The Concubine

by Norah Lofts

  Speed

  THE TOWER. MAY 18TH, 1536

  MARGARET LEE, IN ONE OF the calms between her storms of weeping, spread out the writing things and tried to persuade Anne to the table.

  “I do beg of you, write to him. I’ll take the letter myself and wherever he is I’ll find him, and go on my knees and present it. Anne, you must, you must. He can’t mean this to happen. But you know what he is, he’s waiting for some sign from you. And the time is so short. Do, I beg of you, write a letter.”

  “I wrote once. He took no notice.”

  “Dear Anne, that was before the trial. He had his way. You aren’t even married any more. He can marry Jane now, without…without…”

  She could not bring herself to say the words.

  Margaret could understand Henry’s motives, up to a point; he was an aging man, wildly in love with a girl; he wished to marry her and, being a man who put no consideration before his own pleasure, he had entered into a wicked plot to rid himself of Anne. She prayed that God would punish him for that. But now that he was free again, why must Anne die?

  “He wants me dead,” Anne said. “Nothing else will do. He hates me.”

  “That is no reason…”

  “It is for him. He has hated me for a long time. I think he hated me even while he still believed that he loved me. I made him wait. He’s taking revenge for that, now.”

  “He might still relent, if only you would write. You write such a good letter. You must write and beg for mercy.”

  “He has none. Last evening proved that; he didn’t say—Admit a precontract and live; he said—Admit a precontract and die quickly. He is determined upon my death. Besides, to spare me now, when five men are dead for their supposed sin with me. On their behalf I did write; I begged him to be merciful to them. We know how he answered that plea! For myself I asked only a fair trial, not to have my enemies sit in judgment on me; but they did, with the verdict given before a word was spoken. He has shamed me, and he’ll kill me, but he shan’t humble me.”

  The reservoir of Margaret’s tears had replenished itself and she was crying again.

  “Margaret, please…Don’t make it harder. I am resigned now. I dread the moment, but it will be only a moment. Think of it this way…What would life hold for me after this?” She thought of Catherine, living out the empty hopeless days in the Huntingdonshire marsh while in London another woman wore the crown and was called Queen. Bad enough; but Catherine had had an easy mind; her name had never been blackened; she had not been instrumental in sending five men, young, gifted, handsome, to their deaths. “I was fond of them all, in different ways,” she said aloud. “Their faces haunt me. Their faces and the horrible things that were said in Court. But for the actual doing, I shall be almost glad to die.”

  “So would I,” Margaret sobbed hysterically. “So would Emma. How are we to go on living?”

  “You must try to forget. When you do think of me, remember me kindly. And remember that in my trouble you stood by me, and greatly comforted me.”

  “He’s a bad man. The wickedest man since Judas Iscariot. I pray God will punish him. I pray that Jane will bear him nothing but monsters, and that his leg never heals, but grows worse until the stench of it sickens him. I pray God he never has another happy moment.”

  “Sometimes I feel like that—full of hatred. But there are other times…” Her eyes took on a faraway, mystic’s look. “Times when I wonder, no, more than that, I almost see that the things we do, the things we think we choose to do, and the things that seem to happen to us by chance, were all arranged for us, beforehand. It is a hard thing to explain, especially when you don’t fully understand it yourself. But…You see, Margaret, I was once warned that I might die in this manner.”

  In an awed voice Margaret said, “A soothsayer?”

  “No. A book. A book of pictures. It was some time ago, before the Cardinals’ Trial at Blackfriars. I went back to my room one evening and the book lay on a stool. Just three pages. There was the King and the Queen and me, without my head.”

  “How horrible!”

  “I didn’t think so then. Nan did; she was with me, and when I showed her she said that if she thought it was true she wouldn’t have the King even if he were King ten times over. But I laughed, and called the book a bauble, and said I would have him, even if it meant losing my head. You see, I was set on my course. And lately I have been thinking. If it were my fate to be beheaded, then it was Henry’s fate to bring it about…”

  But Margaret refused to grant Henry even that much of exoneration.

  “That makes it sound as though he isn’t to blame. And he is. He is! He arranged all this so that he could marry Jane Seymour without people saying he was always chopping and changing. And he could pardon you now, this minute, if he chose. He might, if only you’d write to him. Dearest Anne, I beg of you to write.”

  “If he pardoned me he’d always be afraid that some people still considered me his wife—as some people always thought Catherine was. He’d never risk putting himself in that position again. We must face it, Margaret. It is necessary for me to die.”

  Margaret began to cry again.

  Somewhere a clock chimed. Another of the few remaining hours had run its course. It might, she thought, seem strange to wish away what was left of life, but this waiting, without hope, shut in with weeping women and never sure how long one could stay calm oneself, this was the worst part of all, except one, the moment of which she willed herself not to think, the moment when the blade would fall. However skilled the headsman, however swift the blow, there would be some pain. Could she face it without flinching?

  The door opened and she was relieved to see that it was Lady Kingston, come to take her turn. Lady Kingston was pleasant, civil, even kind, but she was blessedly uninvolved. Not a friend who suffered and wept, nor an enemy who gloated. She ignored Anne’s situation, still addressed her with respect, and without any obvious effort always contrived to introduce some topic of conversation that was neutral and of mild interest. She was a good needlewoman and they talked on the subject of embroidery, of Lady Kingston’s difficulty in making a truly satisfactory garden, of cures for freckles and brittle fingernails. Lady Kingston’s hours in the Queen’s Chamber were much in the nature of a social visit. One lady calling upon another and engaging in amiable chatter. Lady Kingston, a modest woman, rather prided herself upon this as an achievement, for in talking with Anne’s other attendants she had learned that Anne was seldom so calm with them; and she had often heard weeping, hysterical laughter and almost demented raving; coming from this very room. I manage better, she thought to herself, and wished that her husband could realize how well, in a quiet way, she assisted him in his far from easy office.

  Her husband might underrate her, but Anne had realized her worth; she was like a piece of good sound, closely woven cloth, with nothing showy about it, but with a strength and substance that once shaped would last almost indefinitely. And for this reason she had chosen Lady Kingston as the repository of two messages. Both Margaret and Nan would have undertaken their delivery, but their own emotions would have impeded their utterance and detracted from the force of what they said. Emma would have been the perfect messenger but her status would make access difficult. Lady Kingston was next best, and Lady Kingston must be used.

  When Margaret, still sobbing, had gone, Anne said,

  “Lady Kingston, please sit there,” and pointed to the chair under the canopy.

  “Oh no,” Lady Kingston said. “Rightly I suppose I should not sit in your presence at all, much less use the Queen’s chair.”

  “At the moment there is no Queen. I wish you to sit there, Lady Kingston, and hear me out. I have one thing upon my conscience and cannot rest until I have cleared it.”

  Lady Kingston took the chair and then looked at Anne with some misgiving. She had no wish to be made to listen to some revolting confession. Behind her professional, impartial manner she concealed certain doubts, being a beli
ever in the adage about no smoke without fire. There’d certainly been a great deal of smoke. Also, from her observation of Anne’s behavior during her imprisonment, Lady Kingston had come to the conclusion that she was a woman likely to say or do almost anything; she moved from tears to laughter, from talkativeness to silence; from raving against the injustice of her sentence to the most dignified acceptance of it, all without reason. She might now, on the eve of her death, have decided to tell the whole story.

  “Madame, I do not think that I am the proper person. You would do better to send for your confessor.”

  “It concerns something that you, as a woman, could better do.”

  Lady Kingston’s fears were confirmed: some woman-to-woman talk of illicit love. Her distaste showed on her face.

  “It concerns the Lady Mary.”

  “Oh, well in that case…” Lady Kingston relaxed and prepared to listen.

  “I want you to go to her, as soon as is convenient for you, after my death, and carry a message. If I could go myself, I would; but I am…I mean I shall be represented by you. See, I go on my knees to you, as I would to her.” She dropped to her knees and stayed there. “Will you do that, go on your knees to her, as my proxy?”

  “If that is your wish.” Lady Kingston’s manner had stiffened again; there was a touch of melodrama about Anne’s action which made her feel uneasy.

  “Say to her that I am sorry, from my heart, for the way I behaved to her, and to her mother. I was set on having my own way, and felt that they were thwarting me. I deeply regret it now and I beg the Lady Mary’s forgiveness. Will you tell her that?”

  “Most willingly.”

  Lady Kingston was puzzled. She had never heard of any specific act of unkindness done by the Queen to Catherine or her daughter; and she had heard Lady Lee, weeping over the injustice of things, say that Anne was so kind, always kind, so kind that she had several times offered friendship to Mary, and every time been repulsed. And surely, whatever had been done to the old Queen and her daughter had been the King’s doing. Lady Kingston had never by word or deed exercised the slightest influence upon her husband’s behavior and privately doubted whether any man ever did anything because his wife asked it. Anne was probably exaggerating. Poor soul, Lady Kingston thought, if that is the worst thing on her conscience…

  And then suddenly the light broke. Of course, Anne was thinking of her child who would almost inevitably fall into Mary’s keeping. Jane Seymour would have little time and attention to spare for the two bastard stepchildren; Mary was so much older, and after all this would be in so much better odor that she might well be put in charge of Elizabeth. This message was intended to soften Mary’s heart and influence her behavior. Quite clever, so much more likely to be effective than a direct appeal which would betray its purpose. Lady Kingston remembered that Anne was always said to have had a good head on her. And oh, she thought, at times like this, how the most ordinary expression can be misplaced; now I am bound to think about her head and what will happen to it tomorrow.

  Anne stood up, and in a different manner said, “I have a message for the King, too. Will you carry it?”

  “Oh, I think perhaps my husband…He is the Keeper of the Tower.”

  “And as such will have other things to see to. Please, Lady Kingston. It is not a long message, but it must be remembered exactly.”

  “Very well.” If it were in the same contrite tone as the message to Mary, delivering it would not bring disfavor upon the messenger. And having thought that, Lady Kingston saw by the way Anne’s eyes suddenly flashed and her mouth curled, that this would not be a contrite message.

  “Tell him,” Anne said, slowly and distinctly, “that I commend me to him and thank him for so constantly advancing me: from a private gentlewoman he made me a Marchioness, from a Marchioness a Queen, and now, having no further honor to bestow upon me, he gives me the crown of martyrdom.”

  “And then,” Lady Kingston said, reporting to her husband over their supper table, “she began to laugh. I tried to calm her, but couldn’t, so I fetched her women. And I came away. I don’t like the way she laughs…It wouldn’t sound quite right anywhere, and here it is downright unnatural.”

  “It’s unusual,” Sir William agreed.

  “She isn’t like anyone I ever knew, or heard of. And if people ask me…after—What was she like? I should be hard put to give an answer. So changeable, and all in a minute. When she spoke of the Lady Mary she looked sweet and sorrowful, when she spoke of the King she looked…vicious, and then she was laughing.”

  Sir William gave a little grunt; all women were like that; didn’t she realize that she herself was variable as an April day?

  “Just at the minute it’s all music, playing the lute, old songs and new ones. You’d hardly think this was the time. Or do you think that she still has some hope, for a pardon at the last minute, or a rescue?”

  He raised his head and looked at her with attentive narrowed eyes.

  “What put that idea into your silly head?”

  “Nothing.” His look dismayed her. “Nothing, except the way she behaves.”

  “You’ve heard no rumor? No gossip?”

  “None. How could I? I’ve seen no one.”

  “You’ve seen her women. Were they more cheerful? Whispering in corners?”

  “Oh no. Poor Lady Lee was crying her heart out again. Why? Are you expecting something?”

  He almost confided in her, but that would have been to break the habit of a married lifetime, so he told her curtly to mind her business and leave him to his, and went on chewing the food which would, he knew, lie in his stomach like red-hot lead, it always did when he was worried.

  He had just received his final instructions from Cromwell. They showed clearly enough that the Chief Secretary thought there might be trouble. The scaffold was to be set up inside the Tower precincts, and to be very low, so that nothing would be visible outside. Only a few carefully chosen spectators were to be present, and as a last precaution the time of the execution had been changed to midday, a fact which was to be kept secret. London which had refused to doff its cap or raise its voice for Nan Bullen, now talked of Queen Anne, of her wrongs and her virtues, quoting the vast sums of money she had distributed to charities in the last months of her life and the interest she had taken in the education of poor boys of promise. Fickle as the wind, public opinion had now swung round so definitely in her favor that an attack on the Tower was likely and a riot in the streets possible.

  It was, Sir William thought, a unique occasion—apart from the rights and wrongs of it. A woman on the scaffold, and that woman a Queen. In the last two hundred years or so, two Kings of England had been deposed, and were dead soon after; Edward the Second mysteriously at Berkeley Castle, Richard the Second mysteriously at Pontefract; but it was one thing to let the London crowd learn of a dark deed done at some distance and irrevocable, and quite another to ask them to stand by and tacitly give their consent to the execution of one who had been crowned.

  “I shall be glad when this is all over,” he said, grumpily.

  “It’s just on ten o’clock, now,” Lady Kingston said. “In ten hours it will be over.”

  He did not correct her.

  In ten hours from now…

  Emma Arnett thought about deathbeds; when you tended the dying you might know that the hours were numbered, the end unavoidable, but there was something you could do: you shifted the pillows, rearranged the covers, moistened dry lips, wiped sweat-dewed brows, and such simple doings distracted your mind. This was altogether different. You sat here, within a few feet of a living, healthy young woman and could think of nothing except that in a few hours this beautiful living body would be a hideous mangled corpse.

  Beyond the dead body she could see nothing; no hope of resurrection, immortality, or reunion. Her belief in Purgatory she’d lost with her belief in priest and Pope; Heaven and Hell had vanished, never to be recovered, on the evening of Anne’s miscarriage, when she
had lost her belief in God. Once her shock at God’s apparent stupidity had subsided, she had tried, with all the force of her resolute nature to drive herself into humble acceptance, to admit that God knew what was best, that His ways, though mysterious, were right. She could never do it; she might as well have tried to restore life to a tree blasted by lightning. Night after night she had lain, her mind going round and round, coming back always to the same hopeless conclusions, the mental exercise as futile as a snake eating its own tail. Even her desire to believe defeated itself, for it was inevitable that sooner or later she should think to herself—If I believe it is because I want to, because I can’t bear not to. And once that thought was thought there was no going back.

  So, when she thought of Anne as dead, it was as dead forever; and under the grief and misery and horror lay the even more dreadful hopelessness of a mind which was homesick for the days when it had seen, beyond the grave, the life everlasting, a world of beauty and plenty past all imagination, peopled by angels and saints and all the hosts of Heaven, basking in the presence of God Himself.

  After her one emotional outburst Emma had not cried again; hers was a grief past tears.

  Margaret, with short intermissions, had cried all the time. She tried not to; she knew that it made things worse for Anne, and did no good at all, but she could not help it. When Anne suggested that they should spend an hour singing she had gulped out, “Oh, how can you?” almost as though it were she, not Anne, who tomorrow morning must kneel at the block.

  Anne said, “Margaret, I should like my songs to be remembered. And there is only you to commit them to memory. In days to come I shall be remembered as one of the wickedest women that ever lived. Henry must justify himself and to do that he will see that my so-called sins are remembered. My child will never know the truth and will be ashamed of me. They’ll find me a nickname—all too easily: The Queen without a Head. But if you will remember my songs, Margaret, and teach them to your children and ask them to teach them to theirs, sometime in the far future, I may be remembered for them, when everything else is forgotten.”