The Concubine (38 page)

“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.”

“I’ll try,” Margaret said, though the mention of the nickname, and the thought of any future without Anne in it, had started a fresh spate of tears.

And the songs that she must particularly master the tunes of, because no one else had heard them yet, were ones written and composed in the Tower, and quite heartbreaking in their sadness.

And the other,

Anne thought—This is the last time I shall use a lute, the last time I shall sing; but the thought did not have, in her mind, the awful finality that it would have had in Emma Arnett’s, for she could add—On this earth. As the dreaded moment drew nearer she became more and more certain of God’s understanding and forgiveness. She’d been a sinner, but on earth she had been punished beyond her deserts, in the world to come that might count in her favor. There would be music in Heaven, and one day she would be there to join in it.

She said, “But Thomas always made the best songs; and this is apt.” She began to sing,

She laid the lute down for the last time.

S
IR WILLIAM WAS A MAN
hardened to his job and willing to face the responsibilities of his office, but he had dreaded the task of telling Anne that her execution was to be postponed for four hours. He was afraid that she would see in the delay some promise of reprieve, or that hearing that she must endure the extra four hours of waiting would provoke tears.

He broke the news in his official, emotionless manner and braced himself to meet what followed.

Something that in almost any other circumstances he would have believed to be a flash of humor crossed her face.

“All my life,” she said, “seems to have been spent in waiting, and now I must wait, even for death.” Her face became somber again. “Not until noon? I am sorry for that. I hoped by that time to be dead and past my pain.”

“With such a skilled headsman there will be little pain,” Sir William assured her. “The sword is sharp, and his use of it very subtle.”

“And I have but a little neck,” she said, putting her hands to it, and laughing. Sir William wondered what his wife had found so disturbing about her laughter. It was, as he had said, unusual. He reflected that he had seen a number of people executed, but none so cheerful.

He had found her with her chaplain, and, his errand done, was about to leave them alone again, but Anne halted him.

“I have made my confession,” she said, “and am about to take the good Lord into my mouth for the last time. That is a solemn moment and not one for the telling of lies. I would like you, Sir William, now to witness that I solemnly declare myself innocent of the crimes of which I was accused. I did not sin with my brother, nor with Norris, Weston, Brereton, nor Smeaton. That is the truth before God in whose presence I shall shortly stand. I trust you to make it known.”

A little earlier she had confessed the truth to her chaplain, admitting to three isolated acts of adultery, “not through any lust of the flesh or any desire whatever save to bear His Grace a living son.” That confession would go with her chaplain to the grave and no one would ever know. But she hoped that what she had said to Sir William in one of the last hours of her life would be spread abroad; it was her final attempt to clear the names of the five men who had died, most of all her brother George…

“I shall report what you have said, Madam, as I report everything,” Sir William said. And that meant that he would write it in his next letter to Cromwell. It would go no further.

Sir William had long ago forsworn the luxury of speaking freely, even his thoughts and his feelings were governed by expediency more often than not, but for a moment he found himself wishing that this last statement of the condemned woman’s might be made public, if only because it would comfort the relatives of the dead men; particularly the wife and mother of Sir Francis Weston who were so devoted, so certain of his innocence, that they had offered the King a bribe of 100,000 crowns in return for his life.

It was reasonably certain, Sir William’s mind ran on, that Anne would not repeat this statement from the scaffold. To do so would be to question openly the justice of her sentence, and risk a more painful form of death. Speeches from the scaffold were almost as stylized as responses in Church. He’d seen dozens of executions, and known dozens of prisoners who, protesting their innocence up to the very steps of the scaffold, had, once they had mounted them, spoken in fulsome terms of the King and admitted that they deserved to die. Everyone knew that unless this formality were observed there might be an unfortunate hitch, a last-minute postponement, and then death in an uglier guise.

He gave a little mental shrug. That was the way the world was and there was nothing he could do to change it.

Anne said, “Thank you. I am grateful, too, for the courtesy you have shown me while I have been in your care.”

“I have done nothing but my duty, Madam.”

She was holding out her hand. As he took it he felt the hard shell of habit and stern thinking begin to fail him. He said,

“I will see…expeditious…easy as possible. God be with Your Grace, then…and hereafter.”

He felt as though an iron hand had him by the windpipe, and the words came out indistinctly jerkily.

She smiled at him; and he who had always been one of those who had wondered what on earth the King could ever have seen in her, reeled for a second under the impact of that vagrant, unpredictable charm. He turned and went blundering out of the room, and once beyond the door stood for a moment blinking and swallowing. When he had himself in hand again he walked on, thinking—I am the last man at whom she will ever smile.

The added four hours of waiting, longer than any lifetime, were coming to an end at last. It was a warm morning, and the air in the Queen’s lodging was still and heavy, yet the four of them, waiting there, shuddered and trembled as though blown upon by an icy wind. Anne in a desperate attempt to comfort Margaret and Nan and Emma had spoken of her certainty of their reunion in Paradise, but her voice was unsteady as she wove her last spell with words, attempting to describe the indescribable the gardens at Greenwich on an unclouded summer day, but more beautiful, with music of which earth’s music was nothing but a faint false echo. “And all whom we have ever loved, even, I think, our little dogs. Think of it so. Tonight and tomorrow, whenever you think of me, think—she has done with pain and trouble; and look forward to the day when we shall again be together.”

Margaret and Nan wept, Emma sat with a face of stone. For her no future either here or hereafter; Anne Boleyn, whom she had loved, better than she had loved her family, or her old master, Richard Hunne, would be dead; and she, forever bereaved, growing older and stiffer in the joints, would go on down a road that grew narrower and darker until it ended in the grave. For her no heavenly gardens, or music, no reunion. She thought, almost angrily—You start by not believing in a mass of superstitions, and you end by not believing anything. It’s like falling down a well, you can’t pull up halfway.

Her big, work-worn hands trembled as she held them in her lap, hiding something there. She was waiting for it to be half past eleven; and presently it was. Time to render the last service of all.

She moved her hands, revealing a small wooden bottle.

“I daren’t bring anything bigger than what I could hide in my bodice, Your Grace,” she said. “I was afraid what I had in my pocket or my hands they might take away from me before they let me in. So there isn’t much, but enough to calm you and take off the sharpest…” She was going to say edge, but that brought the sword to mind, the cold, cruel steel.

Anne looked at her, for a moment unable to speak.

“Emma, that is a miracle! All along I’ve so feared that out there, all eyes upon me, I might, at the last moment…fail.”

It was one thing to be resigned to death, another to face with dignity the sight of the apparatus.

She hoped that the dose Emma had smuggled in was as large, and would act in the same way, as the one she had given her on the day of her arrest. After her trial, when she was allowed the company of her own ladies she had asked about that day and been told that all the way to the Tower she had behaved with the utmost dignity. To a group of spectators, gathered to stare, she had said, haughtily, “You cannot prevent me from dying your Queen.” Yet she, Anne Boleyn, the conscious I, had not been there at all. If she could go to the block in that same tranced way…Then there would be no fear of her screaming, or crying, or laughing. Ever since she had gone to France and left childhood behind she had been—yes, she would use the word now—vain, greedy for admiration, had early learned how to make much out of little, had realized that while girls more naturally pretty could rely upon the impression their faces made, she must cultivate style, manner, charm, a good carriage, and taste in clothes. For her last appearance before the public eye she had chosen her manner, too. She wished to make a calm, a dignified, an impressive exit, so that people, remembering later, brooding over the horrid details of her supposed offenses, might say, “At least she died like a Queen,” and wonder perhaps whether her manner at the end could be consistent with the frivolity, the light-mindedness, the unspeakable behavior of which she had been accused. Now, thanks to Emma, she might perhaps achieve this last ambition.

Emma’s shaking hand poured the dose and Anne’s shaking hand took the cup. It was a good deal larger than the doses Emma had so often administered, but smaller than the one she had offered on the day of the arrest. Still, it would serve.

Then, with the cup halfway to her lips she halted her hand; Margaret and Nan, red-eyed, faces swollen from crying, Emma her face taut with misery.

“We’ll share it,” she said. “Like a loving cup.”

She offered it to Margaret whose mind was so sodden with wretchedness that she would have drunk, without thinking, from a cup of poison just then. She took a mouthful and swallowed it before Emma could say,

“I brought it for you!”

“And I said we would share it. Nan?”

“I couldn’t swallow anything,” Nan Savile said.

“I brought it for you,” Emma repeated. She threw a look of reproach at Margaret and added, “There was little enough.”

“There is plenty to keep me from making a spectacle of myself,” Anne said, and drank. And she had again, more vividly than ever, that sense of destiny of which she had spoken to Margaret. She thought. Even this simple thing has played its part, and no negligible one, in bringing me to this moment. That evening of my first quarrel with Henry, when I was planning to go back to Hever and Emma spoke of her friend the apothecary and gave me the first dose, so that I was almost asleep when he came back and in no mood to carry on the quarrel; but for the dose I should still have been angry and told him that insults were not wiped out by gifts.

She doubted whether she had drunk enough to produce the tranced state in which she had come from Greenwich to the Tower, but she waited for the feeling of calm, of nothing mattering very much, which had so often been the syrup’s gift to her. Today, of all days, and for the first time, it failed her. She might as well have drunk water.

I might have known, she thought; nothing is to be spared me. I go to the block sustained only by my faith in God, the master who arranged this puppet show, and who will not be too hard upon the puppet who all along has responded to each pull of the strings, and all the time believed that she willed every move.

Then, in various courtyards and towers the clocks chimed and in innumerable sunny gardens all over England the hands of the sundials touched the figure twelve. And it was noon of Friday, May 19th, in the year of our Lord 1536.

It had been decided to admit about thirty carefully chosen members of the public, headed by the Lord Mayor; their presence, it was felt, would prevent any accusation of furtiveness; and it would be useful if, as was hoped, the condemned woman made a confession from the scaffold.

When Anne appeared, escorted by Sir William Kingston, and followed by her women, something like awe laid hand on all present, even her avowed enemies. Only a few people had ever thought her beautiful, most had denied that she was even pretty; today she glowed with a beauty that was almost unearthly. She was well-dressed, as always, but nobody noticed the gown of black damask, dramatically in contrast with the huge white collar, or the black velvet hat under which her wealth of glossy hair was closely folded and pinned tight. It was her face that held the attention, the great eyes glowing as though from some inner light, the creamy skin, the mouth, its pinched look gone, sweetly curved, composed.

She moved, with all her unmatched grace, to the scaffold steps and mounted them. Directly ahead of her was the block, with the straw spread about it; on the extreme right the headsman, masked and clad in skintight black, stood, holding the sword behind him, a futile, formal gesture of consideration.

She faced the little crowd, recognizing some faces; the Duke of Suffolk; the Duke of Richmond, Henry’s bastard; Cromwell, whose eldest son was married to Jane Seymour’s sister and who would rise now to greater heights; certain ambassadors; the Lord Mayor.

Emma’s dose had, after all, had some effect; she was no longer shivering, and when she spoke her voice was clear and firm.

She said, “Good Christian people, I am come hither to die, according to the law, for by the law I am judged to die and therefore I will speak nothing against it, as I know full well that what I could say in my defense cannot concern you, or give me hope of life.”

The words held the quintessence of something which Henry had always—though sometimes unconsciously—resented in her; the ability to strip a thing down to its bones. In civil, almost amiable terms she was telling them that, the law being what it was, she was helpless,
and so were they
; they had titles and high office, but they must do the King’s bidding or perish. Even the least sensitive of them understood; in England now there was no law but the King’s will; and he had rigged and they, by active participation or passive acceptance, had helped him to rig an infamous charge against one who had once held his heart in her hands; he had disposed of an unwanted wife, how much more easily would he dispose of an unwanted favorite, or minister?

Her next sentence played, as skillfully as ever her fingers had played upon the lute strings, upon their fears. In a changed voice, a voice that everyone must recognize as sarcastic, she said,