The Concubine

by Norah Lofts

  He spoke with fervor and confidence and a certain rough eloquence.

  “So you think I should go to London?”

  He gave a little secret sigh; women, how stupid even the best of them could be; what did she think he’d been talking about all this time.

  “I think it’s your duty, no less.”

  And although she had, when she laid her problem before him, hoped for the opposite answer, she was conscious of a feeling of relief. She was, after all, a little old to go looking for another job in an overcrowded market, and Mistress Boleyn was easy to serve; it was only that her conscience, her liking for everything to be clean and orderly and above-board, had made her feel that she didn’t want to serve a light woman, even the King’s.

  “If you put it like that,” she said. “And of course I’ll do what I can. But she’s a very strange…at least not like anybody I ever worked for. After all this time about the only thing I really know about her is that she hates the Cardinal.”

  “Well, there you are! What better start could you have? So do we, don’t we? He’s the enemy on the doorstep. No getting hisself picked to be Pope of Rome, he’s doing his best to be Pope of England. You work on that, Mrs. Arnett. And now, if you’re bound for London I’d better tell you how to find my brother. He’ll make you welcome, and through him you’ll find a lot of friends. Down here the Cause is only just finding its feet, up there it’s flourishing. More people think like we do than you’d ever believe.”

  “I shall be glad of friends,” Emma said, “for I shall miss you all.”

  On her way back to Hever she reflected upon the strange turnings life took. After the breakup of her family she had been dreadfully lonely; then, for a brief time, in Richard Hunne’s household, she had fallen into place, been happy, felt at home. Then had come another upheaval and she had been lonely again. She had held to certain ideas, some inculcated by her dead master, some the result of her own observation and good sense, but nowhere, until she entered the haberdasher’s shop, had she found, or even hoped to find, anyone whose ideas ran alongside her own. Then she had found that far from being an oddity, she was one of a group, small as yet, and nameless, who were confident of ultimate victory because their beliefs were taken directly from the Bible, the Word of God.

  And she’d gone into Edenbridge today prepared, hoping to be told that she should leave Anne’s service. The very opposite had happened, and the haberdasher in charging her to put in a word here, a word there, had set her a task the magnitude of which he, in his rustic innocence, had no notion.

  Yet, going back to Hever, she was far happier.

  To the real reason for this happiness her stern, puritanical eyes were sealed.

  X

  …my physician, in whom I have most confidence, is absent at the very time when he could have given me the greatest pleasure. Yet for want of him, I send you my second, and hope that he will soon make you well.

  Henry VIII in a letter to Anne Boleyn

  THE KING’S HIGHWAY. JUNE 1528

  AS HE RODE—NOT HURRIEDLY, BUT keeping a good steady pace—Dr. Butts mused over the mystery of the Sweating Sickness and over the exact interpretation of the Hippocratic Oath, and over the state of things in England, and over his master’s infatuation; and the four subjects, diverse as they might sound, were all one.

  The Sweating Sickness was a form of fever which Englishmen sometimes called the Picardy Sweat, and Frenchmen called the English Sweat. In France it was endemic, a few cases here and there all the time; when it broke out amongst English people, even inside the Pale of Calais, it was always in the form of a horrifying epidemic. It would decimate towns and villages, bring business to a standstill and then vanish completely, and perhaps there would be no other case for twenty years. Unlike most other forms of sickness it chose most of its victims from the upper classes. Its onset was sudden, a little pain in head or belly, burning fever, the prodigious sweating that gave it its name, coma, death. It was not, as some uninformed people averred, a form of the plague, for it left no outward sign upon the body. There was no known cure, and almost no palliatives.

  The King lived in mortal dread of it; and this Dr. Butts did not find strange; it settled upon the well-fed, the well-clothed, the well-housed, the well-born; therefore the King was its natural target. The moment it was known that the Sweat had broken out in London, the King had fled; and his behavior since leaving London had been that of a man trying to elude a conscious human enemy out to kill him with a sword. He’d moved from manor to manor, making his moves suddenly, with no warning; and therein he showed wisdom, for in each abandoned house somebody had died of the Sweat almost as soon as the King had left. As though the enemy, finding Henry gone again, had slashed about with the sword indiscriminately. I’ve missed the King, so I’ll kill you Carey, Poyntz, Compton…For a moment Dr. Butts thought sadly of the dead.

  For himself he had no fear, and he did not find that either surprising or praiseworthy; he’d known his moments of terror when he was young; but no doctor could pursue his vocation for long unless he could bring himself to believe that he was immune to disease. Doctors did die, of course, but chiefly as very young or very old men; it was remarkable when you considered the risks they ran, how few doctors between the ages of twenty-five and sixty died, or even had poor health. St. Luke, their patron Saint, was watchful and powerful.

  Dr. Butts fingered his little golden medallion of St. Luke; and breathed a little prayer of which he was almost, but not quite, ashamed, as soon as his mind had framed the words.

  “Let her be dead before I arrive.”

  And that violated the spirit, if not the actual wording of his Hippocratic Oath. A doctor promised to do his best for his patients. And if Mistress Anne Boleyn were alive when he reached Greenwich he would do his best to keep her alive; see that she was wrapped in wool to counteract the chill which often followed fever, see that she drank quantities of liquid to replace what she had lost by the sweating. And that, he knew from experience, was really all that could be done. All the other nostrums, herbal, animal, and mineral, he had proved to be quite ineffective.

  News that the lady had fallen victim to the Sweat had reached the King at Tittenhanger, one of my Lord Cardinal’s manors where he was making a temporary visit. (The Cardinal, staunch, admirable man, had stayed in London, keeping things together and ignoring the sickness. Quite possibly he had a secret faith in his low birth; a disease which could pick out an Englishman in Amsterdam, and which was unknown in Ireland, and stopped its ravages on the Scottish border, would have discrimination enough to see the butcher’s son under the Cardinal’s robes.) Henry had sent forthwith for Dr. Butts and told him to ride hard to Greenwich and use his best endeavors to save the lady’s life. He’d been so near distraught that Dr. Butts had ventured to offer a word or two of advice, telling him that mental distress could be a traitor opening the door to the enemy. “Above all things, Your Grace must be of good heart and not fret.”

  God and His Holy Mother knew that this woman had done enough damage already without casting the King into a low state of mind which might invite the sickness.

  Henry had said, “I shall be calm and trust you, my friend. And you will send me word; three times a day. And carry this letter which I wrote in haste.”

  Dr. Butts had thought then—If she dies, as she well may, it will be a heavy blow for him; but death brings its own anodyne as I know, having seen it a thousand times. And what a good thing for England!

  Dr. Butts, like the vast majority of people in England, had not been at all pleased with what had happened lately. He was fond of the King, as was almost everyone who came into close contact with him, he wished him to be happy, he wished that he had had a son to be Henry the Ninth. But he deplored an action which aimed at making good Queen Catherine nothing more than a harlot—after nineteen years of blameless marriage—and the Princess Mary a bastard. The King claimed that his conscience was uneasy and that had seemed feasible, until last year, at the end
of the summer, when Mistress Anne returned to Court and the truth was out.

  They said that when the Cardinal knew the truth he went down on his knees and stayed there for two hours, weeping, beseeching the King to abandon his insane plan to marry the Lady Anne. Take her, he was said to have urged, take her as you took her sister, and Bessie Blount, but in God’s name I beg you, do not look to make her Queen.

  The common people had been of the same mind, “We want none of Nan Bullen.” “Nan Bullen shan’t be our Queen,” they had shouted at street corners and tavern doorways whenever Mistress Anne ventured abroad; and by contrast, whenever Catherine went about, which she did now much more than formerly, they greeted her enthusiastically. “Long live Queen Catherine!” “God save the Queen!”

  Anybody except the King, Dr. Butts reflected, would have trimmed his sails to the prevailing wind. But Henry had not. And oddly enough, slow inch by inch, the tide was beginning to turn. Here and there a man would say, “Well, I married the wench I fancied, Pope or no Pope, and why shouldn’t he do the same! The other was a rigged up job.” Even Dr. Butts, completely orthodox, couldn’t help feeling a slight admiration for a man who could stick to his point in the face of so much opposition, so much argument, so much well-meant advice, and such long-drawn-out waiting.

  People said that Anne was already Henry’s mistress, but Dr. Butts, who knew a good deal about human nature, and about Henry, found that hard to believe. It was the desire to possess, not the possession, that drove the King on. Earlier this year he had sent two of his bishops to argue out his case with the Pope, and in the end the Pope had agreed to send a Cardinal Campeggio to England to sit with Wolsey to decide whether the King and Queen were truly married or no.

  Here Dr. Butts broke off his train of thought to spare a little pity for this Cardinal Campeggio who was said to suffer most cruelly from gout, not only in his feet, common enough, but also in his hands. His progress across Europe was being slowed down because there were days when he could not hold his horse’s reins. Dr. Butts hoped that he would get an opportunity to look at those gouty hands. Perhaps, while Cardinal Campeggio was in England he might be persuaded to try drinking the waters at Bath, or Epsom, or another place, far to the north, in Derbyshire. There were known cases where they had brought definite relief to gouty subjects.

  But it would be best for all concerned if Mistress Boleyn could die; then Campeggio could turn about and go back to Italy and a lot of woeful dirty scandal would be averted. If she died, Henry would go running to Catherine and weep on her bosom and she would comfort him. She still regarded herself as his wife and she still had a fondness for him; everyone said that she never spoke, or listened to, a word of criticism with regard to his behavior; she would only say that Henry had been ill advised by his ministers, particularly the Cardinal, and bewitched by Anne Boleyn. (That, of course, was a mere figure of speech; Dr. Butts, a religious man, did not believe in witchcraft and he was certain that the Queen, a religious woman, must be equally skeptical of it.) The Queen, God bless her, would comfort the King as a mother would comfort a child whose toy has been broken. Henry’s own mother had died when he was only twelve and Dr. Butts was one of the few people who realized that in a manner Catherine had slipped into her place. There’d been a brief time when the six years of difference in their ages hadn’t seemed to matter much, but the pattern had been set long ago, before they were married, and it was quite possible…

  Dr. Butts hesitated upon the threshold of this far-flying fancy, and then went on. It was quite possible that the King had always looked upon the Queen as upon his mother and that when he spoke of an incestuous marriage, though he honestly believed he was referring to Catherine having been Arthur’s wife, he was putting into words a thought too deep even for his own understanding.

  As indeed my thoughts will be unless I take them in hand…

  He looked at the fields on either side of the road. Winter and spring had been very wet, and the summer, so far, not much better; the corn was in poor shape and there was murrain amongst the cattle. Could there possibly be a connection between the outbreaks of murrain and outbreaks of the Sweating Sickness? That was a subject that would bear a little investigation. A poor harvest, a shortage of meat, and people would naturally say that the wrath of God was being visited upon the land.

  And suppose the patient to whom he was traveling lived—a certain number of stricken people recovered—and the Cardinals got together and decided that the King and Queen had never been husband and wife in the eyes of the law, and that he was free to marry his paramour. A fine uproar there’d be. Or suppose the Cardinals decided otherwise; would the King then dare to attempt to do some of the things which in moments of anger he’d been known to threaten? Cut England off from the Pope and all things Papal? That was Lutheranism. It had happened in Germany. Could it happen here? God forbid. The way the drunken Germans amongst the Emperor’s forces had behaved in Italy last year when the Pope was taken prisoner was enough to make any Christian man shrink from Lutheranism; monks had been stood against walls and made targets for arrows and knives and any other kind of missile that came to hand; nuns had been raped; Cardinals’ houses had been stripped of all valuables and what couldn’t be easily carried away had been smashed. People who knew said that the Germans had done more damage to Rome in one night than all the barbarian invasions had.

  Tittenhanger was only twenty miles from London, and with his mind so occupied Dr. Butts found the journey short; soon the countryside began to change, to become more populated; traffic on the road increased, though even so it was very light for the time of year; nobody went abroad on an unnecessary errand when the Sweat was about. He realized that the final stage of his journey would be made through the narrow streets and crowded hovels and tenements on the south side of the river, and since he had ridden almost twenty miles and breakfasted lightly, he began to look about for some decent hostelry where he could drink some red Burgundy wine—which he reckoned a great fortifier—and eat some bread and bacon. No beef or mutton while the murrain was raging; too many farmers were inclined to kill off a beast in the first stages of the disease and sell it as sound flesh.

  Without turning his head Dr. Butts raised his hand, a signal which his servant, riding respectfully at a little distance to the rear, with a box of medicaments strapped to the back of his saddle, understood and responded to, hurrying up alongside.

  “We’ll stop at the next decent inn, Jack. Do you know a likely one?”

  “I do, sir. St. Peter and the Keys. Three furlongs ahead, sir, with a great chestnut tree afore the door.”

  “Ride you on, then. Order me red Burgundy wine, bread and bacon; ale for yourself and water for the horses. That will save us time.”

  But he was doomed to waste time, not to save it; and maybe there the hand of God was at work. Maybe it was intended that somewhere in Greenwich Palace Mistress Anne Boleyn, burning with fever, would throw off her covers and, with no one to warn them, her attendants would let her lie and take a chill; or she might be in the hands of some ignorant doctor who still held to the old-fashioned theory that a sickness could be discouraged by denying it sustenance; so she would be kept without the water she needed, and so die.

  Those were his thoughts when he reached the inn and found his servant under the chestnut tree, carrying on a shouted conversation with a woman who stood at an upper window. The door of the handsome inn was closed and a wisp of straw was nailed to it. That was the law in London and for a radius of four miles, a wisp of straw to mark every stricken house, and if anyone from one such must venture out he must carry a white-painted stick so that other people could keep their distance.

  “They’re smitten,” Jack said, laconically. He had no fear for himself, he’d carried that black, brass-bound box into too many dangerous places not to be sure that he shared his master’s immunity. “I keep trying to tell her we don’t mind.”

  “It’s against the law,” the woman said. “There’s a law. Any publ
ic place where there’s a case of Sweat must close. You should know that.”

  “Who is sick?” Dr. Butts asked.

  “My man. Looks like he’s dying.”

  “I am a doctor,” Dr. Butts said. “You can let me in, and my servant.”

  She gave a wordless cry and vanished from the window. Within a few seconds the bars of the door squealed and it opened. The woman, who had been firm and controlled when she spoke of the law, was now incoherent and babbling, with her thanking God and calling down blessings on Dr. Butts and her declaration that it was a miracle which had brought him to her door.

  “I can’t work miracles,” Dr. Butts said; he then added, with a touch of professional pomposity, “I can advise. I shall give you precisely the same advice as I should give the attendants of his Grace the King should he, which God forfend, take the sickness. Are you alone here?”

  “Why, no. My husband’s sister is in the kitchen and her boy is in the yard.”

  “Then ask the other woman to make ready what I want.” He told her briefly what he wanted and said that the boy should draw water for the horses. Then he climbed the stairs and found, as he had expected, the sick man lying almost naked on a bed soaked with his own sweat.

  “Wrap him close, in your best woolen blanket,” he said.

  “And him so hot already!” the woman said in astonished protest.

  “Do as I say. And give him plenty to drink, water, milk, ale, anything.”

  “But, good sir, it’ll all run out again as sweat. This is the Sweating Sickness!”

  “Are you instructing me?” Dr. Butts asked coldly. Then, more kindly he said, “Wrap him warm and let him drink to replace the liquid he is losing, and he may live. Disobey my instructions and he has no chance at all.”

  He then went downstairs, and in the manner which he had learned as a young man, put the sick man out of his mind and applied himself heartily to his wine, his bread and bacon. Then, the meal almost finished, he remembered that he carried a letter. The King’s letters to his sweetheart in the past had been a matter of some speculation. Some people said that for a year or more, until she reappeared at Court, he had written to her every day. That was clearly an exaggeration. Nobody had ever seen one of the letters, not even the lady’s father Sir Thomas Boleyn, beg his pardon, Lord Wiltshire; and that at least indicated that Mistress Anne was discreet and no show off. Some people said that she simply dared not show them, because they were couched in terms that contradicted her own statement, and the King’s, that they were not lovers in the accepted sense.