The Concubine

by Norah Lofts

  The hateful suspicion struck again.

  “You must tell me his name,” Anne said, tightening her grip on Mary’s shoulder.

  “I can’t. I won’t. What right have you?” She flung off Anne’s hand and stood up, sobbing more violently, so that of her next words only a few were enunciated clearly enough to be heard. “Just because…Queen of England…skin of your teeth…prying into my affairs…”

  She ran, crying, from the room.

  That evening, in the hall at supper, Anne was conscious of something in Henry’s mood, boisterous without being pleasant; and of a suppressed excitement, a watchfulness; and of Norris looking at her as he often did these days, with a grave, almost pitying expression, maddeningly similar to the expression dogs wore when they saw you crying. It increased the raw-nerved feeling with which the scene with Mary had left her, and finally she snapped at him, “What’s the matter, Sir Harry. Is my headdress awry?” He then looked like a dog slapped for something it had not done, and said, “Your Grace, on the contrary, if I had a thought it was how well it became you.”

  Toward the end of the meal Henry’s new jester came in. She detested him; he was almost, not quite, a dwarf, big headed, squat, and ugly, but he had been born like that, so although his appearance evoked repulsion in her, she did not hold it against him. What she hated was the slyness of his patter, the innuendos which he produced under cover of near idiocy. Henry doted upon him and allowed him the utmost liberty. She had once voiced a protest about his jokes, “They are an attack upon your dignity.” Henry said, “After supper, at my own table, my dignity can take care of itself.”

  Tonight he did his tumbling and his juggling and his acrobatic tricks, interspersed with stories and comments which were, or were not, amusing, depending upon whether you were aware of their reference. At one point he said, in the bucolic drawl he sometimes affected,

  “Life’s funny, ain’t it? Funny but fair. Oh yes, you must admit, everything work out very fair. Fr’instance I know a man, got a nice kennel, but not dog to put in it, and I know another man, got a nice dog, and he ain’t got no kennel.”

  There was some scattered laughter, a little overhearty, laughter that said—Oh yes, we see the joke; we’re in the know! Anne wondered what was amusing there. Was her sense of humor defective, or was this little freak too subtle for her understanding, as Henry had once suggested?

  An accomplice of the jester threw three wooden hoops in such a way as to form a spinning tunnel, through which he dived, turned a somersault, stood up, and said, “I’m off! This ’ere Court life is too wearing for me. I’m gonna retire to the country, Staffordshire!” He ran off as though he were being pursued by someone aiming blows at him.

  There was another burst of the same kind of laughter, followed by titters from those who, like Anne, had failed to see the joke, but did not wish to seem lacking in appreciation.

  Henry laughed as heartily as anyone; and then, turning to Anne said,

  “Ah, that reminds me, my dear. I hadn’t time to tell you before. I’ve sent your sister and her husband packing.”

  His face blurred; behind it the hall, the fire, the candles, the hangings, the gay-colored clothes, began to tilt and spin. She put out her hands, like a blind woman, and found the solid table edge and held on to it.

  Henry’s voice, coming from a great distance away, said,

  “Silly young cub! He came to me six months ago and spoke of a wish to marry…But this is probably an old tale to you.”

  “No,” she said, and was relieved to hear her voice sound so ordinary; surprised, interested, but quite controlled. “Her husband, you say? She never even hinted. Who is he?”

  “Sir William Stafford. You hadn’t missed his innocent rosy face this evening?”

  She had braced herself to hear that Mary had made some shocking mésalliance. Mary’s own behavior…But there was no reason why she and William Stafford should not be married. He was rather young for her, and not well-to-do, but he was of good family. Why the mystery? And why had Henry sent them packing? Before she could speak, Henry went on, and something in his voice betrayed the fact that he was enjoying himself,

  “I most strongly advised him against such a match. In fact I downright forbade it. Notwithstanding which he married her. Or so he told me late this afternoon. And one can only hope that his tale is true! When did you last see her?”

  “Early this afternoon. But what I…”

  “Sh!” Henry said, raising his hand. “Here is the Welsh harpist who was so warmly recommended to me.”

  The man—he was old, with long shaggy gray hair and beard, and a robe of homespun of the same gray—played superbly, but she could pay him no attention. She understood now why Mary had been so secretive, so distressed; but why had Henry forbidden the marriage in the first place? He’d never, so far as Anne knew, suggested any other match for her; he must have realized, as Anne herself had done often enough, that a woman of Mary’s character and nature, left unattached, was always a potential source of scandal.

  She could understand his anger at finding himself disobeyed. Even if he had merely advised against the marriage and then it had taken place he would have been affronted. He was becoming more and more autocratic over small things as well as large; but he didn’t sound displeased. He wasn’t in the hearty, rip-roaring rage which one would have expected: and he’d laughed at both the slyly relevant jokes.

  The explanation came to her; distasteful, but it must be faced. So she faced it to the accompaniment of the limpid ripple of music that was like the sound of a waterfall. Henry was making Mary his whipping boy. That accounted for his action, and for his manner. And he’d have been even more pleased had Mary done something more shaming than make a clandestine marriage; then he could have said “your sister” with even more venom.

  She’d cried to Emma, before her Coronation, “He hates me.” She had believed it then; but everyday living, some acts of consideration, even of kindness occasionally, had taken the sharpest edge off her awareness of his hatred. Faced with this fresh evidence of it she felt weak, drained and hollow. Emma’s Bible said, “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” What had she sown that the harvest should be so bitter? Used his love for her as a ladder to climb by; used it as a salve for wounded pride, hurt self-esteem. That was all. She’d never done him any harm. She’d failed him in bed, in some obscure way that she would never understand; and she’d borne an unwanted daughter instead of the longed-for boy; and she had not yet conceived again. In the eyes of a man like Henry these were, no doubt, offenses, but they were not deliberate ones. Nothing to justify the tone of voice in which he said, “I’ve sent your sister and her husband packing.”

  But she mustn’t retaliate; mustn’t make the obvious retort, that her sister Mary in making a clandestine marriage behaved in precisely the same fashion as his sister Mary had done. She mustn’t quarrel with him. Because her only hope was to bear his son. Unless she could do that the past was all waste, the future without prospect.

  The last sound of the plucked strings vibrated, shivered on the air and died. She moved her hands and joined in the applause. The old man bowed, more grave and stately than a bishop, toward the King, and spoke a few words in a strange tongue. Henry, genuinely moved, both by the music and by this contact with Wales—he was sentimental about his Welsh lineage—leaned forward and shouted down the hall a phrase in the same tongue, which to the listening ears of the English sounded like abuse. The old man smiled and bowed again.

  “He thanked us for listening, and wished us good night,” Henry said, beaming round with pride and pleasure. “I thanked him for playing for us and wished him good night.”

  Anne said, “I am glad that you could thank him in his own tongue. He played very beautifully. We are all indebted to you for bringing him to London.”

  Henry accepted the implied compliments; then his look as it dwelt upon her, darkened.

  “We were talking about your sister,” he reminded he
r. “You say you saw her this afternoon? Did you make her cry? That silly young whelp found her, blubbering in a corner, took her by the hand and burst in on me to make a full confession. While I was having my beard trimmed!”

  She gripped her hands together under the shelter of the table’s edge and prayed, God give me patience. She said,

  “He chose his time badly.”

  “He chose his wife badly. Years too old. And shop-soiled.”

  Everything in her, except her common sense, cried out against that. She’d have given everything, except her hope of a son, to have been able to stand up and shout—And who had a hand in her soiling? Who used her and threw her aside? Isn’t there for every bad woman in the world a man equally bad? Am I any better than she? No better; less lucky. When he found her crying, he braved you and your barber. If you found me crying, you’d gloat, you’d gloat, you’d gloat…

  But truth, and honest speaking, and Mary, must all be sacrificed to something that had as yet no existence, no shape, no form, no name.

  So she smiled and said, amiably, “They displeased you, and they are punished. So…” She spread her hands. I can dismiss Mary. She’s married; she’s loved. Any man who dare break in with such a confession upon Henry and his barber, is a man indeed. She’ll be safe with him.

  Henry had hoped for a scene. An exchange of verbal buffers. But it was like tilting at one of those scarecrows farmers put in their fields. Unresponsive, cold. Cold as a fish. Her own sister and not a word of protest.”

  What could a man hope for, with such a wife? Nothing.

  The past was all waste; the future without prospect.

  Unless…

  XXX

  Alas, it pitieth me—to think into what misery she will shortly come.

  Sir Thomas More speaking of Anne Boleyn in 1535

  WINDSOR. JULY 1535

  THE DUKE OF NORFOLK WAS not particularly quick-witted and it took him a moment or two to catch the drift of what the King was saying. When he did so, his first thought was that it was wine talking; a justifiable thought for it was growing late, and Henry had not gone sober to bed on any night since Sir Thomas More’s execution. Then, as Henry talked on the Duke thought, Why consult me? His strong self-preservative instinct came into play. How could he possibly answer without offending the King or encouraging him in what he was proposing, a plan which the Duke most thoroughly disapproved.

  He felt Henry’s eye upon him and hoped that he didn’t look as shocked as he felt, and hastily composed his features into an expression of respectful attention.

  When Henry had finished unburdening himself, the Duke said,

  “There is no one in the world who more wishes to see you happy and content and the father of a prince, Your Grace.”

  But not a prince who was Jane Seymour’s son! Jane Seymour, another commoner! Another girl like Anne Boleyn, with a wildly ambitious family! A family, too, as near Lutheran as anyone dared to be in these days when the English Church was so precariously balanced, in an attempt to avoid both Papacy and Lutheranism.

  Henry sensed some reserve and said rather awkwardly, “Of course, I realize that Anne is your niece.”

  The Duke made a gruff, repudiating sound. “That doesn’t bother me. If you send me on an errand with Wiltshire and his popinjay son I put up with their company as I would with toothache; but the Boleyns are nothing to me.”

  “Yet you object?”

  “No. No. I can see…” He cracked a knuckle, then another and stirred on his chair. “Your Grace, I’m no lawyer, just a plain man. If I knew what to say I shouldn’t know how to say it. Cranmer’s your man, or Cromwell…”

  “All in good time. I’m talking to you, now.”

  “Then, Your Grace…There’s a country saying about the fox that got away with the rooster being caught if he comes back for the hen. I’m against playing the same trick twice. We’ve heard enough about consanguinity in these last years. The word stinks. To go raking over all that old business of Mary Boleyn as an excuse for getting rid of Anne, that’d be like wiping your nose on a mucky rag. I don’t say don’t do it, but I do say, don’t do it that way.”

  Henry looked into Norfolk’s earnest, beefy face with something approaching affection. Norfolk had always been his loyal, active servant, but in the last year he had become more; one of the few people whose religious views exactly accorded with Henry’s own. Too many people were either backward-looking Catholics, secretly regretting the breach with Rome, or forward-looking reformers, anxious for more changes. Norfolk, like Henry, managed to be Catholic without being Papist; and Norfolk understood why, in the end, having been given every chance to conform, More, whom Henry had truly loved, the wittiest, most charming man in the world, had had to be beheaded. More had insisted upon regarding the Pope as Head of the Church, and Catherine as Queen of England; and since it was treason for an ordinary man to hold such views, it was doubly treasonable for one whom the King had called friend, and made Chancellor, to do so.

  Therefore Norfolk’s opinion mattered now.

  “Maybe you’re right. Well, there is another way out. A precontract. Years ago Anne was on the point of marrying the present Earl of Northumberland…”

  His voice trailed away as he realized what he was saying. God in Heaven, what happened to people to change them so much? He remembered himself how desire and determination and worship had welled up in him, and he had thought—She is too good for him! Now he could speak of it like that.

  “That hare won’t run,” Norfolk said bluntly. “Mary Talbot tried to bring that up when she was sick of Northumberland and ran back to her father. I happen to know because Shrewsbury consulted me about it. Northumberland said he never was betrothed to my niece, or anybody else.”

  “Oh,” Henry said. He thought for a minute. “Do you reckon he’d say the same if he knew that it was my wish that he admitted to the betrothal?”

  “You know the Percys. Born awkward. And if you said you’d behead him if he didn’t he’d most likely laugh; he’s so sick and full of pain it’d be a merciful end.” He cracked another knuckle. “And precontract is another word that stinks.”

  “So that leaves me where I was, tied to a woman I no longer love.”

  “That’s not so uncommon. I should say that nine out of every ten men hate their wives—after a year. But they use them, as God meant women to be used.”

  Henry said, with an almost touching simplicity, “I have tried.”

  With matching simplicity Norfolk said, “Try again, sire. I’ll be blunt. What this country needs is a prince, not another long-drawn-out wrangle about who is married to whom or, if not why not.”

  “In fact you advise me to do nothing, except,” he laughed a little, “my duty in bed?”

  “For a time, anyway. As for Mistress Seymour…” He broke off, decided that he might never again have such an opportunity to speak his mind, and went on, “My niece set an example, keeping her legs crossed till the crown was in her lap, but that’s not to say that every girl must set her price so high.”

  Henry treated his old friend to one of his most ferocious scowls. Jane was the sweetest, dearest, most innocent little maiden in the world, completely without ambition. Different in every way from Anne, who had always seemed to be offering a challenge or promising something, egging a man on. Different, too, from Catherine, whose wifely attitude had been imposed upon a fundamentally strong character, which, combined with her greater age and her piety, had always slightly awed Henry. Jane was a child, a kitten, a plaything, Henry thought fondly, unaware that he was thinking as only a middle-aged man could do. Norfolk, he decided was entirely lacking in the finer feelings. Still, he was a man of sound sense and his advice, if nothing else, was at least sincere.

  Norfolk accepted the scowl as the price of plain speaking, always a luxury in the Royal presence. He was, on the whole, rather pleased with himself. The King’s trouble was that he was not properly grown up where women were concerned; too soft, too sentimental. Wit
h all women, not merely, like most men, with the love of the moment. Look at Catherine, who had quietly defied him for years; and Mary was worse. My God, Norfolk thought, if she were my daughter I’d bang her head against the wall till it was as soft as a baked apple!

  The silence lasted until Henry broke it, speaking on some other subject; and so slipped away, unremarked, unrecognized, one of those momentous occasions which later can be seen to have been pregnant with tragedy.

  XXXI

  …Jane Seymour’s shameless courtship of Henry VIII was the commencement of the severe calamities that befell her mistress, Anne Boleyn. Scripture points out as an especial odium the circumstances of a handmaid taking the place of her mistress.

  Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England

  GREENWICH. JULY 1535

  ANNE LAY ON HER BED with her skirt pulled aside and one foot, stripped of hose and shoe, being poked and prodded for evidence of possible injury by Emma Arnett. Her cousin, Lady Lee, stood near the head of the bed, holding a flagon of grated hartshorn. Other ladies fluttered about suggesting remedies, suggesting calling Dr. Butts, suggesting—this with faint sly smiles and significant glances—running to tell His Grace.

  It was a warm day, but Anne was shivering and her privet-flower pallor had the gray tinge which Emma knew. It was consistent with the pain of a twisted ankle, yet Emma was puzzled, for there was no sign of swelling, nor had Anne flinched under the probing fingers.

  Anne said, “You stay, Margaret. Send the others away…” When the room was cleared she moved her foot, “Let be, Emma. I did not twist it. I had to think of something quickly and that was the best I could do.”

  “I never saw such presence of mind,” Margaret Lee said, looking at Anne with admiration, and then changing the look immediately to one of pity as she remembered what had provoked the display of presence of mind.