The Concubine

by Norah Lofts

  XLVI

  Yes,—four-and-twenty hours had not elapsed since the axe was reddened with the blood of her mistress, when Jane Seymour became the bride of Henry VIII…The wedding cakes must have been baking, the wedding dinner providing, the wedding clothes preparing, while the life-blood was yet running warm in the veins of the victim, whose place was to be rendered vacant by a violent death.

  Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England

  RICHMOND. MAY 19TH 1536

  THE BOOM OF THE GUN informed Henry that after twenty-seven years he was free of all matrimonial entanglements.

  He was dressed for riding and a horse, chosen for speed and strength, and crammed with corn, stood waiting. Others were posted at convenient stages all along the road that led to Wiltshire, to Wolf Hall, where Jane waited. Pack horses, carrying his finer clothes and gifts for his bride and her family, were already well on their way.

  All morning he had felt nothing but impatience, mingled with regret that circumstances had made it necessary to change the hour of the execution; four hours of daylight wasted: and when the gun sounded he felt nothing but relief. It was safely over; he was a free man; he could go.

  Swinging himself into his saddle he was convinced that the latest attempted remedy was curing his leg.

  Everything was in tune with his mood; the trees hung with translucent green, the fields lively with young corn, the hawthorns in bridal white, meadows rich with buttercups and cowslips, the woods awash in a tide of bluebells. He was a young man again, in love for the first time and on his way to his wedding. All that he genuinely believed, for amongst many other things, he was a poet and possessed the poet’s ability to create his own world.

  Matrimonially, he thought, he’d been ill done by, two cursed marriages, one contrary to God’s law, the other brought about by witchcraft. But now he was free and his real love would make up for everything.

  He rode swiftly, happily in the May sunshine. And no ghosts ran alongside.

  XLVII

  Her father had declared his conviction of his daughter’s guilt at the trial of her reputed lovers.

  Encyclopaedia Britannica

  HEVER. MAY 19TH, 1536

  “NOW MARK THIS,” thomas boleyn said, eyeing with distaste his wife’s face, disfigured from crying, “I never want to hear her name, or George’s. Not from you. Not in this house. Outside I shall hear plenty.”

  Lady Bo took on an expression of true East Anglian obstinacy. She said again what she had said dozens of times in the last nineteen days.

  “I simply don’t believe it. Even if they’ve somehow found a way to make her confess…” She bit the inside of her cheek sharply to control her mouth which was beginning to quiver, “I still shouldn’t believe it. Only somebody wrong in the head could have carried on in that fashion. And she wasn’t wrong in the head, far from it.”

  “What she did wasn’t done with her head,” Anne’s father said coarsely.

  Lady Bo looked at him with more than distaste, with positive dislike.

  Oddly matched as they might seem to any observer, they had been a very happily married couple, until nineteen days ago when, as soon as they had the dreadful news, Lady Bo had begun to urge action. After all he was the father of George and Anne, he couldn’t just stand about and let such things happen without protest. Harsh words had passed between them for the first time.

  “Why, my own father,” she had exclaimed, “and he nothing but a simple yeoman, God rest him, wouldn’t have let such a thing happen to me! He’d have come to London with his fowling piece and brought his laborers and all our neighbors, armed with pitchforks and sickles and made a row even the King would have noticed.”

  “And got himself hanged, drawn and quartered for his pains.”

  An unpleasant thought, but it lacked some ultimate of horror, some inhuman element which she detected in her husband’s behavior.

  “Your father, my dear, is safely in his grave, you can afford to play fast and loose with him. I’m alive. Two of my children are accused of treason; and if I so much as look askance God knows I may be sent to join them. Perhaps you would like that!”

  She thought that over in silence for several minutes. Then she said,

  “Well, they’re not my children, and I’ve never had any hand in any affairs. And stepmothers aren’t supposed to be overly partial. I shall go to the King and tell him that I’m certain a dreadful mistake has been made.”

  If a rabbit had suddenly roared like a lion, the Earl of Wiltshire would have been no more surprised, or shocked.

  “That,” he said, “you will not do. I forbid it.” He still was not annoyed at her; she was an innocent, unworldly creature to whom her obligatory contacts with the great world had taught nothing. “We must walk very warily,” he said, “if we are to come out of this with our lives, our freedom, and our goods.”

  He had then argued that nothing could be done until after the trial; the truth would all be sorted out then; they could depend upon English justice. As soon as the trial was over he argued that no protest could possibly avail; they had been condemned by their peers and to question the verdict or ask for mercy upon two such flagrant offenders would simply be to court danger.

  Lady Bo had wept, had sometimes argued back, had said unkind things, such as, “All you care for are your goods!”

  Their pleasant relationship, adoring on her side, indulgent on his, was shattered past repair. When she was excited her voice became loud and her Norfolk accent very marked.

  “To say that about George and Anne is plain daft. I know it does happen, in lonely places where brothers and sisters don’t see anybody except each other for months on end. But they’re both married. And if it was going to happen wouldn’t it have happened when she was at home and free. I’ve seen them together enough to know, I should reckon. Laughing and teasing each other, or making songs. Besides all which, where was the King while all this was going on? That’s what I should like to know? Norris, too, there’s another bit of nonsense. He came with the King on all those early visits; did he ever show any interest in her then? The whole thing was made up, by the Seymours. And the King. He didn’t dare talk of getting rid of Anne in any ordinary way. Another divorce, people’d have said. So he did this, God rot him!”

  The Earl did not question the rightness of her judgment; but he knew his world. Year by year, ever since Wolsey’s death, the King had assumed more power and grown more tyrannical. Anyone who dared to oppose him could begin to count his days. Any move to help Anne, or George, would have been as futile as, and a good deal more dangerous than, attempting to storm their prison with your bare hands. A situation of this sort was like a hurricane, you couldn’t fight it; all a wise man could do was to lie low, let it sweep over, and hope to escape mortal damage.

  On this Friday morning Lady Bo had a fresh horse to flog. What about decent burial? The King had had his way now, and surely, surely, to a bereaved father—or if he didn’t care to ask, to a stepmother—he wouldn’t deny permission to take and properly inter the body of the woman whom he had once loved, and who had been Queen of England.

  “They’re buried where they fall. That is the law. What difference does it make?”

  “It would make a difference to me. George I never knew very well; but I was very fond of Anne.”

  He then made his remark about not wishing to hear her name again.

  It had been a matter of bewilderment to Lady Bo how Henry, who had loved Anne so frenziedly, could have come to hate her, as he must have done. Now she had a faint glimmer of enlightenment. Feelings did change. She would never feel the same toward Tom again, after this. Still, even had she the power, and even if her feeling of dislike increased to hatred she would never bring unmentionable accusations against him, or have him done to death. But the King…

  “There’s one thing,” she said, in the new firm voice that had developed in a fortnight, “I shall never be under the same roof with him again! I warn you, if ever he comes
to a house of mine, as he walks in, I shall walk out.”

  Thomas Boleyn said sourly, “I wouldn’t worry about that, if I were you. I don’t think we shall be honored by any more visits from His Grace.”

  XLVIII

  STAINES. MAY 19TH, 1536

  MARY STAFFORD CEASED CRYING FOR a moment and said for the twentieth time,

  “Whatever she did—and I don’t for a moment believe that she did all they say—it was his fault. He drove her to it. I know, because I know what he’s like.”

  William Stafford felt again the twinge of distaste which any reference to his wife’s past evoked. He had known all about it; he had accepted it; he had looked upon her as a sweet innocent creature of whom all men she had known—except, of course, Carey—had taken cruel advantage: he had wanted to cherish her and compensate for the way in which the world had treated her. But that was in the past. His attitude had changed as soon as they began to live together, an ordinary married couple. He had become retrospectively jealous, wished her past out of existence, hated anything that brought it to mind. And this affair by focusing Mary’s mind upon the King, the one of whom he was most jealous, had given him some painful moments.

  “I did my best to warn her,” Mary went on, too thoroughly miserable to notice his lack of response. “I told her no good could come of it. I told her she wasn’t pliable enough.”

  He said, with some malice, “I’d have thought the evidence showed otherwise.”

  Mary missed the point—he’d noticed during the last year or so that she did often miss the point; she said,

  “Oh no. Not pliable enough to take neglect and unkindness without trying to hit back. She was always like that. She was the only one who would ever try to stand up to Father. She once…Oh, poor Anne!” Tears threatened again. William said quickly,

  “Then you do believe her guilty?”

  “Not the way they said. Not George! That was unthinkable. I could never believe…His wife invented that filthy tale; she was jealous of Anne and eager to be rid of George. And not Smeaton. Of that I am sure. Anne had taste, and Smeaton, when he wasn’t playing some instrument, was just a plowboy. But the others…Yes, I think she may have tried to console herself, or was trying to make Henry jealous, and so revive…But I’d warned her of that, too. Once his interest wanes there’s nothing to be done. She may even have been trying to retaliate for Jane Seymour. We shall never know.” The exact reason for their not knowing came uppermost in her mind and she began to cry again.

  William said, and this time he spoke from a desire to comfort, not from spite,

  “You must remember that she was hard and cruel to you, Mary.”

  “She was not! She was always trying to give me things. That very last time…” She became incoherent, sobbing out words about a blue dress and not wanting to be measured. This was the first time that the exact circumstances which had brought about the crisis had been mentioned, and Sir William indulged in a few sourish thoughts about the duplicity and the complexity of women. Then he took his stand upon firm fact.

  “She never,” he said, “lifted a finger to help us. To get me reinstated. Did she?”

  “How do we know? Didn’t I want to do something only the other day, and didn’t you forbid me?”

  “You wanted to make a spectacle of yourself. And to no good purpose.”

  “There again, how can you know? He has moods. If I’d just chanced to hit on a good one, he might have listened to me. And I could have told him about George’s wife being so hostile, and how strict Anne always was with Smeaton, and about the dates being so silly. I could at least have tried. I don’t suppose anybody ever thought to say those things to him. Kings do rather…well, live in glass cages and hear only what people want them to hear and see what people want them to see. I know. I was inside once—the cage, I mean. And you can’t blame Anne for not influencing him, when I can’t even influence you. Till the day I die I shall always regret that I didn’t try.”

  “Then I hope that you will also bear in mind that I acted for your final good. We are both banished from Court. And for you to go weeping and wailing, bursting in, would have been fatal to our hopes.”

  “What hopes?”

  “Our hopes of being taken back, my dear silly girl. Leave aside whether it was her influence or not that kept us away from Court; the fact is that from now on everything will be reversed. Whatever was done, or liked, or approved in your sister’s time will now be undone, disliked, and disapproved. And on that turn of the tide we may yet reach harbor. You’ll see. You’ll live to thank me, my dear, for restraining you.”

  Mary Stafford was silent for a moment. She was measuring things up, as scrupulously as her tradesman ancestor had ever measured the cloth or the corn or whatever it was that he had sold; and then she said,

  “No. I shan’t be grateful, William. I was grateful to you for marrying me, but I have borne your child and by obeying you sacrificed the one chance of saving my sister. So I think you are repaid. If you are offered a chance to return to Court, take it. I shan’t go. I’ll never make obeisance to Jane Seymour. When the whole thing is sorted out, she murdered my sister.”

  “If we’re going to use such fanciful terms,” William said, “let’s say that your sister committed suicide. She knew the risk she was taking, and she knew what the penalty was. If she had her due, she’d be buried at a crossroad…”

  XLIX

  God provided for her corpse sacred burial, even in a place as it were consecrate to innocence.

  Sir Thomas Wyatt

  THE TOWER. MAY 19TH, 1536

  NO CHANGE OF SCENE IN even the best-planned masquerade had ever been made so swiftly, Emma Arnett thought grimly, looking around the place; one minute a crowd, the next nobody but themselves; one minute the law taking its course in ordered ritual, the next everything abandoned and in confusion.

  She had always known that the world was a cruel, heartless place, but even she could hardly believe that it would be left to Anne’s women, almost senseless with grief and shock, to deal with the mutilated corpse of their mistress. What happened, she asked herself, when the executed person had no faithful friends?

  She waited a moment for Lady Lee to take charge; she was by every standard the one to do so; a lady born, cousin to Her Grace, a dear, close friend. But Margaret, shaking, weeping, leaned against Mistress Savile, who, shaking, weeping, leaned against her; and the May sunshine beat down upon the headless body, the severed head, the bloody straw.

  Emma said, “There must be a coffin,” and waited a little. There was no coffin. Inside the Tower everything was done to order, and no one had ordered a coffin. The King who had decked his darling with jewels, with furs, brocades and velvets, who had crowned her when she pleased him, and killed her when she ceased to please, had made no provision for decent burial. There was a grave—if you could call it that—Emma said to herself, a shallow hole scooped out alongside the place where George Boleyn and the others had been laid; and there was an old man, more than half drunk, leaning against the wall, waiting to shovel…

  “There must be a coffin,” Emma said again. She ran about, to the guardroom, to the Keeper’s lodgings where Sir William, thankful for once for his wife’s attentions which included the provision of strong beef broth well laced with red wine, said, “I have carried out my orders. No coffin was mentioned. Tell the woman to go away.”

  Emma ran back to the room Anne had occupied and snatched a sheet from the bed, and took a damp cloth from the washing-stand.

  Back by the scaffold she said,

  “There’s nothing; no coffin, no arrangements. You’ll have to help me. I can’t do it all single-handed.” The last words came out bitterly; she wished she could. But time was short. The old man with the shovel was already mumbling about his dinner and the two graves he had to dig in the afternoon. Unless they were quick he’d be dragging this corpse, as Emma guessed he had dragged a good many, uncoffined, by the heels, into the makeshift grave.

 
“If you could brace up, and wash her face, and wrap her in this sheet, I’ll find something,” she said.

  And finally she found it; an old arrow chest; too short, oh good God! And why, why, why, should I still, at such a moment call on that name? But too short, good God, for any one who had…who had died a natural death. Long enough for what remained of the body which had housed the brave defiant girl, the gay woman, the anxious woman, the crafty, the honest, the kind, the cruel, the altogether puzzling and contradictory human being whom Emma Arnett, without knowing it, had loved for thirteen years. And lost.

  The old man, though unsteady on his feet, was obliging and helped them to carry the makeshift coffin to the grave.

  Margaret said, “We must at least say a prayer.”

  “Not too long, lady, please,” the old man said. “I want me dinner. And I’ve got two to dig for this afternoon.”

  Emma knelt with the others, and folded her hands, but she did not pray. She thought—This is a dog’s burial. Worse. When our old Nip died my father laid him by the foot of his favorite tree in the orchard and I put a bunch of gully flowers there.

  They left the old man to his task and stood aimlessly for a moment.

  “We must tidy up,” Emma said, and they went back to the Queen’s lodging where fresh pain waited. Her clothes, still bearing her body’s imprint, still fragrant with her scent; the pillow with her head’s pressure visible; her brush, her comb, her handkerchief.

  “I’m not sure,” Margaret said thickly. “I believe that when people are…when people…” She pressed her hand to her mouth. “I think all their belongings are confiscated.”

  “Property,” Nan Savile said, “and titles. Not things like…Who’d want her poor little clothes?”