The Concubine

by Norah Lofts

  “The King,” Anne said.

  “That can’t be true. Whoever said that was wanting to upset you. And really…” She paused on the verge of saying “you should know better” to the Queen of England. “You shouldn’t play into their hands by getting upset over spiteful gossip.”

  “He said it to my face. He looked me straight in the eye and said my chamberlain had no right to take Catherine’s barge, there were plenty of others quite suitable.”

  Emma halted her hand and said slowly, “That doesn’t make sense to me. Not after he took the Queen’s jewels from her and gave them to you. Unless perhaps…” She was so practiced in finding soothing things to say that she had thought of something that did make sense even as her tongue said that it didn’t. “Unless it was her own, one she’d brought from Spain maybe; then he wouldn’t want it used for such a journey. That must be it.”

  “The barge was hers in the same sense that the jewels were hers, and the title, and the crown. He can’t quarrel with me for having them because he gave them to me; but over this he could. And did. I’ve suspected it for a long time, now I know. He hates me, Emma. He hates me.”

  Emma said, “You mustn’t say such things, Your Grace; and I shouldn’t listen to them. It’s a sick fancy, due to your condition, like wanting things out of season. I shouldn’t think there ever was a lady loved as you’ve been loved. All those years of waiting, and all the changes—all for the good we know, but some of them went against the grain for him. And now, with your Coronation at the end of the month, and carrying his child, you pick on some little thing and say he hates you.” She was about to say, “I call that wicked,” but remembered herself in time and ended by repeating that it was just a sick fancy.

  Anne said, “No. I’m not given to fancies. He loved me—at least he wanted me. I wasn’t brave enough or strong enough. I gave in too soon. And he’s never really liked me since.”

  “He married you,” Emma said bluntly. “He’s giving you the grandest Coronation ever seen.”

  “Not me. The mother of the son he hopes for. But even to her he grudged Catherine’s barge.”

  “Because he wasn’t asked! Close to him, as we are, we see the man, with the same funny little ways all men have; but we should bear in mind that since he was crowned he’s always had his own way—except over his divorce and even that he managed in the end. And by nature he’s masterful; if he’d been born a blacksmith he’d have told his customers what they wanted, instead of taking orders. Over the barge he was put out because nobody asked leave. You mustn’t take that to heart. Did you eat your supper?”

  “No. How could I? I wanted to fling the plates on the floor and scream.”

  “That’s the way to get a baby with no bridge to its nose, or one leg shorter than the other. Will you please, to set my mind at rest if for no other reason, eat a little now?”

  Emma was annoyed with Henry for allowing his displeasure to show, but she thought she understood why he had been displeased. He had won, and having won he was sorry for Catherine and had been hurt to hear of her arms being removed from the barge. It was on a level with his religious policy. He’d won his battle with the Pope, but couldn’t be wholeheartedly glad about it, felt bound to show some compunction, which took the form of trying to keep Church ritual unchanged. Men were like that, always wanting to have things both ways. All the same, it was grossly inconsiderate of him to have upset Anne just now, and for a little while Emma wished that she were back in a simple merchant’s household, where by virtue of long faithful service she would have had the privilege of speaking her mind.

  And that made her think about her own driving ambition to better herself, an ambition which had, in the end, led to her being put in charge of a heartbroken girl being sent home in disgrace, which in its turn had led to her being the most powerful single influence upon the Queen of England. Truly the hand of God moved mysteriously; you didn’t see it at the time, but when you looked back there was no mistaking. God had placed her, so that with a dose of poppy syrup, a sensible word, an encouraging word, she should keep Anne on her course. A humble instrument, Emma thought with pride.

  She stood vigilant over Anne as she choked down the white bread and the beef which, because it was red was supposed to be good for the blood, as red wine was; and presently Anne looked at her, narrowing her eyes and said, “I suppose I should be grateful to you for the care you take of me. And I am grateful. But you are like the King. You look on me as a brood mare!” She stopped eating and for the first time gave voice to the thoughts which tormented her if she woke in the dark of the night. “I often ask myself how this all came about. One thing led to another, and that to the next. I never did a thing without good reason. What went wrong? You always have an answer to everything, Emma. Tell me, what went wrong? You know, because you were with me, I was heartbroken over Harry Percy and then the King came, like a hound on a trail. I stood him off—that was reasonable, wasn’t it? And when he said he would make me Queen, did I do wrong to accept such a dazzling prospect? Does the woman live who would have done otherwise? And now…”

  “Now you are Queen. On the last day of this month you will be crowned. There is nothing wrong, Your Grace.”

  Except, of course, the unfortunate timing. The ceremonies, the wedding and the Coronation, should rightly have been safely over before the pregnancy began. That was the root of the trouble. But it couldn’t be helped, and there were people with worse troubles.

  “If only it can be a boy,” Anne said, placing her palms upon her just perceptibly thickening waist. “It must, it must be a boy.”

  “I pray to God it may be,” Emma said.

  XXVII

  The King’s mistress was delivered of a daughter to the great regret both of him and the Lady and to the great reproach of the physicians, astrologers, sorcerers and sorceresses who affirmed that it would be a male child.

  The Spanish Ambassador in a letter to Charles V

  GREENWICH. SEPTEMBER 7TH, 1533

  IT WAS A GIRL.

  Anne never knew whose voice it was that broke through the half-swoon and said, “Your Grace has borne a fair lady,” but she heard the words, she knew she had failed, and willed herself away, welcoming the enveloping darkness.

  Emma Arnett said to herself, “It is the will of God,” and then suffered the mental confusion of all sensible, rational people brought face-to-face with an act of God which seems senseless and without reason. God surely understood the situation in England; He was omnipotent; He made everything; couldn’t He just as easily have made a prince? Another girl was such a triumph for the Papists who in a few minutes’ time, as soon as the news was out, would be saying that this was God’s judgment on the King’s new marriage. But, hard as it was to accept, it must be accepted; it was the mysterious will of God.

  All through the palace; a girl! What a pity! Out into the streets: a princess! But we wanted a prince! The birth of the baby who was to grow into the woman who was to be the greatest ruler England ever knew, the woman of whom the Pope, hating her, was to say, “She is a great woman, and were she but Catholic, without peer,” was regarded as regrettable by all but the very staunchest of the supporters of Catherine and Mary. The majority of the ordinary people, still Catholic at heart, had been reassured by the slowness and superficiality of Henry’s reforms; his break with Rome had merely trimmed away some old and not particularly desirable customs, like the paying of Peter’s Pence or the appointment of foreign clerics to English bishoprics; the core of ritual and belief had remained intact; and a prince who could be looked to to carry on his father’s policy would have been welcomed by almost everyone in England.

  So the little female creature was taken sadly and washed and swaddled and given to her nurse. And the one person who had a good word for her was her father, the person with the most right to be disappointed. When he first saw her she was squalling; she was red in face, her eyes were screwed up, and she had a frizzle of orange-colored hair on her scalp. He touched
it with a gentle finger.

  “My hair,” he said, “and my voice. She is indeed my daughter and she seems a lusty wench. I pray God will send her a brother in the same good shape.”

  He was disappointed, but less than he had expected to be, less than anyone would have foretold. He loved all his children; he loved Mary and was grieved that she had so decidedly taken Catherine’s part; naturally in the circumstances he could not pamper or favor her, but he had always stopped just short of the positive persecution that common sense suggested; he loved his bastard son and had done everything in his power to compensate him for his state; and now he was prepared to love Elizabeth, the first of his children to be born in wedlock. He intended her christening to give evidence of how highly he regarded her. Ambassador’s might write home to their masters that the King was grievously disappointed, but anyone who ventured in his presence to imply sympathy, however tactful, met with a glower and gruffness. Henry Tudor had had his way and there was nothing wrong with his marriage, nothing wrong with his child.

  Anne was slow to recover and he visited her often, taking presents and making heartening, bracing little speeches. The visits were a trial to him because her disappointment and resentment were so plain to be seen. Unwillingly he found himself remembering how often Catherine had faced a worse situation, a dead baby or a baby dead soon after birth. “It is God’s will,” she had said, every time, and her resignation had irked him. Now he was irked by Anne’s lack of resignation. He chose to put that down to her state of health.

  “When you feel stronger, you’ll see things differently,” he said; and he had his recipes for the rapid regaining of strength; she should eat well; stop fretting and look forward to being able to take advantage of the fine autumn weather and walk in the garden.

  Emma gave much the same advice; she had known a black moment of doubt, thrown it aside, and was now sternly looking forward again. Henry’s attitude had impressed her and increased her good opinion of him; if he could be so cheerful, why should the Queen remain fretful? Since no one else seemed disposed to be frank, she was obliged to be.

  “Your Grace, it is not the end of the world. The Princess is a baby to be proud of, a promise for the future. If you would be cheerful and make an effort, you could be up and about in a fortnight, and by this time next year, God willing, the mother of a prince.”

  But Anne’s disappointment was the more crushing because it had followed upon—and ended—the happiest period of her life. June, July, and August had been three wonderful months.

  The Coronation had been—as Henry had promised—the most magnificent ever seen; and her secret dread, an unfavorable reception by the London crowds, had proved to be entirely without foundation. The ordinary people loved a pageant, loved any excuse to make merry, and from the time when she made her progress, in the disputed barge, to the Tower, until twelve days later when she rode in a litter to St. Paul’s, and thence to Westminster Hall, it had been one long pageant, one long merrymaking. There’d been no need for the pro-Anne patty to whip the crowds to enthusiasm, Heartened by the wine, red and white, which flowed in every conduit and fountain, they had stood and roared out their cheers and blessed her; and if there were some little silences it was because the people were momentarily struck speechless by the sight of her, clad in silver tissue, with her wonderful hair flowing free, so long that she could sit on it, and held back from her face by a circlet of rubies.

  Ambassadors wrote letters which implied that the Coronation had been lackluster, knowing that such news would be welcome; but Anne who was at the center of it knew differently and felt that she had at last been accepted. She was married, she was crowned, and she was going to give the English people what they longed for. Her inner fear of having lost the King’s favor eased; Henry, like everybody else, respected success, and she would be a successful Queen.

  The time which Emma had hoped for arrived, the peaceful ripening time of gestation. Even the weather and the season seemed propitious, the slow, warm days moving toward the inevitable harvest. The frantic anxiety as to the child’s sex had ceased to nag; the physicians said it would be a boy, and so did all the soothsayers whom Henry insisted upon consulting. There was one wise woman living in the Welsh Marches who claimed to be a collateral descendant of Merlin, and who was said to be able to tell the sex of an unborn child from the mere handling of some garment worn by the expectant mother. She was too old to make the journey to London, or Henry would have had her fetched; as it was he sent a trusted messenger, with one of Anne’s petticoats to be tested. The verdict was favorable; the messenger thought it unnecessary and inadvisable to report that the old woman, more than half-blind, had hesitated a long time, fingering the silk, shaking her head and mumbling. Finally she had said,

  “Trying to trick me, are you? Bringing me something two women has worn?” He had assured that this was not so.

  “Then why does my right hand say boy and my left, girl? In all my days such a thing never happened before. Queer, very queer.”

  She evidently took her odd calling very seriously; she held the petticoat in one hand, in the other, in both, and finally, folding it lengthways, hung it about her neck.

  “A boy,” she said then, but uncertainly. She was distressed, muttered that she was growing old, losing her skill; she’d never been confused before. But yes, it would be a boy.

  So the assurances had poured in, and the good wishes; and Henry—if he had ever turned against her, as she had suspected last autumn—had dissembled so well, that Anne had faced the ordeal of childbirth happily and confidently.

  And then—Elizabeth.

  With more justification than ever she could now think—Nothing ever goes right for me; all the trappings, all the possibilities of success but nothing real and solid. And as she listened to Henry’s, and to Emma’s, exhortations to be cheerful and lively, to eat and be hopeful, to look to the future, she could only think, more waiting!

  On the fourth day after her confinement she was at least spared the exhortations, for she fell victim to the complaint, possibly after childbed fever the most dreaded of post-child birth ailments; the one most unreasonably known as “white-leg.” Your legs were no whiter than they had been before, but they swelled and swelled; and they ached with a dull grinding pain, as though they were between two millstones. There was no remedy; you lay and waited—waiting again—and you lived or you died.

  Among her ladies some were sympathetic, some indifferent. Apart from the christening there were no festivities, and when the weather broke there was nothing to do but to huddle in little groups and exchange stories of cases similar to the Queen’s which had ended happily or otherwise; or to express their amazement at the daring Catherine who had refused to lend the christening robe which she had brought from Spain and which had been worn by Mary, for the christening of the new princess. That, they said, had truly angered the King. They talked a good deal, too, about Elizabeth Barton, whom some people called The Mad Nun, and others The Holy Maid of Kent, like Joan of Arc a peasant born, and like her given to the hearing of angelic voices. Elizabeth’s voices were all strongly pro-Catherine and had predicted woe to the country and death to the King should he marry again. Cromwell had recently had her arrested and examined by Archbishop Cranmer, not because he paid much heed to her prophecies, but because he hoped to find out who had. But whatever the talk it always came back in the end to the Queen’s state of health; and hovering meekly, as became a newcomer, on the fringe of each group, there was a young lady who, as she listened, wondered whether it would be so very wrong to wish that the Queen would die. Wouldn’t it be the kindest thing that could happen to her?

  Mistress Jane Seymour, because of her round face and flawless skin and demure manner, looked a great deal younger than she was; she was fresh to the English Court but she had served her apprenticeship in France and from under downcast lids had observed the world with some shrewdness. During the summer she had felt Henry’s eye upon her, assessingly, and had blushed. W
hen he had first made some excuse to speak to her she had blushed again and confined her replies to “Yes, Your Grace,” and “No, Your Grace.” He had not withdrawn his interest, however. What notice he had taken of her in public had been of a jesting, paternal nature, as when coming across her and some other ladies laughing at some joke, he had stopped and said that he hoped the joke, whatever it was, was fit for such young ears.

  “Whose young ears, Your Grace?” one of them had asked, pertly vivacious.

  “This child’s,” he had said, and lightly touched her sleeve.

  To them it had been something else to laugh about, knowing her age; but to her it had been a sign.

  And now Queen Anne had borne a daughter; and was ailing; she might never fully recover; and the King’s eye had wandered. Would it be so very wrong to wish that she would die?

  XXVIII

  But she is so scrupulous and has such great respect for the King that she would consider herself damned with remission if she took any way tending to war.

  The Spanish Ambassador in a letter to Charles V

  KIMBOLTON CASTLE. JULY 1534

  “ISHALL SIT BY THE WINDOW for a while. You go to bed, Maria. God keep you.”

  “Your Grace should go to bed. It has been a full day.”

  “Yes. A day to remember. I shall sit by the window and remember it all.”

  They spoke in Spanish, Catherine and this, the favorite of her women; and they smiled at one another, sharing a joke which never grew stale. Maria, like Catherine, had lived in England for thirty-three years and had thoroughly mastered the language; but when, while they were living at Buckden, in the March of this year, a deputation had come from the King demanding that everyone take the oath that recognized Anne as Queen and Elizabeth as the only legitimate princess, Maria had suddenly become ignorant of any but her own tongue. She had waved her hands, and smiled and smiled, shaking her head and gabbling Spanish until they had decided not to bother about her. Others of the household had taken the oath, making the mental reservation which was permissible in such circumstances; some had refused outright. They had been hauled off. Catherine had also refused and it had looked as though she might be hauled off, too; but in the end she had been sent, this time definitely in the role of prisoner, to Kimbolton, which was a much more strongly fortified place than Buckden. The window by which she sat on this evening of lingering summer warmth was set in a wall four feet thick and it overlooked a wide moat.