The Concubine

by Norah Lofts

  Cromwell felt a tremor in his bones. His flesh stayed solid and steady, but his marrow quivered. Whatever you did, he thought bitterly, was wrong; pitfalls you never dreamed of opened suddenly under your feet. He knew a moment of envy for his blacksmith father. If a horse were properly shod it put its hoof down and walked away, the owner was satisfied and paid you, and that was that. In the world which he had chosen to inhabit no job was ever really done and finished with.

  “I do most earnestly assure Your Grace that until this morning I knew nothing. What Smeaton revealed in his confession was as great a surprise to me as it is to you. We fixed upon him as a likely man. Close to the Queen, and the subject of two casual, quite unrelated remarks which might have meant nothing. He was therefore interrogated…”

  “Did you rack him?”

  “Your Grace, I questioned him in my own house where I keep no implements of torture. And the signature, does that look like the hand of a racked man?”

  Almost unwillingly, Henry said, “No. Not that I care about him. He should be torn in pieces! But Norris…”

  “Naturally I am grieved that anyone for whom you had an affection is implicated. At the same time I feel it my duty to advise you to let things take their course. In a way this is all to the good. The very magnitude of your wrong will divert attention from its nature. This shows her as such a monster of iniquity that no man could possibly have been on guard against her. From our point of view things have worked out well.”

  “A little too well,” Henry said and gave Cromwell a searching look which he met with one of calm and candor. Then, as though seeking some flaw, Henry read the confession again and found, not a flaw but a hateful unpalatable truth. This damned tinkling musician had enjoyed her, just as he himself had dreamed of doing and never had. And the others, doubtless, had had equal joy.

  “I sent Norris to the Tower. Where is this wretch?”

  “On his way there.”

  “Good. And the others?”

  “Arrested or being arrested.”

  And then, deep inside the bulky body with its ulcerating leg, inside the mind hardshelled with egoism and corrupted by power, the young Henry Tudor, gay and just and high-hearted, stirred once, perhaps for the last time.

  “I never wanted this,” he said. “What happens to her I do not care, for whatever Norfolk may say I know she did bewitch me; she’s wasted the best years of my life. But I meant to pardon the man when he had served his purpose. I meant to pardon him…”

  XXXVIII

  I was cruelly handled at Greenwich, with the King’s Council and my Lord of Norfolk who said “Tut, tut, tut,” shaking his head three or four times. As for Master Treasurer he was in the Forest of Windsor. Master Controller was a gentleman. But I to be a Queen and to be so cruelly handled was never seen! Master Kingston do you know why I am here?

  Anne’s own rambling words on arrival at the Tower

  THE TOWER. MAY 2ND, 1536

  SHE TOOK POSSESSION OF HER senses again by a process that was not unlike waking from a light, troubled sleep; but she had not been asleep; she knew that because she was standing upright with her hands clasped before her. She was in her right mind, could see and hear, felt no pain; yet something was wrong, and there was a gap…

  Slowly she looked about and recognized the room. It was the one she had occupied during her stay in the Tower immediately before her Coronation. Except that now there were no flowers nothing had changed; even her chair was there, still under the canopy. This side of the gap the Queen’s Chamber in the Tower. And on the other? She remembered perfectly; her uncle Norfolk’s voice saying, “We have orders to arrest you on a charge of treason; and are taking you to the Tower.”

  Dinner. Yes, they’d been at dinner. Not a lively meal. On the previous afternoon, at the jousting, the King had suddenly risen, wearing a look of dark displeasure and gone away without a word: and he had left a feeling of uneasiness behind him. She had lived in a state of apprehension ever since January and all her women had shared her nervous mood. Henry would, she was sure, get rid of her somehow, and anything unusual could make her feel that the moment had struck; and it was unusual for him to leave in the middle of a joust. So she was prepared for something, had long been so prepared. But treason!

  When Norfolk said the word she had begun to laugh, the senseless, painful laughter that would come upon her at the most unlikely moments and which she was powerless to control. Her women looked frightened and even her uncle and those with him had drawn away a little. Then Emma had come running with the poppy syrup, a massive dose, and had forced her to drink it, saying, “Your Grace must be calm and bear up.” Soon she had stopped laughing and had said to her uncle. “If that be His Majesty’s pleasure, I am ready to go.” After that she could remember nothing; not even how she had made the journey.

  Still, here she was; and not in a dungeon as one would expect. And not alone. There were two women at the far end of the room. She blinked her drug-laden eyes, and then narrowed them, staring and trying to make the women look like Margaret and Emma—the two people most likely to have insisted upon accompanying her; but they weren’t the right shape.

  She said, “Who are you?”

  One woman said, “You know very well who I am; What trick are you up to now? I’m your aunt, Elizabeth Boleyn. And I must say that when I married your uncle and took that name little did I dream that the day would come when I should have such cause to be ashamed of it.”

  “I’m Mrs. Cosyns,” the other woman said.

  “Why are you ashamed?”

  “Ashamed to be related to you, even by marriage,” her aunt said, with a look of utter loathing. “You heard the charges.”

  “Treason, they said. But that isn’t true. How could I commit treason?”

  “I don’t know what you hope to gain by pretending to be a half-wit. The two women who came with you said you’d heard the charges.”

  “Are two of my women here? I’d like to have them with me. You are both excused.”

  “What you like isn’t law any more; you’ll have what’s ordered. Mrs. Cosyns and I are to attend you.”

  “And it is not,” Mrs. Cosyns said, “a job I fancy. I can tell you that.”

  “I shall remember your manner towards me, Mrs. Cosyns, when this farce is ended.”

  “Farce,” Elizabeth Boleyn snorted. “Tragedy more like. Tragedy for the decent members of the family.”

  “You know very well that I have not committed treason. It is an excuse. The King is tired of me and wants to be rid of me. I was willing to go. I would have said so had he given me the chance. There was no need to fabricate a charge against me…”

  “Fabricate!” Her aunt’s voice was almost a scream. “How you can stand there and say such things, when you know…”

  “I know I never did a traitorous thing, spoke a traitorous word. Apart from that I know nothing. When they came to arrest me I had a hysterical fit and Emma gave me a dose. I may have stood there and appeared to be listening to the charges. I may even have replied, but I remember nothing at all. I’d be obliged to you if you would tell me exactly what I am said to have done.”

  She moved to the chair under the canopy and sat down, folding her hands in her lap.

  “I’m not going to soil my mouth with an account of such evil doings,” Lady Boleyn said.

  “I’ll tell you,” Mrs. Cosyns said, and came forward. She had no particular cause, no personal reason for hating Anne; she was human in shape, had, presumably, been once an innocent-hearted child, but life in some way had warped her, made her coarse-minded, spiteful, unkind. She said, with real relish,

  “You’re charged with adultery; with five men, your own brother one of them.”

  “Oh no! Nobody could be so wicked!” She meant that even Henry in his hatred couldn’t have stooped to invent such a charge.

  “You could!” Mrs. Cosyns said. “Your pet, Mark Smeaton, made a confession. And he involved all the others.”

  She said
in a thin, faint voice, “What others?”

  “Sir Harry Norris; Sir Francis Weston; William Brereton; and your brother.”

  “They’ll deny it.”

  “Naturally. But they can’t get away from what the Chief Secretary has written down, just as Smeaton said it. And signed.”

  “Mark went to Cromwell’s house yesterday. He was invited for dinner. He did not come home. He was taken, and with no rank to protect him, tortured. On the rack a man will say anything.”

  The conversation had now reached a point at which Elizabeth Boleyn felt she could take her share.

  “The Duke says otherwise. The confession was signed in a hand no racked man could have written.”

  “Then it was spite,” Anne said. “He affected a great devotion to me, and I offended him once. This is his revenge.”

  She had a passing vision of an impotent, offended girl planning vengeance on a great Cardinal; and it matched exactly with an impotent, offended musician planning vengeance on a Queen.

  The two women had been instructed to spy and pry, to listen and report anything, anything at all that might be useful. So Lady Boleyn threw in a brisk question,

  “And why, pray, should so petted a lapdog as Smeaton turn and bite his mistress?”

  “He was jealous,” Anne said, “and just a little mad. And I know why he named those he did. On ordinary days, when they came to my apartment, they kissed my hand; at Christmas, or New Year, or on a birthday, they kissed my cheek. My brother always kissed my cheek and embraced me. One evening…Mark came in and played the virginals for me. He played very well and when he had done I put my hand on his shoulder and thanked him. He turned and took my hand and twisted it and kissed my palm. I withdrew it sharply and said, “You may not do that.” Then he said, “Mere friends may kiss you, but I who am your slave, may not.” And he began to cry; he cried very easily. I said to him, “Mark you are not my slave, you are my musician, and I cannot allow you such liberties as are allowed to gentlemen of His Grace’s household.” And that hurt him, I could see and was sorry. He was very conscious of his humble birth.” She thought how she had been, too, and taken such pains to spare him whenever possible. And this was how he had repaid her. If it was indeed his doing.

  She jumped up. “I must refute this charge. But how? If I cut my body open, I could not prove it clean.” She put her hands to the top of her bodice and for a moment the two women watching thought that she meant to rip it down and expose the body about which there had been so much fuss—and would be so much more. But she dropped her hands and said again,

  “George and the others will deny this preposterous charge.”

  They must; out of honesty as well as self-interest.

  There wasn’t a man living who could truthfully say that he had sinned with the Queen. She’d taken such meticulous pains during those weeks when she had been set on getting herself with child again. She’d been one of the masked, anonymous dancers; one evening a character from Pope Julius’s game; another evening one of three dozen milkmaids; on the third one of forty-three versions of herself. She had hardly spoken, and when she did she had not used her own voice, or the French accent which came so easily to her; she’d sounded rustic, just a girl up from Norfolk or Suffolk, invited to a masked ball at Court and completely dizzied, ready to go the whole way. She had made absolutely sure that no man could look at her next day and think…

  “Lies won’t save them. Nor you either,” Mrs. Cosyns said. “You’d do better to make a full confession and get ready to die in a state of grace.”

  “To die?”

  “Traitors do,” the woman’s voice was relentless. She had a purpose; if Anne could be driven to confess it would greatly ease the whole procedure.

  She tried to stave off panic by reckoning her resources. Her most powerful relative, her uncle Norfolk, was plainly against her; but surely her father…And that thought brought Lady Bo to mind.

  “My poor mother,” she said. “She will die of sorrow!”

  “Your mother has been dead these four and twenty years,” Lady Boleyn snapped. “If you mean that Norfolk clod, your stepmother, such people don’t die of sorrow. Your blood kin are more likely to die of shame.”

  “Most of them,” Anne said, with a flash of her old spirit, “have too much sense! The charge is false and nobody not poisoned with hatred would believe it for a minute.” But the King believed it. He hated her now as much as he had once loved her. And he had the power of life or death.

  “All those poor young men,” she said.

  “Poor indeed; seduced by your wiles, and doomed to die for their foolishness.”

  Anne stumbled to her chair and sat down again, and thought about death. It came to everyone. With your first breath you began to die and every breath thereafter brought you nearer to the last. But in order to live at all people pushed that thought away, or otherwise life would be just a hopeless waiting. Death happened to other people, and would one day happen to you, but you didn’t face that truth; even at the end, the last desperate remedies, the last rattling breaths were all attempts to evade the truth, to stave death off.

  Henry would act fast; he was hot for Jane and he’d want his next marriage to be legal beyond all question.

  In a short time, a few days perhaps, she would be dead. She looked at her hands, felt the terrified fluttering beat of the heart in her breast and imagined the stillness, the chill, the irrevocability of death. “And after death, the judgment.”

  She sat for a long time, looking back over her life as it would appear when she stood before God to give an account of it. At the end she was comforted. God knew everything, the sorry little shifts, the self-seeking, the many faults, the sins: but He would know, too, and could be trusted to understand, that everything would have been different, she herself would have been different, if only they had left her alone and allowed her to marry Harry Percy.

  XXXIX

  Know that we, the said Abbot and convent…for the many benefits conferred upon us by that excellent man Thomas Cromwell Esq., the principal Secretary of our Lord Henry VIII…have given and conceded and by these presents do give and concede, to the said Thomas…our annual rent or annuity of ten pounds sterling…and in our manor of Harlowe and its appurtenances in the county of Essex…

  Extract from a grant in the Collectanea Buriensis civitatis

  WESTMINSTER. MAY 10TH, 1536

  ALL THAT COULD BE DONE to freshen the atmosphere had been done; the windows stood wide and somebody, within the last few minutes, had burned some lavender; but the stench was still so perceptible that Cromwell, who was feeling queasy, stopped upon the threshold of the chamber, took out his handkerchief and applied it to his nose. Then he realized that such an action might have given grave offense, so he contrived a series of small tittering sneezes, snick, snick, snick!

  From the bed where he lay, fully dressed save for his hose, Henry asked,

  “Have you taken a cold?”

  “No, Your Grace. No. It is the hay fever. A nothing. How are you feeling?”

  “Better. But low. Low. They opened my leg and undoubtedly saved my life. I was nearer death this morning, Cromwell, than ever in my life since I fell in that ditch at Hitchin and almost drowned in the mud.”

  Some ten or twelve days earlier Dr. Butts had succeeded in closing the open ulcer: Henry, with joy, had discarded his bandage and presented Dr. Butts with the title-deeds of a manor in Ewhurst. But the poison, denied outlet, had turned inwards and combined with mental stress and his determination to go about as much as possible and show himself to his people as the innocent, injured man, had had a frightening result. He’d wakened in the early hours of this morning, deranged, incoherent, shouting for Norris. His new Groom of the Stole had fetched Dr. Butts who recognized high fever when he saw it and inspected the leg, horribly swollen and inflamed. He had sent for the barber-surgeon who made the incision; almost instant relief had followed; the King was so much better that later in the evening, bandaged aga
in, he intended to go out, but for the moment he was resting.

  He looked unwell; and so did Cromwell. Cromwell was being driven by that thing most unwelcome to lawyers, haste. Evidence took time to collect, it had to be verified, sifted, correlated, and the King refused to allow for these lengthy processes. He would listen to no protests, the whole thing was distasteful to him and he wanted it over and done with. So for the last ten days Cromwell had been in the uncomfortable position of a normally careful-marketing housewife compelled to do her shopping in the last minute. In what evidence he had so far collected there were contradictions and discrepancies which sickened him to think of.

  Standing by the bed, feeling far from well himself, he commiserated with his monarch upon his lapse from health and proffered his good wishes.

  Henry said, “Did it ever occur to you, Cromwell, that I might die?”

  “All men must die, Your Grace, eventually. Of your demise I have certainly never considered since it is unlikely that I shall have the misfortune to survive you. I am six years older.”

  “But a whole man; which I at this moment am not. I’ve been thinking. Suppose I died. Suppose I died this morning. Who is my heir? Elizabeth—that witch’s get! Is that not so?”

  “The Dunstable Court declared your former marriage invalid and the Lady Mary illegitimate; it follows then that the Princess…”

  “That must not be. Now you listen to me. I’m mortal. The moment this business is over I shall marry again. If she’d died in childbed, or from any other cause, I’d have made the gesture of a two months’ mourning, but no man can be expected to mourn for an adulteress. I shall marry at once. But a child takes nine months to breed and if I should leave Elizabeth as my heir, God knows she would have friends powerful enough to make her claim good. And that wouldn’t suit me. Mr. Secretary, I want this marriage wiped out, made as though it had never been.”