The Concubine (31 page)

T
HE RAIN HAD CLEARED AND
everything was washed with the peculiarly lucid light of a sunny winter’s day. It was fine enough for most of the ladies to go, well-furred, to watch the King and his friends at exercise in the tiltyard. Anne had stayed indoors, careful always to remember that she was supposed to be farther advanced in pregnancy than she actually was; and Margaret Lee had stayed with her. They were busy with an almost completed piece of tapestry. It was heavy and bulky, and Emma Arnett insisted upon standing by to help with handling it.

Anne, as she worked, worried away at the problem which had confronted her, day and night, ever since the autumn. She had told Henry that the child would be born in April. Unless it was prematurely born—and who could count upon that?—April would come and go and she would not be delivered. How late could a child be without causing comment and question? She had managed to inveigle Dr. Butts into discussing that. First babies, he said, tended to be tardy, anything from a fortnight to three weeks, though, he had added, often the baby was blamed for the mother’s fault. Women reckoned so ill. The average for women was about two hundred and seventy days; in his experience, second babies—he had smiled at her as he said this—were usually more considerate than first ones, they were often three weeks early and that was why second confinements seemed easier.

Margaret said, “Have you yet received an answer from Mary?”

“I have indeed. Rude and contemptuous, as always.”

She had been particularly anxious to come to terms with Mary. Mary had been the one who had said—at least so it had been reported and never contradicted—the vilest possible thing about Elizabeth. “And does she resemble her father, Mark Smeaton?” If Mary could say that, about Elizabeth so obviously Henry’s child, what might she not say next time? Mary simply must be won over.

Anne, rebuffed so often, had not tried the direct approach; she had sent a message through Lady Shelton. She had asked Mary to let an old sore heal; she had said that she would be a mother to her, and promised that if she would come to Court and be one of the family that she should take precedence of everyone, she might, if she wished walk, on all formal occasions, side by side with Anne herself. Never had a Queen made such an offer; but Anne reflected with frank wryness, never could a Queen have had quite such reason.

“She said that she would sooner die a hundred times than change her mind.”

“I hope you sent her back a sharp answer,” Margaret said. She was constitutionally incapable of making a sharp answer herself and one of the many things she admired about her cousin was her ability to wage verbal warfare, if need be.

“I wrote to Lady Shelton,” Anne said, a little wearily. “I asked her to tell Mary that from now on what she does and how she acts are of no interest to me. I told her that I hoped to have a son and was merely trying to establish her beforehand. That was sense. If this is a boy, within six months the Lady Mary might lie in Peterborough beside her mother for all any one will care.”

“In less than six,” Margaret said, happily. She, as much as anyone in the world, was counting upon this child’s birth, counting upon it being a boy. She loved Anne and wished to see her properly reestablished. The King had been a little more discreet of late, but he had not yet tired of Jane Seymour; and although Anne seldom spoke of it, Margaret knew that she was troubled. She had never been quite the same since the day when she had discovered Henry with Jane on his knee, and no wonder. Still a boy would right everything. In the joy of being the father of a prince at last Henry would forget the trivial pleasure of dalliance.

Margaret spared a moment to breathe yet another swift prayer for a safe delivery, and a boy baby: and then, seeing Anne’s hands idle and her eyes fixed in an inward, unhappy look, set herself to rouse her.

“Now, blue would you say, or purple? Of blue we have plenty, the purple is running short. If it is to be purple we shall need more.”

Before Anne could answer there was a clatter outside the door; it opened and the Duke of Norfolk burst in. Except for his helm, which he carried in his hand, he was clad for tilting; his long heavy face was the color of tallow.

“The King,” he gasped. “He took a great fall…He may be dead!”

In one piercing second she saw exactly what would happen to her, bereft of Henry’s protection. Mary on the throne. Herself hurried away and disposed of; for Mary would never let this child be born. Then she swayed on the stool, and would have fallen but for Margaret’s supporting arms.

Emma dropped the ends of wool she was sorting and ran forward.

“You take her feet,” she ordered, pushing Margaret away and putting her own arms under Anne’s. “We must get her flat. Open the door,” she said to the Duke, “you blundering fool! You clown! If he’s dead, all the more reason…” O God, she prayed, more earnestly than she had ever prayed before, let the child be unharmed, let her go her full time; this is the prince, dear merciful God, who is to set thy people free!

They laid Anne on her bed, loosened her clothing and wrapped her warmly. Emma put a pillow under her feet, too; and when Margaret took the flagon of grated hartshorn to hold to her nose, checked her.

“I’m not so sure. If he’s dead…At least she isn’t fretting now. What did that old fool say, “may be,” didn’t he? Run and find out. We might have good news to bring her round to.”

Margaret ran, and Emma went down on her knees by the bed and laid her hands gently upon Anne’s body, as though warding off some threatened, physical attack. O God, dear God. The prayer ran through her mind, as repetitious, as stylized as the telling of beads against which her kind railed so bitterly. This was the child who would keep Mary from the throne, keep England from slipping back into the Pope’s clutches, a child whose very begetting was proof of God’s secret, mysterious ways of working His will on earth.

Margaret, less than halfway to the tiltyard met the ladies swarming back. The King was not dead, merely unconscious and suffering a small wound in the leg. The doctors were with him.

Armed with this cheering news Emma set to work with the hartshorn, with cold water, with wrist rubbing. She yielded place to no one, and when Anne moaned and stirred it was Emma’s voice which said, bluntly and briefly, “He isn’t dead.”

“He was stunned,” Margaret said, “and his leg is hurt a little. The doctors are with him.”

“I should go to him,” Anne said.

“Oh no, Your Grace,” Emma said firmly. “That you’ll not do. You’ve had a bad shock and a swooning spell and you must lie and rest.”

“You could do nothing,” Nan Savile contributed. “We shall hear when he comes round. Perhaps you can go then.”

She was content to be persuaded; her limbs felt boneless, and the child lay heavy, heavy, like the weights they placed on prisoners who refused to plead, the
peine forte et dure.

“I’ll rest a little then—though I’m well enough.”

“Small thanks to his Grace of Norfolk,” Emma said grimly. “I’ve never before in my life wished myself married, but I’d give something to be
his
wife for just half an hour.”

Within two hours they had news that the King had regained consciousness and suffered no more than a headache and a scratch and what promised to be a remarkable bruise on the leg. Emma, reasonably sure now that what she dreaded most had been averted, allowed Anne to get up, and clad in a loose robe, go along to his apartments. He made light of the headache, but seemed concerned about his leg.

“It’s on the very spot where I had a most troublesome ulcer, until Thomas Vicary cured it. A fine thing it’ll be if this knock opens it up again.”

She said that she hoped that would not happen. She said that she was glad that so severe a fall had not injured him more. She looked at him with a dreary feeling of guilt because her first thought had been for herself. She’d felt no grief, nothing but fear. It was an outstanding example of the way in which circumstances could corrupt people.

“Dr. Butts has applied a plaster,” Henry went on complaining, “to draw out the bruise, he said. By the feel of it it’s drawing the flesh from the bone.”

I should pity him, she thought, knowing as I do how anything less than perfect physical health disgusts him.

But another thought swung out in counterbalance; he should spare a thought for me, just a question; he must know what a shock I sustained; and I am with child. Not his, but that he does not know. The feeling of something badly amiss, of having lost herself, of having mismanaged everything, of being alone and on the wrong road, a feeling that reached back to that thundery night at Hampton Court, came upon her as it had so often lately, and with even more force. Their whole relationship was wrong; and was she much to blame? She’d only done what most women, placed as she had been, would have done. Every single move in this blindfold game had been forced upon her; and the root, the real root of all the trouble lay with him, with what Mary had once warned her of, his inability to love anyone who loved him. On that night at Hampton Court he had thought she loved him, and he had begun to hate her then. After that she’d been nothing but a brood animal, and knowing that she had not dared to tell him last autumn that she had miscarried. She’d been compelled to find her own way out of that predicament; and she had; and for the last few months whenever she had these dismal thoughts, she had been able to think about the boy whom she might bear. But not tonight. Tonight the child was just a leaden weight, dragging down so that her back ached.

Henry, with the headache like a leaden cap, with spikes inside it, bearing down on his head, and his leg throbbing, a pendulum of pain, thought that it was civil of her to have come, but oh, how he did wish she’d go away. She looked so unwell that the sight of her filled him with foreboding. Something wrong with this pregnancy? He’d asked himself that when he came back from his progress in October, expecting to find her sleek, filling out and had found her hollow-cheeked, a little wild of eye. Later she had seemed to settle down, but not completely, not as she had before the birth of Elizabeth. And maybe, he conceded, for that he was a little to blame. She was jealous. She knew about Jane. And she hadn’t Catherine’s good sense in that respect. Catherine had known about the Stafford girl, about Bessie Blount, and Mary Boleyn…but she hadn’t gone about looking…

Still, there was a belief that a really healthy vigorous child leeched strength from its mother. If that was true this child should be exceptional. Cheered by that thought, he asked a little belatedly,

“And is all well with you?”

She forced herself to smile. “All is well with me. And I hope that all will soon be well with you. I wish you a good night.”

“That I most certainly shall not have,” Henry said, reverting to egotism, “unless I can persuade Butts to remove this damned plaster.”

She went away, moving slowly, very conscious of her burden which had, since the shock, ceased to seem like a part of herself.

Six days later, after a long agony that surpassed the pangs of ordinary birth, she bore what would have been a boy.

Over the tiny scrap of carrion which should have been the savior of his country, Emma, who had not wept for forty years, almost wept, would have wept, had there been room in her shocked and angry mind for any soft emotion.

Her faith, the new faith, founded upon reason and shorn of superstition, faltered and failed. Really, she thought with furious despair, it looked as though God didn’t know His own business!

They brought the news to Henry, where he sat with his leg supported by a stool. It was very swollen, very black and very painful, but that was only to be expected; what distressed him was to find, every time the bandage was removed, that the trivial wound, instead of drying up and healing, remained moist and seemed to be widening. The old ulcer waking again?

That the child was dead brought him no surprise; nothing good could be expected of so premature a labor; that it would have been a son filled him with impotent fury which for about the space of an hour swamped every other feeling. Then it began to recede, leaving, like an ebbing tide, some stark and alien things stranded and exposed.

First, the hope that she would die and thus put an end to this marriage, as cursed as his former one. Second, the determination that should she live, he would rid himself of her. Third, a pondering of the means. And fourth, this for comfort, the certainty that soon things would change and begin to go well for him.

Passionately he willed her to die. It would make everything so simple. There’d be a splendid funeral, as befitted one who had been Queen of England, a little time, a very little time of mourning, and then, because the succession was of such paramount importance, marriage with his darling little Jane. The most captious critic of his acts and motives could find no fault with that.

Let her die, and by dying make good the fraud she had practiced, the fraud which he would never, to his dying day, understand. All those years of longing and waiting. For nothing. Die and wipe out the false promise, the wasted years, the letters, the garden at Hever, Catherine’s tears, Wolsey’s last look. Die and make all good…

She did not die. She clung to life as stubbornly as Catherine had clung to her title. In the whole of God’s creation there was nothing so tough, so resilient as a woman.