The Concubine

  “I never thought of it,” he said. “That is how it is, Anne. When I am with you, I feel that we are alone in the world.”

  She believed it; he looked at her with the eyes, spoke to her with the voice, kissed her with the mouth of love. She thought for a moment, drearily, of all the people in the world who were in love with people who did not return that love. Mary loved Henry, Henry loved Anne, Anne loved Harry Percy. Were there any happy lovers, anywhere? Harry and I could have been, she thought fiercely; that was where we were different, and that is why we couldn’t be left alone.

  “You must give me your ring,” Henry said, prompting her again.

  She took off the little silver and amber thing that she had bought for herself, in Paris, liking the color.

  “It’s a poor exchange,” she said.

  “Of all my jewels, the most precious. Dearer to me than any in my crown.” He kissed it and pushed it on to his little finger where it stuck at the second joint.

  “I’ll have it made bigger tomorrow. There, now we are properly plighted. You are my dear betrothed.”

  He remembered then that this time he had come down to Hever determined to make her his mistress. But it was better this way. She was altogether too rare, too wonderful to rank with his lights-o’-love. She was Queen of his heart, and for her there was but one fitting place.

  “I shall go back to London tomorrow and set Wolsey to work. Handled vigorously this business should take no more than a year.”

  It was to drag on for twelve.

  Harry Norris, except on his rare off-duty times, slept in the King’s chamber. It was a custom left over from the old troubled days when a King was not safe in his bed. At each day’s end, Norris, with the remote, impersonal look of a priest at a ritual, pushed his sword twice under the bed, opened every press or closet in the room, said, “All is well, your Grace, and I wish you a good night,” and then went to his own bed which was always placed between that of the King and the door.

  He was a man of the world and he had never imagined that Henry had come to Hever for his health, or to enjoy the scenery or the company of Sir Thomas and his lady. He was far too discreet to mention the matter to anyone, but he had little wagers with himself about how long Mistress Anne would hold out. This, he thought, would be the crucial visit; the King and the lady had quarreled last time and the King had ridden off in a rage; this time they would make up and the siege would be over. But the King had gone glumly to bed on the first night of the visit, and glumly on the second, and Harry began to wonder: if the first flush of reconciliation didn’t move her, what would?

  On this, the third night, the King came to bed in a jubilant mood; all through his disrobing and preparing for bed he was making jokes, slapping shoulders and humming tunes. Norris drew his own conclusion and was astonished to find that as the King’s spirits soared his own declined.

  It was inevitable, wasn’t it? It was a wonder the girl had resisted so long. Nobody to support her. A father who would sell his own mother to Turks to gain a smile from the King; a stepmother, an amiable little nobody.

  But it was a pity. It was a shame.

  People who gossiped about these visits to Hever declared themselves puzzled to know what the King saw in Anne Boleyn. North knew. Those great dark eyes, so bright, so fascinatingly set with the little tilt at the outer corners, the clear line from cheek to chin, the mouth that changed shape so easily, the wealth of black hair that seemed too heavy to be carried upon that slender neck; the low, velvety voice, the grace that touched every movement. Not pretty, people said; and it was true; she was beautiful. But apart from that, she had something other than beauty, something that would have made itself felt if you dropped a sack over her head. She was made to be cherished, and that was precisely what she would not be now: the King took these little passing fancies, but fundamentally, Norris thought, he was devoted to Catherine. When he rode in the lists he had for his title “Sir Loyal Heart,” and by and large that was true. Considering his looks, his position, his boundless opportunities, he’d been singularly faithful. And that was right, of course; very admirable. But it was hard on the women he pursued and charmed and then abruptly abandoned. Mary Boleyn, Anne’s sister, had almost died of grief, it was said, and she was a light-minded, easygoing creature, very different from…

  How do you know? he asked himself.

  And it was none of his business; the King’s pleasure was; and Kings, like other men, asked the impossible—that their lecheries should be secret; they tasted better so. Norris should busy himself, not with pitying a girl many women would envy, but with thinking up some good reason for making himself scarce, so that the King could go to his rendezvous thinking himself unobserved.

  He performed his senseless ritual and said,

  “All is well, your Grace, and I wish you a good night. I should like to ask leave to absent myself for a while.”

  “Ha!” Henry said, “I thought you were very thoughtful. Did you promise? Because if so, run along. One must never disappoint a lady. But you’ve chosen an inconvenient time. I’ve had two bad nights and I feel like sleeping, and I want to start out for London early. So I warn you, if you come blundering in and wake me, I shall be displeased.”

  Taken aback, Harry Norris said, “In that case, Your Grace, I’ll…I’ll let it go. It was only a…a tentative arrangement.”

  “They’re never any good, Harry, believe me. Hop into bed. And for the love of God, don’t lie on your back and snore. Last night I had to get out and throw you on to your side and I stubbed my toe in the dark. If I weren’t the soul of good nature I should have given you a buffet. Tonight I will. Good night.”

  He settled into the pillow and fastened his right hand around the little finger of his left where the poor little amber ring had stuck. His mind had the same clean, comfortable feeling that his body knew after a bath and change of linen. Tonight he had taken a great decision, of all the decisions that life had demanded of him, the most important. He was glad, glad in the last recesses of his heart and mind, that Anne had resisted his attempts to seduce her. That would have been a bad start to the new life which he planned. He was glad that his conscience had troubled him, and that he had mentioned the matter to Wolsey before he had had any serious intentions concerning Anne. When he’d talked to Wolsey he’d been thinking of the succession, and away at the back of his mind, unconnected, had been his—well, in his own bed a man could be honest—his lust for a maid-of-honor who had caught his eye. Now the two had come together; he’d be done with his old, cursed marriage, and he’d marry his little love, and she would give him sons. God was rewarding him, he thought, for his fidelity to Church and Pope. He’d lived in sin and time after time God had called his attention to the fact; he’d taken heed. And from now on everything would work for his good. He gave a great sigh of contentment and fell asleep.

  Harry Norris thought—It’s over. She didn’t give in, and he’s taken his defeat like the stout fellow that he is. She’ll probably marry some gentleman of Kent who’ll never get over his sense of being favored and will coddle her as he would an orange tree. And that is how it should be. I wish him joy, though I envy him. We shan’t, I think, be coming to Hever any more, and maybe that is just as well, I might, all too easily, fall in love with her myself.

  Anne knew that Emma missed nothing. The emerald ring was easily explained, just another of the King’s gifts. But the absence of the amber one might rouse curiosity.

  She said, “In the garden this evening the King had a cramp in his leg. He said he was subject to it and I told him he should always carry a piece of amber about him. He’d never heard of that remedy. But it is old and tried. You’ve heard of amber as a cure for cramp?”

  “Jade,” Emma said. “Or better still, bloodstone.”

  “Then I’ve wasted my dear little ring, and have in exchange this, which is far too big for me.”

  Emma eyed the emerald coldly. Another piece of bribery and corruption. Oh, she thought, he ma
y have taken her poor trinket in exchange, but who is deceived by that? Emma knew what was afoot; she had noted Sir Thomas’s complaisance, Lady Boleyn’s helplessness; it was a simple, ordinary situation, except for Anne’s behavior. Emma thought that Anne was holding out for some secret reason of her own, making some condition which, up to the present, the King had been unwilling to meet. He would; he was hopelessly infatuated, and since Mistress Boleyn would never give in, he must. He’d give in, and Mistress Boleyn would yield, and on the day when she did, Emma Arnett would quit her service. She had no intention of being a participant in a backstairs intrigue.

  She had only stayed at Hever to suit herself. Once she had brought Anne there her work was done, but she had stayed to help nurse her through her cold, and by that time country life had made its appeal to her country blood. And Lady Lucia, rather surprisingly, had not seemed anxious to have her back. So she had stayed on, never quite settled, telling herself that she might move after Christmas, or in the New Year, and then deciding that Hever Castle was as good a place as any in which to winter.

  Then one day she went into a haberdasher’s shop at Edenbridge, where the haberdasher’s wife, in the act of measuring off a yard of ribbon, suddenly threw it down, said, “My gingerbread!” and fled to the living quarters. When she returned she apologized and they began to talk about cake making and presently Emma was invited into the room behind the shop to taste the new gingerbread and drink a glass of small beer.

  People of the same breed have methods of communication that have little or nothing to do with words; within ten minutes both women felt that they had found a congenial friend and by their third meeting they knew that they shared their beliefs. Emma found herself introduced to a small circle in which the name of her old master, Richard Hunne, was not only remembered but revered as that of a martyr, in which the Pope and all Cardinals and most priests were ill thought of, in which the Bible in English was read by those who could read to those who could not, and was regarded as the final arbiter on every question of belief and behavior. With these people Emma was instantly at home and in their company she was happier than she had been since the dispersal of her family.

  In Hever, especially after the King became so frequent a visitor, she was less happy. She, like Norris, felt that the outcome was inevitable, and deplored it, not from any feeling for Anne, but on moral grounds.

  Yet even she was puzzled. Tonight, for instance, there lay the great emerald, a gift too costly to have been promoted by any good motive; and there were many others, for which Anne seemed to care little, and which she only wore when the donor was expected. And here was the recipient of such gifts, going in good time to her maidenly bed.

  Of the ring she said, “Put it away, it is too big for me.”

  Probing, Emma said, “But His Grace will expect you to wear it. It could be made smaller, mistress.”

  “I don’t think the King will visit us much in future. He is going to be much occupied by affairs.”

  She spoke with as little feeling as though mentioning tomorrow’s weather, and Emma, even more puzzled, put away the emerald and took up the brush and began to brush the long black hair. From her position she could catch, now and again, a glimpse of Anne’s face in the glass. It told her nothing. The eyes wore their look of seeing something far away, and there was sadness in them, but then there always was, even when she was gay and smiling. Under Emma’s hands the hair sprang, warm and lively, and below it was the narrow little skull which housed whatever knowledge, thoughts, and feelings the girl had. What was she thinking?

  It had started with the words, “too big for me.” All this talk of great matters, appeals to the Pope, the supplanting of Catherine; even the weight of Henry’s passion seemed too heavy…She thought—Oh, I would so much rather have been Harry’s Countess than Henry’s Queen.

  VI

  If the Pope be slain or taken, it will hinder the King’s affairs not a little.

  Letters and papers of the reign of Henry VIII

  THE CASTLE OF SAN ANGELO, ROME. MAY 1527

  AT THE END OF THE hot May day which had seen the overturning of the world, the Pope lay on a bed in a high room overlooking the Tiber. In the streets of Rome the Emperor’s German troops, drunken and completely out of control, were sacking the city more thoroughly that ever the barbarians had done in ancient times.

  Clement himself was safe enough. The Castle of San Angelo, built thirteen centuries earlier by the Emperor Hadrian, had proved, before this, to be an impenetrable fortress; and it had food and water for a year. So he lay there, safe in one stony cell in a honeycomb of masonry, with the outer rooms filled with his Cardinals and chaplains and secretaries and chamberlains, and with every entrance and doorway guarded by Swiss soldiers, the most reliable mercenaries in the world. But he could not be thankful, even for safety. He wept, thinking of the Hell let loose in the streets, and of his own helplessness; he, the Pope, the direct successor to St. Peter whom Christ had adjured to be a shepherd to his sheep; he lay here, safe, while the wolves ravaged the flock.

  His self-esteem, at no time a very sturdy growth, wilted and died. Why had he failed? He could truly say, even in this stripped-down moment, that he had done his best. He had recognized that these were dangerous times, and one of his first acts as Pope had been to issue an appeal to all the Kings and Princes of Christendom to live in peace, as brothers. Much good that had done! Greed, jealousy and hatred, ambition, rivalry, stupidity and sheer wickedness had made peace impossible.

  And what could any man, however clever, however well-meaning, do to manage a world where what was called the Holy Roman Empire contained such discordant elements as Spain, most conservatively pious of all countries, and the German states where the Lutheran heresy had spread like plague? Charles V, head of this grossly overgrown Empire, had let his troops loose in Northern Italy, acting out of rivalry with Francis of France who also coveted that territory. Clement had written to him, sharply one day, appealingly the next, but Charles had done nothing and in the end, when Florence, his birthplace, was threatened, it had seemed to Clement not only good sense but the only possible policy to ally himself with France, and with England, against the Emperor. The King of England had recently been angered by Charles’s breaking of his troth with the Princess Mary and marrying instead another of his cousins, Isabella of Portugal—a mercenary act, for Isabella had a dower of a million ducats.

  So it had come to war and the French had been defeated by the Emperor’s forces. And the English, where were they?

  Lukewarm from the beginning. And Clement knew why.

  Tossing uneasily on the bed the Pope admitted that where Henry of England was concerned, he might possibly have managed things better. Henry was a good churchman and very orthodox; in Leo’s time, when Luther first published his protests and criticisms, Henry had written a book which refuted his arguments and Leo had rewarded him with the title Defender of the Faith. He might, in this war, today so disastrously ending, have done more to live up to that title if Clement had been more obliging.

  It was almost two years now since the Pope had first received the information that Henry Tudor believed his marriage to be incestuous and wished to have it annulled. And the request could not have come at a more awkward time, for Clement was then still hoping to make a settlement with Charles, and Charles was nephew to the woman whom Henry wished to put away. It would have been insane to provoke Charles while trying to negotiate with him.

  And there was another aspect too; less obvious, but fully as important. With heresy spreading every day, it would surely have been a fatal move to admit that a former Pope had been wrong to allow Henry and Catherine to marry. That would have started the so-called reformers screaming that dispensations and annulments were like pardons, on sale to anyone who could pay.

  He’d had all the relevant papers brought out of the archives and studied them carefully. Arthur Prince of Wales, and Catherine of Aragon had been young, he fourteen, she fifteen, and the boy alrea
dy sick of consumption, so fragile that the records hinted at advice given that the marriage should not be consummated for a year, or two. Clement could not blame Julius for deciding, on the face of such evidence, that Catherine was free to marry Arthur’s brother; he’d have done the same himself.

  So to Henry’s pleas he had returned noncommittal answers, wishing to anger no one; and as a result, when it came to war with the Emperor he’d had little help from the English.

  He was sorry for that, now. A company or two of English archers might well have turned the tide of the battle today. Still, he did not see how he could have acted otherwise.

  Presently he began to think about the future. In the long history of the Church there had been one almost exactly comparable incident, when, more than two hundred years ago, Boniface VIII had quarreled with the French King and had been taken prisoner. For the next seventy years the Papal Court had been not in Rome, but in a dusty little French provincial town named Avignon. Clement very much doubted whether, if he left his safe refuge and surrendered to Charles, he would be allowed to set up his Court in some dusty little Spanish town. There was less respect for the Church, less chivalry in these days. Besides, those seventy years had been immensely troubled; at times there had been two Popes. A repetition of that kind of thing could be fatal just now.

  He contemplated staying inside the safe fortress of San Angelo for a year; that would give him twelve months to negotiate and hope for a change in the general situation; but what a year it would be; a state of siege, every message having to be smuggled in or out; the constant watching for signs of the pestilence which invariably appeared when too many men were crowded together for too long. And outside, the world going on without a Pope. Imagine the gloating joy of the heretics! No Pope for a whole year, they would say, and who had missed him?