men, Wolsey foremost among them; yet he heard them now, for the first time, without a premonitory pang.

  “Your conscience, sire? Then it must be a trivial matter, for there’s not a man in Christendom that can claim a clearer one!”

  “You’re wrong, Thomas. I have—and have had for some time past—a very heavy burden upon my conscience.” He looked his minister full in the eye. “I’ve lived in sin, with my brother’s wife, these fourteen years.”